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Animals & Totems
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Origin As a named popular category: the later twentieth century. The personal "spirit animal" or "power animal" enters English from Michael Harner's core shamanism (1980) and the animal dictionaries that followed it. The animals themselves are held sacred by particular traditions on their own, far older, terms.
Animals as they appear in symbolic and ritual traditions: the sacred animals of particular deities, the creatures of heraldry and bestiary, clan and totem animals, and animals used in augury. Practices vary enormously and each entry stays with what a given tradition actually holds; the pan-cultural spirit animal of popular usage is a modern blending of specific and unrelated indigenous practices. Each entry records the traditions in which the animal carries meaning.
Facts
Contested Use
Contested or Appropriated Modern Use"Spirit animal" is a twentieth-century English coinage of the neoshamanic movement. It is not an Indigenous term and does not translate one, although it is routinely marketed with Indigenous associations. 1 Contested or Appropriated Modern UseNative scholars and educators object specifically to decontextualised "shamanic" technique and personal animal guides being sold as Native American practice. The objection is to the attribution and the sale, not to the study of animal symbolism. 2 Contested or Appropriated Modern UseOften conflated with the Ojibwe doodem, the source of English "totem": a doodem is an inherited clan and its defining being, governing descent and marriage within a nation. It is not chosen and it is not a personal guide. 3 Origins
Origin PeriodAs a named popular category: the later twentieth century. The personal "spirit animal" or "power animal" enters English from Michael Harner's core shamanism (1980) and the animal dictionaries that followed it. The animals themselves are held sacred by particular traditions on their own, far older, terms. 1 Whose Classification This IsThe modern scheme - one animal, one fixed meaning, retrieved by a technique - was assembled by Michael Harner as "core shamanism" (1980) from ethnographies of unrelated peoples, deliberately stripped of the languages, obligations and communities the practices belonged to. 1 Structure
StructureReal animals grouped by modern zoological class, as a way to browse a large field. The meanings are tradition-specific and frequently conflict - the same animal is sacred in one tradition and ill-omened in another - and traditions sort animals by their own criteria, not by biology. 3 Status
Standing as a Comparative CategoryA popular category, not a comparative one. Anthropology treats clan totemism, guardian-spirit acquisition, augury and animal symbolism as separate and non-equivalent things; the single phrase merges them. 2 Learn More
Animals That Carry Meaning
This category holds animals as they appear in symbolic and ritual traditions: the sacred animals attached to particular deities, the beasts of heraldry and the bestiary, clan and totem animals, and the creatures used in augury. Unlike the mythical creatures, these are real animals invested with meaning (the eagle, the serpent, the bear, the raven), though the meaning given them is a cultural matter.
Each entry stays with what a given tradition holds about an animal, since practices around sacred and totem animals vary enormously from culture to culture and a single symbolic reading would misrepresent them.
Against a Single Symbolism
Popular writing often assigns each animal a fixed universal meaning, the owl as wisdom, the wolf as loyalty, but the traditions themselves are far more varied, and the same animal may be sacred in one culture and ill-omened in another. The atlas keeps to what particular traditions say rather than to a modern pan-cultural key, and notes where the term "spirit animal" itself is drawn from specific Indigenous contexts that ought not be generalised.
The entries group the animals by class (mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, invertebrates and the rest), as a simple way to browse a large and varied field.
Cross-Tradition Connections
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