Subcategories
Birds
12 of 64 entries in Animals & Totems. Click any to see everything it connects to.
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Birds groups the animals valued as spirit guides and totems across a wide range of traditions, among them the Eagle, the Hawk, the Hummingbird, the Owl, the Peacock, the Raven, the Rooster and the Swan. The grouping is zoological, by class of animal, and does not imply that these birds carry the same meaning in the traditions that venerate them; an owl can be a symbol of wisdom in one tradition and an omen of death in another.
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.
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