Old SymbolsWhere every symbol began

Animals in symbolism

What animals and birds have meant across cultures, in omens, art and belief, and where each meaning comes from.

This collection gathers what animals and birds have meant, one people or writer at a time. Animal symbolism has fifteen animals and a page on the idea of the spirit animal; Bird symbolism has seven birds and the feather. Every meaning on them is a belief held by a named culture, and each page says whose it is and when it was recorded: the Ojibwe teaching that the wolf is a brother, Herodotus on the cats of Egypt, the Cherokee stories James Mooney collected between 1887 and 1890. Many of the “spiritual meanings” published online for seeing an animal cite no older source, and where we could not trace one, the page says so.

The animals and birds

The insects are the butterfly, dragonfly, moth, ladybug, bee and spider. The mammals are the cat, dog, wolf, fox, bear, deer and rabbit, whose page takes in the hare, and there are pages for the snake and the frog. The birds are the cardinal, hummingbird, owl, crow, raven, hawk and blue jay, with the feather.

Animals in other collections

Some animals also have pages where their meaning belongs to one tradition or one season. The Halloween symbols include the black cat, the owl, the bat and the spider and web. In Genesis, Noah sends out a raven and then a dove, and the dove has its page among the Christian symbols. Odin’s two ravens, Huginn and Muninn, follow him everywhere, and Store norske leksikon notes that one of his many names is “the raven god”. The lucky cat is the Japanese beckoning figure, which the Maneki Neko Museum in Seto says was born in Edo at the end of the Edo period.

The spirit animal

The spirit animal page says where the phrase comes from and why many Native people object to its loose use. Merriam-Webster dates it to 1873, for a supernatural being of Indigenous cultures and traditions that takes the form of an animal, and James Frazer derived the related word totem from an Ojibwe word in 1887. 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”. Merriam-Webster notes that the everyday use, for something or someone one enjoys and identifies with, “is often considered an offensive appropriation and trivialization of Indigenous American cultural traditions.”

Sources

  1. The Wolf Is My Brother (Robert Shimek, 2013), Robert Shimek, White Earth Indian Reservation, October 2013; published by the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Natural Resources Department, Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, pp. 1–4
  2. The History of Herodotus, Volume 1 (Macaulay translation), Herodotus, trans. G. C. Macaulay (London: Macmillan, 1890), Book II, Project Gutenberg, Book II, chapters 66–67
  3. Myths of the Cherokee (James Mooney, 1900), James Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee, Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, part 1, Project Gutenberg, I. Introduction; 15. The four-footed tribes; 26. How the Deer got his horns; 49. The snake tribe
  4. Genesis 8:7-8 (King James Version), Genesis 8:7-8, Bible Gateway, Genesis 8:7-8
  5. Hugin og Munin (Store norske leksikon), Store norske leksikon
  6. 日本生まれのラッキーゴッド、招き猫, museum website, read September 2026, 招き猫ミュージアム (Maneki Neko Museum, Seto), page “招き猫について”
  7. Spirit animal (Merriam-Webster), Merriam-Webster Dictionary, entry “spirit animal”, Merriam-Webster, entry and usage paragraph
  8. Totemism (James George Frazer, 1887), J. G. Frazer, Totemism (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1887), Internet Archive (University of Toronto copy), pp. 1 and 54
  9. Honoring Animal Relatives (National Museum of the American Indian), Native Knowledge 360°, National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution; last updated 20 August 2020, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Honoring Animal Relatives, reference guide

Last reviewed September 30, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research