Product Description

"The creation of an altar is a sacred act, an act of power and grace. For a few timeless minutes you enter a dimension beyond ordinary reality, where light, sound, and energy merge into an exquisite state of being."

The human urge to create physical sacred centers for our lives is so deep that we often create them unconsciously. Photos on the dresser, personal objects on our desk or around the computer are tangible tokens of our longing for balance and wholeness--and of our attempts to strengthen connections between our loved ones, nature and community, and other great sources of spiritual power.

The internationally acclaimed author of Sacred Space, Denise Linn, speaks directly to this primal need for hallowed and holy places. In Altars, she demonstrates in photos and text how you can further enrich the areas around us at home or in the office by creating unique shrines for personal devotions, intimate centers for healing and contemplation. Beautifully illustrated and thoroughly practical, Altars shows how to

- Create personal altars for prayer and devotion, stillness and listening, loss and mourning, relationships and love, and connecting with the life energy
- Find the right place to install a home shrine, according to the points of the compass and the ancient and honored principles of feng shui
- Select altar objects that are particularly suited to your special needs
- Purify yourself and your altars with incense, prayers, drumming, and chanting
- And much more!

Everyone who yearns to draw near the mysterious and wondrous, to infuse ordinary moments with sacred meaning, will find a great wealth of beauty, inspiration, and wisdom in this unique book.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #152726 in Books
• Published on: 1999-10
• Released on: 1999-10-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 160 pages

Amazon.com Review
This beautifully written book offers instruction and inspiration to those who want to integrate altars into their daily lives. Author Denise Linn (Sacred Space, Quest, Sacred Legacies) helps readers become more conscious of what they are already unconsciously doing: creating altars in the kitchen corners, on shelves, and in other everyday spaces in their homes. "The urge to create sacred spaces is so deep in the human psyche that, even when there is no formalized intent to make an altar, we often create them subconsciously by the way we gather our photos on a piano, or by the way we carefully arrange objects on a desk or around a computer," Linn writes.

Linn suggests how to create altars with specific events or agendas in mind (i.e., holiday, vacation, or birthday altars filled with symbols of hope for the coming year). She also offers ideas for creating altars that honor new relationships, births, deaths, and other rites of passage. Exquisite color photographs make this a stunning resource for your home and spirit. --Gail Hudson

From Library Journal
Linn, author of the equally beautiful Sacred Space, has created a kind of how-to sequel to that book. Her guide, illustrated with more than 100 color photographs, shows the reader how to construct, decorate, and consecrate personal altars, with symbols and images from all traditions. Her attractive and simply written work should have a strong appeal to the extrainstitutional spiritual seeker and reader. For most collections.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Altars, Linn says, are spaces consciously arranged with a spiritual--and, for her, a psychological--intent. In cultures in which spirituality is less circumscribed, less divorced from mundane life, people create altars naturally in the home and the workplace. Some of this altar-building is unconscious, but that it is altar-building becomes obvious when, for instance, one changes the arrangement of family photos on a coworker's desk, much to that person's discomfort. Linn urges us to make altars deliberately, whether they be ancestor altars for recalling the beloved dead, creativity altars for encourage visitation by the muse, or love altars to attract and encourage relationships. She offers numerous suggestions of artifacts for and arrangements of altars, so that this is not a cookbook of the spirit but a resource list meant to spur thoughtful construction. Lavishly and beautifully illustrated, Altars should prove quite popular with New Age readers. Patricia Monaghan

Customer Reviews

This is a lovely book with wonderful ideas.
I shared this book with my 10 year old daughter, and she made herself the most beautiful altar in her room. She made one for my husband and my 13 year old son and 14 year old daughter followed. They personalized it with special pictures and their own treasures. When they have a problem, they light their candle and pray. Its a special connection and looks so nice.

The *best* book on Altars
I've looked at every book I could get my hands on about the subject of Altars, and Denise Linn's book on the topic is, in my opinion, the best. Many of the other books have way too much text, but Denise Linn's book on Altars has lots of great pictures and just the right amount of descriptive text. She also has wonderful suggestions on various types of altar objects (with pictures), where to find different altar objects, imaginative altar layouts, etc. This is a *must have* book, and unfortunately, I'm sad to see that it is currently out of print. So if you can find a used one, grab it ! ! You won't be disappointed.

Nice altar layouts no matter which spiritual path you follow
If you practise Amerindian spirituality, Buddhism, Christianity, etc as your spiritual path; you wil find ways to set up an altar in your home.

My only minor nitpick is that in the Medicine Wheel layouts on pages 56-61. Ms Linn places the elements in the wrong directions IMHO.