Once you have constructed your inner temple, you might wonder what you can do with it besides conduct astral rituals. The answer is, whatever you can imagine. I’ve listed a few ideas below, based on my own experience, with brief instructions on how to perform the exercises. May they serve as inspiration for your own workings.
Power Storage Location
Our ritual tools are repositories of power. They also have spirit. By entering into a meditation, traveling to your inner temple, and placing your ritual tools in a special place (such as a workroom or a storage chest) you can call upon the power of those tools even when you are physically separated from them, for instance, while you are travelling. This is also helpful for tools you have collected that have no physical basis; for example, in a vision I was gifted a sword that has certain magickal properties. This tool has no physical counterpart among my ritual items, but it hangs in honor in the workroom of my inner temple. This principle also applies to other things that have spirit — like herbs, stones, and animals.
Mind Palace
The mind palace is a mnemonic device for remembering information. As you progress in your witchcraft practice, you will gather a great deal of information that you wish to remember. My technique for storing this information in long-term memory involved going to my inner temple, to the area designated for memories, and inscribing the information in specially labelled books. Sometimes this inscribing took the form of words. Other times it was a symbol that had been magickally encoded with information. Other times it was a graphic representation of a specific memory that was the trigger for the information. The key here is to know what you want to remember and how you intend to go about retrieving that information. To this day, there are symbols I cannot draw or look at without remembering certain information automatically because of this technique.
Shortcut to Everywhere
Like the Floo Network in Harry Potter or the front door in Howl’s Moving Castle, the inner temple can serve as a shortcut between locations on the astral plane. You can decide which doors lead to which places; the laws of architecture and physics don’t apply here. In my inner temple, I can travel down a stone well to a door which leads to a castle tower with a window that opens to the the starry landscape of the astral plane, through which I can fly to the Celestial City and visit the Akashic Records. I similarly have a gateway to the trunk of the World Tree that I can step through and travel like water through the fibers of an ancient tree, up to the branches or down to the roots. I also have shortcuts to the inner temples of other witches that I am close to, so I can leave messages for them or check up on them if they’re not feeling well. Again, the key is to know where you would like to go and what symbols are going to get you there. Once you have that information in your head, you can construct the gateway based on your intuition or on symbols meaningful to you.
Mirror of the Soul
For those who have difficulty processing emotions, trauma, or shadow, a mirror to the soul might be a worthwhile working to undertake. It involves installing a full-length mirror in your workroom or another place in your inner temple and empowering that mirror to work as a viewscreen to the things you’re having difficulty in processing. By projecting it outside of self to observe at a distance, then reaching into the mirror and integrating the thing back into yourself, you can process difficult experiences more comfortably. The mirror can be as plain or as detailed as you like, but I’ve found that the construction and shape of the mirror gives insights into true nature of the one who created it.
Message Board
I have difficulty processing messages from the spirit world, so I have made a place in my inner temple — in the foyer, right where someone first steps in — that has a guestbook and pen so visitors can leave me “psychic emails”. I can touch the names or symbols and “download” the message they have for me. Other people might want to use a message board like one might have in a college dorm room or a mailbox for messages to be left outside of the temple itself. Whatever the visualization, it is a powerful tool and a great workaround for people who have difficulty discerning spiritual messages in ordinary reality.
The Sky’s The Limit
If you have suggestions or experiences with workings in the inner temple, I would be interested in hearing about them! Drop me a line on the contact page.