There are really two approaches you can take here. You can pick up a deck of medicine cards or Druid Cards or Celtic animal cards and simply allow the luck of the draw to reveal your animals to you. I tried that once (picking the nine cards that the medicine deck suggests) and while I certainly got some interesting information I didn’t produce any real results. The primary problem is that the animal you have a bond with may not be one of the cards in any deck.

A second way is to journey to meet your power animal. According to Michael Harner in his book the Way of the Shaman. If you journey to either the lower or the upper world and ask to meet you companion you will know that you have the right one when you see the same image three times. I’ve tried this and I will attest that it works in the sense that you certainly will meet a companion but .. (why is there always a but?) it never produced for me an animal that really was an ongoing part of  my work (Fetch is a ring tailed marsupial who keeps promising to bring me things but has never delivered).

What did work for me was actually very simple.  After trying what I would call the intellectual approach I looked around at the statues I had been collecting and realized that the majority of animals portrayed where either in the owl family or the cat family. I then went out and got a beautiful book on owls and after looking at all the pictures and reading about them I decided to do an exercise in shape-changing.

Over the years I’ve done most of my journeying lying down on the bed – the floor is probably better since there’s less probability of falling asleep but my bedroom, more often than not, is limited in floor space. On this particular occasion it was probably about 3:00 in the afternoon and I had just finished rereading my owl book. I lay down and closed my eyes and found myself in a tower room. There were large windows in the room that had been thrown open to allow for easy access to the sky. I knew my intention was to turn into an owl – I just didn’t know what kind. I spent a few minute is a mental debate with myself about whether or not it’s possible to compress my actual body weight into the form of an owl and realized it wasn’t. (isn’t there something about mass as a steady state?) Once I realized I couldn’t simply turn into an owl physically even on the other plain I lay down on the chaise lounge that just happened to be in the tower room and went into a trance. I knew that turning into an owl would require me to take about 5 or 6 pound of myself, reform it as an owl and then place my consciousness into that form. The first thing I was aware of were my wings. I noticed how large and powerful they where in relationship to the rest of my body. As I soared out the window for my first test flight I asked I asked Archmedies (Merlin’s companion Owl – who was supervising my transformation) what kind of owl I had become, and he infromed me that I was a snowy owl.

I really hadn't had any type of preconceived notion on what type of owl I would turn into.  Two of the most powerful archetypes in my life supposedly had owls as totems.   Athena is always portrayed with an owl and in fact an entire species is named after here and Merlin supposedly had Archimedies (an attribution that is probably more thanks to Walt Disney then ancient mythology). Real live owls were also playing a dominate role in my life at the time with a family of great horned owls nesting in my office building. It certainly seemed reasonable to me that any of these owls could have ended up being my totem. The reason I bring this up is my recurring message that based on my experience very little of our relationship with the "other" world can be determined intellectually. All these relationships exist at the soul level and it is our job to recognize them and not to decide on what they should be.

Once I realized that I "belonged" to the snowy owls it was only a short period of time later that Argetnel came to visit me in my tower. Argetnel means silver cloud in Gaelic and no she did not arrive on my proverbial doorstep and tell me her name. What I did know was that she had a name and that I was suppose to figure it out. I have a note in my journal that says I quickly narrowed it done to Argetnel (Gaelic- white silver) and Nephale which is Greek. By the way Athena’s owl introduced herself to me as Rhamsia -(Greek –little sword). I fiddled around with the numerology of both names but found myself knowing that her name was Argetnel.

While my journal isn’t dated I remember this as happening sometime in the Spring and Sinechta came to me shortly thereafter.

I did much the same ritual to meet Sineachta as I did Nel. I had been lead on a guided mediation of turning into a large cat (a puma or mountain lion) a few month previous to this and I had been amazed at the time how real my "cat" body actually felt. This probably isn’t very hard to understand given that I’ve lived with feline-domesticus most of my life. When I decided to journey to meet my other companion the process of shape-changing into a snow leopard was almost instantaneous. I have to admit I was surprised that both my companions where "snowy" animals. I was living in the southwest when I first began journeying so maybe it was just that I was tired of the heat but later through my journeys and my dreams an entire mythology was revealed to me.