This page groups spirit animals by the culture whose records pair them with a deity. Wikipedia notes that "the Egyptian pantheon was especially fond of zoomorphism, with many animals sacred to particular deities -- cats to Bastet, ibises and baboons to Thoth, crocodiles to Sobek and Ra." Browsing by attested-in-region lets a visitor find every spirit animal recorded by the same culture.
Facts
Contested Use
Contested or Appropriated Modern Use"Spirit animal" is a twentieth-century English coinage of the neoshamanic movement, from Michael Harner's core shamanism (1980) and the popular animal dictionaries that followed. It is not an Indigenous term, though it is routinely marketed with Indigenous associations; the meanings recorded here belong to the named traditions. 3 Overview
What Defines This GroupingSpirit-animal entries whose subject is an amphibian in modern zoological classification. The class is a browsing frame only: traditions sort animals by their own criteria - edible and inedible, clean and unclean, wild and domestic, kin and stranger - and not by biological class. 2 Origins
Whose Classification This IsModern zoological classification. Linnaeus's tenth edition of Systema Naturae (1758) put frogs together with snakes, lizards and turtles in one class, Amphibia; the modern amphibian class is a later and narrower division. 4 Learn More
Amphibians as Spirit Animals
This small group gathers an amphibian among the spirit animals, a creature such as the frog or toad, which lives between water and land and so is widely read as a symbol of transformation, transition and rebirth.
The browser will find the amphibian the atlas classes here. The entry describes its symbolic associations, distinguishing traditional meanings from the modern spirit-animal idea.
Attested In Region
Filter Results4 entries
Sources
1. Divinity Atlas Directory Taxonomy, First Edition Category Tree
2. Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005the article on animals in religionView the Source 3. The Beauty of the Primitive: Shamanism and the Western Imagination
Andrei A. Znamenski, Oxford University Press, 2007on Michael Harner and the making of core shamanismView the Source 4. Systema Naturae, 10th edition
Carl Linnaeus, Laurentius Salvius, 1758the tenth edition, 1758
Divinity Atlas Directory Prose, First Edition Category Descriptions
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