Spirit Animals in the focus of my art

Part 1 - Motivated for Power-Animals 

When I got to hear about the shamanic Power-Animals, I approached the topic with my background in the humanities about natural-religious cultures that I had acquired in my studies of pre- and early history and ethnology.

Animals had been the source of food in the ancient natural-religious tribal cultures all over the world and they had been valuable down to the last bone in order to produce things of daily life. Clothes, blankets, water tanks, arrowheads, fats and so on. Everyday life, survival and danger were uniformly connected with the animal world of the respective habitat. To pay religious attention and thanks to animals, to fraternise with the spirit of animals, to celebrate this source of food, also to conjure and to strengthen this vital relationship through rituals and to avert dangers can be seen in addition to what connects humans and animals in the depth of evolution anyway.

Inspiration, 1990 Pigment acrylic, chalk a. canvas 

During embryonic growth we pass through certain animal stages. In our instincts, physical qualities, within abilities and characteristics, the relationship of man with the animal kingdom appears to be inscribed in the gene code.  Looking back over the past centuries of Europe, it was of particular value to set oneself as far as possible apart from the animal brothers and sisters and to deny this relationship and to use the characteristics of animals as a metaphor primarily for evil in humans. In the European Middle Ages the souls of women and animals were equally denied and animals have retained the object character before our law until today.

A special part in the fact that Power-Animals could spread as a modern idea in the western world was given by some descendants of the North American Indians, even before Michael Harner pioneered the Power-Animal and his Core Shamanism in the 1980s. I came into contact with this modern idea of Power-Animals in 1996 in Berlin through by a German shamanic woman. Through her I got to know the ideas of a shamanic worldview. My own spiritual orientation had been Christian and Buddhist until then, with an inner world of images that bore witness to shamanic elements. So I had been open to learning and at the same time I resisted essential contents and techniques. She invited spirits and other powers as helpers of healing work, which I could not perceive myself. She admitted that she was not sure of her own Power-Animal and was therefore in the realm of conjecture. 

The fact that I could not perceive the Power-Animals did not necessarily lead me to conclude that these spirits did not exist or that the healing work would remain without effect. At that time it seemed to me to make sense to open up the shamanic space of experience myself in order to be able to understand and judge what modern shamanism offered.

Thanks for reading. 

Continued with 

Part 2 - Power Animal Mysticism - My Research and Criticism