This post comes to you in two parts: the first part was born of an animal card reading I did for myself, which felt deeply resonant for some of the current collective energies. The second is a meta-exploration of the more fraught aspects of working with animal symbolism as part of our animist toolkit.
The other day I pulled out my ancient deck of Medicine cards*. This is the oldest divination deck I own: my mother got it for me as a gift when I was a young teen back in Chile, on one of her business trips to the United States. It was a rare treasure, something we couldn’t get in our more limited market at the time, and it filled me with a mysticism I was only starting to form language for.
You see, I had always sensed that Earth and her animals, plants, fungi, insects, even the “weeds” blowing up cracks in the asphalt, were all deeply numinous, wise, creative and spirited. But growing up in a Catholic culture, the message I heard often was couched in religious terms: all of Creation was there for humans to dominate and use. “They are soulless”, I was told over and over — only there for us to build and perfect the planet according to our designs of Progress.
Not everyone I knew felt that way, but this litany, repeated at regular intervals, was like sandpaper scouring at the tender skin of that inner space of connected knowing. My then-new deck of cards helped me give new words to this other way of seeing the world, and offered me unerring guidance from the wisdom and heart of the animal spirits portrayed in each card.
But, back to the other day —
I was doing a simple card spread for myself, but the message felt so attuned to the collective energies I’m witnessing, that I decided to share it with you as well, with some thoughts to help you take the message deeper if it speaks to you.
Wild Boar in a reversed position asks us to engage with any places in our life where we’re avoiding confrontation.
Turtle reminds us that we’re held and supported by Gaia, our Earth Mother, especially through her abundance and fertility.
Black Panther/ Black Jaguar in reverse comes with an invitation to dare to meet darkness in our life: whether that’s our own Shadow or communal Shadow, the places that are dark because we have never “gone there”, the places of uncertainty, fear and grief, but also simply the unknown.
There’s a strong appeal to courage in these cards. The reversed cards in this deck tend to indicate where an animal spirit alerts us to an imbalance in our life, relative to the gifts they carry within them. Let’s explore some connections.
Wild Boar
Wild Boar is the ancestor of domesticated pigs. In European folklore and myth, they are represented often as warrior-like and ferocious, likely because the males can be highly aggressive to humans and other animals during their rutting season!
Boar’s presence lets us know there’s an opportunity to level up our sense of respect for self-and-other by showing clearly where we stand. For some of us, that involves tapping into some deep well of fierceness, perhaps even more so if our own assertiveness has been tamped down for a long time. Some inner line in the sand needs to be acknowledged. What do you stand for?
For others, perhaps the way to this inner sense of dignity comes from recognizing where we’re being loud or reactive, but it’s not serving us in the long term. Oftentimes, being outwardly aggressive helps us protect a place of raw vulnerability underneath. By all means, I champion each of us expressing what’s important to communicate, whether it’s frustration, anger, or something else. But I want to draw a fine distinction about the times when we may seem like we’re “speaking our truth” or “standing up for what we believe in”, but we’re not getting our message across– we’re trading off our sense of strength and effectiveness for volume, or we’re trying to get through to someone who’s made it clear they will not meet us. In cases like these, the better confrontation might be a mindful one with ourselves, to clarify why we feel this way and find a more centered course of action. Picking our battles and choosing to take a stand where it truly matters to us is key here. Boar reminds us that we grow from the process of engaging and meeting challenges versus shying away, avoiding, or denying.
( I’m strongly reminded of a favorite poem by William Stafford, included at the end of the post).
Black Panther/Black Jaguar
Black Panther, in this case, refers to the melanistic (dark brown/black) variation of Jaguar. Her velvety dark fur often shows ghostly, darker rosettes in certain lights, seeming like a nigh-twin to the tawny Jaguar.
Panther speaks, like Boar, of facing, meeting and engaging instead of shying away. It’s like they each ask us to take one extra step forward. Whether “forward” in your case means “deeper inward”, or “courageously ahead” in the external world (or a combination) will depend on where your biggest challenge lies at this time. The difference between Boar and Black Panther is that Panther’s energy is about facing, specifically, the uncertainty of dark, unknown places. In Mayan mythology, the Jaguar is associated with great power — being a mighty predator — and with the Underworld, the night-dark world of the spirits and ancestors.
This is certainly an opportunity for us to do any Shadow work that’s been knocking on our door, asking for our attention. That could be trauma healing; intergenerational healing; healing of the land; working to right social and ecological injustices; digging up our exiled and disowned experiences, talents and desires; taking time to unearth secrets deep from our hearts, in safe, contained spaces such as soul-friendships, with a trusted therapist, or in communal settings of mutual care.
But in this particular reading, I felt yet another layer arise.
In conversations with clients in particular, a unique theme has been emerging recently. It’s like the calling of a sweet melody, heard just before waking — something hard to grasp, pulling and drawing us, looking to take form, but just beyond reach. This too is the realm of darkness, but this is the creative darkness of that which is not manifested yet. Often, claiming time and space to give shape and articulation to these visceral pulls can be what scares us the most.
There are a million uncertainties around that which is yet-uncreated. Creating something, for one, requires us to also grow new neural pathways to sustain the creative process. Whether you’re making music or creating a new business or a new relationship, you’re simultaneously re-growing a new you! Allow me to explain:
You’ve likely had millions of iterations of some daily chores and tasks, such as getting dressed, showering, brushing your teeth, and so on. These neural pathways have grown more efficient over time (although, I must add, with caveats for the neurodivergent among us). Still, there’s a familiar “trail through the woods” of life experience there.
Meanwhile, when we’re creating something completely new and unknown, which sometimes we don’t even have a name for, we’re “bushwacking”.
We have to come up with a flowchart of decisions from scratch. Is it a painting? Very well, what paint should I use? Watercolor, acrylic, oil? What format? Which color palette? And so on, and so on. It’s the easiest thing in the universe to get overwhelmed, especially if we expect the process to fit seamlessly into our pre-existing life flow. Instead, we have to make extra space for ourselves just to get the hang of all the little steps leading up to the kinds of experimentation and exploratory play we need to articulate the unspoken inklings of our heart. To succeed, we need the same patience and repetitions that we’d offer a child.
This can be a perfect spot to get stuck and not create, not-take the next small soul-step into seeming thin air. The parts of us that don’t know– whether the outcome is worth the investment, of energy, of growing literal neural pathways, of emotional discomfort, of standing there empty handed and awkward for long periods of time — threaten to outvote the parts that have faith in the creative spark.
When Black Panther comes to point out an imbalance in all this, she reminds us that our brains like to find certainty at all costs. Sometimes they do this by projecting a negative outcome onto the future, just to help us feel like we know what’s going to happen. We don’t know what the unknown holds, so we assume the worst of it. And we are wired to have a negative bias!
It’s up to us to discern a truly negative situation from an open-ended one, and patiently help our nervous systems attune to what’s emerging with more openness, curiosity and hopefulness. Here is our chance to identify whatever it is we need in our world — including all the forms of healing, liberation, regeneration and restoration I mention above — so we can receive the unknown with more spaciousness.
Turtle
Which brings me to the message of Turtle. In mythologies from peoples around the world, Turtle often shows up as a powerful figure holding up the world. Turtle becomes a messenger, then, of Earth herself, with her ability to hold the complex web of life, and with her long, slow cycles of change. Earth’s fertility, abundance and love for all her children are indicated here as a stabilizing force, as we confront the unknown with Boar’s fierceness and Panther’s willingness to go into the dark. We are reminded that we are not doing this alone in the slightest, and that if we stand for integrity and wholeness, the Earth-forces that resonate with our initiative will partner with us in whatever challenges lie ahead.
How do we weave ourselves into the basket of mutual support and reciprocity that Earth offers? We start sending signals. We court the wild and the feral worlds all around us. We ask our fellow Earth beings to let us see them, to be shown a sign of their willingness to connect. We listen and keep eyes open to notice, in everyday life, in dreams, and in symbols — for the beings we are reaching for are both the tangible nature beings we see, and also much larger than their embodied avatars. We engage both in ritual and literal nourishment of the web. Do you love the colors of the flowers, the way they bend and sway in the wind? Paint them. Write a poem for them. Do it badly, even! But let them know you come with an open heart into relationship with them. Create a spot for birds and pollinators to drink water, grow herbs or vegetables, participate in regeneration projects. “Get in on” the Earth mutual support network! That’s how we get underneath the fragile skin of what our culture calls “the economy” to tap into the well of abundance and reciprocity that’s always been there.
So often we let the status quo dictate what we dare to imagine, but underneath that status quo we’ll typically find a hyper-individualistic, hostile view of life. If there’s a song you can hear just out of reach, a feeling you can’t quite put your finger on that inspires you, imagine that Gaia is ready to support you in exploring those slender threads. And even better yet, in weaving something new, generative and wonderful from them, together with you.
*Including some big-picture social complexities
I want to be sure to address some of the more complex social aspects — to working with a card deck like the one I’ve shared here, and perhaps to building our feral animist toolkits.
My understanding is that the author of the Medicine Cards, Jamie Sams, produced a body of work she portrayed as Native American without that being her true heritage, and what she taught was an amalgamation, not accurate to a specific Native nation or tribe. This is part of a phenomenon of cultural appropriation whereby many authors and teachers have profited from casting a glamour in the popular imagination, bringing forth exoticized and distorted images of indigenous spirituality. These images have taken root in place of true, respectful listening to the varied and diverse voices of indigenous teachers and leaders, who represent perspectives highly specific to their bioregions and more-than-human symbiotic partnerships.
My intention here is not to perpetuate these trends, and I don’t pretend that the symbolism I’ve shared here represents indigenous wisdom as such, in its proper context, where each People indigenous to a particular spot on Gaia’s body holds complex webs of meaning-making and relationship with their local animal kindred. The world over, they’ve held these webs against the unspeakable pressures of colonizer violation, genocide and injustice, and the destruction of their lands.
I’m sharing the explorations above from the very same place they came to me first: a place of using stories and imaginings as pointers, to help us step sideways from our dominant culture’s disenchantment and denial of the wisdom of the more-than-human beings we share this world with. I do live in a world full of magic where almost everything is as pregnant with symbolic meaning as the juiciest, most epic dream, so this is my genuine lived experience. I don’t think we need to add indigenous “credentials” to our personal animist experiences, as the experiences stand on their own. We can learn respectfully from myth and folklore from many cultures, and build our own set of meanings from experience, observation and relationship with the beings involved. I hear from clients and friends all the time about incredible connections and synchronicities with the animal world, warning from danger, alerting to opportunities, and singing forward their deepest longings into emergence. I believe if more of us trusted that the Cosmos in all its dimensions and expressions is communicating with us, we’d be far healthier contributors to Earth’s life than we are at this time.
I’ve written a bit more on this topic here, on the yes/and of “interpreting” animal symbolism and engaging in direct relationship with the animal being as they exist in the world. I also encourage you, in the spirit of overturning exploitation of indigenous animist cultures, to support the rights of indigenous people of the land you live in, learn from them with respect, and find ways to connect with and support the native plant and animal species that belong in your area.
A Ritual To Read to Each Other
By William Stafford
If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.
For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.
And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.
And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider—
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.
For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give—yes or no, or maybe—
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
