Seeing Everyday Symbols--Home Altar Constellations

When I first learned to do family constellations, I was given a set of wooden figurines. These were for tabletop setups. They fell over a lot, because the bottoms had bumps on them, and they had no eyes--so you didn't know which way they were facing.

I give them eyes with a magic marker and sanded the bottoms. I learned that some people just used round markers like checkers, and that there were better figurines you could buy. For one-on-one constellations done on a floor, instead of a tabletop, I had footprints.

But What About Remote Constellations?

But I was doing a lot of remote coaching work (phone or Skype), and wanted to add constellations where needed. This was all one-on-one, and my clients didn't have figurines or footprints. For a while I was stumped.

At the time, I had been practicing and teaching shamanism already for 20 years. I began to think of the constellations in terms of my shamanic training, of what my teachers called "your medicine." That means your healing or magical abilities.

Learning About "Object-Persons"

What's on your altar at home are not "medicine tools," or "medicine objects," they taught me. They hold a form of consciousness and are your living helpers. The English language makes this hard, so try calling them "object persons." Just like we talk of the "stone people," or the "plant people"--with some respect.

So, all sorts of little random "object persons" had collected themselves, and come and gone already in my apprenticeship and practice. Mostly there was nothing special about them (a stone, a knife, a pine cone), except that they jumped out at me with special meanings. Well, my clients' houses and yards were also full of random object persons.

Was there some way I could just use them for the remote constellations?

So I started experimenting. Within a couple months, I was astonished.

Surprise--Household Stuff Works BETTER than Figurines

It seemed very much like the little household object-persons worked better than the figurines or checkers or footprints. Beyond their positions and orientations in a constellation, there were vast further layers of rich symbolism.

Look at this one. I ask a woman to choose and place object-persons on an altar intuitively or randomly ("don't THINK about it!"). She is to set up first herself, her goal ("to feel solid and safe in life"), and her mom and dad. Mom is the white bowl, dad the knife, the client a tiny red box, and her goal a small white stone.

Start with the size relationships. Compared to the woman and her goal, the parents are huge. Mom is a gaping white emptiness and dad a mammoth sword-like thing. Mom could swallow 20 object-persons the size of daughter. Dad's blade stands between daughter and mother, and points across the path from daughter to safety. Who here is big, important, and overpowering?

What a Revealing Arrangement!

And what's going on? The daughter's goal is white, just like mom--but solid, not empty, and tiny. We might think dad's knife is there to keep daughter from being engulfed by Mom, except that the sharp edge is facing the daughter.

Mom is the perfect rounded feminine symbol. But while daughter is a container like mom, she has been "rectangularized" into a box. Was she sliced by the knife? She is red, suggesting passion, blood, roses, etc. Is this woman a frightened daddy's girl--cut off from her female lineage? Is the female lineage voracious and dangerous?

Working with a person, of course, you get lots more context. Some symbolisms drop away, while others reverberate together into strong patterns. But look how much more information we are working with already in a first, minimal set up. You would have none of this if these were figurines. To begin with, the sets of figurines have to be all in the same size range.

Again, I was astonished by the eloquence of these first experimental home altar constellations.

Yes But You are Special--You Say?

But now maybe you are saying to yourself: "sure, but I don't know how to read such symbolisms." I don't have your training.

Ah well, I have a strong answer for that. I happen to know you CAN. I'm the former cognitive scientist who did ground-breaking work on metaphor. So I can tell you with some authority that your native abilities with language and thought are built for symbolism and metaphor. You already know how...

Intuition + Simple Questions = Rich Symbolism

Usually, some of it will jump out at you intuitively, and then you use the simple questions above to deepen and enrich the patterns of meaning. Also, the more you practice with the questions, the stronger and quicker your intuition about these things gets. Before long, you'll be noticing constellation symbols happening around you in your daily life (see my last blog for an amazing example). And at that point, you have started to enter the shaman's enchanted world.