When I was writing the other day about polar bears and the qualities and medicine they possess as spirit guides, a question came to me. People experience and, if properly trained, deliberately seek and work with the magick and medicine of other animals. Shamans work with their allies - the animal spirits - as part of the oldest healing tradition on this planet. But do we humans, as a species, have our own medicine? Are we animal spirits, in the shamanic sense?

In the shamanic belief every thing is alive and carries with it power and wisdom. Power animals are an essential component of shamanic practice. They are the helping spirit which add to the power of the shaman and are essential for success in any venture undertaken by the shaman.

Shamans believe that everyone has power animals - animal spirits which reside with each individual adding to their power and protecting them from illness, acting similarly to a guardian angel. Each power animal that you have increases your power so that illnesses or negative energy cannot enter your body. The spirit also lends you the wisdom of its kind. A hawk spirit will give you hawk wisdom, and lend you some of the attributes of hawk.

Everyone is thought to have a few of these guardian power animals or it is thought that the individual could not survive childhood. Over the course of her or his life the person may have several. If a power animal leaves and one does not come to take its place the individual is considered, by the shaman, to be disempowered and therefore vulnerable to illness and bad luck.

This quote comes from the website Shaman Links, one of many, many websites about shamanism, power animals, and animal wisdom and medicine. Google as I might, I could not find a reference to humans as spirit animals rather than as shamans or as beneficiaries of animal guides.

Some people believe that humans are "better" than animals. Christians certainly believe that their God gave humans dominion over all of the animals on Earth. If you followed this belief, then it would be easy to come to the conclusion that humans might become spiritual allies with animals to benefit from the medicine they have to offer us, but that we, as higher beings, don't actually have this kind of medicine ourselves. I have a hard time buying into this way of thinking. Shamans do believe that animals serve people, in a sense, but in the same way that an angel or some other divine being comes to a person's aid when help is needed. Christians don't believe that people are "better" than angels. I don't believe that humans are "better" than animals.

Pagans, for the most part, believe in the immanence of the divine, that it can be found everywhere, including within ourselves. We also tend to believe in the concept that everything is interconnected, that we are all part of a large, singular spiritual whole. Following a belief system like this it is much more likely that humans are placed right along side all other beings, as opposed to being put on the top of some spiritual hierarchy. Anti-Darwinists aside, human beings are animals. Isn't it conceivable, then, that human beings do, in fact, possess our own unique medicine as animal spirits?

Imagine a shaman from another world who comes to Earth either literally or on a shamanic journey through different dimensions to find healing allies from whom he can bring medicine back to his ailing people. There are lots of beings on this planet, of every variety imaginable, animal, vegetable and mineral. There are lots of humans. What wisdom, what medicine, would this visiting shaman find if he turned to one of us? What is human medicine, shamanically speaking?

When I was studying the philosophy of aesthetics, we addressed the question of "what is art?" It's an unanswerable question, you see, so to get as close to an answer as possible, you have to ask lots of other questions whose answers spiral closer and closer to the core of what it is to be art. If we apply this methodology to the search for human medicine, then there are a number of ways to approach the problem.

I suppose one could argue that we humans developed our own medicine. Throughout the millennia of our existence we have worked to perfect it to a literal science. But the thing we call medicine today - that vast industry of machines and drugs and hospitals and insurance companies and paper pushers - leaves very little room in the end for true healing. Yes, people are cured of many things through the application of modern medicine, but in the shamanic sense, this feels as far away from medicine of the spiritual and magickal varieties as you can get.

What else then?

Animal magick or medicine is thought to come from physical and behavioral characteristics particular to that animal. We could look at what shamans have traditionally considered to be the spirit and medicine from our closest genetic relatives: apes. Animal Spirits, one of my usual resources for information on animal spirit medicine because they truly have the most exhaustive list of animals I've found - yes, even a dung beetle is important to the shaman - says that the gorilla's wisdom includes intelligence, gentleness, maternal instinct, use of speech, and benevolence. I can accept absolutely that these are the things that the gorilla has to teach us, and humans (well some of them anyway) do possess these qualities, but are they the first things that you think of when you think of humans? I'm not so sure.

What are the singularly human characteristics that could be the source of human medicine? As I make a list of the ones I can think of and I look at my shamanic references, it's difficult to identify a quality that can't be explained through association with a particular animal spirit. Yet I'm not willing to concede that humans can't be spirit animals in our own right.

One distinction between humans and other animals that is fairly universally accepted is our ability to reason. True, scientists have done studies and there is plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that other animals do apply reason and logic to problem solving, but the enormous capacity and functionality of our brain is a remarkable and uniquely human characteristic. Think of all of the things that are a product of human thought, ingenuity, creativity and industry. True, not all of them are beautiful and good, but they still came about because some human being had an idea and turned it into a reality. This ability seems like a good place to start if we are looking for a human characteristic that could be the source of human medicine.

There is so much more to consider, so many more questions to explore. I see a stack of books in my future. A phone call to my friend who is a professor of philosophy. A shamanic journey. Right now, my head hurts from all this thinking. I'm off for coffee and to enjoy the beautiful Sunday morning sunshine while it lasts.

There will be more . . .

Posted by Angela-Eloise at 11:20 AM