Altars:
Everywoman's sacred place
Beautiful
Necessity, The Art and Meaning of Women's
Altars by Kay Turner (Thames and Hudson,
1999
Reviewed
by Stephanie Hiller
|
Heartfire
(1986)
by Rose Wognum Frances
|
This
is a most appropriate time to consider
women's long-lived tradition of keeping
altars at home. We live in an age of
instantaneous global communication. Ours is
an age of marvels, an age in which computers
have made possible the fullest integration of
image, word, and sound that the world has yet
known. Yet the computer's claim on the future
is foretold by something from the past. Long
ago, the domestic altar provided the site
where binary thinking -- the difference and
the connection between Self and Other (the
0/1 of human consciousness) -- was first
conceived. . . One form has very deep
historical roots in the sacred; the other is
secular and hardly has a history at all. But
they begin to overlap. Evelyn Hall Greiner
calls her altar a point of connection with
all other altars, "like the Internet. The
Internet of the soul." (161)
Today
many women are building altars for ritual
celebrations, but Kay Turner's book reminds us
that women have kept altars in their homes for
ages. The intimacy of this very personal form of
devotion is characteristically and profoundly
female.
Even in
my atheistic upbringing, the altar played a
dramatic role. When I was a small girl growing
up in an apartment in New York City, I used to
spend time with a neighbor who lived across the
hall, a single women (a spinster!) named Helen
O'Brien. A Catholic, she must have felt it was
her sacred duty to introduce me, a Jewish child
with no religion, to the true faith. She created
an altar for me on a shelf in the closet, where
I spent happy hours touching and looking at the
holy images.
Looking
back, I recall no attachment to the particulars
of Helen's faith; I simply enjoyed the
specialness of this exotic -- and secret! --
form of play. But when my mother found out -- I
don't remember how -- she was understandably
upset, and my altar was destroyed. Many years
later I identified readily with the women of
ancient Palestine who saw their own altars
repeatedly demolished by the gestapo of the New
Religion…
An altar
is a very private special place, where the soul
feels safe to peek out through eyes usually
focussed on the mundane. It is a little theater
where the sacred is personfied in its most human
forms and the story of one's life is played out
by willing hands. One's favorite saints and
one's favorite people -- relatives, friends, and
the beloved ancestors -- all reside together
there, graced with love and beauty, the
cherished fragments of our mortal lives
rearranged by our will within the shelter of the
altar's protective frame, sanctioned by the
deity. Now the wounded daughter, the deceased
parent, the baby not yet born may interact with
one another according to our deepest prayers and
wishes for their healing, protected in the womb
of the sacred.
Kay
Turner has given us a perceptive and lovely book
about the ways that altars enrich women's lives.
Whatever their religious orientation, whether
Catholic, wiccan, Native American or Indian,
altars are ways to nurture a relationship with
the divine, a way to cast our problems into the
arms of the eternal beloved -- usually maternal
-- offer up our prayers to Her. Often the altar
is passed down the maternal lineage. "Personal
relationship with divine beings is a gift from
grandmothers and mothers to their daughters."
(30) Soleda "Chole" Pescina, an elderly Catholic
Mexican American, rarely went to church because
"we are our own priests at home" (28). She
learned a female-based folk Catholicism from her
grandmother in Mexico.
Altars
are power centers, places where we worship
undisturbed and uncensored by either external
authority (the male priest) or community
pressure (the congregation). "The altar's
construction induces a kind of ready, vibrating
energy," (96) according to the geometric designs
with which they are executed. Power objects like
crystals, feathers and ritual tools help focus
our spiritual intentions.
"If, as
artist Carolyn Oberst suggests, 'Women
understand…image veneration in a visceral
way,' this is true in part because the physical
labors and entailments of pregnancy, birth,
breast-feeding and child-rearing can be shared
with a Divine Mother whose visible, familiar
body in image form is a source of desirable
identification. In this way, reproductive
processes are assisted; moreover, by extension,
a woman's body -- her life lived in the body --
is validated; her capacity to regenerate human
life is made sacred." (118)
Making
offerings is a way of sustaining the vitality of
the altar, of giving something tangible back to
the deity as a sign of devotion. "One brings
what one has, a symbol, no matter how humble, of
what one wants to give." (35)
Words of
power are also associated with altar making."
Through the use of language, the self-created
altar becomes a vehicle for self-creation, an
instrument of shaping consciousness, and for
fulfilling needs and desires." Altar languages
combine praise and supplication -- the language
of giving -- with prayers, songs, chants which
Turner calls the language of receiving. Some
women "tell Her everything." "Self-disclosure
grounds the believer's ability to be fully
present as herself with her close deities, to
ask from them what is needed and receive
whatever is granted." (143)
Reading
this book makes me want to spend much more time
with my own altars (which spontaneously spring
up on window-sills, dresser tops and the
mantelpiece but receive, alas, little attention.
My electronic altar commands by far too much of
my time! But abstract words are not the same as
the rocks and feathers we pick up in the passage
of our lives, things which can be arranged and
touched... Turner has collected dozens of
illustrations to display the inspired variety
and colors of the many diverse and personal
altars she had the pleasure of visiting all
across the country. In that way, Beautiful
Necessity is an altarpiece in its own right.
I heartily recommend it to women who love art as
a way of embodying their own sacred
spirits.
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