Animal symbolism

Insects: souls, ancestors and a weaver

Several of the insects are souls in the records. In Japanese belief, Lafcadio Hearn wrote in 1904, a butterfly may be the soul of a dead person as well as of a living one, and any butterfly that enters a house ought to be kindly treated. Liddell and Scott’s Greek lexicon gives psyche, the soul, the further sense “butterfly or moth”, and the moth shares many of the butterfly’s soul beliefs. One old name of Japan, Akitsushima, is written with the character for the dragonfly, and at the Bon festival, Hearn recorded in 1901, dragonflies are said to carry the spirits of the ancestors back to their former homes. English custom, as Elizabeth Mary Wright described it in 1913, was to tell the bees of a death in the family, in a whisper, or they would leave their hives and never return. The “lady” of the ladybug is the Virgin Mary, the Online Etymology Dictionary explains. In Diné (Navajo) tradition, as the weaver Barbara Teller Ornelas relates it, Spider Woman brought the gift of weaving to the Diné, and looms and tools are still passed down from weaver to weaver; her story is on the spider page. The spider of Halloween has a page of its own, spider and web.

Cats, dogs and wolves

In Egypt the cat was sacred to the goddess Bast, E. A. Wallis Budge wrote, and Herodotus says that a household whose cat died shaved their eyebrows, and one whose dog died shaved their whole body and head. History.com counts the belief that a black cat crossing your path is bad luck among the oldest superstitions; the folklorist Phoebe Millerwhite explains it by the fear that such a cat might be on a witch’s errand, or the Devil in disguise. Elsewhere the same cat was a good sign. Daniel Compora of the University of Toledo told History.com that in Scotland and Japan black cats “have been known to represent prosperity”. The Halloween black cat and bat have pages among the Halloween symbols, and the Japanese beckoning figure is the lucky cat.

For the Ojibwe, Ma’iingan the wolf is a brother. Robert Shimek, of the White Earth Reservation, quotes Edward Benton-Banai’s The Mishomis Book: the first man and the wolf “became like brothers”, and the Creator told them that “what shall happen to the one of you will also happen to the other.” Ojibwe teachings prohibit the hunting of wolves, the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission writes. Mooney recorded that the Cherokee revered the wolf as the hunter and watchdog of Kana’ti, and that their largest clan was the Ani’-wa’ya, “Wolf people”.

Bears, deer, foxes and hares

Makwa the bear has the largest clan membership among the Ojibwe, the commission writes. The bear clan were traditionally the medicine people and the protectors, and its members still take on the protector’s role. The Cherokee, Mooney recorded, held bears to be transformed Cherokee of an old clan, who could talk if they only would. He also recorded the belief in the Little Deer, the pure white chief of the deer, who asked the blood of every deer a hunter killed whether the hunter had asked pardon for the life he took, and if not, followed him home and put the spirit of rheumatism into his body. Mooney found faith in the Little Deer among the older Cherokee almost as strong as belief in a life after death. In Japan foxes are said to be the messengers of Inari Okami, and are called byakkosan, “white foxes”; Fushimi Inari Taisha adds that “this does not mean that Inari Okami is a fox!” (see fox). In the Jataka, the stories of the Buddha’s former lives, the Bodhisatta is born as a hare and offers his own body as food, and the god Sakka daubs the sign of a hare on the moon. The Easter hare comes from a German custom first recorded in 1682, and Stephen Winick of the Library of Congress found that nobody joined a hare to the goddess Ostara until 1874. Both are on the rabbit page.

Snakes and frogs

In Genesis no beast could match the serpent in cunning, and God curses it to crawl on its belly. Ovid tells how the god Aesculapius came to Rome as a serpent, “the restorer of health”. Mooney recorded that the Cherokee regarded snakes as anida’wehi, “supernaturals”, close to the rain and thunder gods, and that their feeling toward snakes was “one of mingled fear and reverence”. In Exodus God plagues the whole of Egypt with frogs.

Where the spirit animal comes from

The spirit animal page traces the phrase. Merriam-Webster dates it to 1873, for a supernatural being of Indigenous cultures and traditions that takes the form of an animal, and the ideas behind it differ from one nation to the next. John Long, an interpreter and trader who knew the Ojibwe (his “Chippeways”), wrote in 1791 that each of them had “his totam, or favourite spirit, which he believes watches over him”, in the shape of an animal he would never kill, hunt or eat. James Frazer derived “totem” from an Ojibwe word, and the Ojibwe People’s Dictionary gives the stem =doodem- for “clan, totem”. Many Native people object to the loose modern use, for anything one enjoys and identifies with. Merriam-Webster notes that it “is often considered an offensive appropriation and trivialization of Indigenous American cultural traditions”, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian calls the popular idea a “non-Native concept” that “trivializes Native relationships to the animal world”. Pinny Lavalier, a Sicangu Lakota volunteer at Native Languages of the Americas, told Discover in 2021: “In theory, it’s quite harmless if white teenagers want to say their spirit animal is a wolf, but in practice it goes along with dehumanizing us.” Spirit animals by birthday are modern. One such system comes from The Medicine Wheel: Earth Astrology (1980) by Sun Bear and Wabun, and some Native groups called Sun Bear a “plastic medicine man”.