R. J. Stewart

Author - Musician - Teacher

This is the complete unabridged text of an article originally written for Pan Gaia magazine: the published article became a feature item and was edited and reduced. See the Pan Gaia website at www.pangaia.com

Stampeding to Oblivion: Survival of the Fatuous

The UnderWorld Perspective

R J Stewart © June 2004

I have called this article Stampeding to Oblivion because of my concern for the damage that humanity does to itself, and to the others orders of life, manifest and unmanifest, that share planet Earth with us. There are many major matters that we should, as humans, be dealing with at this time. While our leaders fight over oil reserves, no matter what disguise is cast over the reason for conflict, while the three dogmatic Book Religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, battle in their death throws like monstrous beasts, while the human autoimmune system is increasingly compromised and millions are dying of incurable syndromes, what are the magicians, seers, seeresses, wiccan, pagans, and others of our spiritual revival doing?

Which brings us to the second part of the title: Survival of the Fatuous. We are doing more, I trust hope and invoke, than just dressing up in robes and going to Renaissance Fayres. And there is much more yet to do, for a long, long, time to come. So this article is a call to arms…not the kind of arms that profit the cronies of government, but the open arms that reach out and embrace our fellow creatures in this vibrant living world.

Some of our immediate and long term tasks, as aware and responsible people of spirit and magic, must involve improving human relationships with the living creatures of our world, of land, sea, and of air. 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 other orders of biological life epitomises the human rage, anger, greed, and self-destruction that we must seek to transform.

If you are truly interested in, and 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, physical and metaphysical, that not all humans are stampeding blindly to oblivion. Ready to join up? Do you want to know more?

Amid a plethora of books tapes CDs courses seminars workshops festivals initiations attunements rituals orders lodges covens temples paths and traditions plus some erstwhile religions in various stages of growth or decay, how are we to find a way to communicate with, and relate to, the fellow creatures of our world ? How do we distinguish between fatuous fantasy and raw reality?

Fortunately for us, there is much wisdom and learning available from ancestral traditions, if we are ready and willing to work with it, and to thoughtfully 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… for that is the way of the moribund.

The Power of the Toad

Back in the mid 1990’s (remember those hazy years, when the United States had a president?) I met one evening with Grandmother Kitty, a Lakota elder, who had a reputation for being strict and fierce. We did what all good people involved in magic and spirit do when they meet together, 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, were the current obsession in America and Europe, 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 in a polluted planet, thousands of people seem perfectly willing to ignore the crisis, yet were also willing to go on seminars and courses to find “power animals”. In the Gaelic and Lakota traditions (and please understand that there are several of each, and no single all- embracing tradition), power animals are always associated with living organisms, and are never symbolic.

So when this theme of Bless the Beasts was established, I remembered my conversation with the Grandmother…who has since passed into the Otherworld. I know that her fierce spirit will guide those who follow in her footsteps. Sharing thoughts and experiences with her, comparing our ancestral traditions, helped me to clarify my understanding of certain ways towards redeeming the ills at the very foundation of this culture...one of which is our horrendous relationship with our companions in Nature.

The primal magical traditions, worldwide, 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 co-operate with the other orders of life, rather than coerce and exploit them.

When I talked with Grandmother Kitty, there were a few fundamental truths of working with Spiritual Creatures that we shared, Native American and European, but which seem, to this day, to differ from the popular view found in many of the books, courses, and seminars that are widely known.

The most important one is this: you do not choose them, they choose you. As Kurt Vonnegut once said, this is so important that you should write it, now, on a piece of paper and paste it to your computer screen where you can immediately forget about it.

“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 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, which 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… a consciousness of “what is fitting” that Gaels and Native Americans still share, though it is rapidly dying out.

Here are a few of my conclusions from experience, most of which were discussed in that long evening with Grandmother Kitty, along with other topics that may not be written about.

There are three typical problems about our revival of interest in power animals, or Spiritual Creatures.

1. The first problem is that they are often treated like possessions. How many times have I heard someone say “my power animals are…” and then a list? Such Creatures are not owned, nor are they badges of merit. They are living powerful independent beings, who associate with us through choice, and not on command. When I hear the words animal helpers I burn with anger and chill with sorrow.

   Along with this is the distressing willingness to speak about the power animals on the personal ownership list…in traditional magic you hardly ever speak about them. In some ways of working it is strictly forbidden to even mention them. That summer evening, when I intuitively mentioned the Toad to Grandmother Kitty, it suddenly 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. The second problem arises when Living Creatures 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 swiftness and power chooses the eagle. This attitude reveals something shocking: the person who thinks this way is not relating to actual spiritual creatures, but to an egocentric idea, a fantasy, of personal empowerment. Such fantasies are especially rife in schools of neo-shamanism that are strongly influenced by psychology ( psych- ology: an almost extinct late 19th and early 20th century materialistic science of the mind that you may have encountered from time to time).

   We have extended exploitation into the spirit world

   Both of the above attitudes are only marginally removed from gross materialism, in which living beings are owned, are product, and are useable and disposable. Little wonder that we are all trapped in the Stampede to Oblivion. Humans, who should be co-operating in the life of the planet by contributing their unique skills, have extended materialistic exploitation into the spirit world. My herd of buffalo on the astral plane is the biggest, most powerful, that there has ever been! Survival of the Fatuous in pseudospiritual neoshamanistic egolution. Egolution, not Evolution.

   Not only do global corporations claim to patent genes and seeds, but humans now also claim to own the spirit power of the Living Creatures. Hubris might be an appropriate word, but it is too lenient.

   But let us unleash the comforting dogs of sympathy awhile. Maybe some of this widely published and practiced nonsense over power animals or Spiritual Creatures arises because we are so cut off, so 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.

   In addition to the Living Creatures, our magical and spiritual traditions teach us about the Mythic Creatures, that have no bodily form, the unicorn, the Simurg, the dragon, the manticore and so forth. These are of another order of life, for they exist only in the metaphysical worlds. In this short article we are concerned primarily with practical relationships between humans and Spiritual Creatures, so Mythic Creatures cannot be discussed in depth. In brief, a power animal or Spiritual Creature has a natural counterpart, a biological form and body. Such a body is both individual and collective, one creature standing for many. Just as one human may stand for many.

   The classic example of human estrangement from Living Creatures, with which many of you will be familiar, is how those who eat meat are shocked and disgusted when they encounter, for the first time, the vicious practices of the industry that provides their food. Meat is seldom understood as the flesh of a living creature that endures suffering for human profit, but is, instead, a packaged product that we buy from the store. As long as we can keep it on that level of non-relationship, we can ignore the brutality of the meat industry, and just pretend that it does not happen, or claim that it has nothing to do with us. Do I hear a million voices chanting we are what we eat? Do I hear an amen, or just another order for a burger?

   So when we try to encounter Spiritual Creatures, as we should, as we must, if we are to be true humans and participate more fully in our living world, most people in this technophile modernist culture have no real background of relationship with living creatures to draw upon. That does not, I would propose, give us any excuse for ignorance or irresponsibility, but rather gives us greater sense of urgency about finding and developing a new relationship with our cousins in planetary life and consciousness.

3. The third problem is related, again, to the realm of fantasy. Just as Grandmother Kitty was sceptical of people who “had” the wolf, the bear, the deer, I am tired of people who “have” dragons. Firstly they are not, in the traditional sense, power animals, secondly they are mythic beings that embody geomantic and telluric forces, and thirdly, we all seem to be reading too many sword and sorcery novels and watching too many mythic movies. Why does no one have the gerbil? What is so wrong with gerbils, anyway? Can it be the numbing effect of those wheels that humans force them to run around in their miserable little cages?

We can take a good example from a completely different tradition, that of the Hindu deity Ganesh. His power animal is the mouse or rat. A small persistent hungry rodent, showing us how we should be hungry for wisdom, dig in hidden places, and endure against all attacks, all persecution, and all odds. The same creature, by the way, was sacred to Apollo in ancient times, 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 you to wisdom than the Mouse? Or the liberated Gerbil?

Emotional investment in power animals

The three problems briefly outlined above will inevitably lead to an imprisoning emotional investment in fantasies about power animals. If we work with older traditional methods, however, the creatures choose us, even if we do not like them. In this way there cannot be a fantasy or emotional investment or romanticised self-identification. Traditionally, a creature will work with you during a certain phase of your life, or for certain tasks. Then they, and you, move on. This is very different to owning a dog, a cat, or a parrot. Yet the same sentiment is found over “power animals” as is found with pets. I am not saying that the feelings are not genuine, in a modernist world where love is at the very end of a long shopping list, and has such a short shelf-life, but I am saying that such sentiment is misplaced in magical and spiritual work.

Very well, I hear you say, you have given us a list of problems to think about, but how offering some solutions?

Solutions from Tradition

During 30 years and more of spiritual practice, I have found that most questions are answered very simply within folkloric traditions. By this I mean the traditions handed down by our ancestors, those grass roots traditions that have endured through centuries, and I do not mean our revival traditions of witchcraft and paganism. Our revival traditions draw, rightly and validly, upon the folkloric ancestral traditions, but they also create new material that has yet to withstand the test of time, dream, and memory.

Often we have to come at the wisdom of the older traditions sideways, with a mirror, but there is also plenty of direct information that may be found. 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?

I firmly assert that it is the ancestral folkloric spiritual traditions that bring many races together in mutual understanding, while it is the formal religions that set them to war with one another.

Do you want to commune with Spiritual Creatures? Try the following:

1. Form an intention when you go to sleep 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 first 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).
   

   At first it will seem that the creature can, and does, change day by day…this is good! It expands our consciousness, and liberates us from stereotypes. We do not own or choose the creatures; they come to us, in an infinite dance of change and interaction. What could be better?

   With practice this method will lead you, in time, to powerful creatures that have a longer term relationship with you…but that must come naturally, rather than be contrived or built up. Working with Spiritual Creatures is not about reinforced conditioning or symbolism.

   If you are in the city you will probably see, at first, birds, dogs, cats, maybe squirrels. If you are in Manhattan you will see dogs with clothes. But soon you will discover the vast insect realm that supports all planetary life…ah…there is mighty power indeed. If you are in the country, or by the ocean, your range of living beings will be greater. Do not squander this wealth of spiritual gifting by staying in and watching wild life documentaries on television, or by thinking that power animals are all in the mind.

2. Hearken to the wisdom of the folk tales that teach us about birds, animals, fishes. In the Breton tale of N’oun D’oare, the Wise Fool [1], the Wise Fool is a boy who sets out on a mysterious quest to find a girl that he loves yet has never met, and on the way we saves a small bird, and a small fish. Each little creature that he saves, is king or queen of the birds, the fishes, and helps him in his quest. Eventually he progress 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 he 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 co-operation.

   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. Work ceaselessly within yourself to be more aware of the processes of death and birth. We are so cut off from these that many of our ideas of animals birds fishes insects, are almost entirely idealised. Note, for example, the huge popularity of cartoon creatures.

   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 word beyond death, in places where you, as a living human, may not go.

4. Think long-term, think on-going. Ignore and scorn the egocentric fantasy 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. That is our goal, and we, as modernist individuals, are tiny but significant parts of a huge pattern of transformation and interaction.

In Conclusion

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.

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© R J Stewart 2004

1: Celtic Myths, Celtic Legends, R J Stewart, Sterling NY 1992