Subcategories
Fish
3 of 64 entries in Animals & Totems. Click any to see everything it connects to.
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Fish holds the Salmon and the Seahorse, grouped here by zoological class rather than by any shared role. The category is expected to grow as more aquatic spirit animals are added to the atlas.
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 fish 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: Pisces, a class named by Linnaeus in the tenth edition of Systema Naturae (1758). 4 Learn More
Fish as spirit animals
This group holds the fish among the spirit animals: creatures of the water, which in symbolic lore are often linked to the unconscious, to fertility and abundance, and to hidden depths, and which carry sacred meaning in several traditions.
The browser will find the fish spirit animals the atlas gathers. The entries describe each animal's symbolic associations, distinguishing traditional meanings from the modern spirit-animal idea.
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