Animal Spirituality: One Last Thing

At least, for this year. I finished my first skim-through of Fang and Fur, Blood and Bone: A Primal Guide To Animal Magic by Lupa, available on Amazon and Smashwords.

In general, I like it. It didn't give me a lot of answers, but it was very practical.


Wolf "introduced" itself to me as a savage beast, and stuck around through my personal exploration of a more gentle theme, that is: family. I had trouble with Sibling to the point of physical, and now total emotional, psychological, and spiritual divorce. However, I did get back in touch with the extended family. My mother had estranged herself from my aunt before dying, and Sibling and I carried on the mistrust of our aunt's jovial affection. I haven't gotten the whole story behind that, but I have learned a lot from staying with the extended family. And I felt that Wolf might have had something to do with that, somehow.


While I don't feel as much of myself in the Dung Beetle (because, wow, do I feel it with Wolf, and I really want to figure out how and why because Wolf never occurred to me before and I'm even a little embarrassed still that that is my primary animal-self) this has popped up often enough, dramatically enough, that I felt moved to take a look. Since understood dreams as archetypal anyway, and had never been much of an entymology geek, I didn't bother to browse for the species.

And then I bothered to browse for the species, because the beetles that I dream of aren't just oversized black coccinellids.

...Actually, they might have been. Humbug! Well, it got me on some interesting trains of thought, anyway, when I considered the recurrence of the Dung Beetle (and not, say... Stag Beetle, or Rhinoceros Beetle,) as a spiritual guide.

Do they represent a passing, recurring message that "many annoyances or tiny shadows can snowball overwhelmingly"? "Don't take shit from other people... no, no, seriously, they need that to lay eggs in and eat and not starve and that's why they work so hard to roll it up into a ball but other beetle people keep stealing it from them"? "That which humans turn their noses, is nutritious to other living creatures, and can even be considered as beautiful and valuable as Ra's own sun"?


image by: Mark Whitworth
I'm beginning to accept that the serpent is simply much too "forefront" consciously. I almost forced life lessons out of it, and myself to identify in it. I would say that, from now on, all serpentine thoughtforms would be tributes to Serpent rather than interpreted as channeling Serpent, which I feel is an important distinction to make right now. The closest word I could think of, to my understanding of this Serpentine archetype, is that it's an egoistic understanding that I have rather than a spiritual one. This was what I wanted to be, because it was cool, and while for many people that desire is already a sign that some part of the human self aligns with that animal self... in my case, it wasn't.