Altar in the Orthodox Church. A stone carved altar helped to understand the dynastic ties of the Mayan states. Stone altar field

Circle preparation

The magic circle can be lined with crystals and stones, or herbs.
Starting and ending in the North, place 7, 9, 21, and 40 quartz crystals of any size in a circle inside or directly on the restraining rope. If the ritual involves ordinary spiritual and magical work, the crystals are placed face out. If a protective ritual is performed, the crystals should be placed with their faces inside.
If you are using candles to mark the cardinal directions in a magic circle, instead of stones, surround each candle with the following minerals:

NORTH - agate, emerald, jet, olivine, salt, black tourmaline.
VOSTOK - royal topaz, citrine, mica, pumice.
SOUTH - ambergris, obsidian, rhodochrosite, ruby, lava, garnet.
WEST - aquamarine, chalcedony, jadeite, lapis lazuli, Moonstone.

stone altar

To make such an altar, look for a few smooth flat stones at the bottom of a dry river or on the seashore.
The altar is made separately from three large stones. Two smaller ones are placed at the base, and the largest and flatter one must be placed on top, it forms the altar itself. The left foundation stone represents the Goddess. It can be an ordinary pebble rolled by a river, a stone with a hole (chicken god) or a quartz crystal sphere - in general, any stone associated with the Goddess from the following.
The right foundation stone represents God. It can be symbolized by a quartz crystal, a piece of volcanic lava, or a long thick mace-shaped stone, that is, any stone symbolizing God from the following.
A small stone is placed between these stones. A red candle is placed on it, symbolizing divine energy Goddess and God, in the form of the element of Fire.
In front of these stones, another one is placed - for sacrifices: wine, honey, cookies, semi-precious stones, flowers and fruits.
To the left of the sacrificial stone, a small stone with a bowl-shaped recess is set. Fill it with water, symbolizing the element of Water.
Any flat stone can be placed in front of the sacrificial stone to serve as an incense burner.
A long, thin quartz crystal can replace your wand, and a sharpened flint or obsidian shard can serve as a magical dagger.
All other tools are simply placed on the altar in the required order.
The stone altar can be used in all kinds of rituals.

Goddess Stones

Basically, these are pink, green and blue stones that have a connection with the Moon and Venus and are ruled by Water and Earth. These are peridot, emerald, pink tourmaline, pink and blue quartz, aquamarine, beryl, turquoise.

Stones associated with specific deities:

APHRODITE - salt.
GREAT MOTHER - amber, coral, stones with a hole
VENUS - emerald, lapis lazuli, pearls.
DIANA - amethyst, moonstone, pearls.
ISIS - coral, emerald, lapis lazuli, moonstone, pearls.
KWAN YING - jadeite.
CYBELE - jet.
COATLICU - jadeite.
LAKSMI - pearl.
MAAT - jadeit.
MARA - beryl, aquamarine.
PELE - lava, obsidian, peridot, olivine, pumice.
SELENA - moonstone, selenite.
TIAMAT - beryl.
FREYA - pearl.
HATOR - turquoise.
CERES - emerald.

God Stones

Basically, these are red and orange stones, as well as those associated with the Sun and Mars, ruled by Fire and Air - bloodstone, ruby, garnet, orange calcite, diamond, tiger's eye, topaz, sun stone, red tourmaline.

Stones associated with specific deities

APOLLO - sapphire.
BACHUS - amethyst.
DIONYSUS - amethyst.
CUPID - opal.
MARS - onyx, sardonyx.
NEPTUNE - beryl.
ONE - stones with a hole.
POSEIDON - beryl, pearl*, aquamarine.

* I call pearls and coral stones, because they have been called so since ancient times. Although we know perfectly well that they are the waste products of marine organisms, and the ethical question of whether to use them in our rituals is faced by each of us. Although I collected corals, I did not use them in witchcraft.

RA - tiger's eye.
TETZCATLIPOCA - obsidian.
Aesculapius - agate.

pyramids

In ancient times, all over the world, people built mounds and mounds from stones. Sometimes these structures served to mark caravan routes, often they were built in honor of some historical events, but usually such pyramids had a ritual significance.
In a magical sense, the pyramid is a place of power. It concentrates the energy of the stones of which it is composed. Pyramids stand on the Earth, but their tops go to the sky, representing the symbolic relationship of physical and spiritual reality.
During outdoor rituals, a small pyramid (of no more than nine or eleven stones) may be placed at each of the main points of the Circle of Stones. This is done before the designation of the circle itself.
Next time choose a lonely wild corner with an abundance of stones. Clear a place for yourself among them and sit down. Imagine your magical goal. As you visualize, grasp the nearest stone in your hand. Feel the energy pulsing in it, the energy of the Earth, the energy of nature itself. Place the stone on clean ground. Take the next stone and visualize your goal again, and then put the stone back to the first one.
Thus visualizing, keep collecting stones,
| Laying out of them a small pyramid. | Stack the stones until you feel them vibrate and pulsate. Put the last stone on top of the pyramid with a clear ritual intention - to connect yourself with the Earth through the pyramid and with this last magical action to fix your magical goal.
Place both hands on the pyramid. Give her your energy. Let it grow inside the pyramid. Fill it with power and watch your magical target fill with power.
Then leave the pyramid to finish its work alone.

Spell with candles and quartz crystals

Take a colored candle, the color symbolizing your magical goal. Choose it in accordance with the proposed list (or choose a color intuitively):

WHITE - protection, purification, calmness.
RED - protection, strength, health, courage, cetrast.
LIGHT BLUE - healing, patience, happiness.
DARK BLUE - transformations, spirituality.
GREEN - money, fertility, growth, development.
YELLOW - intelligence, teaching, divinity, attractiveness.
BROWN - Animal healing.
PINK - love, friendship.
ORANGE - excitement, energy.
PURPLE - strength, healing from diseases.

With the end of a pure quartz crystal, carve the desired symbol on the candle. It can be a heart for a love spell, a dollar sign for a money spell, a fist for a power spell. Otherwise, you can use the appropriate rune * or simply write on the candle what you need.
As you draw or cut, visualize with crystal clarity how your goal might manifest. Insert the candle into the candlestick. Place the crystal next to her and light the fuse.
Once the flame is lit, visualize your desires clearly again. Crystal, candle and symbol will do their job.
Symbols and signs
They are used for quick writing in magical works, the Book of Spirits, your Book of Reflections, and so on.

To make such an altar, look for a few smooth flat stones at the bottom of a dry river or on the seashore.

The altar is made separately from three large stones. Two smaller ones are placed at the base, and the largest and flatter one must be placed on top, it forms the altar itself. The left foundation stone represents the Goddess. It can be an ordinary pebble rolled by a river, a stone with a hole (chicken god) or a quartz crystal sphere - in general, any stone associated with the Goddess from the following.

The right foundation stone represents God. It can be symbolized by a quartz crystal, a piece of volcanic lava, or a long thick mace-shaped stone, that is, any stone symbolizing God from the following.

A small stone is placed between these stones. A red candle is set on it, symbolizing the divine energy of the Goddess and God, in the form of the element of Fire.

In front of these stones, another one is placed - for sacrifices: wine, honey, cookies, semi-precious stones, flowers and fruits.

To the left of the sacrificial stone, a small stone with a bowl-shaped recess is set. Fill it with water, symbolizing the element of Water.

Any flat stone can be placed in front of the sacrificial stone to serve as an incense burner.

A long, thin quartz crystal can replace your wand, and a sharpened flint or obsidian shard can serve as a magical dagger.

All other tools are simply placed on the altar in the required order.

The stone altar can be used in all kinds of rituals.

Ministerio de Cultura y Deportes Guatemala

Archaeologists have found a stone carved altar in the north of Guatemala, which depicts the history of one of the previously unknown Mayan rulers. According to a press release from Tulane University of Louisiana, Chak Tok Ich "aak was a vassal of the Canul kingdom and under him began an expansion that allowed the Canul dynasty to establish control over most of the Mayan plains.

The Canul kingdom existed from the 1st century BC to the 10th century AD and occupied territories in the south of modern Mexico and in the north of Guatemala. The first reliable information about it dates back to the end of the 4th-beginning of the 5th century, when it occupied the territory of the modern Mexican state of Quintana Roo. In 530-540, the Kanul state expanded due to expansion to the south and southwest. In the middle of the 6th century, Kanul began to fight with the most powerful kingdom of Mutul at that time, with its capital in Tikal, which occupied land in the territory of the modern department of Peten in northern Guatemala. About 10 years later, the rulers of Kanul captured Mutul and for 200 years ruled almost all the Mayan plains.

One of the vassal and allied city-states of Canul was the city of La Corona, located in the north of modern Guatemala. Since 2008, American and Guatemalan archaeologists have been excavating here. In 2017, an expedition led by Tomas Barrientos found a carved altar in the ruins of the temple. A limestone slab measuring 1.46 × 1.2 meters weighed about a ton, in the center of the altar was carved the image of the ruler of La Corona named Chak Tok Ich "aak, who holds a scepter in the form of a two-headed snake, a symbol of his power. Deities emerge from each head - patrons of the city. An inscription was carved along the right edge of the altar with the exact date, May 12, 544. At the bottom was an image of a supernatural creature decorated with aquatic plants. Other artifacts found in La Corona made it possible to establish that Chak Tok Ich "aak continued to rule at least for another 18 years and was ruler in 562.

In 544, the kingdom of Kanul was ruled by the powerful Serpent Dynasty, which was nicknamed so because of the hieroglyph for a snake and served as the emblem of the dynasty. According to the inscriptions on the altar, Chak Tok Ich "aak married one of the princesses from the Snake dynasty. La Corona, which was located near the kingdom of Mutul, became one of the strongholds of the Kanul dynasty. The rulers of Kanul created a "protective belt" from vassal states located on the borders of Mutul.

“The altar shows us a part of the history of Guatemala that happened about 1500 years ago. And in this case, I would call it the historical Mayan version of the Game of Thrones, says Thomas Barrientos. According to the scientist, the altar "filled in the gaps" and made it possible to "put together the pieces of the puzzle" concerning the political relationships in the Mayan states. “This high-quality work of art shows us that these rulers became very powerful and forged alliances among themselves to compete with others, in this case, Tikal.”

At the beginning of 2018, archaeologists in northern Guatemala over 60,000 Mayan buildings. These were cities with temples, palaces and fortifications connected by a network of roads.

Ekaterina Rusakova

Altars of the Old Gods

As you know, the most important place in the structure of almost any traditional ritual is occupied by the act of offering a sacrifice - it does not matter whether it dominates the ritual or performs an outwardly secondary function. Accordingly, most of the traditional sanctuaries contain an altar as one of their elements, that is, a kind of sacred object on which the actual sacrifice is performed. And it is quite natural that in the Indo-European Tradition, in which the stone has such a great sacred meaning, it is the stone that very often acts as an altar.

The classic version of the traditional stone altar can probably be considered a stone (unworked or hewn to give a certain shape) with a “bowl” - a recess on the upper surface, intended both for the actual sacrifices and gifts, and, often, for collecting rain or dew water. This kind of altars, which are stone cubes or cylinders with a recess at the top, were used by the ancient Etruscans; in the northern lands, the stone-altar was subjected to much less processing, but the recess-"bowl" remained unchanged.

It can be said that in terms of their functions, these northern altars approach stones-cups (in the recesses of which small sacrifices were often left to ancestors); moreover, the small holes on the "cups" and "pegs" can be considered as miniature "bowls" of large altars (which, in fact, prompted us to combine them in one chapter). Nevertheless, the difference between them is fundamental - primarily because for the "cups" the function of the altar is in most cases secondary.

The most striking example of ancient European stones-altars are, undoubtedly, the Baltic stone altars, widespread in the territory of Lithuania and Latvia (71) . About three hundred of them are known in total; most of them (the so-called "Aukshaitian altars") are flat boulders, on the upper face of which "bowls" about 10-20 cm in diameter and about 10 cm deep or a little more are drilled and polished. Significantly fewer (about 40) are known Lithuanian altars with hewn side and end (top and bottom) surfaces (“Samaitian altars”). This type of ancient stone altars is distributed mainly in the western part of Lithuania; they are characterized large sizes(about a meter high) and rather wide sacrificial "bowls" (sometimes more than 50 cm in diameter), having vertical cylindrical walls and, often, a specific bottom relief (the middle of the bottom is raised).

3.1. Ancient from the Lithuanian sacrificial stone of the god Ragutis on one of the neutral squares of Vilnius. In the center of the upper surface of the stone, a hewn sacrificial bowl is visible.

But, of course, the Baltics are not the only region where you can find such sacred stones with “bowls” for sacrifices hollowed out or drilled into them. Similar altars are known practically throughout Europe; so, for example, a stone with a bowl drilled into it, similar to the “Aukshaitian altars”, is located in Scotland, on the slope of the mountain Arthur’s Seat (“Arthur’s Seat”) above Edinburgh. It is quite possible to assume that such altars are traditional for the Indo-Europeans in general, or at least for their northwestern branch.

Several years ago, during the Don expedition in 2000, I happened to describe for the first time similar altars on the territory of the Russian Plain (72) . In addition to individual sacred stones, the expedition of 2000 studied and described four megalithic cult complexes (temples), of which two were discovered for the first time (as a result of a special survey local residents). The sacred stones that form the sacred centers of these two sanctuaries - Kozinsky and Krasnokholmsky - belong to a new, hitherto unknown in Russia, type of cult stones-megaliths, conventionally called by us "stones with sacrificial bowls."

The first of these sanctuaries is located near the village. Goat, located on the river. Beautiful Sword, on the road to the village of Soldiers. The sanctuary is less than 1 km away from the river bank and the famous Horse-Stone, described by A. N. Afanasiev, N. I. Troitsky and other authors, which suggests the existence of some connection between these complexes in the past.

The sanctuary is a scattering of rather large uncut stones from the local pinkish-gray dense quartz sandstone, located on an insignificant (less than 1 m) hill overgrown with grass. The hill has a natural geological origin and is probably formed by a bedrock outcrop of the same sandstone.

Two stones that form the sacred center of the sanctuary are located in the eastern part of the stone placer and are surrounded by other stones from the north, west and south. The stones are arranged close to each other along the west-east line; the dimensions of the smaller, western, stone are 1.1 × 0.9 m, the dimensions of the larger, eastern, are 1.60 × 1.1 m.

The visible part of the western stone is a flat slab protruding above the ground by an average of 20 cm. In the center of the slab there is an artificial rounded bowl-shaped depression measuring 36x46 cm. Probably, this stone slab is a kind of altar or altar, in the "bowl" which a sacrifice was poured or laid (honey, beer, blood; meat, agricultural products, etc.). It is possible, however, that the "chalice" was used as a ritual hearth - rituals associated with lighting fire on cult stones have been preserved in a number of regions of the North-West of Russia to this day (73) .

General scheme of the main stones of the sanctuary near the village of Kozye. Plan and side view

As already mentioned, stone altars of this type are described for the first time in Central Russia. The only possible parallel may be one of the cult stones of the already mentioned tract Chertovo gorodishche in the Kaluga region. A. Perepelitsyn describes this stone as follows: “It is located a few tens of meters from the “cup” one and is interesting for the (obviously artificial) blind hole cut in it in the form of an irregular pentahedron with ribs of 15–25 cm and a depth of up to 40 cm” (74) . However, it is impossible (for the time being, at least) to unambiguously assert the same type of this monument and the western altar plate of the Koz'insky sanctuary.

3.4. Sanctuary near the village of Kozye. Stone-altar with a sacrificial "bowl" (view from the west)

The second, eastern stone, has a maximum height of 70 cm. Its upper face has a very significant slope to the east, so that the stone adjoins the altar slab with its highest part. On the upper face of the stone there are - one above the other - two rounded "bowls" with a diameter of 20-25 cm. From the upper, more clearly worked out and deeper "bowl" to the lower, almost flat, there is a plum cut into the stone. A similar drain leads from the lower "bowl" to the ground.

Without conducting a special study, it is impossible to unequivocally state that the system of "bowls" and plums of the eastern stone of the sanctuary is man-made. However, it is also hardly acceptable to assume a completely natural origin of this complex system. The most probable is the "intermediate" option - the artificial refinement of natural potholes and other irregularities of the stone. Ultimately, the question of the man-made bowls and plums is not so important - on the example of "cups" and "trackers" we know that in ancient times both stones with natural recesses and stones with artificially carved recesses were used as cult objects. .

In general, the Kozinskoe sanctuary gives the impression of a carefully thought-out cult complex, in which there are no random elements. The orientation of the stones shifted back to back along the west-east axis suggests the traditional fundamental dyad Death-Life, each of the components of which is associated in the sacred Tradition with a certain cardinal direction (Death - west, Life - east). If this comparison is correct, then on the altar of the western stone, behind which at the moments of the Equinoxes the sun set (“died”), in ancient times sacrifices were made to the chthonic gods, the gods of Death, the Other World, and magic. On the contrary, bowls and plums of oriental stone, behind which the sun rose ("was born"), could serve to collect rain and dew water. On the basis of ethnographic material throughout Europe, a respectful attitude towards water accumulating in the recesses of sacred stones is reconstructed - everywhere such water is considered healing, holy, etc.

In this regard, it is very interesting to recall the archetypal motif of Living and Dead Water, which is extremely common in Slavic folklore and epic. Healing, magical water accumulating in the “bowls” of the eastern, “dawn” stone in this connection can be associated with Living Water, and the water that collects in the altar of the Black Gods altar can be associated with Dead Water…

RELEASE OF "OLD STAFF" When the Cheka was reorganized into the OGPU, the county emergency departments were immediately reduced, then the "local" concentration camps. The 1923 commission revealed 826 "unjustified" executions, corruption, and alcoholism. In the spring of 1923, a commission rolled up to Solovki. Since 1924