Animal Spirits

The tradition of animal spirits holds that particular creatures embody distinct qualities and serve as guides, guardians, or emblems for individuals and groups, a family of beliefs found, in very different forms, across many cultures. Its most anthropologically studied form is totemism, in which a clan or lineage stands in a special relationship to a particular animal species, treating it as ancestor, kin, and emblem, often with prohibitions against killing or eating it; the concept, drawn from Ojibwe (doodem) and Australian Aboriginal material, became a central topic of early anthropology through Durkheim, Freud, and later Levi-Strauss, who read totemic animals less as objects of worship than as a symbolic language, creatures "good to think with," a system of differences by which a society maps its own divisions. A distinct strand is the idea of a personal animal guardian obtained through vision or dream, prominent in many Native North American traditions (sometimes loosely termed the "spirit animal", a phrase now widely, and often inappropriately, borrowed in popular culture).

In modern Neo-Pagan and New Age practice these ideas have been reworked into the "power animal" or "totem" as a source of personal guidance. The underlying intuition is widespread: that the natures of animals, the cunning of the fox, the vision of the eagle, the endurance of the bear, offer a vocabulary for human character, kinship, and the sacred.

Two English terms cover most of what is written on this subject, and both came from somewhere specific before being applied everywhere.

Totem entered English from Ojibwe, where the underlying word concerns clan membership and descent. Nineteenth-century anthropology took it up as the name for a supposed universal stage of religion, and totemism became a category applied across four continents. It was dismantled in the twentieth century by writers who showed that the practices grouped under it had little in common beyond the observer's expectation, and the word survives mainly as a caution.

Spirit animal is more recent and has no single origin in any tradition. It circulates now as a general term for a personal animal guide, and it is applied backwards onto Native American traditions that use their own vocabulary for quite different relationships: a clan affiliation, a being encountered in a vision quest, and a helping spirit acquired through training are three separate things, and none of them is what the popular phrase means. Members of those nations have objected to the usage, both to the flattening and to its use in casual online speech.

The underlying subject is real and very widely distributed. Traditions across the world hold that particular animals are related to particular people, lineages or specialists, and that the relationship carries obligations.

The atlas names the tradition and its own term wherever it can, and uses the general labels only where a genuine comparison is being made.