Anyone who’s loved and lived with a creature of another species – or two or three or many more—knows how different their realities are from our own. And yet, they share our space and time and are close as family, often more so. They pay attention to our ways of being. If we make an effort, we may come to know their realities, too.
It’s safe to say that relationships between humans and other animals are intrinsic to witchcraft. How and why that is so is the subject of A Witch’s Ally, a beautifully rendered book about ways of knowing –and being known by—non-human animals.
Author Dodie Graham McKay lives in Manitoba, Canada. She’s a green witch, a Gardnerian priestess, and a filmmaker. She authored an earlier book, Earth Magic, and she’s a contributor to Taurus Witch, one of the twelve volumes Ivo Dominguez, Jr.’s Witch’s Sun sign series.
A Witch’s Ally is concise and packed with information and food for thought organized in three parts. In Part 1 McKay covers the history of witches’ magical relationships with the animal kingdom. This part includes material on the connections between animals and the Gods and Goddesses of various pantheons plus brief write-ups of how dozens of different animals have been treated in Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Welsh, Roman, Celtic, and Slavic spirituality. Part Two is about modern witchcraft and practices with non-human animals and the natural world generally, including unseen elements of nature and hidden realms. Part Three is a practicum for doing and making things to enhance one’s magical practice with animals and “to nurture and care for the creatures of the world.” The book begins with a tribute to McKay’s Oban the Wonderdog (2001-2017) whose life remains a guiding presence for her. The book ends with a chapter on how to say goodbye: how to grieve the loss of a companion animal while also gratefully celebrating their short lives.
A Witch’s Ally includes a lot of well-defined terminology. For starters, McKay distinguishes between pets, animal companions and animal familiars. “Pets and animal companions are the physical animals in our lives, and it is how we interact with them—and their magical aptitude—that makes them different.” A pet is a physically, living non-human animal who shares our home and part of our daily life. A pet is also an animal companion if “we share a type of uncanny psychic bond and the ability to communicate beyond usual animal-human relationships.” An animal companion will “have a sense for magical work and actively seek out opportunities to share in our workings in a mutually beneficial way.”
Animal familiars are something else. They are, “nonphysical animals that act as guides, informants, and protectors for us.” An animal familiar may appear in dreams, journeys, meditations or through channeled messages or divination.
McKay explicitly excludes from her typology the notion of a “spirit animal” because, though the term is a common one, “and it may sound innocent enough…the way this term has been used by modern, mostly white, practitioners of New Age and Pagan spiritualities has conflated it with the spiritual and religious practices of North American Indigenous peoples. This trivializes and generalizes the actual beliefs and practices of Indigenous peoples and the variety of belief systems practices by still-living cultures.” I am so glad McKay writes this. She notes that the use of the term “spirit animal” is often accompanied by caricatures of Indigenous people in “degrading, dehumanizing, and insulting situations.” Who needs it?
Instead, McKay delves into the many culture-respecting terms and concepts for animals who present themselves in spirit form. These include the medieval term “charge;” the concept of the “daemon” in Greek myth; the witch’s familiar; the “fetch; the Norse term “fylgia,” for an animal companion; the “genius loci” of Roman times; the mascot, totem, and tutelary. McKay wants people to stop using the term “familiar” for a critter who’s really just a witch’s pet.
Words matter, and the term I find most useful in A Witch’s Way is one that was introduced in 1909 by a German biologist named Jakob Johann von Uexkull. Umwelt, translated from German as “environment,” describes an animal’s perceptual world. While all creatures share the same world on Earth, “each species has a different perspective of its reality, or umwelt, based on how it evolved to sense and experience it.” A canine umwelt, for example, includes smell as the primary sense for understanding the environment. Dogs need to sniff to stay happy and mentally stimulated.
What’s key about the concept of umwelt is, as McKay writes, that “most creatures look at the world via the perspective of their own umwelten and leave it at that, humans included. What makes us different is that we humans also possess the capacity and opportunity to become aware of and respect the umwelten of other species.” McKay writes that “knowing that the creatures around me can see, hear, smell, or feel things that are beyond my own capacity fills me with a sense of wonder and magic, reminding me of why I have devoted my life to witchcraft in the first place.” Simply put, one widens one’s world by appreciating the umwelten of other types of beings.
McKay includes a journey to discover the umwelt of another animal plus a host of other practices involving animal communication, divination, attracting and fostering a relationship with an animal familiar.
Why do these things? Why work with animals, in the mundane and spirit realms? McKay offers her “why’s” in the book’s conclusion. “When we practice witchcraft,” she writes, we crave contact and communion with the hidden realms, to travel beyond the limits of our physical bodies and have experiences that empower us to create effective change to our mundane reality… to do extraordinary things, we need extraordinary allies. The non-human beings that exist beside us could be those allies, but in order to create those relationships, we must not overlook them.”
By incorporating non-human animals into one’s witchcraft, she concludes, we “affirm our connection to the natural world because we want to remember that there is magic—and we are a part of it.”
~reviewed by Sara R. Diamond
Author: Dodie Graham McKay
Llewellyn Publications, 2024
208 pp., $18.99
