How to Create a Living Altar to the Dark Goddess

Working with the Dark Goddess

1. Intention

The Dark Goddess can help us find the resolve, dedication, strength, and faith to enter abodes of fear. The first step on the path of engagement with Her is the setting of an intention. Called sankalpa in yogic traditions, this is our resolve, our commitment, our statement of yearning in the dance of free will and determinism. We must be clear in our call, direct and unpretentious in our approach. In one sense, the guidelines are simple:

I. Discern the yearning
What is it that calls to you?

II. Engage willingness
Make a commitment to the path

III. Trust the process
Surrender yourself

This is not a mere matter of reading words, however; this is the reality of taking steps toward the deep end of the pool. The more clearly you can articulate for yourself the nature of your exploration and where you wish to go, the more carefully and precisely you will be guided toward your destination. With your sankalpa is set, you are ready to begin the work of opening to Her.

2. The Living Altar: Tools, Symbols, and Practice

Every Dark Goddess shares five essential qualities. They are: embodiment, relationality, cyclicity, the chthonic, and the antinomian. Through them, she offers us Her gifts, with liberation the greatest of them all. These five qualities are the very core of what it means to be a dark goddess, and thus, in concert they create a vibrational energy evocative of Her essence. In this way, your opening to the Dark Goddess is facilitated by working with them—they set the stage for a personal invocation that allows the Dark Goddess to manifest as you desire to know Her.

Creating your Dark Goddess altar with the tools, symbols, and practices offered here, inclusive of your own inspirations, lets Her know that you are ready, and makes a sanctuary in which She can dwell for the duration of your worship. Study these qualities along with their correspondences. Get to know them inside so that you feel both physical and subtle levels of manifestation; for these can help you not only deepen spiritual discovery and self-awareness, but also come closer to the heart of Her—and through this, the heart of the world.

i. Embodiment

This quality is the root of all others. Literally, it corresponds to the Muladhara Chakra, the energy center at the base of our spine, the root of the body. Without this quality, there is little space from which we can engage Her.

Here, in the realm of matter and our embodied selves, is where the Dark Goddess lives and fights for life-affirming change. From here, She calls upon us to re-sanctify nature. She is in the stuff of our bodies, and in the stuff of our world denied and rejected. She is the dirt under our fingernails, excrement, blood, women’s moon-time blood; she is in the juices of our love making, the burps of babies who come in all the colors of rain-washed Earth, the flesh of our beloved dead. She is the Divine immanent, here among us—and she is neither shy nor embarrassed about it. Rather, she shows up inebriated on the festival offered, drunk from the kissing of wounds.

The first of Her qualities, embodiment is also the power of the body’s wisdom and intuition. It has correspondences in Earth and North. Her tool is a sacred diagram (such as a pentacle, labyrinth, yantra, or mandala) that provides a contemplative entryway to insight and deeper revelation of the inner mysteries. Engage practices such as breath work, meditation, focusing, movement, yoga, and energy raising techniques to enter the arena of embodied wisdom. Draw on the power of your personal experiences to call up corporeal parables. These are the stories our bodies know that cross time and space; for example, childbirth, near-death experiences, and athletic episodes of being ‘in the zone.’

Use resin incense and flowers to help awaken your senses and open the gateways to Her, with mindfulness to both external and internal realities. Find inside yourself the aromas, sounds, sensations, and feelings that arise, and pay particular attention to smells as activators of the subtle body. What you experience, this is an essence of the Dark Goddess.

ii. Relationality

Whether taken literally or metaphorically, the Dark Goddess is the one who shapes reality, creating and filling in spaces where we need to do the hard work of the spiritual journey. As we do this work, we may come to realize that relationships are our primary reminder of connection. We might not be surprised, therefore, to find the quality of relationality located at the Anahata Chakra, our heart center, a place of balance, potential, and equanimity. Seat of the soul in many traditions, the heart is the place through which we experience the bonds of Creation: from the outside in and the inside out.

The second of her qualities, relationality has correspondences in East and Air. The tool of the Dark Goddess in the East is the mirror. In it we see revealed our most authentic nature and the heart of all truths reflected through Her. As she gazes back at us, we may delve into the questions—especially those that relate us to our physically-, emotionally-, intellectually-, and culturally-informed notions of who we are—that get at the meaning of our identity and existence. This is the very stuff of soul making, the very stuff of awakening spiritual maturity. Here, She offers us the power of an unconditional embrace.

Practices such as seva, or selfless service, and other efforts that create happiness, deepen heartfelt feeling states, and cultivate compassion (our ability to be with suffering) ignite this quality of hers. Practices you might wish to explore include dream work, scrying, regression, and forms of transpersonal therapy, journaling, walking/active meditation, and conscious loving.

On your altar, use things that you particularly enjoy touching, picking up, and holding. Spend time with the objects of your choosing, allowing the holding to rekindle ancient memories and awaken mythic connections. Choose a variety of tactile delights to incorporate into your ritual environment, such as textured fabrics, wood, stone, and fur. Above all else, bring yourself into love through devotion. What you experience, this is an essence of the Dark Goddess.