Subcategories
Mammals
28 of 64 entries in Animals & Totems. Click any to see everything it connects to.
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Mammals is the largest of the spirit animal groupings, holding twenty one animals from Bear and Tiger to Rabbit and Rat, drawn from totemic and symbolic traditions across the world. As with the other animal groupings here, the category sorts by zoological class; a wolf's meaning in one tradition and a fox's in another are not assumed to line up just because both are mammals.
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 mammal 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: Mammalia, a class named by Linnaeus in the tenth edition of Systema Naturae (1758). 4 Learn More
Mammals as spirit animals
This group gathers the mammals among the spirit animals, the beasts that many traditions, from indigenous totemism to modern spirituality, hold to carry particular powers, teachings or kinship with people. Mammals, being warm-blooded and often close to human life, figure largely in such lore as guides, guardians and emblems of virtues.
The browser will find the mammal spirit animals the atlas gathers. The entries describe each animal's symbolic associations across traditions, distinguishing long-standing cultural meanings from the modern "spirit animal" and "power animal" ideas that have popularised the concept.
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