Some of your pets are members of your god posse — the team of guardian spirit entities who attend you on your life’s mission — incarnated in animal form.
Borrowing from the Wiccan tradition, I refer to the elevated relationship between human and animal souls as a familiar.
In a very literal and tangible way, there are no relationships on earth that teach you more about the benevolent spirit entities who attend you in this life than your animal familiars. Not all your pets or domesticated animals are familiars — the designation of familiar is very special and unique label.
The cat familiar is simply the most popular or well-known — the traditional classic — but this special spiritual relationship is not limited to members of pagan faiths or to any particular species of animal.
Here’s what I personally believe about our familiars:
When you connect to an animal and she becomes your familiar, you elevate her spirit to the human sphere of consciousness. You know the ones you’ve done this with — they stand out clearly among your pet/owner connections — they become more human than animal. You willfully — by your divine grace and choice — lift the soul of your animal companion up to our level.
As a kid it always disturbed me that Christianity said animals did not have souls. There can be no doubt that if there are souls to be had, at all, period, by any living entity, then your familiars have souls — a different kind of soul than a wild animal.
Like a spirit guide, ancestor, or guardian angel does for you, you become the sponsor or patron of this creature’s spirit. Unlike a human child who emerges or breaks off from your physical body, but has an independent soul — and so only requires a temporary dependence — you bring your animal familiar into your spiritual body — your aura. You lend a piece of your spiritual bubble to her — she actually becomes part of your soul.
This is why you can’t be technically alone with another human in the room, yet your familiar can be by your side, with you, in your most private physical space. When she leaves her physical body behind, she literally will not “go to heaven” because she is tethered to your aura and will remain with you, for good.
You are here to experience and learn how to love unconditionally. Your animal familiars are the most obvious, visible form of “guardian angels.” They may even be the only kind of guardian that manifests a physical form you can easily perceive.
Our animal familiars are pure, unconditional love incarnate. They are the “sure things” in your god posse. Anyone — no matter your physical appearance, personality, handicaps, abilities, talents, or human qualities — can have this relationship. It transcends judgement.
The miracle you have manifested with your familiar in this lifetime is one of your A+ love lessons learned. You’ve already created it. It will never go away; it can’t be reversed. She is on your Team for good. What she can continue to do for you one day will change — but then she will become a small piece of your love — your power — that is not bound to the physical world.
There are certain tasks that my different guides and guardians are best equipped to handle for me. When I am asked to send my thoughts and prayers for someone’s animal companions, I literally send my departed familiar Cera to deliver those messages. This is a kind of magic she is especially qualified to execute.
In honor of my familiar Cera’s passing June 25, 2004, this week I’m exploring the phenomena surrounding the Animal Spirits in your God Posse with a brief series of articles:
- The passing of a pet — a life loved to completion
- Euthanasia — the flower of life blooming in reverse
- Shifting your perspective on the Angel of Death
My love for my familiar taught me so much about how the relationships with my guardian angels and spirit guides work… I can’t dump the richness of familiars in one post. It has taken me three years to process the experience and control the emotions enough to revisit my fifteen year relationship with Cera and celebrate her as my “angel with fur.”
Seek Wisdom — Practice Love
As I read your article, I had to call out to my angel with fur, my cat Neptune, and she came racing up the stairs to leap up on my lap and rub her face against my hands as they type…
I’ve never known a cat like Neptune, or her brother Seth (who is my husband’s cat). She talks incessantly if I take the time to talk back to her, and she has so much unconditional love to give.
All she seems to do in life is sleep, eat, play and love.
What a great role model!
Yet another illuminating article, thank you Slade!
KL & Neptune,
Please come back soon and read about my Cera in the next few days.
By the way, interesting detail I did not include in this post — I am paraphrasing my friend Seth when I mention “a life loved to completion.”
So considering this post in light of the earlier one on temporary spirit guides – Do we sometimes have temporary familiars?
While I was still married, a starving, rain-soaked, freezing black kitty adopted us one dark February afternoon. Max had apparently never heard of someone not liking cats and insisted on bonding with me in the most intense fashion. My former husband claimed him as his but it was clear who Max held the most affection for. He completely won me over. My spoiled rotten dogs were horribly jealous!
Max never lost the independence and self-sufficiency gained from an early life on the streets but he was also quite expressive with appreciation for getting to live in such a cushy world. He would do his own thing most of the time, but every couple of days he’d demand a long session of crazy lovin’ complete with kisses, caresses and a roaring purr, and spent most nights (when he wasn’t out hunting) sleeping curled up in the small of my back.
As it turned out, Max’s appearance coincided with the beginning of the end of my marriage. Three years later, along with the other tasks of splitting up a household, I relinquished custody to the “real” cat person.
I miss you, Mad Max the Thundercat.
One of my spirit guides is a wolf who walks with me whenever I’m on a shamanic journey or meditation. Quite a number of times, he has turned into a puppy and jumped into my arms, as if to suggest that I need to take him out of the spirit realm into the material realm with me. This has convinced me that my familiar, a dog, is out there looking for me somewhere. I just need to call him to me or find him.
Alright, I’ve got to show off. I couldn’t read the first paragraph of this post without heading out to my wife’s photography and pulling up some of the pictures of my cat, Seven. (Yes, her name is a number…
)
First, as a kitten:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/paperdollimages/53956155/in/set-1270915/
As she is now (and me, if you’ll ignore the beard):
http://www.flickr.com/photos/paperdollimages/486123744/in/set-1270915/
And, here she is perched on her throne:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/paperdollimages/111431509/
Seven is adorable! And I notice from a caption you have another cat named LOLA! Excellent name…
Well thank you very much, Lola.
Lola’s full name is Lola Trixybell Phoenix the Destroyer (Snow). My wife never adds the ‘Snow’ part, but when she was a kitten, and we were thinking that we would give her away with her brothers, we called her Snow because she was all black.
Yes, we have a sense of humor that is usually lost on ‘normal’ people.
Adorable photos!
And I couldn’t resist, I had to show one of mine…
http://www.klmasina.co.nz/2007/04/02/what-happens-when-you-shower-kittens-or-kids-with-unconditional-love/
Love the name too – Seven! That’s great.
Wonderful article Slade. I was pointed your way due to my recent posting about the illness of my cat Circe.
Thank you for the comfort.
kay
Great article Slade.
I have always felt that the pets (especially my cats) I have had throughout my life have been playing some sort of important role but couldn´t put my finger on what it was!
I do have a question though…I have always bonded really well with most cats, even if they aren´t mine and feel a deep bond with my mother´s kitten and with my own cat Posy. I never met a cat I didn´t like, until this summer, when a cat that lives with its owner in the flat below mine tried to adopt me, but amazingly, (and I adore animals and cats especially) I couldn´t relate to this cat and its presence irritated me hugely. It was big and fat and cried – all the time, except when it was stroked. But it was difficult to stroke it because whenever you touched it, it tried to move away. It used to sit outside my door for hours and cry when its owner was downstairs and would have let it in in any case.
I always felt that animals were a reminder of unconditional love, playfulness and joy. But this animal was the first I ever came across that had nothing to show me of that and worse, annoyed me. What do you think?
(PS – I did feel kind of mean letting it cry outside my door for hours!)
Anna,
I absolutely agree with you about the connection between pets and unconditional love.
I have had similar experiences (and guilt) over the animals I couldn’t connect with. Your story of the neighbor’s needy puss is heart-breaking. But just like with people, neglect can have long-lasting damage — pushing away the very kind of attention that is needed most.
Of course it is not your fault — you can’t go back and give that kitty the home and attention it required at a very early age. No doubt your inability to connect with it was due to its spirit being “broken” in some way.
You can’t save them all, and you can’t love them all — but what you can do is love and cherish the ones who come into your life. You never run out of love to give, but there are limits to your resources.
All we can do is love the ones we can, and hope that everyone else does the same. You make a difference one relationship at a time; every one of them is precious.
Today I am grieving sweet Jake, my 14 year old Boston terrier mix. He tangled with a rattlesnake some time yesterday.
Jake never realized he was a small dog. He was 15 lbs of solid muscle – built like a linebacker – tough, loyal, and protective to the very end. I know it was a rattlesnake that got him because it was still on the premises when I came home and found Jake, horribly sick and in distress. A big, vicious, and damaged rattlesnake. The damage indicating that, as usual, Jake was doing “his job” – what he’d always done – keeping the property free of threats to his family.
It was after hours. The local on-call vet in our more rural county recommended taking him to 24 hr emergency clinic in the next county. I rushed him there, where I was offered cost-prohibitive anti-venom treatment that carried little chance of recovery given Jake’s size, age, and the amount of venom he’d taken. They pressed me for a decision as there was no time to waste. I couldn’t allow his continued suffering, and didn’t feel good about a treatment that would keep him hospitalized, and in pain for several days with little hope.
And so I sat with him; stroked his old gray face, rubbed behind his ears in his favorite scratch spot, told him how much I loved him, that he was the greatest dog ever, and watched him slip away.
I can’t stop crying.
The experiences I have had with those who have passed on have assured me that our connection with our little furry angels continues on long after this life. They wait for us, patient, like a dog or cat waiting for their friends to come home after work. And their love warms us and welcomes us to the other side.
Diana,
Thanks for that. This article was written for a very specific pet… I just had to put another cat to sleep a little less than a month ago and the absence is still so palpable. I have yet to process through to the point where I can write additional material in this vein… BUT I can say that my awareness of their spirits is a powerful source of comfort.
Had to respond. My husband and I married in 1990. He was in sales and traveled a lot so I was alone most of the week. We both love dogs and so we began discussing the prospect and what we might get. I had always wanted a Chinese Shar-Pei so we checked out the paper for breeders (not puppy mills). We ended up getting one and she was beautiful. We named her Ming Su Ling. She was everything we wanted and more. She was very protective of me all during the week while my husband was gone but when he came home, she would turn the protecting over to him. She was very, very smart and had quite a vocabulary and seemed to understand every word we said. She was a very good judge of character too. If she met someone she growled at, we moved away from that person. She was never wrong. She had so many attributes I could never list them all here. We had to have her put down after 18 years, 8 months & 13 days. Shar-Pei’s rarely live that long and she was very sick and very old. She began having seizures and it broke my heart to see her suffer but it was like she refused to give up. I cried for months after her passing but then I began to realize that she is still here with us in spirit. She lets us know she is still here in many ways.
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