A small table

The teaching

As the custom of the household shrine in many lands teaches it.

A place set apart

In every tradition that keeps one, a household shrine is a small place set apart from ordinary use, so that attention has somewhere to go. It is made clean before anything is put on it, and kept clean. It is placed where it can be seen and where it will not be knocked or used for other things. It is tended at fixed times, and the things on it are chosen because they mean something, not because they are many. What follows is how several peoples have kept such a place, and how the old natural magic set out a table for a single planet.

The Roman lararium

A Roman house kept a shrine to its Lares, the guardian spirits of the household: a niche or a little temple near the hearth or the kitchen, painted with the Lares as dancing youths pouring wine, the genius of the head of the family making an offering, and a serpent, the spirit of the place. A little food from the meal, wine and incense were offered there. On the first day of the month, on the Nones and the Ides and on feast days, as Cato writes, the household hung a garland over the hearth and prayed to the Lar. A boy who came of age dedicated his childhood amulet, the bulla, to the Lares.

The beautiful corner

An Orthodox home keeps its icons in one corner, called in Russian the beautiful corner, set toward the east where it can be: Christ, the Mother of God and the saints of the family, with a small oil lamp burning before them. Prayers are said there morning and evening, and a guest entering the room greets the icons first. Blessed things are kept beside them, water from the feast of the Theophany, palms from Palm Sunday, candles from the night of Easter. The icon, in this teaching, is a window, and the honour given to it passes to the one it shows.

The god-shelf and the Buddhist altar

A Japanese home may keep a kamidana, a god-shelf set high on a wall facing south or east, holding a small shrine and the paper talismans of the great shrine at Ise and of the local shrine. Each morning water, rice and salt are offered, with sake on the first and fifteenth of the month and fresh sprigs of the evergreen sakaki, and the household bows twice, claps twice and bows once.

Many homes also keep a butsudan, the Buddhist altar for the family's dead, with a principal image of the Buddha and the memorial tablets of the ancestors. Before it a candle is lit, incense is offered, flowers, rice and tea are set out, and a small bell is struck.

The ofrenda

For the Day of the Dead, Mexican families build an ofrenda, an offering table for those who have died, often in tiers. On it go photographs of the dead; candles to light their way; marigolds, whose colour and scent are said to guide them home, sometimes laid in a path of petals; cut paper banners, the bread of the dead and sugar skulls; the food, drink and small pleasures each one loved; water for the thirst of the journey, salt, and copal burning. The dead are welcomed for the night and remembered by name.

Shrines of daily worship

A Hindu home keeps a shrine, a shelf or a small room, for the images of the family's gods. Daily worship there follows a pattern of welcome: the lamp is lit, incense is offered, water, flowers and food are presented, a bell is rung, and the flame is waved before the image in the rite called aarti. The food offered is then shared as prasad, the god's gift returned.

A Chinese home may keep an altar of the ancestors, with their tablets and a burner for incense, where sticks are lit and food is set out at the new year and on the days of remembrance.

A table for one planet

The Renaissance natural magic of Marsilio Ficino and Agrippa used the correspondences to gather the things of a single planet in one place, so that the place would take in that planet's life. For the Sun one would bring gold, saffron and the bright colours, frankincense, cinnamon and the bay; for Venus roses, myrtle and sweet scents, and white, green and rosy colours; for Jupiter the oak, the sapphire and the colours of the air.

Ficino advised the learned, whom he thought prone to the melancholy of Saturn, to draw on the three kindly planets he called the Graces, Jupiter, the Sun and Venus, through their colours, their scents, their foods, their music, and walks in sunlight among green things.

The four elements

Many modern traditions of Western magic set the four elements on the table, each at its quarter, after the order of the Golden Dawn: air in the east, as incense or a feather; fire in the south, as a candle; water in the west, as a bowl or a cup; earth in the north, as a stone, salt or a dish of soil. The elements stand for the whole world gathered into a small space, and the one who sits before them sits, as it were, at its centre.

A table for the season

A table can also follow the year. Schools in the Waldorf tradition keep a nature table, where children set out what they find on their walks, buds, shells, leaves, conkers and seeds, on a cloth whose colour changes with the season. Modern pagans mark the eight festivals of the wheel of the year in the same way: snowdrops at Imbolc, eggs and spring flowers at the spring equinox, flowers at midsummer, grain at the harvest, apples and the memory of the dead at Samhain. The table changes as the world outside does, and that is its teaching.

Keeping it

Every tradition above asks the same of its keeper: a fixed time, a small act and steady care. Fresh water each morning, the flower changed when it fades, the dust wiped away, the light lit and put out; a bow, a word or a minute of silence. The act is small so that it can be kept, and it is kept so that the place stays alive. In those traditions the food that is offered is afterwards shared and eaten; on the house's table there is no food, so that nothing spoils and nothing tempts a child or an animal.

Safe keeping

A flame on a table is never left alone, and it stands in a holder that cannot tip, away from curtains and books and out of the reach of children and cats. Incense is burned as the teaching on smoke describes. Lilies, all of them, with their pollen and even the water in their vase, can kill a cat, and foxglove, oleander and lily of the valley are poisonous to people and to pets, so the flowers on a table are chosen with care. Small stones are a choking danger for small children.