Ambassadors to the Animals:
What Pagans Need to Know About Spiritual Creatures and Human-Animal Relations
by R.J. Stewart
If you are involved in magical and spiritual work, you are already an ambassador for humanity. You are standing to plead on behalf of those humans who are unwittingly aggressive and destructive. You are declaring to the infinite range of living beings, phsyical and metaphysical, that not all humans are stampeding blindly to oblivion. Ready to join up? Do you want to know more?
We are doing more, I trust, hope, and invoke, than just dressing up in robes and going to Renaissance Faires. So this article is a call to arms…not the kind of arms that profit the cronies of government, but open arms that reach out and embrace our fellow creatures.
As responsible people of spirit and magic, one of our tasks must involve improving human relationships with the living creatures of our world. Without them we are nothing; we would have no basis for our manifest existence. Yet we have abused, ignored and plundered them for centuries. Only those with a talent and a discipline for spiritual magic can change this. Our bad relationship with these others orders of biological life epitomizes the human rage, anger, greed, and self-destruction that we must seek to transform.
The primal magical traditions, world-wide, all have methods for working with other orders of life, with spirit beings and living creatures (i.e. birds, animals, fishes, insects, and all orders of life that have a biological manifestation in form). In this context, the faery and UnderWorld traditions of Europe and the Mediterranean and North Africa, have much in common with the Native American and shamanistic traditions. These traditions, be they shamanistic or not, all share this perspective: Humans cannot survive alone, and must co-exist and cooperate with the other orders of life, rather than coerce and exploit them. Fortunately for us, there is much wisdom and learning available from ancestral traditions, if we are ready and willing to work and thoughfully adapt it for contemporary use. This article contains a few loose ideas on how we might proceed. It is not intended as a rigorous philosophical or procedural document…but as a few signposts on the Way Back Home.
Who Wants Toad?
One evening back in the mid-1990s, I met with a Lakota elder, Grandmother Kitty, who had a reputation for being strict and fierce. We did what all good people involved in magic and spirit do when they meet, which is to drink beer and crack jokes. Yet, there were serious things moving underneath our laughter and shared stories. Among the many things that we talked about was the current obsession with Power Animals, Totem Beasts, or, as I prefer to call them, Spiritual Creatures. Neither of us could understand why, at a time when biological species are dying out hourly, thousands of people seem perfectly willing to ignore the crisis, yet are willing to spend time and money to go to seminars and courses to find “power animals.” We noted and confirmed that in the Gaelic and Lakota traditions power animals are always associated with living organisms–and, equally importantly–are never symbolic.
As we talked, we confirmed that there were a few fundamental truths of working with Spiritual Creatures that we shared, but which seem to differ from the popular view.
“Everyone wants to have the wolf, the bear, the stag,” said Grandmother Kitty, “as if that gives them merit.”
“But what if the one that comes is the toad?” I replied, and she gave me a long hard look.
“Why would that be so?” she said at last, testing.
“My teachers told me that small is powerful, and that the ones that choose you, even if you dislike them, are the most powerful for you, no matter what you think you want.”
She nodded, and we drank our beer and sat in silence for a while, knowing that we were in agreement. She then changed the subject, whish is what you do after talking about something powerful. We came back to it later, sideways from time to time, which is often done in traditional cultures.
Three Truths About Spiritual Creatures
Here are a few of my conclusions from experience, most of which were discussed in that long evening with Grandmother Kitty. They are three typical problems about our revival of interest in power animals, or Spiritual Creatures.
1. “Power animals” are NOT possessions. How many times have you heard someone say “my power animals are…” and then a list? Such an attitude betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of such Creatures. They are powerful and independent living beings, who associate with us through choice, not on command. When I hear the words “animal helpers,” I burn with anger and chill with sorrow.
In traditional magic, one hardly ever speaks about non-physical allies. In some ways of working it is strictly forbidden to even mention them. That summer evening, when I intuitively mentioned Toad to Grandmother Kitty, it suddently occurred to me that this was one of the creatures that she worked with. But I knew better than to ask her outright–that would have been crassly insensitive.
2. Living Creatures are NOT symbols. The second great falsehood about these Creatures arises when they are regarded as “qualities” or “attributes” that the individual “needs,” in order “to develop.” Thus someone who wants strength “chooses” the ox, or who wants power “chooses” eagle. Attitudes like this reveal a sad truth: for many, “power animals” are only the symbols of egocentric fantasies of personal empowerment. It is shocking but true: exploitation has invaded the spirit realm as well as the physcial one.
Such attitudes of ownership and objectification are only marginally removed from the gross materialism and consensus culture, in which living beings are viewed as little more than products. Not only do global corporations now claim to patent genes and seeds, but humans claim to own the spirit power of the Living Creatures. Hubris might be an appropriate word, but it is far too lenient.
But maybe some of this widely published and practiced nonsense over power animals arises because we are so cut off and isolated from actual living creatures. In all ancestral wisdom traditions, without exception, the power animals are associated with, identical with, at one with, actual living creatures in the natural world. They are never symbolic.
3. Spiritual Creatures are NOT pets. If we work with traditional methods, we understand that the creatures choose us, even if we do not like them. There is no room for a romanticized self-identification; traditonally, a creature will work with you during a certain phase of your life, or for certain tasks. Then they, and you, move on. It is a working relationship, not a sentimental one, and has nothing at all in common with our relationship with companion animals.
Just as Grandmother Kitty was sceptical of people who “had” the wolf, the bear, the deer, I am tired of people who “have” dragons. Why does no one have Frog as their ally? Or Prairie Dog, Gerbil, or Snail? An infatuation with animals perceived to be cute and/or aggressive reveals much about the shallowness of these supposed relationships.
A good example of a more healthy attitude comes from a completely different tradition, that of the Hindu deity Ganesh. His power animal is the mouse or rat. A small, persistent, hungry rodent, the rat shows us how we should be hungry for wisdom, dig in hidden places, and endure against all odds. In ancient times, the rat was sacred to Apollo because of its UnderWorld attributes. Not Apollo in his chariot in the heavens, but Apollo in the UnderWorld, where the hidden Sun is found by secret ways. What better creature to lead to wisdom than the Mouse?
Solutions from Tradition
Very well, I hear you say, you have given us a list of problems to think over, but how about offering some solutions?
During thirty years and more of spiritual practice, I have found that most questions are answered simply within folkloric traditions. By this I mean the traditions handed down by our ancestors, grass roots traditions that have endured through centuries. I do NOT mean our revival traditions of Witchcraft and Paganism. Our revival traditions draw upon the folkloric ancestral traditions, but they also create new material that has yet to withstand the test of time, dream, and memory.
There are many practical examples from ancestral European sources which have parallels in many traditions worldwide. When I discussed some of these practices with Grandmother Kitty, we found a number of similarities between the Lakota practices and the ancient European. Not, I hasten to add, because they are all “shamanism” but because they all embody ways in which the various ancestors related to the living world around them. At this level, the older traditions share much in common. How could it be otherwise?
Really Want to Commune with Spiritual Creatures? Try This.
1. Open to Dreams. When you go to sleep, form an intention that when you awaken, you will be open to the presence of a spiritual creature or power animal. When you go out of your door at dawn, look up, then down, and then all around you. The fist living creature that you see is your spiritual creature. If this is a slug on your doorstep, so be it. Form a relationship with the first physical creature that you see, and develop it in dreams, visions, and meditations. This method was used extensively by the Scottish and Irish seers, and by the peoples, priests, and priestesses, of the ancient Mediterranean cultures. It forms, among other things, the spiritual basis of the ancient art of augury (not, I hasten to add, that you should sacrifice your slug upon a tiny altar and try to read its entrails).
2. Read Folk Tales. In many traditional tales of birds, beasts and fish there is great truth. In my book Celtic Myths, Celtic Legacy, I wrote about the Breton tale of N’oun D’oare, the Wise Fool. The Wise Fool is a boy who sets out on a mysterious quest to find a girl that he loves yet has never met. On the way, he saves a small bird, and then a small fish. Each little creature he saves, turns out to be the king or queen of the birds or the fishes, and each helps him in his quest. Eventually he progresses from these small, apparently insignificant beings to the many-horned Lord of the Animals, Griffescornu, who has a horn upon his head for each day of the year. But N’oun D’oare could not have come to the presence of this mighty power of nature, redolent of Pan or Cerne, without his foolish-wise love and care for the Living Creatures that helped him upon the way.
Please be aware that there is no sentiment in such stories: they are about mutual respect and cooperation. There is, however, deep wisdom for us in such stories, in our quest to improve our relationships with our fellow creatures, in a world that is under threat.
3. Become Aware of Birth–and Death. We are so cut off from these processes that many of our ideas of non-human beings and their lives are almost entirely idealized. Be aware that real living creatures die all the time, as do we; that they are reborn ceaselessly, as are we. You cannot work with power animals without working consciously with death. One of the great secrets of traditional magic is that the physical creature, your ally, has a spiritual presence in the world beyond death, in places where you, as a living human, may not go.
In your work with Spiritual Creatures, it is important to think long-term and ignore egocentric fantasies of self-development. That is not what working with Spiritual Creatures is about. Think of the living world, and of a long-term expanding relationship between humans and every other organic life form.
Ultimately we may become true beings, complete inhabitants of Earth, by building a Threefold Alliance. Two parts have been discussed herein: human and creature. The third part is, of course, faery. A complete being on Earth is a harmonious relationship between human, faery, and living creature. What are you waiting for? Your potential friends, mighty allies, mentors, companions, are out there. The slug on the porch, the mouse in the bushes. Oh, and, of course, the stag in the forest and the bear raiding the dumpster.
–R.J. Steward is a Scottish author, composer, and musician, living in Washington State. He has forty-two books published worldwide, and has composed and recorded for feature films, theater, and television. His latest book is The Well of Light, From Faery Healing to Earth Healing, which includes a CD of visualizations with original music. Incidentally, he is not the R.J. Stewart who produced Xena: Warrior Princess.
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