Altar

• 1. Introduction

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  An altar is one of humanity's most persistent inventions. Long before the first temple was built or the first priest ordained, people were stacking stones in high places and setting fire to offerings, reaching toward something they could not see. The word itself tells part of the story: the modern English "altar" descends from the Latin altare, probably rooted in adolere, meaning to burn, and shaped by altus, meaning high. A burning place on a high place. That combination of heat and elevation is almost a definition of the sacred impulse.

  What can a single object reveal about the full range of human religious imagination? The altar appears in Jewish scripture as a heap of unwrought stone, in Buddhist homes as a lacquered wooden cabinet with hinged doors, in Norse paganism as a pile of rocks in a forest clearing, and in fourth-century Roman churches as a free-standing table at the western end of the building. Each form carries a distinct theology inside it. The same essential idea, that a designated surface can connect the mortal to the divine, keeps reasserting itself across cultures that had no contact with one another. How did this idea travel? How did it transform? And what do its many shapes say about the people who made them?

• 2. Deep Roots

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  Noah erected the first altar recorded in the Hebrew Bible, and the tradition spread quickly through the patriarchs: Abraham built one, then Isaac, then Jacob, then Moses. These early Israelite altars were made of earth or unwrought stone, deliberately uncut, and placed in conspicuous spots where they could be seen. After the revelation at Mount Sinai, the practice became more regulated. Inside the Tabernacle, and later in the Temple, only two altars were permitted: the Altar of Burnt Offering and the Altar of Incense, both placed near where the Ark of the Covenant was kept.

  Archaeologists have found physical evidence of this ancient practice. Three rock-hewn altars have been discovered in the Land of Israel: one below Tel Zorah, another at the foot of Sebastia (the ancient city of Samaria), and a third near Shiloh. Stone does not rot, which is why we know more about altars than about many other aspects of ancient worship.

  In Ancient Rome, altars were often inscribed with the donor's name and the name of the deity being honoured. One of the most important surviving examples is the Ara Pacis, dedicated by Augustus Caesar at the opening of the Pax Romana, the long period of relative peace he ushered in, to Pax, the goddess of peace. The Ara Pacis was not merely a religious object; it was a political statement made in stone, and it has survived to make that statement still.

• 3. Table of the Lord

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  The word altar appears in Greek as thysiasterion in the New Testament twenty-four times. For Catholic and Orthodox Christians, that frequency is no accident: the altar is where the Eucharist is celebrated, and in their theology the Eucharist re-presents, in the literal sense, the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. The table where bread and wine are consecrated is therefore not a piece of furniture but a site of ongoing sacred action.

  The earliest Christians appear to have celebrated the Eucharist on portable altars set up wherever a community gathered. Some historians argue that during the Roman persecutions, the church met in the catacombs and used the sarcophagi of martyrs as altar surfaces. Other historians dispute this reading, but the tradition of placing relics beneath permanent altars is widely thought to have grown from it.

  When Constantine the Great and Licinius legalized Christianity, formal church buildings went up in great numbers. The earliest churches built in Rome placed the sanctuary at the western end, with a free-standing altar in the middle. Ministers celebrated the Eucharist facing east, toward the entrance, and the congregation is thought to have faced the same direction. After the sixth century the arrangement reversed: entrances moved to the west, the altar moved east, and priests and congregation all faced east together. By the Middle Ages in Western Europe, altars were being built permanently against the east wall of the chancel, a positioning that would dominate for centuries.

  The Roman Missal, in editions from the 1604 typical edition of Pope Clement VIII through the 1962 edition of Pope John XXIII, acknowledged both orientations with the rubric "Si altare sit ad orientem, versus populum" ("if the altar is to the east, facing the people"). The current norms declare a free-standing main altar "desirable wherever possible", and recommend that new churches have only one altar, quoting the Roman Missal's language that it "will signify the one Christ and the one Eucharist of the Church".

• 4. Reformation and Revision

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  The Book of Common Prayer, the foundational document of the Church of England, uses no form of the word altar at all. The object in question is called the Lord's Table or Holy Table. That terminological choice was deliberate and contested, carrying real theological weight about whether Holy Communion was sacrificial in nature.

  The rubrics of the Second Prayer Book of Edward VI, published in 1552, directed the priest to stand "at the north syde of the Table". That instruction was carried through the 1662 Book of Common Prayer and remained influential for nearly three centuries. Interpreters disagreed about what it meant in practice: the north side of the front of a fixed table, the north end of a fixed table (meaning the priest faced south), the north side of a free-standing table, or the north end of a table placed lengthways in the chancel. Where a priest chose to stand often signalled his theological leanings, toward the more Reformed end or toward the more Catholic end of Anglican practice.

  The Oxford Movement in the nineteenth century pushed Anglican churches in a markedly different visual direction. Candles and, in some cases, tabernacles reappeared. When a stone altar was installed in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Cambridge following rebuilding works in 1841, the case went before the Court of Arches, which ordered the stone removed and replaced with a wooden communion table. The legal system had been drawn into a debate about materials.

  Percy Dearmer, in his influential manual for priests the Parson's Handbook, which was popular in the early-to-mid twentieth century, specified that altars should stand 3 ft. 3 in. high and be at least deep enough to hold a 20-inch-square corporal with room to spare. He also recommended three steps and a silk frontal in the seasonal liturgical colour. Calvinist traditions took a sharply different path: Reformed, Baptist, Congregational, and non-denominational churches typically use a simple Communion Table with a linen cloth, an open Bible, and a pair of candlesticks, and they do not call it an altar precisely because they reject the sacrificial understanding of the Lord's Supper.

• 5. Eastern Traditions

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  In Byzantine Rite churches, the altar is called the Holy Table (Hagia Trapeza in Greek) or, in Church Slavonic, the Prestol, meaning the Throne. The Greek word bomos can refer either to the altar itself or to the entire sanctuary area, which encompasses the space behind the iconostasis, the elevated projection called the soleas in front of it, and the ambo.

  The Holy Table is normally free-standing, roughly one meter high, and generally square in plan. Its construction favours sturdiness over appearance, because once it is consecrated and wrapped in its plain linen covering (the Katasarkion in Greek, the Strachitsa in Slavonic) that cloth is never removed. The linen symbolises the winding sheet in which Christ's body was laid in the tomb. A second, ornamented outer cloth in the liturgical colour of the season is draped over this, reaching to the floor, representing the glory of God's Throne. Beneath the altar table sits an ark containing the reserved sacrament for communing the sick, inside a miniature shrine called the Kovtcheg. Also kept on the Holy Table is the Gospel Book, resting on the antimension: a silken cloth printed with an icon of the burial of Christ, with a relic sewn into it and bearing the bishop's signature. The Divine Liturgy must be served on an antimension even if the altar itself has been consecrated and already contains relics.

  A second, smaller altar, called the Table of Oblation (the Prothesis or Zhertvennik), stands on the northern side of the sanctuary. It is there that the bread and wine are prepared before the Divine Liturgy begins. The Prothesis carries its own symbolic geography: it represents both the cave at Bethlehem and the Anointing Stone on which the body of Christ was prepared after his deposition from the cross. Subdeacons are permitted to touch the Table of Oblation, but no one of lesser rank may do so; the restriction on the Holy Table itself is tighter still, limited to ordained members of the higher clergy.

  The Syriac Maronite Church and other Syriac churches generally use free-standing altars so that priests and deacons can walk around them in procession. In the Armenian Rite the altar sits against the eastern wall, often set in an apse, and is distinguished by having several steps built onto the top of the table itself, on which the tabernacle, candles, ceremonial fans, a cross, and the Gospel Book are placed. Coptic Orthodox altars must have a square face, and the standard Coptic liturgy requires the priest to encircle the altar, so it is never fixed to a wall, and most stand beneath a baldachin.

• 6. Beyond Christianity

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  Taoist practice extends the altar well beyond the walls of any single building. Imperial dynasties built enormous outdoor altars called jitan to conduct offering ceremonies known as jisi. The Temple of Heaven in Beijing is among the surviving examples. At a much smaller scale, nearly all forms of Chinese traditional religion involve baibai, the practice of bowing toward an altar while holding a stick of incense, done at home, in a temple, or outdoors, by an ordinary person or a Taoist priest, and timed to particular dates on the lunar/solar calendar.

  At certain festival dates, food offerings are set out for gods or the spirits of the departed: rice, slaughtered pigs and ducks, or fruit. Another form of sacrifice involves burning Hell Bank Notes, on the assumption that items consumed by fire will appear intact in the spirit world for the departed to use. Orthodox Daoist practice, by contrast, calls only for incense, candles, and vegetarian offerings.

  In Japan, the butsudan is a wooden cabinet with hinged doors that open to display a religious image of the Buddha or the Bodhisattvas, typically a statue or a mandala scroll, installed in the highest place of honour. The cabinet holds subsidiary items called butsugu: candlesticks, incense burners, bells, and platforms for offerings such as fruit. Some sects also place ihai, memorial tablets for deceased relatives, within or beside the butsudan. The original design for the butsudan began in India, where people built altar-spaces as offering-places to the Buddha; when Buddhism moved into China and Korea, walls and doors were added around statues to protect them from the weather, and elements of indigenous Chinese and Korean religious practice were woven in.

  In Norse paganism, the basic altar was called a horgr: a construction of piled stones, possibly placed in a wooded clearing. One recorded use involved placing a bowl of animal blood on the horgr during a sacrifice, then dipping fir twigs into the blood and sprinkling participants to consecrate them to the ceremony, which could include a wedding. Separate animal species were associated with specific deities: a goat for Thor, a sow for Freyja, a boar for Freyr. In Hindu South Indian temples, each deity typically receives a separate shrine, each contained within a miniature house; outside the main shrine stands a statue of the deity's vahana, or sacred vehicle. The Indian Orthodox Church places its altar (called the thronose, meaning throne) toward the eastern side of the sanctuary, within a canopy called a Beth' qudisho, or Holy House, decorated with between three and twelve candles symbolising the twelve Apostles.

• 7. High Places and Portable Altars

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  Before any fixed temple existed, people climbed to elevated ground. High places, altars erected on hilltops and ridges, were common across nearly all ancient cultures, built on the assumption that proximity to the sky brought proximity to the divine. In Israelite and Canaanite culture, these were called bamah in Hebrew. Prior to the Israelite conquest of Canaan in the twelfth to eleventh century BCE, high places served as shrines of the Baals and the Asherot, the fertility deities of the Canaanite religion. At a high place, alongside the altar, stone pillars called matzevot were erected to represent the presence of the divine.

  After the Temple in Jerusalem was built, high-place worship became officially forbidden, but it persisted stubbornly, denounced repeatedly by the prophets as an affront to God. The resistance to centralisation was not mere disobedience; the instinct to worship on your own land, at a site you had built yourself, ran deep.

  The opposite impulse, portability, runs just as deep. Altar stones allowed army chaplains of the Latin Church to place a consecrated surface on any available table when serving troops, a practice that continued into the early twentieth century. The carroccio of the medieval Italian city-states pushed portable worship to a martial extreme: a four-wheeled mobile shrine pulled by oxen, equipped with a flagpole and a bell, on which Mass was celebrated before battle. It also served as the army standard, combining religious authority with military symbol in a single object. The Roman Missal itself, in editions from the seventeenth century onward, continued to picture the main altar as free-standing, and the rite for dedicating a church assumed that the bishop could walk all the way around the altar during its consecration, regardless of what the architecture actually permitted.