First Workings is plain on the point: a practitioner needs a notebook, a pen, a quiet place, a regular time, and honesty, and does not need an altar, robes, candles, incense, a blade, or a cup. That remains the Order's position. But many practitioners choose to keep a working space, and many find it useful. This page is for them, and for anyone who wants to understand what they are looking at when they see one.
What a Working Space Is For
A place set apart for practice does three things that can be observed, whatever else it may do.
- It cues the mind. A practitioner who works in the same place, with the same scent and the same sound at the opening, finds after a while that the place itself begins the change of state. The smell of a particular incense or the sound of a bell becomes a signal, much as a familiar room signals sleep. This needs no theory beyond the ordinary workings of habit.
- It gives the practice a home. A fixed point to which one returns is a reminder that the practice exists, on the days when it would be easier to forget it.
- It separates. Several practitioners describe their working space as a decompression chamber: a cool, quiet place where the day's anger can be set down safely before it reaches anyone else.
Practitioners who keep altars also say that an altar comes to reflect the person who keeps it. What is placed on it, and where, and what is never placed on it, is a kind of portrait. A practitioner who rearranges their altar after a year may learn something from what they move.
The Mind as Altar
Many practitioners keep no altar at all, and some of the most experienced say that the mind is the only place a working requires. A working can be done with the eyes closed, sitting on a bus, by attention and breath alone. The record is the one essential tool, and it can be kept anywhere.
A practitioner who has no private place, or who lives with people who would not understand, loses nothing essential by having no altar. The page Discretion considers how to practice in a shared home.
Choosing a Place
A corner of a room, a shelf, the top of a chest, or a box that opens into an altar and closes into a box will serve. What matters is that the place is quiet, that the practitioner can be undisturbed in it for the length of a working, and that it can be kept clean. Some practitioners keep a whole room. Most do not.
Practitioners who work outdoors should respect the law and the land: do not trespass, do not light fires where fires are forbidden, leave nothing behind, and choose places where one will not be watched or alarm anyone who happens by. The page The Long Work describes a solitary night outdoors that some practitioners keep.
The Altar Itself
An altar is a surface. A table, a board, or a cloth laid on the floor will do. Many practitioners cover it with a dark cloth and orient it toward a direction that means something to them. Ceremonial custom favors the east, where the sun and the morning star rise. Some currents of the left-hand path favor the north or the west, and the Order's own gesture may be made facing any direction at all.
At the center most altars have a focus: an image of a figure, a statue, a sigil, a dark mirror, a stone, the Open Ring, or nothing. Some devotional practitioners divide their altar into two halves, one for the light-bearer and one for the prince of darkness. In some groups, historically and today, a person serves as the altar. Any practice of that kind requires the full and freely given consent of every adult involved, and a group in which such a role is expected of members is showing one of the warning signs listed on the page Working With Others.
Implements
The objects found on most altars are few, and each has a customary use. None of them does anything by itself.
| Implement | Customary use | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Flame | Marks presence; the oldest element of ritual | A stable holder, and never left unattended |
| Cup | Receives; holds an offering or a drink | The Order's practice is sober, so water |
| Blade | Points, divides, and traces a figure in the air | Never used to cut a living thing; know the law on carrying one |
| Bell | Marks the opening, each transition, and the close | It marks time; it does not reset a room |
| Incense | Scent as a cue to the change of state | Ventilate; mind allergies and smoke alarms |
| Dark mirror | Scrying and contemplation | See Scrying |
| Dish | Burning paper, holding offerings | Heat-proof, on a heat-proof surface |
| Snuffer | Ends a flame without blowing it out | A custom, not a requirement |
| The record | Holds the plan and the account of every working | The only essential object on this list |
Some practitioners claim that a bell cancels the low vibrations in a room, or that crystals store energy in proportion to their size. These are beliefs of the energy model described on the page On Magic, and they are not physics. A bell adds a sound, and a sound is a fine way to mark a moment.
Materials
Practitioners are told, in many books, that a blade must be double-edged, that a cup must be silver and never gold, that candles must be of a certain color for a certain purpose. These are customs, and none of them is a law. Some teachers go further, and regard rules about required materials as a means of control. Candle colors and metals can carry meaning for the practitioner who chooses them, and that meaning is real in the way any meaning is real. Whether they do anything more can be tested, by keeping everything else the same and changing only the color, and recording what follows.
Many practitioners find that making their own implements is itself a discipline, and that a found object they have chosen, cleaned, and set apart serves better than an expensive one bought ready-made. When an implement has outlived its use, it can be retired without guilt. Some practitioners clear their altar completely from time to time, so that the practice does not harden into a display.
The Acquisition Trap
The trade in ritual objects is large, and its goods are beautiful. It is easy to mistake the gathering of tools for the practice they are meant to serve, and to end with a working space that resembles an actor's dressing room: everything ready for a performance that is never given. The second edition of First Workings removed every suggestion to buy anything for this reason. The page Symbols of the Left-Hand Path makes the same point about signs: a symbol does no work by itself, and neither does an implement.
Safety
- Fire. Use short candles in stable, heat-proof holders. Burn paper only in a heat-proof dish on a heat-proof surface. Tie back long hair and loose sleeves. Never leave a flame unattended, and never fall asleep with one lit.
- Smoke. Ventilate. Heavy incense in a closed room is unpleasant at best and harmful to some people, and a smoke alarm is a better thing to have than to disable.
- Offerings. Food and drink left on an altar should be cleared promptly.
- Oils and herbs. Some are irritants or poisons. Use no herb or oil whose safety you have not confirmed from a reliable source. Dilute oils, test a small amount on the skin first, and take nothing by mouth.
- Blades. Keep them where children cannot reach them, and know the law where you live.
- Children and animals. Keep the working space out of their reach. The Order's texts are written for adults, as its Statements of Position say.
The Order's Practice
The Order requires no altar and prescribes no arrangement. It uses no pentagram, no goat, and no inverted cross. A practitioner who wishes may place the Open Ring at the center of an altar, but it is not blessed, charged, or consecrated by anyone, and it does nothing that any other meaningful image would not. If there is a cup, it holds water. And whatever else is on the altar, the notebook should be there too.