This page groups spirit animals by the actual kind of creature they are. Wikipedia notes that "animal worship (also zoolatry or theriolatry) is an umbrella term designating religious or ritual practices involving animals." Browsing by creature-type lets a visitor find every spirit animal of the same kind of creature.
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 bird 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: Aves, a class named by Linnaeus in the tenth edition of Systema Naturae (1758). 4 Learn More
Birds as Spirit Animals
This group holds the birds among the spirit animals, creatures that, by their power of flight and their song, have long served as symbols of the soul, of messages between worlds, and of freedom, vision or omen in the lore of many peoples.
The browser will find the bird spirit animals the atlas gathers. The entries describe each bird's symbolic associations, distinguishing traditional cultural meanings from the modern popular notion of the spirit animal.
Creature type
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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