Judika Illes - The Element Encyclopedia of Witchcraft - The Complete A–Z for the Entire Magical World

There are various definitions of nahual.

The nahual is a person who can transform, a shape-shifting witch or sorcerer. These practices were a major concern for Colonial priests in Mexico. In 1600, Fray Juan Bautista warned of native sorcerers who transformed into chickens, dogs, jaguars, owls, and weasels. The seventeenth-century priest Ruiz de Alarcón mentions specific cases and explains the power as deriving from Satanic compact. (The Spanish Inquisition was in full swing in the Western Hemisphere.) However, the concept is of indigenous origin. Satan didn’t exist in the Western Hemisphere before priests brought him.

The Aztec deity Tezcatlipoca, the divine sorcerer, was believed able to transform into a jaguar. Nahuals tend to possess specific forms; in other words not every nahual transforms into the same shapes. Not limited to animals, some nahuals may also be able to transform into natural forces, like lightning or (especially) whirlwinds. Some nahuals (this human kind) can also allegedly become invisible and thus transport themselves secretly from place to place.

Nahuals were feared and respected for their power. Although the stereotype, as filtered through the Inquisition, identifies them as malevolent independent practitioner sorcerers, they also served as protectors of their communities. During the Colonial Era, nahuals lead native resistance, which may explain some of the colonizers’ hostility toward them.

Secondly, the nahual may be the animal part of this dyad. Every human being has a nahual. You have a nahual but if you don’t know its form, then you’re only half a person, not operating at your full capacity. Under the Aztec Empire, a priest presided over a ritual on the fourth day following birth to determine a baby’s nahual and bind the relationship. This nahual serves as the person’s guide and protector, offering various psychic gifts and magical or physical powers. Each type of animal is capable of offering different gifts. Every Aztec deity had a nahual. If you share a nahual form with a deity, you share a bond with that deity, too.

If you didn’t receive your nahual as a child, it’s never too late. Another Aztec method is a do-it-yourself ritual:

1 Go into the woods alone and go to sleep.

2 Your nahual will either appear in your dreams or you will be confronted by your nahual when you awake.

3 Once the nahual is identified, you are obliged to enter into a life-long contract with it.

Furthermore, in Toltec and Mixtec traditions, the nahual is an individual’s totem or fateguardian, or perhaps the personification of one’s deepest psyche. Nahual also names the reciprocal relationship between a person and their animal double.

In Oaxaca, the traditional concept is related but subtly different. Naguals, as the word is most frequently spelled there, are a form of animal ally. Every one has one; their identity is disclosed via ritual. At its most superficial level, the nagual serves as a magical assistant, it can help you accomplish your life’s goals if you know how to work with it. However, the nagual may also be understood as a person’s other half; they mirror each other or share a soul, or perhaps the animal is the person’s second soul. Lives of human and animal are bound up together. They’re not identical, not interchangeable, one is not merely the transformed shape of the other but should one die, the other one will too.

No need for a priest here: parents usually determine a nagual’s identity shortly after a child’s birth. Identification of the nagual reveals crucial information about the child’s nature and required upbringing, not to mention taboos, which are very easy to break if you don’t know about them. There are various slightly different methods of determining a nagual. Here’s one:

1 Sprinkle ashes outside the place where a baby was born.

2 The first animal footprint captured by the ashes identifies the nagual and sometimes the baby’s name.

“ Strega ,” “ strix ,” “ estrie ”: these terms are synonyms for “witch,” although literally what they mean is “owl.” Owls were witches’ familiars from ancient Egypt, Rome, and Asia to modern Africa and Native America, with many stops in between. They represent divine yin: night, darkness, magic, and sacred lunar and feminine mysteries.

Owls are associated with wisdom, both conventional and secret, witchcraft, magic, sex, death, and birth. In the Eastern Hemisphere, owls were understood as emblematic of the uterus and as embodying the Great Mother’s power over life and death. Owls are sponsors of shamanism. They bestow gifts of clairvoyance and teach the arts of astral projection. They serve as guides to the realms of the spirits and the dead because, of course, owls can navigate the darkness.

There are approximately 135 living species in the order Strigiformes , varying in size from the six-inch elf owl to the three-foot long Great Gray Owl. Owls have a very distinctive shape. Only their silhouette may be required for identification. Compared to other birds, owls are fairly odd looking, resembling cats with wings. (If seated silently on a tree branch, it may be hard to immediately distinguish an owl from a cat, especially from a distance and in the dark.)

Their eyes are circular, evoking the full moon’s shape and glow. Some owls are even horned, or at least they appear to be.

Owls announce the night like crows herald the day. No bird or animal is more associated with night than owls.

Owls made a very early impression on people: in Les Trois Frères cave in France, home of the “ Dancing Sorcerer, ” an unmistakable outline of a pair of snowy owls together with their chicks is chipped from the rock face. Paleolithic “Eye-Goddesses” may represent stylized owls.

“ Striges ” was the Roman name for witch, typically understood malevolently. Owls were perceived as harbingers of doom, trouble, and death—in short bad news; however the Romans also had tremendous issues with women’s power. By the classical period, women were essentially property belonging to men: their husbands, fathers or brothers. Those women who rebelled, for instance those who joined the Bacchanalia, were punished. It was not a culture innately sympathetic to women’s sexual autonomy or to their sacred arts.

Strix came to be understood as a specific kind of witch: grotesque, sexually voracious, baby killing, female cannibals—all the negative stereotypes that still exist. This isn’t an integral part of the word’s meaning, however. Strix and its linguistic derivatives may also be understood to denote witchcraft’s positive attributes: knowledge of Earth’s powers, the ability to journey between realms, and acquisition of great wisdom, especially of crucial, secret topics.

Various sacred female spirits are profoundly identified with owls:

Owls are sacred to Athena. The small screech owl is her emblem and Homer describes Athena as “owlfaced.” It was popularly believed that Athena appeared on the battlefield as an owl during a Greek battle with the Persians.

Owls are identified with the Semitic wind spirit Lilith, whose name is cognate with “screech owl.” (There are those who deny that she appears in the Old Testament because the only clear reference to her may also be understood to literally mean “screech owl.”) Unlike most other formerly prominent Middle Eastern deities, Lilith, identified as Earth’s real first woman, survived to star in worldwide Jewish folklore, where she serves as the prototype of the witch.