Sacred Space

Given our close proximity to Yule, I thought I would touch on Sacred Space, Ritual Space, whatever you wish to call it.  How many people are able to have a special room, set aside completely for doing Ritual or Spell work?  My e-friend Tru has a beautiful ritual space, painted a light baby blue and full of bookshelves and cupboards with assorted goblets and candles.  It's a gorgeous room.  Me?  We have an end table we pull out to use as an Altar table, and we keep our Altar supplies in boxes in the front of the bedroom close for easy access.  Hey, our home is slightly more than 900 sq ft.  2 bedrooms.  I have a jar of consecrated water sitting on my counter, and all our craft books are piled on the dining room table.  We only have 3 bookshelves, and one of them is being used to hold all our DVD s/VHS/Video Games.  We have enough books to open our own library, most of them are still in boxes.  We just don't have the room.  It sucks to have to look through 5 boxes to find out which one has the book you want to read in.  You know which one it was in?  The last one we looked in.  Yeah.  Figure that out.

Okay.  Back on topic.  Yes, we keep our Altar supplies in boxes.  We each have our own box, because we each used to have our own Altar.  We are eventually going to combine everything into a family Altar one day, but that will happen once we get a permanent Altar table. I know a lot of people don't have the space required for a whole room to be set aside for Ritual use.  Before we had Brianna, we set up our Altars in a corner of our main room, and just pulled them out for rituals.  What with an almost walking baby on our hands, that is kind of out of the question now.  We do our rituals in our living room, usually.  We follow the basic rules of Sacred Space, even if we can't use the room as Sacred Space all the time.

The two most important things in my view are cleaning the room and cleansing the room.  As long as these are met, I think that this is the only thing that you really need to have for a space to be Sacred Space.  They are equally important, if a space is cleaned in the physical world it makes it much easier to clean it in the spiritual world.  That, and if you are seeing little bits of dirt in your carpet in can be pretty distracting from your Ritual.

What does everyone else do for Sacred Space?  Are we the only ones to keep our Ritual supplies in boxes?!  Especially with Yule coming up, I think we should all pay a little more attention to our Ritual Space.  Before each Sabbat, I like to do a blessing in our Sacred Space.  The one I like is based off of a blessing for a house or property. 

Blessing for a Sacred Space

Items Needed - White Candle, protection or blessing incense, consecrated water, consecrated salt

Light the candle and the incense.  Sprinkle some of the water and salt around your sacred space.  Say, "Goddess and God, spirits of the North, South, East and West, bless this space.  Allow only good intentions and watch over those who enter here.  As I will so mote it be."
Sit in front of the candle and incense and visualize your space being blessed and filling with sacred light.

On the topic of Rituals, I found a really interesting article at Live Wicca.  It's by a man named Mike Nichols, and it really makes you think about why we use the directions and elements we do.  Here is the link.

Hope you all found this interesting!  Everyone have a great day!

Goddess Bless,

S.