#shadow-work

When it was my turn to share, I mentioned the shadow-work I've done over the past week and touched briefly on my interaction with the coyote. As I spoke about it, I became sure I'd pegged the type of canid wrong. Perhaps the exact type of dog wouldn't matter much to some people, but I've found even small variations in genus can make a large difference when working with animal energies.

I'd toyed with the idea that it could have been a golden jackal after our first meeting and had dismissed it because of how far away these animals live from me. I realize creatures from anywhere in the world can approach us through the astral, yet I've most often worked with animal energies from my own continent, if not the country where I live.

This morning, however, the photograph I took yesterday kept popping into my mind's eye. The lone pagan object ever given to me by my parents was related to Anubis, and my relationship with them continues to feed my anxiety even though I ended it a long time ago. Despite the fact that seeing Anubis sometimes reminds me of them, I've been unable to get rid of all of the Anubis-related items I've collected over the years. I simply knew I would work with him someday, although I didn't know why or how.

When I looked up golden jackals today, I learned that the ancient Egyptians had in part chosen a jackal god because of the tendency of those animals to dig up the shallow graves. By worshiping Anubis, the Egyptians thought "like would fight off like" and would protect their dead. The filthy paws of the creature I'd encountered immediately sprang to mind when I read that, as well as its lean, emaciated body. I knew it had been starving, but it wasn't until my research this morning that I realized it had been hunting in a necropolis for food. Maybe the slime covered figure I saw in a journey yesterday was a corpse I need to tend—something symbolic that I need to grieve.

I believe my need to grieve may be why the jackal is here. Since last November, the daemon Eurynomous has pushed me to complete a rite I call Walking the Seven Gates, a death ritual I enact whenever I am in need of rebirth. To put it mildly, it's always knocked me flat on my ass for about a week afterward—and the ritual itself often takes several weeks to complete. I put Eury off because of this. I felt I had no time with my Goetia immersion work. I wasn't sure when I'd have time, especially with my seminary training coming up, but I knew it wasn't now.

Of course, when the domagick challenge came up, I immediately thought of Walking the Seven Gates. I set the idea aside because I still couldn't figure out how to make it work with my Goetia immersion studies. In the end, I chose the most transformative thing I could come up with instead: lessening my anxiety. If I accomplished that, I figured I'd have a better handle on life, if nothing else.

But the lessons we need to learn have a way of coming up again, no matter how we try to put them off. Maybe Eury didn't want me to involve him in the work he had planned in the first place. I can't say for certain. I think it's more likely that he noticed me constantly ditching him and set another divine intelligence in my path that I couldn't ignore. The jackal worked admirably.

In addition to helping me figure out I need to grieve, Eury may be pointing out that I have to let my typical methodology go too. While Walking the Seven Gates is a solid ritual, I can't fit it into my life right now, so I need to stop trying to shoehorn it in and find another way. Becoming a Daemonolater has taught me there is no one way. So it seems that this death ritual will involve more than one type of rebirth. Magickally, I can't rest on my laurels this time; I have to try something new. Exactly what that is yet… I have no idea.

Today I gave myself a break and simply created an artistic offering to Anubis. I had a doctor's appointment, and my energy felt too "meh" to do much else. Besides, the Five Warrior Syllables workshop starts tomorrow, and it takes place over the course of three days. I wanted a bit of a break before spending that much time with others.