The books make it sound so grand. The temple is to be a chamber set apart, oriented to the east, with a double cube altar at its center, pillars of black and white, and a floor tiled like a chessboard. I read those descriptions for two years before I began to practice, and for most of that time I believed I could not begin, because I lived in one room with a folding bed.
What finally got me started was a sentence in a much plainer book, which said that the first temple is a chair. I have come to think that this is the most useful thing anyone told me, and I want to pass it on.
What a place does
Consider what the grand furniture is for. A temple, stripped of its ornament, does three things. It tells you that you have arrived somewhere other than the rest of your life. It keeps out what does not belong. And it holds, between one session and the next, the mood of the work, so that you do not have to build it from nothing each time.
None of these depends on architecture. All three depend on consistency. A place becomes set apart by being used for one thing and nothing else, at the same hour, day after day. The mind learns the association with remarkable speed. After a few weeks, sitting down in the chair begins to do half the work of settling you, in the way that the smell of a school corridor can make a grown adult feel eleven years old.
That is the whole secret. A temple is a habit with a location.
The corner
So begin by choosing a corner. It should be the quietest spot you have access to, and the least used for anything else. The end of a bedroom is better than the middle of a living room. If you have a choice, face east, not because the east is holier but because the tradition faces east and it costs nothing to join it. If you have no choice, face the wall you have.
Clean it. I mean this literally and I mean it as the first ritual act. Dust the surfaces, wash the floor, take away everything that has drifted there. The old instructions for consecrating a temple run to pages of sprinklings and censings, and I have come to believe that their real content is: pay attention to every part of this space once, with your hands. You will know the corner differently afterwards.
The table
Next, a surface. A small table, a shelf at chest height, the top of a low chest of drawers. This is your altar, and the word need not frighten you. An altar is the place where attention is put down. Its use is to hold the few things the work requires and to give the eye somewhere to rest.
Three things belong on it at the start. A light, which may be a candle in a safe holder or a small lamp. Your diary, with its pen. And one symbol, a single one, chosen because it means something to you now: a drawing of the hexagram, a stone, a card. Change the symbol when your study changes. Resist, with all your strength, the urge to add. I have seen altars so crowded with statues, crystals, feathers and bowls that there was nowhere left to put one's attention at all. The power of a bare table with one flame on it has to be experienced to be believed.
The chair
Then the chair, which is the real temple. It should be upright and plain, and of a height that lets your feet rest flat. Keep it for practice if you can. If it must serve at the dinner table as well, then let the act of carrying it to the corner be part of your opening.
The same holds for everything else. If you cannot leave the altar standing, keep its three objects in a box, and let the unpacking and repacking become the beginning and the end of the rite. Some of the most serious practitioners I know work from a shoebox. What matters is that the same things are laid out in the same order in the same place.
What can wait
Robes, wands, cups, daggers and incense can wait, and most of them can wait for years. I do not say they are useless. A garment put on only for practice is a strong signal to the mind, and I wear one. A tool made with your own hands over several weeks carries a weight that nothing bought can match. But these things are fruit and not root. Acquired before there is a practice for them to serve, they become a substitute for it, and a drawer full of unused regalia is a melancholy thing.
The rule I give to anyone who asks is this. Add nothing until its absence has been felt in at least thirty sessions.
Living with other people
Most of us share our homes, and the corner has to be negotiated. Be plain about it. You are asking for twenty undisturbed minutes and a shelf, which is less than most hobbies demand. You owe no one a lecture, and you should not make a mystery of it either, since mystery invites curiosity. In my experience housemates and families adjust within a fortnight and then forget about it, which is exactly what you want.
The portable temple
There is a further stage, and it is the point of the whole exercise. After some months of sitting in the same corner, you will find one day, on a train or in a waiting room, that you can close your eyes and be there. The stillness of the place has moved inside. The outer temple was a scaffold for building an inner one, and the inner one goes where you go.
The old books knew this. Behind all their marble and gilding they say, in one way or another, that the true temple is the practitioner. But one does not start there. One starts with a clean corner, a small table, a flame and a chair, and one comes back tomorrow.