Reptiles gathers the scaled animals, the Lizard, the Snake and the Turtle among them, each carrying its own distinct symbolism across the traditions that venerate them, from renewal and healing to the shape of the created world resting on a turtle's back. The grouping is zoological, by animal class, not a claim of shared meaning.
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 reptile 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. Linnaeus had no class Reptilia: in the tenth edition of Systema Naturae (1758) snakes, lizards and turtles sat in the class Amphibia alongside frogs, and the separate reptile class is later than that. 4 Learn More
Reptiles as Spirit Animals
This group gathers the reptiles among the spirit animals: snakes, lizards and their kin, which in the symbolic lore of many traditions carry associations with renewal (through the shedding of skin), primal power, earth and the underworld.
The browser will find the reptile spirit animals the atlas gathers. The entries describe each animal's symbolic associations, distinguishing traditional meanings from the modern spirit-animal idea.
All Reptiles
Filter Results5 entries
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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