#fire altar

[arjuna-vallabha]

Zorosatrian fire altar, fire temple in Chak Chak, Iran, photo by Mical Huniewicz

[mysticramblings]

[paganomicon]

Here’s a video of me fire dancing with my bestie!  Dancing with fire really makes me appreciate the delicate balance of fire that we live with as magical people.  For more thoughts on this, check out my article, My South Altar: Honoring My Inner Fire.

[tattooed-alchemist]

I had a fire in my fireplace for my waning moon work in early October, and before the new moon, I cleaned out the entire fireplace.  Like bare clean.  The ashes were strewn on the compost pile in the backyard where a couple of days of rain were about to happen.

I set a large log on the fireplace grill and put a cardboard box in front to act as a riser.  I want everything but one thing that I put in here between now and Samhain to be burnable.  The one non-burnable thing is a timer pumpkin light, which goes off for four hours nightly and minds itself. 

For the new moon, I put the light onto the riser, with freshly-charged rechargeable batteries, and turned it on at approximately 5pm.  It ran until 9pm, just as promised and then switched off.  Why should this light show be happening in a rapidly moldering pumpkin in my Pacific Northwest yard?  I’ll be having a nightly fireplace light show as the evenings slowly get darker earlier.  Sunset is about 6:30pm at the moment, and will be a little before 6pm by Samhain, so my living room should be plenty dark when the light kicks on at 5.

Edited to add: There is a touch of weird motor noise where plastic rubs plastic but after a couple nights of use, it’s clear it runs accurately for four hours from 5pm to 9pm.  It’s not too loud but there’s an eerie quality to the noise.  I have a silicon lube I use on my alchemical glassware which never dries out and I smeared a dab or two of that on a couple of parts on the light casing and the noise is lessened a bit but still eerie.  It sounds like Muffled Moaning Myrtle is up my chimney.