Eating Your Totem
Okay. So my dear Bren may or may not have eaten his “Totem” for dinner last week. And I joked about it. A few people had panic attacks about this. So in my usual sweet but sarcastic way let me address this.
First of all, I am the kind of woman who has been known to start pillow fights in the middle of the afternoon in downtown Ottawa. I don’t take life all that seriously. I take my Witchcraft seriously, but not entirely seriously. If there was a rule that in order to be a Pagan and/or Witch you had to be serious all the time, about everything, and never crack a joke, I’d join the Discordians, or possibly the Pastafarians. I do love spaghetti.
So with that out of the way …
I just adore the endless debate over the proper definitions and uses of words. Especially words stolen from cultures we invaded then conquered and shoved onto reserves to eek out a life of poverty and hopelessness.
The whole Totem vs Familiar vs Power Animal vs Let’s Just Call Them Sprits debate is a personal favourite of mine.
Folks often use Totem for just about anything. From my understanding in most of the cultures that have Totem concepts, you get one of these at birth. Often it’s a tribal thing. Kind of like how as a Fergusson our ancient clan badge is the Poplar tree. There are all kinds of rules regarding Totems, depending on who you talk to. These things vary from culture to culture, tribe to tribe, website to website … got it?
Familiar also gets used for just about everything.
In my mind it is an actual animal (maybe a plant too) you work magick and ritual with. In A very real sense, not a “My cat jumped on my altar once” way. My now elderly dog Crash and I have a relationship that can only be described as uncanny. Those are other folk’s words, not mine. The fact that she allows Bren to take her half a block away from me to potty in the morning is amazing. This dog and I part a part of each other. In ritual we dance an intricate dance built upon a decade plus of working together. She guards me as I walk the Hedge and sometimes even joins me. I can go on and on but I won’t.
Then there’s Power Animals, Spirit Guides, Spirits, Ancestor Teachers … the list goes on and on and often different words are used for the same thing.
It’s enough to make your head spin.
Now while I do understand it is important to be using words in a way that makes sense to us all, so that we can communicate better, I also feel that at times we worry far too much about these things.
Once upon a time, while wandering on the otherside of the Hedge I found myself hanging out with the God Who Has Antlers on His Head. Since nothing seemed to be happening, I decided to ask a question.
I asked “Sooooo … are you one individual god, not a god at all, are all gods one god, or are you some kind of archetype … or what?”
His response:
“It doesn’t matter”
So there you go.
It doesn’t fucking matter.
Not that we have that out of the way …
Bren is not a shamanic practitioner; he’s a Druid and Philosopher. He doesn’t know what his Totem is and I don’t know what his Totem is. He has a special fondness for rabbits, that’s all.
And yes, he eats rabbit. Last week was not the first time either.
In some Traditions, it’s totally against the rules to eat your Totem. Bren knows this. He has worked with First Nations Elders off and on for many years. Not as a spiritual student, but as a guy working for the government and such learning their customs and values in order to beat the white guys in charge over the head with the proper ethics of dealing with the First Nations people. But he knows a heck of a lot about First Nations culture, customs and spirituality.
When I joked to him about eating his “Totem” the first thing he mentioned (not totally seriously) was that it’s against the rules in some Traditions to do so.
At which point I said “Yeah, but you’re white”
Bren and I are not First Nations. We are Celts and Anglo-Saxons by blood and culture at best (and Canadian of course)
The debate over whether white folks have Totems aside, there is a lot of good evidence that animals had some major sacred importance to white people once upon a time. The horse for example was associated with some heavy hitting goddesses, with the land itself, and with sovereignty.
But white folks being white folks, we’ve always done things a little differently than other cultures. We don’t treat scared horses like sacred cows in India, or Totems you can’t eat.
Here’s an interesting ancient Celtic practice:
In order to be king, you must (in front of the whole tribe) have sex with a horse, then kill it, then butcher it, then eat some of it, and then cover yourself with its blood and guts and maybe even parade around in its still oozing hide.
Yep yep
So, even if Bren’s Totem is a rabbit, I don’t feel all that bad about serving it to him for dinner.
Thanks for reading yet another nonsensical ramble.
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Wow, this is an awesome post. Best part of this post:
“It doesn’t fucking matter.”
Well said
ps – Don’t be getting intimate with any rabbits now Dr. Brendan… lol.
This is not only ridiculous statement about “you must (in front of the whole tribe) have sex with a horse, then kill it, then butcher it…”. Where do you pick up such nonsense. What you are referring to is known as the Asvameda Ceremony which was widely practiced in the Indo European world & was noted by Giraldus Cambrensis as still being practiced as late as the 12th century. BUT it was mostly done symbolically. A white mare would be killed and as part of the inauguration ceremony a broth would be made from the flesh of the horse & the would be king would get into the broth, presumably after it cooled down. A similar practice was noted in India although simulated sexual relationship was practiced. The idea in the Asvameda is that the one to become king “marries” the most important member of the animal kingdom and in this way inter-relates with nature in a physical & ceremonially symbolic way.
Wow hunny, you take things waaaaay to seriously. This blog post was not a history lesson.
It was quite common in some cultures that an animal which was particularly sacred, and thereby taboo dietarily, would in those cultures have a particular day set aside for its own sacred religious feast, when eating of that exact beast was rather obligatory.
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Hugh,
What I read about the Vedic horse sacrifice was that the king’s eldest queen had to have sex with the horse, who was of course male and was already slaughtered and lying belly up when she did it.
This information is in Roberto Calasso’s Ka.