Home›Amphibians›Belongs To TraditionBrowse ByBelongs To TraditionThis page groups spirit animals by the group of people they stand for. Wikipedia notes that "a totem ... is a spirit being, sacred object, or symbol that serves as an emblem of a group of people, such as a family, clan, lineage, or tribe, such as in the Anishinaabe clan system." Browsing by belongs-to-tradition lets a visitor find every spirit animal standing for the same kind of group.FactsLearn MoreBelongs To TraditionSourcesComments (0)Reader Challenges (0)FactsContested UseContested or Appropriated Modern UseWell-attested"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. 3OverviewWhat Defines This GroupingWell-attestedSpirit-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. 2DirectoryCategoryWell-attestedAnimals & Totems 1OriginsWhose Classification This IsWell-attestedModern 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. 4Learn MoreAmphibians 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.Belongs To TraditionFilter Results2 entriesBasis of the Membership FigureAllIndependent Survey (1)Era of Decline End YearAll600 (1)1976 (1)Era of Decline Start YearAll300 (1)1966 (1)Era of Modern Revival End YearAll1471 (1)Era of Modern Revival Start YearAll1463 (1)How the Expectation Is EnforcedAllCustomary Norm (1)Membership Figure As OfAll2016-01-01 (1)2018-01-01 (1)Origin Period End YearAll1046 BCE (1)300 (1)Origin Period Start YearAll1600 BCE (1)1 (1)Place of OriginAllChina (1)Roman Egypt, chiefly Alexandria (1)Practice StatusAllLiving, and practised in varied local forms (2)Status TodayAllHistorical; not practised continuously (1)Living tradition, practised today (1)Revived or reconstructed in the modern era (1)TheologyAllAncestor-centred (1)Animist: persons and powers in land, water and living things (1)Emanationist: reality proceeds from an ineffable One (1)Monistic: one ultimate reality behind all appearance (1)Polytheistic: many gods (1)Show ResultsBrowseCompareChinese Folk ReligionBelongs To Tradition1 entryHermeticismBelongs To Tradition1 entrySources1. Divinity Atlas Directory Taxonomy, First Edition Category Treetier 12. Encyclopedia of Religiontier 1Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005the article on animals in religionView the Source3. The Beauty of the Primitive: Shamanism and the Western Imaginationtier 1Andrei A. Znamenski, Oxford University Press, 2007on Michael Harner and the making of core shamanismView the Source4. Systema Naturae, 10th editiontier 1Carl Linnaeus, Laurentius Salvius, 1758the tenth edition, 1758Divinity Atlas Directory Prose, First Edition Category Descriptionstier 1Comments (0)No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.Sign in to join the discussion.Reader Challenges (0)No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.