| This dissertation investigates the expression of women's spiritual voice through the cultural communication form of the home altar. Women have kept altars for sacred communication since the Stone Age. The home altar situates sacred communication within daily life, serving as a focus for spiritual communication.;Altar communication involves the intrapersonal level of human communication which is poised between consciousness and the unconscious. The Jungian perspective that consciousness arises out of the unconscious, and that the unconscious houses the Divine, is inextricably bound to the organic. The natural symbol, in its wholeness, is found on all altars, and through its multivalent capacity communicates spiritually through its earthy, organic nature.;Therefore, in constructing reality through communication, the contents of the unconscious, repressed by the overly rational paradigm of the West, need be invited into consciousness. The creation of the home altar as a sacred space, invites the spiritual voice of the divine to speak.;This feminine spiritual voice "speaks" through the rhetoric of silence and symbol, and the attendant communication forms of prayer, listening, dwelling, meditation and contemplation, for example. These communication forms are necessary to commune with the divine feminine, or soul.;Four ethnographic studies provide insight into how altar communication assists in the construction of reality, also referred to by altar keepers as "co-constructing" reality with divine assistance.;Today, there is a spontaneous resurgence of altar keeping. This resurgence is believed to be the effort of the human psyche to compensate and enlighten human communication by giving voice to the divine feminine that simultaneously restores a voice for the health of mother earth. That the altar communication form today resembles that of altars kept 8,000 years ago designates the home altar as an archetypal communication form. The Greek goddess Hestia, as the archetypal enactor/protector of home altar communication, foregrounds the importance of the home as a sacred dwelling place for spiritual communication and its homemakers as essential to a living, spiritual life. The phenomenological effects of altar keeping and the intuitive languages conveyed through symbol and the plenum of silence are described through the Hestian methodology of altar keeping. |
