Animals & Totems
Tiger
Mammals
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Origin 1980 to 2000
Tigers are the largest living cats: solitary, individually striped, and now reduced to a fraction of a range that once ran from Anatolia to the Russian Far East. Chinese tradition gives the white tiger, Baihu, as guardian of the west and one of the four symbols of the sky, paired with the azure dragon of the east; the pairing of tiger and dragon as complementary forces is old and pervasive in Chinese art and later in martial practice. The tiger is the third animal of the Chinese zodiac. In India Durga rides a tiger or lion, and Shiva is shown seated on a tiger skin. Korean tradition treats the tiger as mountain spirit and guardian, and it appears in the founding narrative of Dangun.
Facts
Disputed
Contested or Appropriated Modern UseThe words spirit animal and totem are used in popular Western practice for a personal animal ally. Native scholars and communities object to both usages, on the ground that they take the vocabulary and the authority of particular Indigenous traditions and apply them to a generic and commercial practice. 5 Suzanne Owen's The Appropriation of Native American Spirituality (Continuum, 2008) documents the objection Indigenous communities in North America raise, ongoing and in the present tense, against the commercial "spirit animal" genre. Owen's study examines how the practice borrows specific Indigenous terms and claimed lineages, presenting them as licensing a service sold to outside customers, and sets that use against the communities' own accounts of what those terms and practices mean within their traditions. What is disputed, on Owen's reading, is not that people generally feel a kinship with animals, a widely attested feeling that belongs to no one tradition, but the specific commercial borrowing of Indigenous vocabulary and claimed authority. The atlas records the animal, records that the modern commercial practice exists, and records that this documented objection is made, without adjudicating between the parties. Identity
Creature Type Correspondences
Element Correspondence Meaning
Symbolic MeaningChinese tradition gives the white tiger, Baihu, as guardian of the west and one of the four symbols of the sky, paired with the azure dragon of the east in an old and pervasive complementary imagery. 3 Origins
Origin Period1980 to 2000 1Tradition: Modern Western esotericism Attributions
Mythic AssociationIn Hindu tradition the goddess Durga is shown riding a tiger or lion into battle, and Shiva is depicted seated on a tiger skin. 2 Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceThe White Tiger of the West is one of the Four Symbols of Chinese constellations, paired with autumn and the element metal and set against the Azure Dragon of the East. 4 Learn More
Guardian of the West, and the Tiger-Dragon Pair
Chinese tradition gives the White Tiger, Baihu, as guardian of the west and one of the four celestial emblems that divide the sky, set opposite the Azure Dragon of the east. The pairing of tiger and dragon as complementary powers, earth and sky, yin and yang, matter and spirit, is old and pervasive in Chinese art, geomancy and later martial practice. Korean tradition treats the tiger as mountain spirit and guardian and gives it a place in the founding narrative of Dangun. In India the tiger is the mount of Durga in her warrior aspect, and Shiva is shown seated on a tiger skin, the animal's ferocity absorbed and mastered by the ascetic.
The tiger's real situation today is precarious in a way its old reputation as guardian and mount could not have anticipated: wild tiger numbers fell from an estimated hundred thousand around 1900 to roughly three to four thousand individuals in the wild today, three of the historic nine subspecies already extinct, and the species is listed under Appendix I of CITES, the strictest level of international trade protection; a coordinated international effort known as Tx2 set a goal of doubling wild tiger numbers by 2022, the next Year of the Tiger after the goal was set, with real but uneven success across the range states.
Third of the Twelve, the Sign of Courage
The tiger is the third animal of the Chinese zodiac. As a birth-sign it is read for courage, authority, competitiveness and a certain restless independence, the qualities of a predator that hunts alone. Beyond the calendar the tiger is one of the great apotropaic figures of East Asian folk practice: its image guards doorways and children's clothing against evil, and paintings of tigers were hung to drive off malign influence, a protective role that draws directly on the real animal's standing as the apex predator of the region. The sign is associated with the pre-dawn hours and, in the five-element scheme, most strongly with wood.
White tigers, familiar from zoos and circuses, are not a distinct subspecies or albinos but ordinary Bengal tigers carrying a rare recessive gene for reduced pigmentation; essentially every white tiger alive today descends from a single wild-caught cub named Mohan, captured in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh in 1951 and then deliberately inbred to fix the trait, a breeding history that modern zoo and conservation organisations now generally discourage because of the health problems it has concentrated in the line. The subspecies most bound up with Chinese tradition has fared worst: the South China tiger has had no confirmed sighting in the wild since the 1990s and is considered functionally extinct there, so the tiger the zodiac and its apotropaic imagery draw on survives today mainly through the Siberian and Bengal populations of other regions.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Named as the emblem animal of the lunar mansion Wei (Tail) in the twenty-eight xiu list.
Attested in Region
China, Regions The white tiger of the west, and the tiger as the yang animal set against the dragon.
Durga's mount, and the tiger skin Shiva sits on.
Korea, Regions The tiger of the foundation myth and of folk painting, comic and dangerous together.
The Amur tiger addressed as an ancestor by the Nanai and Udege.
Disciplines That Use This
One of the animal spirits gathered under this discipline. Where a tradition restricts this material, the restriction is recorded on the tradition itself rather than repeated for each animal.
Sources
1. Shamans and Religion: An Anthropological Exploration in Critical Thinking
Alice Beck Kehoe, Waveland Press, 2000ch. on core shamanism and its commercial forms
2. Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization
Heinrich Zimmer, Princeton University Press, 1972on Durga's tiger and Shiva's tiger-skinView the Source 3. A Dictionary of Chinese Symbols: Hidden Symbols in Chinese Life and Thought
Wolfram Eberhard, Routledge, 1986s.v. tiger; Baihu; the tiger-dragon pairView the Source 4. Chinese Mythology: An Introduction
5. The Appropriation of Native American Spirituality
Suzanne Owen, Continuum, 2008ch. on the marketing of Native spirituality
Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005View the Source A Chinese Bestiary: Strange Creatures from the Guideways through Mountains and Seas
Richard E. Strassberg, University of California Press, 2002
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