Posts Tagged ‘altars’

In the modern world, there are innumerable devices to help remind us of our daily to-do lists and which keep every conceivable bit of data close to our fingertips on the keyboard. Memory, therefore, becomes rather overrated. Why remember something if a handy-dandy post-it note or your Blackberry can do it for you? Why remember faces and names if a Facebook album can organize them so much more easily? And why memorize facts if Google, Wikipedia, and Encyclopedia Britannica have us covered? With all of this convenience, it is no surprise that memory loss is on the rise as we appear to be losing our capacity to retain as much direct information as we previously could.

Once upon a time, mankind had to be multilingual, they had to be able to do complicated math in their head, and they had to remember their family lineage, their local geography, and their tales of myth and religion. And they did. It was a simple matter of remembering it or losing it. Because something once forgotten, was forgotten forever. The average man or woman could not read or write, they had few maps, no cameras, and therefore had fewer ways to record all the little tidbits of information we, in contemporary society, so often take for granted. Recipes, spells, songs, family history, engineering instructions ~in the modern world, all of these can be written down and referred back to; there is no need to know them by rote. But in the societies that came before us on the grand time line of earth, lives ~ both magickal and mundane ~ were ruled by what, and whom, they could remember. And in ancient societies it was often much more a matter of who was remembered than anything else.

Rome provides us with several classical examples of the power of memory and remembrance. Its broad spectrum of opposites (rich vs. poor; literate vs. illiterate; urban vs. country, Republic vs. Empire etc) allows for a vast array of valuable viewpoints a scholar can look back on and pull positive life lessons from. The Pax Romana (27 BCE-180 AD) in particular stands on a wonderful cusp of literacy where the written word was becoming accessible to more people and thus people of more classes and more ways of life were recording what they felt it was important to remember.

Rome, overall, adored the idea of remembrance. It was always looking backwards over its shoulder, usually at ancient Greece, to use the power of the past to magnify its energy in the present. But the Roman people were also looking forward, and both the poor and the rich were striving to be remembered by the future.

Roman Ancestors: Real & Imagined

From a modern viewpoint, Rome is the past. But the Romans were aware that there was a past beyond them: that people had come before them: that these people had lived, and laughed, and built civilizations; ones which, would ultimately lead to Rome itself. And this past was alive and a part of their everyday routines.

Ancestor worship was a very strong component of both urban and rural Roman religion. The power of one’s family was honored second only to the later cults of the emperors. Roman homes, which also doubled as Roman business offices, were built around the notion of ancestor worship and incorporated an idea of public and private adoration and remembrance of the ancestors. Upon entering a Roman house, one first encountered a short hallway which featured the death masks of the house’s ancestors. Although it sounds a bit macabre, it is not so far removed from our own sphere of familiarity. Check out your own walls and mantles: have any photos of your family up there? Same thing; we just have better technology to preserve images.

But note that earlier I said, the “house’s” ancestors and not the “family’s” ancestors. Those masks would stay with the house even if the family were to die off into obscurity or the house sold to another family. The idea of “family” or “ancestry” was not just an emotional concept, or a list of past relatives and their notable deeds, it was associated with place as well. Both the spirits and there memory were given a physical location. The ancestors of the house would stay with the house, not necessarily the family, becoming remembered spirits of a place and not just of a family. It gives whole new meaning to the idea of ‘if these walls could talk.’ The orator Cicero famously bought a ‘used’ house as such.

The house would also feature at least one altar to the household gods, who are often simply referred to as the Lares Familiares (which literally translated means house guardians/spirits, however they most likely would have had individual names only members of the household would have been aware of) and the Penates. Typically after passing through the aforementioned hallway, one would enter a central square or rectangular open air atrium, which featured a public altar (a lararium) for business associates and other guests of the open areas of the house to pay respect to their associate’s Lares at. Accessible through narrower hallways or beyond storerooms, smaller, more private lararium have been found, typically displaying signs of much heavier usage than the public altar on display. It is conceivable that family secrets were passed down and hidden family rituals were performed at these smaller more personal altars. The remembrance of the ancestors was, it seems, divided into public and private spheres.

Imagine the wider scenario in the modern world. Do you know who lived in your house or apartment before you? The Romans believed that the people that lived in a house imprinted on it, leaving the Lares behind. The terms Lares and Penates may, in fact, have an older, more local meaning for the Roman region and may be a watered down remembrance of the ancient local gods, the genius loci, that were worshiped in the area prior to the Latin tribes’ emigration to it. Given that your home might have some household gods lurking round it in Roman fashion, it might be helpful to show some respect to the Lares that have been left behind, or to perhaps attempt a spiritual cleanse to encourage the household spirits to accustom themselves to your presence and over to your aid.

The Political Power of Memory

Politics and class distinctions were also ruled by the idea of a remembered family history: the longer a lineage, the more status and power, often regardless of wealth. Whole genealogies were crafted, occasionally from thin air, in an effort to connect powerful personages to the past. The Emperor Augustus and his uncle, the infamous Julius Caesar, for instance, connected their lineage back to the mysterious and mythic Aeneas, going so far as to have their court poet, Virgil, craft the eponymous Aeneid in their family’s honor. Through the figure of Aeneas, they linked their family back to the Battle of Troy, the Trojan royal family, the goddess Aphrodite/Venus herself (as she was reputedly Aeneas’ birth mother), and the founders of Rome, the twins Romulus and Remus, who were themselves purportedly the 13th generation of descendants down from Aeneas. Therefore the imperial family, in one fell swoop, used the memory of the past to link themselves to their city’s founders and to the divine.

The first was a sound political move, the second allowed them to take their power a step further. The connection with the divine was indeed, one of the Emperor Augustus’ primary talking points when he convinced the waning Senate to deify Julius Caesar as a god, starting a tradition of deifying the Emperor which would continue until the pagan Empire’s fall to Christianity. Although initially intended to be a cult revolving around the recently dead Emperor and other members of the imperial family, the cult quickly came to include the living Emperor as a god, similar to the Egyptian style of royal worship. Money took on a new significance in the cult of the Emperor. Having the Emperor’s head on the coin was not just a way to let the people all round the Empire to know what the Emperor looked liked or to indicate that the money was minted in his reign, it became a small, portable, spiritual token. The use of the past for political power is not an unfamiliar concept in politics and one still used in the modern age. The French Revolution looked back to the Roman Republic as a model, sparking off a Greco-Roman Renaissance. In 20th century Italy, Benito Mussolini summoned up the glory days of Ancient Rome by bulldozing the streets into some semblance of their ancient geography. And consider President Obama’s references back to President Lincoln. All instances of memory being used for political power.

Back in ancient Rome, it was not just the Emperor that strived to be remembered and revered in the public collective after he was gone. The funerary artifacts of the upper and middle classes indicate an interest in persevering an individual memory of themselves, leaving behind what we presume are life-like portraits of themselves on their coffins. And there were too, the aforementioned death masks. The poets of the Pax Romana indicate the philosophical state of mind of the times in their work. Ovid sums up the idea of immortality through the written word rather well numerous times, but a particular favorite of mine is in his less political and more romantic work Only the Poets are Immortal which sums it up rather nicely, albeit full of hubris for his field:

“For myself, let Apollo bestow on me cups
Overflowing with the waters of Castaly;
Let the myrtle that dreads the cold adorn my brow
And let my verses ever be scanned by the eager lover.
While we live we serve as food for Envy;
When we are dead we rest within the aureole
Of the glory we have earned.
So, when the funeral fires have consumed me,
I shall live on,
And the better part of me will have triumphed over death.”

Rome Remembered: Active Memory on Rome’s Streets and in Today’s Libraries

But the collective Roman memory of the past wasn’t just based on family and imperial legends. There were, and are still, a few remaining slightly credible written sources which would have been available to the upper classes of Rome and the academics of the later empires. Oral histories, preserved by the writer Livy, recorded the kings, legends, and hazily remembered festivals of the early Roman Republic. Secrets and prophecies were also purportedly recorded in a grouping of texts called the Sibylline Oracles, a jumble of pseudo-mythical and prophetic texts which were initially protected in a sacred cave not far from Rome by the Sibyl: a magickal dedicant and sometime prophetess; until Augustus collected them in the library of his house on the Capitoline hill in Rome. Later scholars revised, edited, and added, and the remaining texts were then preserved, resulting ultimately in a Renaissance period compendium of the Oracles. But where both of these preserved bits of memories highlight the amazing nature of the Greek traditions and the Latin tribes of central Italy, few historical mentions are made of the prehistoric Etruscans whose ruins dotted the Roman countryside. For one reason or another, the Roman people chose to almost consciously ignore many aspects of these direct cultural predecessors or else make connection with them taboo. There are in fact several sources which indicate the Romans, like the medieval denizens of the region after them, regarded the Etruscan ruins as haunted or else the ancient equivalent of Boo Radley’s house; either possessed of dark spirits or lived in by those on the fringe of society.

And beyond this, the poetry and literature, particularly of the 1st to 3rd centuries AD, has preserved snippets of the more homespun and philosophical nature of remembrance conducted on an everyday level. We know that the Roman doctors had thousands of herbal cures, passed down through generations of trial and error. We know that Roman magicians, frowned upon by Roman law but still to be found in the marketplace and on seedy street corners, hawked spells and potions they claimed to have learned in far-away lands. Priests conducted traditional ceremonies, some public and some private, supposedly handed down through the generations. And recent excavations in Roman cities indicate that certain eateries and market food stalls lasted longer in the marketplace, possibly favored above others because of their standardized food recipes, presumably also passed down through the generations. However, although these are referenced in what sources we have, these everyday activities (bar farming which we have an incredibly dense and detailed grouping of texts on, most notably Cato’s De Agricultura) are not recorded in particular detail. A few spells, a few chants, and an occasional half-recipe have crept in. And although it is very possible that this discrepancy in the historical record is due to a lack of relevant texts having been preserved; it seems then, that of all the things the Romans wanted to remember, they wanted to remember each other. Be it for personal or political reasons, they wanted to remember those people, those individuals who had come before them and whose foundations they had built their empire on.

It is, perhaps, a lesson we can learn from them. Honor your ancestors. Remember where you’ve come from. Send a prayer to your great great grandmother or favorite great uncle, ask for some guidance from the spirits of your house, be they family or be they adopted Lares. Reorganize your family photo collection, hang some updated photos on the wall. Set up a subtle altar in front of it and every time a guest comments on a picture you will know that whether they intended to or not, they’ve just paid homage to your household spirits, Roman style.

Sources:

Allison, P., 2001. Using the Material and Written Sources: Turn of the Millennium Approaches to Roman Domestic Space. American Journal of Archaeology, 105(2): 181-208.
Beard, M., North, J. & Price, S. (1998). Religions of Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bergmann, B., 2007. Housing and Households: The Roman World. In Alcock, S.E. and Osborne, R. (eds.) Classical Archaeology. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 224-240.
Clarke, J.R., 1991. The Houses of Roman Italy 100 B.C.- A.D. 200: Ritual, Space, and Decoration. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Davies, P.J.E., 2007. The Personal and the Political: The Roman World. In Alcock, S.E. and Osborne, R. (eds.) Classical Archaeology. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 307-328.
Ellis, S.P., 2000. Roman Housing. London: Duckworth.
Ferguson, J. (1970). The Religions of the Roman Empire. London: Thames and Hudson.
Fowler, W. (1914). Roman Ideas of Deity. London: MacMillan and Co., Ltd.
Grahame, M., 1998. Material Culture and Roman Identity: The Spatial Layout of Pompeian Houses and the Problem of Ethnicity. In Laurence, R. and Berry, J.(eds.) Cultural Identity in the Roman Empire. London: Routledge, 156-176.
Hales, S., 2003. The Roman House and Social Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Knights, C., 1994. The Spatiality of the Roman Domestic Setting: an Interpretation of Symbolic Content. In Pearson, M.P. and Richards, C. (eds.) Architecture and Order: Approaches to Social Space. London: Routledge, 113-144.
MacMullen, R. (1981). Paganism in the Roman Empire. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Turcan, R. (1992). The Cults of the Roman Empire. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

One of the things that I hear from a lot of people when they are new and starting out in Wicca or Witchcraft is a feeling of defeat when it comes to working with an altar.

Some people find they are in living situations where they are around other people that don’t agree with their practice while others find they just don’t have the room.  They look at pictures of other people’s altars with their grand deity statues, pretty wands and shiny athames and they feel that because they can’t have these things on display or that they can’t fit it all in one place that this somehow means they can’t practice Witchcraft or follow the Wiccan path.

Nothing could be farther from the truth.

I have had altars on bedside tables, wall shelves, the corner of a desk, the top of a cardboard box, on a large round wooden table and on a plastic storage tote.  Some altars are really obvious and some blend right in with other things in a room so that nobody notices it.  While there are traditional ways an altar can be set up and different traditions will designate everything from what direction to point the altar, to the candle colors, to what you can actually have on it.  Does that mean it has to limit you in your home altars?  No.  It’s up to you to decide how you want to work with your altar.

When it comes to tradition and altars, many people who follow a specific tradition will use that traditions altar arrangement for their formal rituals and for some of their personal workings, but at home in their personal space they may not have a formal altar set up and instead just have a dish of salt water with a shell in it, a vase of flowers, a candle and some incense all set up in an attractive way on a table and this is an altar for them.  The four elements are represented and the items may have personal significance or sacred, sentimental meaning.  They might not have a wand or athame out because it’s not a working altar (meaning they aren’t casting circles there and working spells) so they don’t need working tools.  It might also be that they can’t have them out there for fear of upsetting someone.  Instead this space serves as a reminder of their path, a devotion to the elements, and a place to express their beliefs in some way.

If you need to setup and take down your altar, you certainly can.  If you set up your altar in privacy, hold your ritual or work your magick, and then put away all your working tools or obvious Craft items when you’re done leaving only a few sacred objects behind that, to anyone else, would just look like a nice arrangement of decorative items, that’s perfectly fine.  You know what the items represent and the energy they add to this space.  As long as you treat the space as sacred and you don’t keep your empty coffee cup there in the morning next to your dedicated crystals and offering incense you’re ok (unless of course your path is more of a Discordian one, then the coffee cup might be perfect there as an offering to the Gods of Caffeine).

The ultimate idea of an altar is for it to be a sacred space for honor, worship and working magick.  It doesn’t need to be a place of display to show off your witchyness unless that’s what you want and what you feel safe doing.  If you live at home with your parents and they aren’t going to agree with your practice then create a small sacred altar space that isn’t going to be obvious.  Get a small box to safely store your working tools in when you aren’t using them that will be out of sight from prying eyes.  The same can be said if you have children or pets that could get into things or get injured on the pointy tip of an athame.  If you don’t have the room on a flat surface for your tools, create a new surface by purchasing a wall shelf that is long or wide enough to hold your items.   I’ve even seen tiny, almost miniature altar tool setups for travel that could work too (birthday candles come in a ton of different colors and burn for about 15 minutes making for a great mini altar candle or spell candle).  One of my favorite altar setups for someone that just can’t keep anything out is to get a steamer chest that you can keep your things inside of when you’re not using them; these often have locks on them as well.   Then when you’re ready to do a ritual or spell you can take out what you need, put your altar cloth on top and then use it as your altar surface.

Altars are any space where sacred objects are placed that is treated with reverence and holds a place of sacredness.  Being in a situation where you have to be creative and maybe make a few compromises doesn’t mean you have to give up completely.  A corner of a desk with a blessed candle and a cleansed crystal is just as much an altar as a whole table that is spread out with tools.  If it means something to you and is a place where the sacred is honored, then you have created and altar.

Just keep that great witchy bumper sticker in mind; Where there’s a Witch, there’s a way!