Any reason you couldn't enchant an effect into an animal?
Eg: I want put an effect into a horse that lets it walk on water, duration diameter, 2x/day, activated by the rider. (Ignore the fact that horse shoes or sadles may work better/easier)
Can I do this or does it violate essential nature of the horse?
There is a set of rules for enchanting animals as an appendex of the Lost Covenant of Calebas. (There might be something about it in HoH True Lineages as well in the Tremere chapter).
It's not something explicitly covered in the core book. I'd talk with your group and figure something out. By and large I don't see a problem with it (even just the simple answer of making an animal into an enchanted device).
Awakening looks more like it's providing a creature with might, and allowing it to use it's own abilities.
I'm looking more to enchant an animal as you would any device...Wonder what kinda form/shape bonus i could get? all that springs to mind is a rabbit and luck
The awakening mystery allows a magus to cast spells to awaken a faerie spirit within a target. These spells as presented can not be made permanent.
Oh, wait! These are just guidelines. They could be used to stat out a constant effect enchanted device. A Merinita's staff talisman can be an artificial faerie with might and powers of its own!! That's incredibly cool and quite powerful. But it's also pretty subtle Fruny I don’t think that most people will pick up on it on their first read through (I sure didn't).
In any case, the Calebais rules take an animal with magic might and provide it with intelligence. The magus can further enchant effects into the beast which the beast can activate using its magic might. It doesn't involve mystery initiation. It involves a hermetic breakthrough (ala HoH True Lineages). You have to spend a season studying the process to pick it up.
These are different processes, and I don't believe that it is accurate to say that the Calebas rules have been subsumed into the awakening mystery. They are significantly different.
I find this mildly disappointing in that I cannot now unambiguously point to the Appendix of Calebias and say "here's a hermetic breakthrough" because the someone else might point to the awakening rules and say "no, it was a mystery that was written up prior to the publication of the mysteries books so it had to be presented differently".
Now the only honest to goodness breakthrough that we have unambiguously described in the published material is clarification from Covenants which is so frightfully inefficient in terms of vis and time that any magus who uses it should get slapped upside the head with a gift of reason lab text for being an utter fool. Why couldn't casting tablets have been written up as a discovery?
Certainly I can present awakening as both a mystery and a separate breakthrough from the mystery but our published setting suffers somewhat because we have five hundred years of research by the order and nothing to show for it.
(How's that for making a mountain out of a molehill?)