ABSTRACT
Historically and etymologically, altars harness and liberate some of the most potent forces of consumer behavior that late capitalism has struggled to marketize and commodify: sacred and profane, gift giving and sacrifice, utterance and ineffability, immanence and transcendence, public and private, self and other, material and ethereal, agency and community, order and chaos. As mediating vehicles between realms of experience, altars invite the exploration of antinomies, and encourage the probing of relationships. As metaphoric high places of supplication, altars comprise both a metaphysical fulcrum and catechetical crucible, on and within which materiality is transmuted into quintessence. Altars are the sites of creative destruction and destructive creation. Altars reify what people deify, and deify what people reify.
