This page groups spirit animals by the wider idea a culture builds around them. Wikipedia notes that "similar concepts, under differing names and with variations in beliefs and practices, may be found in a number of cultures worldwide." Browsing by symbolic-meaning lets a visitor find every spirit animal carrying the same underlying idea across different cultures.
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 a fish 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: Pisces, a class named by Linnaeus in the tenth edition of Systema Naturae (1758). 4 Learn More
Fish as spirit animals
This group holds the fish among the spirit animals: creatures of the water, which in symbolic lore are often linked to the unconscious, to fertility and abundance, and to hidden depths, and which carry sacred meaning in several traditions.
The browser will find the fish spirit animals the atlas gathers. The entries describe each animal's symbolic associations, distinguishing traditional meanings from the modern spirit-animal idea.
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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