Dec 20 2008
Animals and Ritual
I find it interesting the different levels that people consider their pets in relation to their family. On a parenting forum that I frequent one of the members was saying that she didn’t want to use the picture that was taken of her family at Thanksgiving as the Christmas portrait because it didn’t have their pets in it, and I’ve tended not to know what to make of people who refer to their pets as their children, and call themselves “Mum” and “Dad” to the animals. We had some friends who would refer to my husband and I as their pets Aunt and Uncle and we asked them not to do that any more because it just felt strange. Perhaps because we weren’t as close to them as that, and to me it just felt odd.
I suppose it depends on your kinship with the people and their animals, really. I consider Nimue to be a companion, a familiar but yet I do not call her my daughter, and do not refer to myself as her Mom. Maybe if I didn’t have a child it would be different, I did call Tori, the cat I had two before Nimue my kitty-baby some times, and when I had Anakin I would occasionally buy him presents and wrap them under the tree around this time of year. I would send other friends dog supplies and cat treats for their various menageries also. For Nimue and the other felines in our house I have bought some wet cat food as a special treat, and some cat treats as a thank you for their guardian ship of their home, but I don’t know that I’ll do much else with it this year.
The animals have acted in a few rituals that we’ve done, and often times they’re very interested to sit on the tarot cloths or altar cloths while we’ll read tarot. The energy is very attractive for them. I know when I was living at home with my parents still I couldn’t lay out the altar in my room because Anakin would lie in the middle of it and knock everything over. As with anything learning how to successfully incorporate animals with your spell workings takes practice, patience, and compromise. I don’t look for rituals that have specific parts for our animals, but I will leave certain portions open if they’re actually active in the area while they’re going on. I don’t believe in forcing the issue, just as I’m not going to force my son to participate in anything if he doesn’t want to. It’s entirely up to him if he wants to work with the rituals. So far his participation has only been in the blowing out candles capacity.
