The Wind In My Hair, And The Sand At My Feet

One big piece of advice that Mahadevi gave me, was to find my power animal, name it, and never tell its form or name to people unless I absolutely trusted that person. He didn't recommend any reading about this, but only told me that he had one animal for him in his mortal form, and another for his Goddess form, and he shouldn't even be telling me so because it's a Wiccan Druidic secret... but that I should find mine. During that time I tried to articulate to him why I simply could not see animal guides anywhere on my path or in any direction that I would beat my path, just came up short.

I think that I finally can articulate why I don't have one and don't want one. You know... after falling out with Mahadevi, and then after that actually gaining a very small bit of personal experience with animal spirit guides.

So far, I've gathered from the reading that I have done, that a lot of different cultures have utilized animals as part of personal spiritual practices. So, there are different words for them, and even more ways of working with animals as encompassed by that word:



totem - This word is commonly used to refer to any animal spirit guide in the English-speaking occult and metaphysics world, but originated specifically from Ojibwe. While regional practices might vary within this language, (the regions being North American) the word appears to refer to a family or communal animal representative.

nagual - I first came across this in The Usborne Book of the Haunted World by Caroline Young. This term doesn't seem commonly used, and notably Meso-American Pagan Reconstructionism is relatively unpopular. The way that nagual were described, were quite striking. The book described a battle against Spanish conquistadors, wherein the leader of the opposition was accompanied by a giant bird. When the bird was fatally wounded, the leader mysteriously was also. And then the bird vanished. There was also another story about a nagual being angry at someone's sloppily-made poncho. My research beyond this early reader's resource ("research" meaning, in this instance, Wikipedia) indicates that a nagual was a person, a magician, who was said to be able to shift their shape into an animal, rather than one who could project their animal form separately from their still-separately-active human self.

zodiac - Like the totem, this sort of animal spirituality can be made personal... but is determined impersonally. Rather than bloodline or tribal affiliation, it is determined by calendar. Tonalism (related to Meso-American tradition, from the Aztec calendar the tonalpohualli) had an animal affiliated with one of twenty days, and the affiliation appeared to extend to people born on that particular day. The Chinese zodiac, or 十二生肖 had twelve animals affiliated with a year each, along with five classical elements, which created a cycle of sixty combinations and determined an individual's personality determined by the year of their birth. The word zodiacus itself is Greco-Roman, meaning "wheel of animals" similarly assigning an animal to a period of about one month.

fylgja - Norse Paganism appears to have made animal guides very personal, although there's naturally some ancestral-based spirituality here as well. In this translation of Professor Mundal's dissertation on Fyglia motifs in Norse Literature, the animal fylgja represented an individual human's animal alter-ego or personality. It followed (the meaning of fylgja, as the umbilical cord and afterbirth "follows") a baby out of the womb, and stayed the same form until that person's death.

familiar - This is strange.

ba - In Kemetic spiritual tradition, this is one of many nonphysical parts of a person, only noted here because it's represented as having that person's head but with the body of a bird. Interesting, many of the Netjeru or Kemetic/Egyptian deities are commonly portrayed as having human bodies and animal heads. There is a surviving scroll of papyrus that carries a segment of a story, about a depressed man arguing with his ba about whether suicide was an option, entitled Dispute Between A Man And His Ba.

therian otherkin - Theria is a sub-class of mammals that do not lay eggs. The modern otherkin community may have a broader range of this definition, to include birds and reptiles in their therianthropic practices. It appears that animal identity (not necessarily spirituality) appears to have much less of a dis-identification process than most of the above. As in, instead of an external guide, or something to change into, the non-human animal-self is the default while the human self is the pretense.



So. How could I find my power animal? I'm a child of the concrete jungle. Non-human animals are not that powerful to me, if they are even present at all it's under quite controlled or controllable circumstances. They're pets, or pests, or food that I only meet after it's dead and bled and skinned and chopped up and processed and made-to-look-nice and frozen or canned and dyed and seasoned/marinated and microwaved and not seeming anything like an animal at all. Sometimes I doubt that what remains, had ever lived enough to die in the first place, or if it's all just imitation flavoring and imitation texturing.

On a more Darwinian train of thought: human beings do count as animals, but I haven't heard of a meditation yet where one must enter an altered state of mind in order to be guided by the Great Human Spirit. Human or humanoid spirit guides appear to generally be granted the benefit of much more individuality. And then there's the fact that bacterium counts as an animal. What if I have a single-celled animal spirit guide and just never saw it on my astral travels because I didn't have an astral microscope and the proper stains?

And then, why would it be an animal? If it reflected a personality trait... well, I think that individual animals already have individual personalities with individual complexes of traits. This posed the main problem for me, because animal spirit guides would be, to me, a misappropriation of the very existence of another being. There exist real animals, and from the limited experience that I've had with real living animals (and from my extensive compassion for them,) I just cannot see them as so much more magical than we are. Maintaining non-human animal archetypes, symbols, and significances are... just plain specie-ist!

Then again, I don't have a problem with using writing systems from languages that I don't even speak or read (like runes) in my spirituality. I don't have a problem with seeing plants as so much more magical, misappropriating their very existence whether spiritually conferring qualities to herbal teas, or taking for granted that some cosmic tree of life or other is real. And, I don't have a problem with taking the very existence of humans and using anthropomorphized forces of nature as part of my spirituality, I just find it strange that the recognition of animals from the same angle cast a very different role.

And, despite my reservations and the reasons behind them, I recently seem to have... actually, found a personal animal spirit guide. (More on that next entry.)