Neolithic Shamanism: Spirit Work in the Norse Tradition - Raven Kaldera 2012

The Brown World: Animals

Hail to the Hunter on the track,

Hail to the scent of the Prey,

Hail to those who eat green,

Hail to those who eat red,

Hail to those who eat all.

Hail to the keen ear and the sharp eye,

Hail to the life that gives itself to us.

Animal spirits are the entities that are probably the most associated with shamanism in fiction and in modern neoshamanic practice. How many times do we hear teachers promising to help a seeker find his spirit animal? Animal spirits have a much bigger fan club than plant spirits in modern neoshamanism, with many new people running around showing off how cool their “spirit animals” are. Oddly enough, they all seem to have “spirit animals” like Wolf, Bear, Cougar, Eagle, and Hawk. That’s not to say that some people are not honestly approached by those animal spirits—certainly I’ve met a few—but one wonders why there aren’t more people working with Rat and Chipmunk and Frog and Cockroach. The big, glamorous predatory animals seem to be the ones that all the would-be spirit workers scramble to obtain . . . as if such things could be obtained just by wanting them. No, with animal spirits, it’s best to put the call out and see what shows up, and don’t be disappointed when it isn’t Wolf or Eagle. Every animal spirit has something to teach. Every animal has its power.

Here we need to differentiate between the term totem animal and spirit animal, the latter of which is heard constantly in every neoshamanic workshop. Like Greenwights, animal spirits consist of either the souls of specific animals (usually dead ones, unless we’re talking about the classic witch’s “familiar”) or the grandparent spirits of the different species. These latter ones are what we’re talking about when we say Bear or Crow or Elephant, and some of them are quite powerful indeed. When people refer to “spirit animals,” they might mean these overarching vaettir, or they might mean smaller spirits of that species—perhaps animal ancestors—who have taken an interest in you and bother to show it. Totem animals are creatures that one admires, emulates, and attempts to make a connection with; ancestral totems are animal spirits who were revered (and perhaps worked with) by one’s forebears, and could theoretically be called upon for aid in a pinch. There are also occasionally ancestral connections to specific animals, and such connections entailed certain obligations. If a would-be contemporary shamanic practitioner decides to take up these obligations again, it is quite possible to restore such tutelary relationships, but that is a different thing from having a personal spirit animal.

Not all shamans or shamanic practitioners have a single special “spirit animal”; in fact, it’s not all that common in this tradition. Most either have several animal spirits whom they work with off and on when needed, or they don’t work much with animals. Some do have a strong and bonded relationship with one overarching animal spirit, but don’t think that one needs to do this in order to be a shaman or shamanic practitioner. You are as likely to make allies with any of the other spirits in this book—plants, Wind, Water, Fire, the dead—as you are to be approached by an animal spirit. It is not, as some neoshamanic traditions would have it, the defining moment of the shamanic experience, nor the defining characteristic of the job. Allies come from many places. The ones you admire from a distance may never become interested in you, and the ones who bless you with their presence may be the last ones that occur to you . . . and in some cases, the last ones you want.

Unlike the other spirits, we feel it’s wisest in this day and age to wait for animal spirits to contact and choose you. This is because most of us will never have an accidental encounter with the actual animal, unless we do a great deal of traveling and camping in wild places for months at a time. In ancient times, the human world and the world of wild animals were much closer together, and often impinged on each other. Humans were aware of where the wild animals lived and what their habitat was, and after the Neolithic agricultural revolution, most people had daily contact with domestic animals. An animal spirit who was interested in you might send one of its corporeal children close enough for you to get a glimpse, repeatedly until you were sure that the omen was correct, and only then would you be sent out to have your vision. Spending time around the actual animal was a way for you to learn lessons directly from that animal spirit. (Of course, if you already work closely with a particular animal and have a close relationship with them—for example, you own a horse farm and have worked with horses for twenty years—this advice need not apply.) In our contemporary age, we not only live lives far removed from the natural world, but as a species we have done untold damage to that natural world. We’ve harmed the ecosystems that animals depend on, so perhaps it is no surprise that the overarching spirits of our animal kin might be less inclined to take an interest in our well-being. After all, as a species, we take so little comprehensive interest in theirs.

On the other hand, this chapter deals with nine specifically chosen animal spirits, and you may not have a relationship with any of them, nor might they wish to have one with you. So how does one use this section, if you can’t just walk up and knock on their doors, so to speak, and be reasonably sure that they will open up and talk to you? It’s a difficult question, and one that had to be wrestled with as we wrote this chapter. First, let’s discuss why we chose these spirits, and then we’ll go into the solution to the problem.

There is no way that we could cover all the animals and animal spirits who are traditional to the areas of northern Europe where our tradition hails from. There are hundreds of animals in the ecosystem (thousands if you take all insect, reptile, amphibian, and fish species into account), and probably every grandfather and grandmother spirit of those animals has been connected with a person at some point. We had to choose nine, and selecting those few made this one of the hardest chapters to write. We decided to choose three wild mammals from predator to prey, three domesticated mammals, two birds, and a fish. Other animals that have been traditionally associated with the Northern Tradition include the adder, badger, beaver, bee, bull or cow, carp, carrion beetle, cat, cock, crane, deer (red and fallow), dog, eagle, eel, eider, elk (moose), falcon, fox, frog, goose, hare, hedgehog, lynx, marten, mouse, musk ox, otter, partridge, plover, polar bear, quail, rat, seal, sheep, stork, swallow, weasel, whale, wolf, and the ancient and now-extinct uruz, or aurochs, similar to our American buffalo but less shaggy. These all have their myths and fables, and there are probably more that we haven’t found yet.

However, we do feel reasonably certain that the exercises we’ve suggested for each one of these animal spirits can be used with different animals spirits of the same general sort. These exercises demonstrate how to go about establishing and maintaining a relationship with an animal spirit, after all, and can be easily adapted to suit one’s own practice. For example, Squirrel may never be one of your allies, but the exercise associated with Squirrel could be easily applied to Mouse or Hare or any other small prey animal. Bear may not speak to you, but Bear’s lesson could be applied to other large predators. Goat’s lesson about skin can be applied to Cow or Sheep equally well. We suggest that you ask the animal spirits to send someone appropriate over—and gift them well when you ask—and apply the most relevant lesson to who ever comes. (It may also be that they have an entirely different lesson to teach, and that’s all right too—let them guide the process.)

One note about genders of animals in this chapter: We alternate between he for one animal and she for the next, largely at random. Just because we randomly use she for Bear and he for Boar does not mean that you might not get a he-bear or a sow. The actual spirit who comes to you may be male or female, as it chooses. Your actual gender probably does not have nearly as much to do with that as you may think—it’s all about what that spirit thinks will be best for you.

When dealing with animal spirits in this tradition, one has to bring up the phenomenon of shape-shifting, and that is what we will be practicing in this chapter. Do not attempt any of these exercises until you have thoroughly practiced the Body exercise in the Beginning Place chapter and have become skilled at it. You need to have a good sense of your energy body as separate from your physical body in order to move on to these more advanced practices.

Shape-shifting is the art of temporarily (and occasionally permanently) reshaping your energy body for a purpose. One purpose might be to confer extended abilities onto your physical body. The two are linked, and while borrowing Reindeer’s legs will not change the structure of your own knees, it will have an effect on your physical legs. The reasons why this happens are long and fairly convoluted, but suffice it to say that because the two are linked, what affects one will affect the other to some extent. (That’s a two-way street; physical illness can drain the chi from your energy body and make it dull and diffuse.) These extended abilities are not permanent. They last only as long as you are concentrating, and it takes a great deal of concentration to make these connections on top of whatever activity you were doing that required this work, so sometimes the effects will last only a few seconds of crucial time. This is not a bad thing—please read and reread our warning about making permanent changes to the energy body in the Body section before starting these procedures.

Another purpose might be to shift only your energy body, after enough of it is separated from your physical body to journey about, into a shape more useful to journey with. Giving yourself a form with wings or fast-running feet can be a real boon in those cases. It’s important to remember that while Otherworlds are more malleable about certain physical laws than our own very heavy world might be, they do still have consistent laws of nature and physics that you must abide by. For example, you might be able to shift energetically into a bird form and fly in a specific Otherworld, but there will still be winds that you must cope with (which is why you want that bird spirit right there helping you), and simply trying to fly like Superman or turning into a floating blob might not get you very far. If you’re traveling in an Otherworld where you can do anything and be anything and you are never hampered by physical laws that you didn’t expect . . . you’re probably still in your own head.