Space variant beams are of great importance as a variety of applications have emerged in recent years. As such, manipulation of their degrees of freedom is highly desired. Here, by exploiting the circular dichroism and circular birefringence in a Zee
man-shifted Rb medium, we study the general interaction of space variant beams with such a medium. We present two particular cases of radial polarization and hybrid polarization beams where the control of the polarization states is demonstrated experimentally. Moreover, we show that a Zeeman-shifted atomic system can be used as an analyzer for such space variant beams
