Invertebrates gathers animals without backbones that nonetheless carry heavy symbolic weight across traditions, among them the Butterfly and Dragonfly, both associated with transformation, the Octopus, the Scorpion, and the Spider, whose web is read as a creation or fate symbol in more than one culture. The grouping is by zoological class, not by a shared meaning across the traditions that venerate them.
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 Origins
Whose Classification This IsModern zoological classification, loosely applied. "Invertebrate" is not one of Linnaeus's classes - the tenth edition of Systema Naturae (1758) divided these animals into Insecta and Vermes - and the word names what an animal is not. 4 Overview
What Defines This GroupingSpirit-animal entries whose subject is an invertebrate. The grouping 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 Learn More
Invertebrates as Spirit Animals
This group holds the invertebrates among the spirit animals: creatures such as insects, spiders and their kin, which in symbolic lore carry meanings from industry and transformation to weaving, fate and the small powers of the world.
The browser will find the invertebrate spirit animals the atlas gathers. The entries describe each creature's symbolic associations, distinguishing traditional meanings from the modern spirit-animal idea.
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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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