The night before he died, I lay on the floor of his room in the rest home, and journeyed for him. I was looking for a Power Animal who he had known when he was a child, but who had since become lost to him. His daughter drummed softly for me. The room was darkened. I found his Power Animal, and returned them to him. I whispered the name in his ear, and took the unusual step of telling his daughter, because he himself had been non-verbal for over a year.
I was not surprised that his Power Animal was a great sea bird. He was always one for sailing. He had been half way round the world on his own, in a scruffy little boat. His son, who lived on the harbour, remembered him coming in at dusk, the sails candid white against the deepening sky and the choppy grey sea. Sailing bonded the two of them.
When the Maori sailed to Aotearoa from Hawaiki, they were guided by the great sea birds. The name for such things is tohu: a marker, a sign. The next morning, I drove in to help the rest home staff wash him and dress him after he had died. (‘Now you are prepared to God’, said Jingle, the Filipina health care assistant, in her gentle English.) In the car on the way in, it was nine o clock, and the radio station played the ‘Bird of the Day’ as they do each day at that time. On that day it was, of course, his Power Animal, and so I heard the voice of the great sea bird speaking. It was a tohu, a sign I had got it right.
A Power Animal can be your best friend and protector. When I had surgery earlier this year, I called to a Power Animal to protect me as I went under the anaesthetic. I was comforted knowing she nestled in my chest. When I do anything in Non Ordinary Reality that is tricky or new, I ask a Power Animal to accompany me. When I do psychopomp work, I am part of a team with two Power Animals. I always ask for their permission beforehand. Wanna come with? Yes! They always say. As a team we rock.
I house sit a bit, and once I was looking after a special cat, a Devon Rex. She is small, white, has a strange little triangular face and one blue eye and one green. I love her. Her pancreatitis flared up suddenly. When I got home from my night shift she was missing. I found her in a wardrobe under a pile of clothes, and straight to the vet we went. So I journeyed to a giant extinct cat, the greatest cat of all, and I asked her to look after her tiny sister. I visited the cat at the vet. We bumped heads as we usually did, and I gave her greetings from the greatest cat to the smallest. She recovered and has survived to this day.
For instant succour in distress, I recommend dancing your Power Animal. This took me ages to learn, because I am woefully inhibited that way. Now I enjoy whooshing and howling and racing and creeping across my bedroom, rattling as I go. I can guarantee you will feel better and your Power Animal will love it too.
If you work with Power Animals, remember that this is a relationship. It is a kind of friendship. When we neglect our friends, they drift away. This is why there are Power Animals who were with us when we were small children, but who left us long ago. Retrieving them is a wonderful thing to do for a human person. However, the relationship needs to be maintained. Give your Power Animals some love. Take them for a walk. Share food with them. Thank them for their help and wisdom. If they exist in this Middle World, chances are they are endangered. Find out about them, and help their cause if you can.
Like relationships among human people, we can be close to a particular Power Animal for a time, and then lose touch with them. It is a bit like childhood friends where we outgrow some of them, but others last long term. I have some Power Animals who I have worked with for years. I have a couple of others who show up from time to time. This is all to the good.
When you google your Power Animal, and you will, resist the temptation to interpret them in a generic way. As in Bear means strength and Fox means cunning or whatever. This is your relationship with your own Power Animal and it is not reducible to a stereotype. I am also wary of events where all participants have a Power Animal bestowed on them. Again, it is a complex and sometimes long-term relationship, not like pairing up in a workshop for a discussion. There needs to be permission and mutual trust.
I don’t talk directly about my Power Animals although I know others who do. My reason is because the relationship is a bit like being in love. If I tell you about my beloved and you meet them, you might not resonate with them at all. You might think ‘Oh, how ordinary’, when for me it is not ordinary at all. It is a relationship easily misunderstood and trivialized. It is also at times just plain bad culturally as well. (I look forward to Simon Moya-Smith’s book ‘Your Spirit Animal is a Jackass’ published by the University of Minnesota Press when the pandemic is over.)
It is surprising who a Power Animal might be. A sparrow is of course equal to an eagle in Non Ordinary Reality. I did Power Animal retrieval for a fit young Rugby playing man. His Power Animal was a small sea creature. I was like, yeah, I know, just roll with it and see what you can make of it. I am just the messenger here! Power Animals can be extinct or mythical. They are not domestic animals, because those are so influenced by human spirits. And when I began this work I was keen to ask the question ‘Why are they always big fashionable animals? Why is a slug never a Power Animal?’ The answer to that is that people have been working shamanically for thousands of years and they know who shows up and who doesn’t. Slugs and slaters and flies just don’t.
I work with an extinct Power Animal and I love the access this gives me to the past. At the time of writing this, we are in the middle of the COP conference on climate change. Many world leaders have gathered in Glasgow to do nothing at all except dissemble and lie to each and kowtow to big business. (Oh, sorry, I mean put their best minds to the crisis at hand). I did a night time ritual in some Red Zone land, which was damaged by earthquakes and now abandoned to housing. In a spinney of native trees I found a concrete pipe and set up an altar on it. I burned a photo of the conference venue along with some other offerings. I saw the fire as a purification rather than as a destructive force. So I asked for a purification of motive and heart, for a holy fear to come over all the people at the conference. I asked my Power Animal for help and thousands of extinct creatures landed on the roofs, and crawled out of the floors, and moved through all the rooms of the conference centre. As I walked home in the middle of the night, I was followed by a stream of them. I hope it helps.
So we can develop relationships with Power Animals beyond the standard journeying to the Lower World and asking them for advice and help. In sum, it is like a friendship, it is unique, flexible, and sometimes last a lifetime.
Credits:
The image is from the excellent Valhyr, who creates Norse imagery. And further reading: Michael Harner 'The Way of the Shaman' and 'Cave and Cosmos'.
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