  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 Zeeman-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
