Hazel wood(a.k.a. Hazelnut wood) is recommended for use in the construction of a vodoun altar. I am having a hell of a time locating this stuff in anything larger than branch size. Does anyone have any experience building an altar from hazel wood?
Hazel is not usually commercially available (I’ve looked myself). You may have to find a hazel tree and do it all the hard way.
I have found a source of confirmed hazel wood locally. The big question is will it have enough diameter to be useful.
A Vodou altar can be made from anything. I’ve seen altars made from filing cabinets that work great. The only time I’ve known about certain woods being used are for ceremonial objects like the Baron’s walking stick, the wood for which can only be obtained in Haiti.
Bump. I just got my copy in of the 2nd edition of The Spider and the Green Butterfly and in it EA recommends your vodoun altar be made entirely out of hazel wood. I’ve also seen several respected posters on here recommend making Ouija boards with hazel wood… something about its energetic properties makes it ideal for spirit resonance.
Alas, though, I can’t seem to find any site online that sells hazel wood altars. I did find Wood Spirit Boards - pre Ouija - Talking Boards - Witch Boards which apparently sells Ouija boards that can be made from any wood according to your specification, but I don’t know if they do hazel and their boards are rather pricy.
Does anyone know a good resource for hazel wood altars? Or, barring that, where to go for hazel wood boards so I can construct one myself?
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Hazelwood lumber is not something that you can find commercially simply because the Hazel tree is more like a really big bush. The trunks rarely get big enough to saw into lumber.
If you are dead set on having an altar made out of Hazel wood, probably the best that you could do would be to order some Hazelwood for smoking meat and then crosscut the wood into short pieces and then assemble them into a table that resembles something like this.
Another alternative might be to create a table that looks something like this.
And because I’m such a really nice guy, here’s a link to someone that sells Hazelwood. I don’t know them from Adam. I just googled Hazelwood for smoking and they came up.
http://www.druidswood.co.uk/buy.hazel.html
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Interesting, thanks for the info! So I take it you never created a hazel altar for vodoun then? Although I can see crosscutting dozens of the wood pieces and assembling them together would work, it seems pretty time consuming and frankly, kinda aesthetically unappealing.
Upon further research there seem to be at least two types of hazel: one found in America, Corylus Americana, which is described as basically a large shrub like what you’re talking about, and the other, Corylus Avellana, found in the UK, which appears to be a fairly decent sized tree: https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/visiting-woods/trees-woods-and-wildlife/british-trees/native-trees/hazel/
Perhaps this second type would be big enough to make large enough boards for an altar?
The variety found in the UK is still not commercially cut into lumber. You possibly could find and cut down several Hazel trees and take them to a small bandsaw mill operator. This would all be a very hands-on operation though. I don’t believe you’ll find Hazelwood lumber for sale anywhere. I know I dug long and hard and settled on oak.
However, cedar lumber is available. There are at least three varieties of Cedar in North America and you can buy lumber made out of all three of them.
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