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Sacred Correspondences
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Belongs To Tradition

This 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.

Facts
Contested Use
Contested or Appropriated Modern Use
"Spirit animal" is a twentieth-century English coinage of the neoshamanic movement. It is not an Indigenous term and does not translate one, although it is routinely marketed with Indigenous associations. 1
Contested or Appropriated Modern Use
Native scholars and educators object specifically to decontextualised "shamanic" technique and personal animal guides being sold as Native American practice. The objection is to the attribution and the sale, not to the study of animal symbolism. 2
Contested or Appropriated Modern Use
Often conflated with the Ojibwe doodem, the source of English "totem": a doodem is an inherited clan and its defining being, governing descent and marriage within a nation. It is not chosen and it is not a personal guide. 3
Origins
Origin Period
As a named popular category: the later twentieth century. The personal "spirit animal" or "power animal" enters English from Michael Harner's core shamanism (1980) and the animal dictionaries that followed it. The animals themselves are held sacred by particular traditions on their own, far older, terms. 1
Whose Classification This Is
The modern scheme - one animal, one fixed meaning, retrieved by a technique - was assembled by Michael Harner as "core shamanism" (1980) from ethnographies of unrelated peoples, deliberately stripped of the languages, obligations and communities the practices belonged to. 1
Structure
Structure
Real animals grouped by modern zoological class, as a way to browse a large field. The meanings are tradition-specific and frequently conflict - the same animal is sacred in one tradition and ill-omened in another - and traditions sort animals by their own criteria, not by biology. 3
Status
Standing as a Comparative Category
A popular category, not a comparative one. Anthropology treats clan totemism, guardian-spirit acquisition, augury and animal symbolism as separate and non-equivalent things; the single phrase merges them. 2
Learn More
Animals That Carry Meaning

This category holds animals as they appear in symbolic and ritual traditions: the sacred animals attached to particular deities, the beasts of heraldry and the bestiary, clan and totem animals, and the creatures used in augury. Unlike the mythical creatures, these are real animals invested with meaning (the eagle, the serpent, the bear, the raven), though the meaning given them is a cultural matter.

Each entry stays with what a given tradition holds about an animal, since practices around sacred and totem animals vary enormously from culture to culture and a single symbolic reading would misrepresent them.

Against a Single Symbolism

Popular writing often assigns each animal a fixed universal meaning, the owl as wisdom, the wolf as loyalty, but the traditions themselves are far more varied, and the same animal may be sacred in one culture and ill-omened in another. The atlas keeps to what particular traditions say rather than to a modern pan-cultural key, and notes where the term "spirit animal" itself is drawn from specific Indigenous contexts that ought not be generalised.

The entries group the animals by class (mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, invertebrates and the rest), as a simple way to browse a large and varied field.

Belongs To Tradition
Filter Results5 entries

Chinese Folk Religion

Belongs To Tradition
1 entry

Hermeticism

Belongs To Tradition
1 entry

Islam

Belongs To Tradition
2 entries

Jainism

Belongs To Tradition
1 entry

Judaism

Belongs To Tradition
1 entry
Sources
1. 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
2. Shamans and Religion: An Anthropological Exploration in Critical Thinking
Alice Beck Kehoe, Waveland Press, 2000on New Age shamanism and Native objections
3. Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005the article on totemismView the Source
Divinity Atlas Directory Prose, First Edition Category Descriptions
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