Setting up ritual chamber - equipment

The setting up of the ritual chamber and its furnishing is one of the few endeavors in life where there is a genuine advantage to being time-rich and cash-poor.

 There are some stores from which you can order a box containing an instant Satanic temple, including robes and banners – but tempting as this is, it simply will not do.

Like yuppies trying to get a short cut to being cool by buying ‘pre-stressed’ jeans or leather jackets – you cannot get occult credibility with money alone.

 Each item in the ritual chamber must have a resonance with you, so that when you touch and use them, the things they represent to you come alive in your mind.

Truly, a Dixie cup of Diet Coke with a Baphomet scrawled on it with Magic Marker will be of more use to you than a solid silver chalice full of vintage wine, if that item holds more meaning for you.

 For this reason it is best to make your own ritual equipment wherever possible.

I appreciate that not everyone will have either the blacksmithing skills and tools necessary to make a sword, or the carpentry skills to make an altar, but everyone has some skills:  sewing, woodwork, painting - whatever your strengths are, you should play to them, utilising them to achieve a ritual chamber which is as charged with your own personality and ideas as you can make it.

 However, as talented as you might be, it is unlikely you will be able to do it all, and even more unlikely that those items that you cannot make will be available off the shelf at Wal-Mart.

 You will need to haunt thrift stores, yard sales, antique shops and other unlikely places to find things that have the patina of age and the right kind of resonance for you – you can even find many such things on E-bay.

 Here are some ideas to get you thinking creatively about ritual equipment and how to find it.

 Chalice

My own chalice, a heavy, silver-plate copy of a medieval goblet was bought for less than the price of a Starbucks’ Latte on a quiet evening on E-bay when other bargain hunters must have been looking the other way.  You can frequently find goblets and trophy cups in antique and junk stores.

 Sword

Swords have always represented material power, partly because they represent physical force, but also because they were very, very expensive.  Often only the chief or king in ancient cultures got to have a sword – everyone else had to make do with some kind of sharpened stick (such as a spear or pike).

 Today it is pretty much the same: a good sword is very expensive.  There are some very nice looking, cheap swords which can be bought at the mall, but be warned, when you get them home… they feel cheap.

 For a few hundred dollars you can buy genuine antique swords, and if that is in your budget, then that is an excellent option.  Masonic ritual also requires a sword, and you can find vintage masonic swords at quite reasonable prices.

 However, for those living in tiny apartments, there might literally not be room to swing a sword.  Consider a short sword, there are some excellent choices out there.  Searching for ‘short sword’ on E-bay alone yielded hundreds of hits, some of them antiques at reasonable prices.

 For some, a large knife will be sufficient, and again there are many decorative knives which would be more than suitable.  To make your ritual blade as personal as possible, I would recommend the purchase of a kit.  Retailers such as Texas Knifemaker’s Supply (www.texasknife.com), allow you to choose a suitable blade, select handle material and a few other essential such as rivets.  After a few hours with some sandpaper, you will have a beautiful knife which you have crafted yourself with virtually no metal-smithing skills required.  

 As an alternative, consider purchasing a spear head and putting it on a short, stubby wooden handle – there are a lot of  vintage/antique spear heads around in junk stores (people brought them back from African trips) and on E-bay, but Cold Steel (www.coldsteel.com) makes some very nice looking modern ones.

 Candlesticks

This is a good example in being able to see the potential of an item.  I could not find the right candlesticks anywhere at any price, but when I spotted a pair of old, brass candlesticks in a thrift store, I saw in an instant what needed to be done.  For a few dollars at a good hardware shop, you can buy a spray can of black stove paint – this is normally used for touching up barbecues and other outdoor equipment.  Within a half-hour, I had a pair of heavy, black candlesticks for my altar.

This paint works extremely well for blackening any metal items that you might need for the ritual chamber, bells, bowls, incense burners – though I’d be careful of using it with anything you might eat or drink from.

 Incense burner

Ritual as far as possible should engage the mind and all of the senses.  Incense is an a very powerful trigger to the mind and the emotions – one need only get a waft of a scent associated with some happy moment in the past to be transported. The choice of incense is therefore going to be very personal.  There are two types of incense, the kind that comes pre-formed in stick or cone form and the loose kind that has to be burnt on a charcoal disk or on a fire.  The second type causes a greater volume of smoke, which can create a more atmospheric effect.

 There are a number of commercially available incense burners, of varying materials and qualities that can be bought for both types of incense.  You may alternatively choose a simple metal or ceramic bowl, filled with sand. This can be more aesthetically pleasing than a commercially made item from the mall.

 Bell/Gong

One of the biggest challenges is the use of the bell or the gong used for purifying/polluting the air.

 Anton Lavey recommended a concert-quality gong, but for most homes, the size of one of these and the volume of noise it will make will be disproportionate to the size of your ritual space. And what would you do with it when it’s not in use?

 Smaller bells are obviously called for, but it is hard to find small bells that have much in the way of quality of sound.

 Some, for whom space is truly at a premium, have found that using a good-quality tuning fork from a music store, can have excellent results, being able to be struck against any hard surface.

 Personally I have found Tibetan ‘Singing Bowls’ to be an excellent way of purifying/polluting the air.   These vary in price from a few dollars to a few hundred dollars, depending on whether you go for something mass produced on a lathe, or whether you have bought a hand-beaten antique.

 Singing bowls are held in the palm of the hand, and can be struck like a gong with the beater that is usually provided.  Alternatively, the same beater can be used to gently rub the edge of the bowl, creating an ethereal humming note, which reverberates around the room (this is in fact very similar to the moistened finger on the wineglass trick).

 I generally use the bowl by striking it eight times and on the ninth and final strike, make the bowl ‘sing’ one long, loud note.

 The Wand or Phallus

On the first night of the full moon, go into a wooded glade, and using a brand new axe, upon which the sigil of Baphomet has been etched, cleave with one blow, a staff from a yew tree which has never been cut by human hand before.  Well, this is how many grimoires would have you go about it, and if you have the time, the tools and can wander around woodland at night with an axe without getting shot, then good luck. 

 The wand, signifying fire, can be made from just about any kind of wood you choose.  This is one tool which just about anyone can make for themselves.  Really.  Finding a piece of wood you like the shape of and sanding the rough bits could be as much as you need to do.  The more adventurous could try a little whittling, or wrapping one end with leather thonging to make a handle.

 You could alternatively buy a nice piece of exotic wood from a woodworking supplier and paint, carve or burn your preferred evocations/words of power onto it. 

In Laveyan rituals, the wand is replaced with a phallus, and he says that the dildos sold in adult stores will do.  I do not personally use a phallus, but if I wanted to make one, I would carve it from hard wood (ebony or mahogony would be my choices).  I certainly would not choose a pink plastic vibrator to go on my altar.  However, there are (so I am told) kits available from these same adult stores, which enable a man to make a life cast of his own (presumably erect) penis.  This would be a good compromise and again, would make the ritual item more personal and therefore more representative of real forces.

 Also, if a priestess wanted to use a phallus and she chose to use a vibrator or dildo she used in personal life, then I could see arguments for this because of the psycho-sexual associations of that item.  Perhaps this is the only occasion when a commonly used item can also be used in the ritual chamber.

 Baphomet

The centre of the ritual space should have an image which represents the magician’s beliefs and the energies he intends to engage with.  For myself I use an image of the Baphomet which I painted myself.  For others it will be a simple inverted pentagram, or an image of their patron devil or demon.  There are many artists out there selling prints or paintings of Baphomet or other demons (including my own limited edition prints), and these are obviously better than owning a commercially-made image.  However, as with the other ritual equipment, an image of your own fashioning is going to be of the most use and appropriateness to yourself.  A scant few years ago, having no ability with a pen or a brush excluded you from artistic endeavour.  However, Photoshop and other software packages have made artists of us all.  With a few clicks you can create your own personal image.

 Robes

Strictly speaking, there is no need for special robes for ritual.  Many Satanists carry out their workings naked.  Others just wear their finest suits and dresses.  If wearing ordinary clothes suit your purposes, then why not?  However, if you do use street or work clothes for ritual, I suggest that you change one thing – make some kind of addition or subtraction to your clothing so that it feels different.  Perhaps omit the wearing of shoes, so that the ground feels different, or perhaps do not wear underwear – whatever it is, do something so that the everyday associations you have with those clothes is broken, and they somehow become ‘different’ when you’re wearing them in the ritual chamber.

 For some, putting on a special robe is part of the transformative process of going from one’s mundane existence into the world of ritual.  A robe should have only two main requirements – it should have a hood, so that by pulling up the cowl, the magician can feel that he/she is isolating themselves from the material world around them and thereby entering their own world.  This is why monks and nuns all over the world wear hooded robes. Secondly, the robe should be loose enough to not be restictive, and should allow access to those parts of the body necessary for autoerotic or mutual sexual activity if that is part of the working.

Robes can be purchased through a number of companies on the internet, or for those with sewing abilities, interest in Dungeons and Dragons, Lord of the Rings and suchlike have led commercial pattern makers to create a wide range of robe designs that can be made up easily.  A moderately able person with a sewing machine could make two robes in a weekend.

 The Altar

The altar will largely depend on your own circumstances.

Those with a room that can be set aside for the purpose will be able to have dedicated ritual chambers with permanent altars, and can let their imaginations run riot in its decoration.

In many parts of the world – New York, London, Amsterdam – in fact most of the world’s major cities – property prices are so high that owning an apartment or house large enough for one room to be set aside for ritual only, might seem a luxury for the super-rich. 

Those who have to pay extravagant prices for modest homes will find that their ritual space will have to double up as a dining room, lounge or as a guest bedroom.  Their imaginations will have to be reigned in and made to work harder.  The best use of available space will have to be made.  It is worth noting that many of the significant early rituals of the Church of Satan were carried out in the living room of the Black House, using the mantlepiece as an altar.

So, depending on available space, for some, the altar will be a purpose made wood and metal table, ideally in the shape of a trapezoid.  For others, it will be a table, a bookshelf, or the top of a dresser.

My final point on the subject of ritual equipment is this: while the actual space you use for ritual purposes may be used for other things – your ritual equipment should not be left lying around. The purpose of ritual is to create a unique state of mind, and the use of special clothes, incense and so forth are so that each of the senses are triggered into that frame of mind, and each time you go back to the ritual chamber, this response gets strengthened.

Seeing the items of ritual outside of their context can only weaken these associations, making it harder to open the door to effective magic.

Therefore, when not in use, ritual items should be wrapped in cloths and kept in a special box, out of sight until they are needed.