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Animal Spirits, the practice of treating certain creatures as guides, guardians, or emblems, is recorded here with a live tie into eight religions, the second highest count of any discipline the atlas holds, after Numerology's nine.

Three of the Eight Share Real History

Santeria (Lucumi), Haitian Vodou, and Candomble are not three independent inventions of the same idea. All three descend from the religion of the Yoruba people of West Africa, carried across the Atlantic by the slave trade and reshaped in Cuba, Haiti, and Brazil. Their shared animal symbolism traces to that one lineage, not to three separate discoveries of it.

The Rest Reached It Separately

Celtic Paganism, Chinese Folk Religion, Norse Paganism, Shinto, and the Yoruba tradition itself have no comparable line of descent connecting them to each other. Each built its own account of the bear, the fox, the crane, or the fox spirit independently, out of its own landscape and its own dead. This is not the same shape as the atlas's other convergence essays, which mostly stress independent invention across the board; here three of the eight are one story and five of the eight are five stories, and the count alone does not say which kind of convergence it is.

Where To Read More

• Animal SpiritsCosmological DisciplinesThe discipline itself, claimed by eight religions
• Yorùbá Religion (Ifá)Polytheistic (Animist)The common root of three of the other seven, carried across the Atlantic by the slave trade
• Santería (Lucumí)Syncretic (Afro-Caribbean)One of the three Yoruba-descended traditions, reshaped in Cuba
• Haitian VodouSyncretic (Afro-Caribbean)One of the three Yoruba-descended traditions, reshaped in Haiti
• CandombléSyncretic (Afro-Caribbean)One of the three Yoruba-descended traditions, reshaped in Brazil
• Norse PaganismPolytheistic (Historical/Revived)Reached the same practice with no line of descent connecting it to the Yoruba-descended three