independence, protection, uncovering secrets, spirits
Dog: loyalty, sustained effort, hearing, friendship, guardian
Lizard: dreams and dream divination, powers of the imagination
Lovebirds: love and marriage, partnership and companionship
Parrot: impersonation, mindless chatter, repetition
Snakes: creativity, wisdom, psychism, rebirth and regeneration, relation to spirits
Spider: insight, originality, new start
Turtle: patience, perspicacity, longevity
Stone Shrines: Creating a Crystal Altar
By building a stone shrine, altar, or power center in your home, you can create a place for daily conjuring, rituals, and thinking. This will set the stage for you to focus your ideas and make them grow. Having a shrine in your home allows you to rid yourself of personal obstacles and invite friendly spirits. Your shrine will spark your inner flame and bring daily renewal. The more use an altar gets, the more energy it builds, making your spells even more effective.
Create your shrine on a low table covered in a white scarf. Set rainbow candles in an arc and then add black and white candles. Place a heatproof bowl containing amber incense (good for creativity and healing), and place it in the center of the rainbow, surrounded by quartz. You should also keep a stick of sage or a seashell on your altar for cleansing the space every day.
Prosperity stones should be to the far left on the altar, in the money corner. Romance crystals should sit to the far right on the altar.
The rest of your altar should consist of meaningful, personal symbols. They should reflect your spiritual aspirations. I keep fresh wildflowers in a vase, a statue of a goddess, abalone shells, a magnetite obelisk, and a rock-crystal ball on my altar. An obelisk or pyramid on your altar can be used for writing out desires and wishes. You can use just about anything—photos of loved ones, religious images, and so forth.
With your altar, you can create a bridge between your outer and inner worlds. It can even be a place where you commune with the deepest and most hidden parts of yourself. An altar is where you can honor the rhythms of the season and the rhythms of your own life. An altar is a touchstone, a place to see the sacred and incorporate it into your life each and every day. It can be your special corner of the world where you can rest and connect with your spiritual center. Creating and augmenting your altar every day is one of the most soul-nourishing acts you can do.
Following it a table of different crystals and what their presence on your altar will mean:
Altar Crystal: amazonite, aventurine, carnelian, chrysolite, chrysoprase, citrine, green tourmaline, malachite, yellow fluorite
What They Mean: Creativity
Altar Crystal: amethyst, azurite, celestite, lapis lazuli, moonstone, selenite, smoky quartz, sodalite, star sapphire, yellow calcite
What They Mean: Intuition
Altar Crystal: amethyst, magnetite, rhodochrosite, rose quartz, twinned rock crystals
What They Mean: Love
Altar Crystal: bloodstone, carnelian, citrine, dendritic agate, diamond, garnet, hawk’s-eye, moss agate, peridot, ruby, tiger’s-eye, topaz, yellow sapphire
What They Mean: Prosperity
Altar Crystal: amber, apache tear, chalcedony, citrine, green calcite, jade, jet, smoky quartz
What They Mean: Protection
Altar Crystal: azurite, chalcedony, chrysocolla, green tourmaline, hematite, rutilated quartz, tiger’s-eye
What They Mean: Self-Assurance
Altar Crystal: amber, aventurine, blue jade, dioptase, Herkimer diamond, jasper, kunzite, moonstone, onyx, peridot, quartz, rhodonite
What They Mean: Serenity
Altar Crystal: carnelian, obsidian, quartz, selenite, sodalite, topaz
What They Mean: Success
Altar Crystal: agate, aventurine, bloodstone, calcite, chalcedony, citrine, dioptase, emerald, garnet, orange calcite, ruby, topaz
What They Mean: Vigor
Altar Crystal: emerald, fluorite, Herkimer diamond, moldavite, serpentine, yellow calcite
What They Mean: Wisdom
The Faces of the God and Goddess: Mythology for Modern Times
In designing your own rituals, you can pull from the wealth of the world’s mythologies and create original rites based on the merging of your intention and the deity’s sphere of influence. When selecting deities to call upon in your circles and ceremonies, you will need to have an understanding of gods and goddesses and their domains or powers. It is also helpful to have an affinity for the deity. You should feel drawn to whomever you invoke. If you feel inclined toward a specific deity, however, you must do your homework and find out everything you can about it. Good research can often reveal the reason for your intuitive affinity. Discretion and caution should be exercised with any god or goddess. Some divinities can have a major impact on your life and create chaos and disturbance. Kali, for example, is a dark and destructive goddess to be approached very carefully. Always be careful about invoking more than one deity at once, as there are often fundamental incompatibilities. Choose the deities you invite into your ritual carefully. For example, if you want to create a ritual of peace, you do not want to invoke Mars, who is a warlike divinity.
A few years ago, a group of female coworkers were experiencing great difficulties and harassment from their male boss. We created a ritual in which we called upon the Amazons to come to our aid. We created a circle and a ceremony for a situation none of us had experienced before. The energy of Penthesilea, the Amazon who stood against Achilles at the gates of Troy, was exactly the kind of defensive power we needed.
You can use the energy of the gods and goddesses in practical and helpful ways. A recently unemployed friend is researching the rites of Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of prosperity, to invoke her generosity. An infertile couple can call upon Tara, the “Mother of all Buddhas,” and a man looking for physical love could invoke the lusty Arcadian god, Pan.
Whatever your spiritual aspirations, there is surely a god or goddess to appeal to for help in your ritual work. With practice, experimentation, and time, you will begin to develop special relationships with deities that you can refine in the days and years to come. I strongly advise caution, common sense, and good manners in any dealings with the deities and denizens of the mythical realms. The friendship of fairies, for example, can be a blessing or a curse. If you call upon the fairy folk and then don’t thank them and wish them well on their way, they may play pranks on you. Unless you work
