Animals & Totems
Frog
Amphibians
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Origin 1980 to 2000
Frogs are amphibians that pass from aquatic gilled tadpole to air-breathing adult, and they breathe partly through a permeable skin, which makes them acutely sensitive to water quality. Their symbolism is nearly always fertility, rain and transformation. Egyptian religion gives Heqet, a frog-headed goddess of childbirth associated with the Nile flood and attested from the Old Kingdom, and frog amulets are common. The second plague of Exodus 8 is frogs. In Mesoamerican and Andean traditions frogs call the rains, and frog imagery is widespread on ritual vessels. The frog who becomes a prince is a Grimm tale of 1812, and in that version he is thrown against a wall rather than kissed.
Facts
Disputed
Contested or Appropriated Modern UseThe words spirit animal and totem are used in popular Western practice for a personal animal ally. Native scholars and communities object to both usages, on the ground that they take the vocabulary and the authority of particular Indigenous traditions and apply them to a generic and commercial practice. 4 Suzanne Owen's The Appropriation of Native American Spirituality (Continuum, 2008) documents the objection Indigenous communities in North America raise, ongoing and in the present tense, against the commercial "spirit animal" genre. Owen's study examines how the practice borrows specific Indigenous terms and claimed lineages, presenting them as licensing a service sold to outside customers, and sets that use against the communities' own accounts of what those terms and practices mean within their traditions. What is disputed, on Owen's reading, is not that people generally feel a kinship with animals, a widely attested feeling that belongs to no one tradition, but the specific commercial borrowing of Indigenous vocabulary and claimed authority. The atlas records the animal, records that the modern commercial practice exists, and records that this documented objection is made, without adjudicating between the parties. Correspondences
Element Correspondence Attributions
Mythic AssociationEgyptian religion gives Heqet, a frog-headed goddess of childbirth and fertility associated with the annual Nile flood, attested from the Old Kingdom onward. 2 Identity
Creature Type Origins
Origin Period1980 to 2000 1Tradition: Modern Western esotericism Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceExodus 8:1 to 8:6 records the second of the plagues visited on Egypt as an overwhelming multiplication of frogs across the land. 3 Learn More
Heqet, and the Plague of Frogs
The frog, which appears in teeming multitudes with the rising of the waters and transforms from a limbless tadpole into a four-legged adult, was across the ancient world an emblem of fertility, birth and renewal. In Egypt it was embodied in Heqet, the frog-headed goddess of childbirth and midwifery, who gave the breath of life to the newborn, and the frog hieroglyph could stand for a great number, for teeming abundance. The Book of Exodus turns the same fertility against Egypt in the second plague, when frogs swarm out of the Nile to fill the land, houses and beds, the fertile creature become a torment.
The frog's ancient status as an emblem of abundant, teeming life has been undercut by a real and severe modern crisis: since the late twentieth century a fungal pathogen, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, chytrid fungus, has spread across the world's amphibian populations, driving numerous frog species to extinction or near-extinction and prompting quarantine, captive-breeding and biosecurity regulations in many countries; herpetologists now count the chytrid pandemic among the worst wildlife disease events ever documented, a stark modern counterpoint to the frog's old symbolism of fertility and plenty.
The Toad in the Moon, and the Bringer of Rain
In China the toad or frog is a lunar creature: a three-legged toad is said to live in the moon, and the money-toad of the immortal Liu Hai became a popular emblem of wealth and good fortune. Because frogs call before rain and swarm with the coming of water, they were widely associated with rain-making and with the fertility the rains bring, and frog-charms and frog-rituals for rain are found across many cultures. The frog's transformation from water-dwelling tadpole to land-going adult gave it, almost everywhere, a further meaning of rebirth and metamorphosis. Fertility, birth, rain, wealth and transformation gather to the small amphibian of the water's edge.
European folk tradition gives the frog its own transformation story of a different kind: the Grimm brothers' The Frog King, published in their 1812 collection and placed first in it, tells of a princess whose golden ball is retrieved by a frog on the promise of companionship, a promise she resents and finally breaks by throwing the frog against a wall, at which point he becomes a prince; the tale is the ancestor of the now-familiar frog-into-prince motif, though the transformation in the earliest recorded version is closer to a violent release than to the kiss modern retellings prefer.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Attested in Region
Egypt, Regions Heqet, the frog goddess of birth, and the frog hieroglyph that writes a hundred thousand.
The frog as the voice that calls the rain and as the companion of the storm gods.
Disciplines That Use This
One of the animal spirits gathered under this discipline. Where a tradition restricts this material, the restriction is recorded on the tradition itself rather than repeated for each animal.
Related To
Sources
1. Shamans and Religion: An Anthropological Exploration in Critical Thinking
Alice Beck Kehoe, Waveland Press, 2000ch. on core shamanism and its commercial forms
2. Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005s.v. Heqet; the frog as fertility and birthView the Source 3. The Holy Bible
Anonymous (multiple authors), Robert Barker, 1611Exodus 8:1-6, the plague of frogsView the Source 4. The Appropriation of Native American Spirituality
Suzanne Owen, Continuum, 2008ch. on the marketing of Native spirituality
A Dictionary of Chinese Symbols: Hidden Symbols in Chinese Life and Thought
Wolfram Eberhard, Routledge, 1986s.v. toad; the lunar and money toadView the Source Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
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