Subcategories
Amphibians
3 of 64 entries in Animals & Totems. Click any to see everything it connects to.
Citation Formats
General Reference
APA Style
BibTeX
Amphibians covers the Frog, whose associations with fertility, rain and transformation recur across a wide range of unrelated traditions. The category is a zoological grouping by animal class rather than by shared symbolism, and is expected to grow as more amphibian totems and spirit animals are added.
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 an amphibian 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's tenth edition of Systema Naturae (1758) put frogs together with snakes, lizards and turtles in one class, Amphibia; the modern amphibian class is a later and narrower division. 4 Learn More
Amphibians as Spirit Animals
This small group gathers an amphibian among the spirit animals, a creature such as the frog or toad, which lives between water and land and so is widely read as a symbol of transformation, transition and rebirth.
The browser will find the amphibian the atlas classes here. The entry describes its symbolic associations, distinguishing traditional meanings from the modern spirit-animal idea.
Sources
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.
Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.
View At A Past Year
The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.