Lammas Altar

So this is my altar for Lammas:

Like most of my altars, it has my usual suspects towards the back, such as my element jars, Tibetan singing bowl,and God/Dess candles (red for God, amber for Goddess).

The altar cloth I am using is an orange/gold/blue scarf, which I think shows the transition into the harvest season.

I moved the incense burner towards the back and have been using incense for my offerings this month.

Below that, I have my yellow offering bowl with a bit of flour in it to represent the first harvest. I wrapped my prayer beads around it, which you can see as the gold and black beads around the bowl.
The left of the bowl has my ceramic wheel of the year, with Lammas almost at the top.

The right of the yellow bowl is a small heart shaped box, which I found for a dollar at Michael's craft stores. I am using it to hold my two of my pendulums, and will be painting it later so it looks nicer.

Rose quartz on the left, carnelian to the right

On either side of the altar, I have a few stones, which I chose by using my carnelian pendulum. This is my first time using my pendulum to help me decorate my altar, and I really enjoyed it, so I will probably do so in the future. Because I used my pendulum, the stones I put up there are not necessarily just for Lammas, but also to help me out personally.

Another part  of my altar that reflects my personal life instead of the holiday is the Tarot card I placed down in front.

I started working at my new job yesterday (and its going wonderfully) and I put the Ace of Pentacles down to reflect my financial growth, as well as to help motivate me to get working! I put a chunk of raw clear quartz on top to amplify the energy of my altar as a whole.

Changing my altar from Litha to Lammas really gave me a sense of calm, like I was shaking out the cobwebs a bit. I think having my pendulum help choose the crystals helped create this sense of calm, and I also like how I focused a bit more on my personal life, rather than just choosing symbols for the holiday.

I hope this helped give you some ideas for your altar. Thanks for reading!

Update

Hey everyone, I'm so sorry I haven't posted in a while. If I'm being honest with you all, I've been struggling with my depression, and it has killed my motivation to do anything pagan or witchy.

BUT! I have just put up my  Lammas altar, so that will be coming up a little closer to the Sabbat. I also have a lavender 'pleasant dreams' witchy craft coming up, so the second I get all the necessary components (I'm missing witch hazel, which seems kind of ironic to me) then I will do that and get that up here on my blog as well.

In other more mundane news, I had my volunteer orientation for the local animal shelter yesterday, and very excited to begin helping out my community. I've looking forward to this for a month now, so I'm glad its finally happening.

I also start my job on Monday! This is a huge relief to me, because I've been unemployed since I graduated college, and its very difficult to pay for my rent without a source of income.

So in short, I am still alive and (fairly) well, I just haven't had much to report or blog about. Hopefully I will get my altar post up early next week (I'm thinking Tuesday), and then do one about my actual Sabbat celebration the following week.

Thanks so much for reading, and hopefully now that my life is getting more productive, I will be more productive as well!

Thoughts on Respect and Offering Ideas

I have discovered that a lot of my practice is based on the idea of honoring and respecting myself as well as the God/Dess, spirits, and ancestors. The ancestors one is especially important to me, because without them I would not even exist. I spend a lot of time lately thinking about how I am connected to to them as well as to other spirits, and I always feel that they deserve a lot of respect.

It is strange to me to watch a show such as Ghost Adventures (my guilty pleasure) and see how they try to contact spirits around them. A lot of their tactics involve yelling or threatening spirits, and I feel like I go the other way about it.

Whenever I try and communicate with spirits, or even just pray, I end with a thank you, and often a kiss. The kiss is something that came to me while praying when I first started out my journey with Paganism, and is my way of offering love back to the world. It has inadvertently become a big part of my craft. I kiss my ring after asking for protection, kiss my divination tools after using them, and kiss the air to seal my prayers. I have a tattoo in memory of my great-grandmother, and I kiss that as a way to honor and show that I miss her.

Again, it comes back to how I feel these things should be approached with respect. For me, another part of that respect can be given through offerings, so I thought today I would give you a list of some of my offerings:

• Drinks: This one was how I started out with offerings, because its usually something I have readily available. Whenever I would make tea, I would pour a little in my offering bowl. I would also leave small amounts of wine when I had that, and I have read recently that a lot of people leave out water for the spirits.

• Food: Like drinks, this is good because its readily available. I don't really use food a lot as an offering, just because its never really felt like something that I wanted to offer. The only time I really used food was when I wanted to leave an honoring for the aforementioned great-grandmother, in which case I offered a food that I knew she liked. 

• Incense: This is the type of offering I have been doing lately, just because I have collected a lot of incense and wasn't burning it nearly as quickly as I thought I would.

• Body: No, I don't mean offer up your body (unless that feels right to you), what I mean is use physical actions as an offering. For example, lately my favorite offering is dance. I will turn on a song and dance in their honor. I like this a lot too, because it is a way of offering things without needing any actual thing. This means it can be good for people who can't afford physical offerings, or who are still 'in the shadows' and are unable to leave things out.  It doesn't even have to be dance, you could run in their honor, sing, do yoga, etc.

• Art: I have yet to do this, because I am not very good at art, but I have known people who do devotional drawings or poems as a means of offering.

• Pretty Much Whatever You Can Think Of: If you think it would be something good to offer, chances are, it is.You can usually tell if its been accepted or not, and if you are unsure, you can use divination to confirm. I have friends that use pendulums to help determine what offerings they should leave. One friend asked what that spirit would like to be offered, and it told her lemons, so whenever she gets a lemon with her water at a restaurant, she uses it as an offering. Another friend offers Swedish Fish, so it really depends on you, and your relationship with who you're making offerings to.

I hope this helps give you some ideas for possible offerings, and again, its just a few things I have done, or have seen others do.

Thanks for reading, and have a great week!