Introducing the
Totems Themselves
Our world is populated by a wide variety of living beings and other phenomena. We’re most familiar with the physical animals, plants, and the forests, fields, and other ecosystems in which they live and thrive. Each part of nature has its own individual spirits, whether they’re embodied in live animals and other biological beings or within physical stones and waters. There are also “disembodied” nature spirits, those that either no longer have physical form or never had one at all but are still an integral part of the natural world. Cultures around the world and throughout the history of our species have acknowledged, honored, feared, and placated these spiritual beings and their physical counterparts.
I’m not here to talk about individual spirits, however. Some of them can certainly be powerful allies if we make good relations with them, but they’re not the totems I had in mind. A totem represents all of the members of a given species or phenomenon, physical and otherwise. The totem Barn Owl, for example, was never itself born into a physical body. But Barn Owl watches over all barn owls of the past, present, and future, as well as all the barn owl spirits that have never had bodies themselves.
Before we move on, I’d like to introduce some of the types of totems you may be working with as you use this book. Traditionally, totemism and similar systems in indigenous cultures have largely dealt with animals, plants, fungi, and stones (depending on the individual culture, of course). The role of these totems has varied from a set of symbols akin to surnames that organize the people into groups and govern who may marry whom, to individual allies and protective spirits, to beings that watch over secret societies and other sacred groups within a community. When I write about totemism, here and otherwise, I am not speaking from any indigenous perspective—quite the contrary, I am a white girl from the Midwest, raised as a Roman Catholic and self-and-spirit-taught as a Neopagan since 1996. I use the term “totem” not in its original Ojibwe context, but in the broader definition the word has come to take in the English language. What I describe here is my own creation based on years of practice, experimentation, and direct work with the totems themselves, as well as notes I’ve traded with other neototemist practitioners.
I will share anecdotes throughout this book, but my experiences should not be seen as holy writ or some indication of a totem’s meaning. I don’t put totem dictionaries in my books specifically because I want people to forge their own relationships with the totems rather than saying, “Well Lupa said that Domestic Horse taught her about independence? That means Horse means independence universally!” What a totem tells you may not be what it tells me, and I’d rather you not miss out on the sometimes amazing and terrifying but always rewarding experience of discovering totems for yourself.
I’ve already written extensively on animal, plant, and fungus totems in previous works (there’s a list of those at the beginning of this book). Now I’d like to at least introduce some of the types of totems you may be working with in your bioregional work.
Biological Totems
The totems we’re most familiar with are those of biological beings. The three main groups of biological totems are animal, plant, and fungus totems. These totems each watch over an individual species. It’s important to make these distinctions. Spectacled Bear is a different totem than Polar Bear, for example, and while they may have certain ursine qualities in common their experiences are vastly different overall. Therefore it is short-sighted to talk about a “Bear” totem, especially when what most people really mean is Brown Bear.
Another thing to keep in mind are odd exceptions. While various North American canid species have always interbred, in recent years coyote-wolf hybrids, or coywolves, have begun to establish themselves as a group in the Northeastern United States and other places where gray wolves have been pushed back. The few remaining wolves mated with coyotes, and these offspring then interbred with other wolves, coyotes, and each other. Coywolf is a very new totem who has been birthed as coywolves created their own unique niche; sometimes Coywolf will show up as Gray Wolf and/or Coyote, or sometimes all three will appear.
Animal Totems
These are the best known and most commonly worked with totems; they’re often the easiest for us to relate to as we ourselves are animals. For millennia we’ve looked to them for lessons on how to behave, and we’ve told stories about them to teach ourselves and each other cultural morals and pass down information from generation to generation. We see a bit of ourselves in them, and hope to embody some of their qualities, too.
As some cultures have become more industrialized and distant from nature, animal totemism has often been reduced to a series of mascots or symbols on billboards and clothing. But over the past couple of decades, as interest in nature spirituality in general has increased, people have started re-exploring totemism as more than mere symbols. This is especially true for nonindigenous people (like me) who weren’t raised in cultures with totemic systems, allowing us to create our own relationships with the animals based on our experiences and values.
The big, impressive animals like hawks and lions aren’t the only ones who have totems. Every animal species, from Paramecium caudatum to the blue whale, has a totem watching over it. There are also totems for extinct species and domesticated ones. Some even include mythological animals under the totemic umbrella.6
Because we ourselves are animals, we often find it easiest to reach out to the totems of other animal species. They’re familiar, and it’s not too much of a stretch for us to imagine what another animal’s experiences might be like. Many of us have a favorite animal when we’re children—and a lot of us hold onto those into adulthood, too! For some, it turns out that favorite animal was in fact a totem making an early appearance in our lives. So what differentiates a favorite animal and a totem?
When I was very young, Gray Wolf came to me while I was observing the family dog, a large black German shepherd. From then on I was absolutely obsessed with wolves. I had shirts, statues, stuffed toys, and books all about gray wolves. I pretended to be a wolf whenever I played with other kids at school, even if it made no sense in the game we were playing. As I got older, I found that this “wolf-ness” was rubbing off on me. I found myself emulating wolves—usually in very clumsy imitations. I discovered Paganism and other forms of nature spirituality in my teens and began to explore totemism, at which point Gray Wolf made a more formal introduction. The totem told me how it had been with me the whole time, guiding me in my floppy-eared puppy stages. Wolves were still my favorite animals, and after this meeting there was more purpose to the interest.
While we’re on the subject, a question that comes up every now and then is whether Homo sapiens has a totem. In my experience (and you’re welcome to take this with as much salt as you like), we myth-making animals were not content with just one totem to describe our complex experiences and ourselves. We acknowledge many deities with humanlike characteristics who still maintain the profound power and awe associated with the human and other natural phenomena they embody. Opinions vary as to whether each of these deities is their own independent being or whether they all reflect facets of one great divinity; needless to say, I tend to think of totems as the gods of other beings, and perhaps they see them in more nuanced, complex forms than we do.
However, there may also be much to be learned by going to the Ur-totem of our species, Homo sapiens sapiens. Before gods, temples, agriculture, and alphabets was the human ape. Really, there were several human apes—us, the Neanderthals and the Denisovans, and numerous other now-extinct hominins. We were the only survivors to this day, and our totem still waits at the root of our DNA for us to remember ourselves and who we were before we fell into our current spiral of self-centered delusion and outward destruction. I haven’t done much work with this totem yet, so this is all I’ll say about it for now.
Plant Totems
Most writings on plants in spiritual practices are focused on using parts of the physical plants for our benefit either through herbalism or mind-altering entheogens. Some may acknowledge the spirits of the individual plants, but rarely are their totems addressed, a practice due to human bias toward animals as exemplary living beings, where plants as only part of the scenery. In fact, the term “plant blindness” was created to describe this phenomenon; plants are simply not seen let alone appreciated for their crucial places in ecosystems and their unique evolutionary history. When we walk through the forest or fields, we gasp with joy when we see a single bird fly up out of the grass, but we don’t take time to explore the grass itself or any of its other plant neighbors.
I started working with plant totems after my move to Portland; the animal totems that greeted me encouraged me almost immediately to start talking to their plant and other nonanimal neighbors. Some, like Douglas Fir, were new to me; others, like Red and White Clovers, had been around most of my life without me realizing it. They were instrumental in helping me appreciate totemism on a bioregional level.
Working with plant totems is different from animal totem work in some ways, and a lot of this has to do with how plants view the world. For the most part, they’re stationary beings once their seeds settle into a patch of soil. However, there’s still plenty of movement up and out as they try to get as much sunlight as they can. In my experience, this tends to give them a viewpoint of depth rather than breadth of knowledge; plants put down roots and get to know one place for life. No surprise, then, that they were some of the strongest supporters of my getting to know my Oregon home in as much detail as possible!
Where animal totems often seek us out actively, plant totems are more likely to wait patiently for us to pay attention. I find that the state of soft fascination referred to earlier works especially well for catching these more subtle signals. When I allow my perception to relax, rather than being bombarded by stimuli, I’m more able to notice when a plant totem may be trying to get my attention. For instance, when I first began hiking in the Columbia River Gorge, I was often overwhelmed by sightings of ravens and mule deer and the Douglas fir and Western red cedar trees towering overhead. It took a while for me to settle my perception down enough that I started to notice the less obvious parts of the ecosystem I was walking through, like banana slugs and tiny white shelf fungi. It was in this stillness I was able to hear the soft voice of Western Maidenhair Fern hidden in the undergrowth, one of the first plant totems to teach me the value of quiet communication.
We’re a little lower on the list of a plant totem’s priorities. While we require plants to live as omnivore, they could do quite well without us humans, so long as there were other animals to produce carbon dioxide for them to breathe and decaying flesh for fertilizer. The fact that some plants can feed us is less out of altruism and more about the plants using us. Tasty fruit surrounds seeds that animals then spread around in droppings; the fruit wasn’t produced exclusively for our benefit. It’s also the case that while some plant totems—especially the totems of domesticated plants—enjoy working with us, others seem ambivalent at best. Often it will be up to us to start a conversation with them and give them reasons to work with us.
Because plants figured out different solutions to the problems life throws at all beings, a plant totem’s perspective and manner of communicating with us may seem quite alien at times. Working with plant totems is often an exercise in stretching the mind, and it may involve everything from communicating through scent (chemical signals are big communicators for plants) to trying to be patient with long-lived tree totems that wonder why we can’t just outlive our problems.
There are other ways in which plant totems differ from their animal counterparts, but for the most part it all boils down to a completely different set of evolutionary tactics for surviving and thriving in a multitude of environments. With patience and a little humility, we can reach out to them and create just as strong a set of relationships as with our animal totems.
Fungus Totems
If plants are often ignored in totemism and elsewhere, fungi are all but completely forgotten. With the exception of some writings on hallucinogenic fungi like psilocybin mushrooms, fungi are usually lumped together with plants under the too-broad heading “mushrooms” or aren’t mentioned at all. What’s more, fungi are often demonized; outside of mushrooms, we’re more likely to hear about the medical problems caused by athlete’s foot (Tricophyton sp.), ringworm (Tinea sp.), yeast infections (Candida sp.), or the health problems caused by buildings infested with black mold (Stachybotrys sp.).
In reality, fungi are absolutely necessary to our existence. Several species normally live in or on our bodies, and we cannot survive without them. Almost all plants, including ones we eat or feed to our livestock, have symbiotic relationships with fungi that are intertwined with their roots and help them absorb nutrients and survive in harsh conditions. Fungi break down rotting plants and animals and return those nutrients to the food cycle; commercial agriculture involves chemicals that kill off the resident fungi, necessitating the use of harsh chemical fertilizers to make sure the crops grow big and fast enough in the fungi’s absence.
The lessons fungus totems have to show us differ from those of plants in many ways. While fungi appear to be rooted in place much like plants, the mushrooms we see popping up overnight are simply the temporary reproductive parts. The main part of the organism exists as an extensive network of filaments throughout the soil, decaying log, or other substrate the fungus grows in.
One of the most important things I learned in dealing with anyone—human, fungus, or otherwise—came from the totem Fly Agaric. The bright red cap of its mushroom is the well-known “toadstool” in picture books and Nintendo games worldwide. Siberian shamans and more recently psychonauts also consume it as a hallucinogen in spite of its toxicity. Fly Agaric isn’t especially happy about its perception as a way to get high (even for spiritual purposes) and especially resents newer attitudes that commodify it rather than treating it as a valuable part of its ecosystem only to be taken out with great reverence. It was Fly Agaric that really brought home to me the fact that most of its life cycle is spent in the soil, helping plants to grow and offering nourishment to tiny microscopic beings that further break down decaying matter. In our very first conversation, this totem emphasized that the decay cycle was its most important job and that we humans would do well to remember that. My takeaway was a crucial lesson in not making nature spirituality so human-centered; Fly Agaric and other fungus totems have a lot more to do than feeding hungry animals and their spiritual proclivities.
Unlike plants, fungi don’t need sunlight to survive. You may be surprised to know that fungi are actually more closely related to us animals than they are to plants—we share a common ancestor that existed long after plants had split off from our part of the evolutionary tree. In my experience, these two facts further contribute to the fungus totems’ more grounded approach. Plants may be rooted, but their totems have a bit of an obsession with growing higher and upward, competing for sunlight. Fungus totems are less fussy about solutions to problems; after all, fungi will grow in everything from digestive tracts to dung to rotting carcasses. If you want a practical and down to earth perspective, talk to a fungus totem.
And due to the fact that a lot of fungi aren’t good for us health-wise, either ingested or inhaled, they’re reminders that being a part of nature means taking the bad with the good. They’re pretty unapologetic about that harsh lesson, too. I once asked Destroying Angel, the totem of a notoriously poisonous fungus, why its mushroom was so deadly. “Well,” it said, “it keeps you from eating them before they’ve spawned, doesn’t it?”
One thing that fungus totems do have in common with their plant counterparts is that they’re often quieter than animal totems. In my experience, if an animal totem wants to get my attention in a meditation or otherwise, it’ll come and find me. Fungus and plant totems, on the other hand, tend to wait to be noticed; much like their physical children, they often go overlooked. When they do try to open communication, the ways they talk tend to be not so much vocal and verbal as through intuition; when I work with plant and fungus totems I tend to “feel” rather than “hear” them, and I’ll talk more about that later in this chapter. So we (as human animals ourselves) need to be more proactive in making contact with them, as well as learning the unique ways in which they communicate with us. On the other hand, keep in mind that many fungi have a tendency toward grumpiness, so it may take a while for them to warm up to you.
A Quick Note About Lichens
Lichens are a special case. Lichens are composite organisms made of a fungus and an algae (though some lichens have a cyanobacteria, or plant-like bacteria, instead of the algae). They’re classified biologically with fungi since the fungus in a lichen provides the being’s structure and main body, while the algae is sort of a photosynthetic add-on. It’s a very important add-on, though; if a lichen is separated into its fungus and algae components, the fungus loses its shape. So the algae gives form to the raw material of the fungus’s body.
Lichen totems have a similarly dual nature. When I work with lichen totems, sometimes the totem of the lichen itself will show up. Other times, I work with the totems of the individual species of fungus and algae that make up the physical lichen. At times all three will appear at various points in my meditation or ritual. It seems to be primarily a preference on the part of the individual lichen totem whether or not the fungus and plant totems are involved.
The various appearances of lichen totems may also be related to a point the totem wishes to make. The totem Oak Moss Lichen once appeared to me initially as itself but then split into its corresponding fungus and algae totems. It did this because it wanted to emphasize that we too are complex beings with many parts and layers and elements that all come together to create us as individuals.
There are plenty of biological beings besides animals, plants, and fungi, such as bacteria, protozoa, and archaea. These are generally too tiny for us to see, and outside of microbiology few of us know much about them. You’re welcome to work with them if you like, but I won’t be addressing them much in this book for sake of space and time. Many of the concepts in this book can be used to connect with microscopic totems, so feel free to experiment if you like!
Land Totems
In addition to the biological totems I’ve already discussed, there is an additional, broader group of totems: the land totems. Some people may debate the use of the term “totem” to refer to these beings, either because they aren’t associated with biological beings like animals, or because some cultures have referred to the embodiments of natural phenomena as “spirits” instead. In my personal experience the overarching guardians and caretakers of different types of land and water formations, natural forces, and places have the same general characteristics as animal, plant, and fungus totems. For the purposes of my practice and writing here, I use the term “totem” as an umbrella covering all of these. It’s a bit of a semantics debate to be sure, and if at the end of the book you decide you wish to use different terms for any of the beings I discuss here while still using the concepts I describe, you’re more than welcome to do so.
These are the totems of what we’d consider the nonliving parts of nature. They’re the totems of minerals and waterways, of land-shaping forces and weather patterns, of soil and sand. Animal, plant, and fungus totems are defined through individual species that evolved over time; while individual members of those species may live in very different places—gray wolves in Mexico versus in Russia, for example—every one of them shares a single common ancestor and has essentially the same DNA makeup minus a few regional and individual quirks. Land totems, on the other hand, are more defined by certain patterns of natural formation and other nonbiological phenomena that have the same results each time. Sandstone always forms when sand and other tiny mineral particles (usually quartz or feldspar) are bound together with a natural mineral cement. Quartzite always forms from sandstone made from quartz that is then subjected to great heat and pressure through tectonic activity.
Remember in the introduction when I said that totems are made of several different components in addition to natural history, including relationships their physical counterparts have with the rest of their ecosystem? It’s the same way with land totems. Take the metal gold. Its totem watches over every atom of gold in existence. But the totem Gold also includes the complex relationships that humanity has had with gold over the millennia, good and bad, from its value and beauty, to the warnings that gold can lead to temptation, to the harmful mining practices often used to extract it from the ground. It also is made of the various forms that gold has been sculpted into over time, from devotional statues to electronic circuits, and the meanings behind these creations. So, like animal and other biological totems, land totems are more than just the physical rock, wind, or water they watch over.
Whereas an animal species has one totem associated with it, other parts of nature may have several. There are totems of specific types of mineral and different sorts of rock, but there are also totems of the erosive and volcanic and other forces that shaped these stones. When you hold a piece of obsidian in your hand, you’re holding a connection to multiple totems—Silica is the totem of the mineral it’s made of, Volcano is the totem of the geologic phenomenon that created it, and Obsidian is its “self” totem.
If this is too confusing, you’re welcome to work with the most immediate totem, that of the stone or other mineral you’re working with. Just keep in mind that they’re more complex than gemstone dictionaries make them out to be, and other factors—like the quartz that the stone tiger’s eye is made from, or the heat and pressure that caused the metamorphosis—may come into play. Again, you have to create your own relationships with the totem—what Tiger’s Eye told the writer of such-and-such book may not be what it wants to tell you.
You might think that the sun and moon are totems as well, in and of themselves. However, they are individual celestial bodies that happen to have a direct effect on the planet. Most stars and moons are too far away to even be visible, let alone interact with us and our world. But we can consider the totems Star and Moon as those that watch over the sun-star that provides the sunlight that bathes our world, and the satellite-moon whose gravity draws the tides to and fro. Even though most of their physical counterparts are much further out in the galaxy, we can still consider Star and Moon to be land totems because of the contributions two of their children make to our planet. And, of course, our own Earth is watched over by the totem Planet.7
Going smaller rather than bigger, it is possible to break totemism down even more finely; there are totems of the individual elements like carbon and oxygen, as well as of molecules, and parts of atoms. Even subatomic particles have their own mysterious totems we’re only just getting to know. The perspectives of these very small, large, or strange totems may seem quite alien indeed (pun only partly intended). Planet, for example, is used to working with entire worlds, ranging from tiny little balls of ice in outer reaches of solar systems to gaseous globes too toxic for us to ever approach. While it’s aware that on one little blue planet, Earth, the well-developed life-system is shifting drastically right now, it takes a more whole-world view rather than being concerned with the goings-on of individual life forms. My attempts to work with these great celestial totems hasn’t gotten me particularly far, much like one cell in my body trying to get my attention may be unsuccessful. I’ve had similar troubles working with the very smallest, like Proton and Charm Quark and the totems of other atomic particles.
A totem practice can be quite complicated, as you can see. For the sake of this book, I’ll primarily be sticking with land totems whose physical counterparts can generally be seen with the average naked eye and are largely confined to our planet (and with which I’ve actually been able to communicate). If you happen to connect with something not included here, you can still try using the material in this book to work with it.
Natural forces also have their totems. Gravity has a totem that embodies not only the gravitational pull of the earth, moon, and sun, but also all the research and storytelling we’ve made about gravity, even the semi-apocryphal tale of Isaac Newton “discovering” gravity after an apple fell on his head. (It actually didn’t hit him, for what it’s worth; he just observed it fall to the ground and that got him thinking about why.)
Erosion is another totem that comes into play quite a bit. When I spend time in the Columbia River Gorge, I may come into contact with a whole host of totems, not all of which are biological. Take the Columbia River itself. River is, of course, one of the prevailing totems. So is Basalt, Volcano, and Flood brought forth by Glacier. And there’s Erosion, still wearing down the stone to this day through the river and the rain and the stomp of hiking boots on the soil.
Land totems can be very difficult to contact at times, especially those that don’t make use of us for their own ends. Erosion likes to reform the land into new shapes and will make use of any handy tool. When an elk goes leaping down a hillside or a large tree is uprooted by the wind, Erosion is there to break down the edges of the soil and create new configurations. Volcano, on the other hand, couldn’t care less about us no matter how many offerings we toss into the lava. We may plead with deities that put a bit more anthropomorphism into the volcanoes themselves, but the totem Volcano is only interested in relieving pressure by whatever means necessary.
_____
Regina is a geologist whose love of the land started with a childhood love of rock hounding. From clear quartz crystals to shiny pieces of pyrite, the wide variety of minerals captured her imagination from a young age and never really left her. She’s expanded her collection quite a bit over the years, but she still prizes her very first rock, a small piece of fossilized wood. For her fortieth birthday, Regina goes on a weekend meditation retreat to learn more self-care skills; one of the meditations asks participants to bring something with strong sentimental value, so she brings the petrified wood with her. During that meditation, she imagines a giant prehistoric conifer tree falling into a swamp and then settling into the mud at the bottom. The tree glows slightly as it transforms from wood to stone, tiny bits of mineral replacing the atoms of lignin, cellulose, and other biological substances. The glow then coalesces into the form of a woman of indeterminate age. She smiles and holds out her hand. Regina’s little petrified wood is there, and as she takes it from the glowing woman it continues to glow. When Regina comes out of her meditation, she feels as though she has been shown some secret that exists beyond the physical process of fossilization itself, and she wonders what else the woman in her meditation might be able to teach her.
Totemic Potpourri
In the next chapter I’ll talk about how to find your bioregional totems. Before that, however, I’d like to cover a few more of the basics of totemism. A number of questions frequently arise when teaching people about nonindigenous totemism. As always, the answers that follow are based on my own experience, so take them with as much salt as you like.
Are totems “real” or are they just
a figment of my imagination?
As far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t especially matter. I’ve spent almost two decades working with totems, and I gave up long ago trying to prove they exist as independent beings outside of my own experience or some collective consciousness. I speak with them as though they are their own beings, but if it turned out that it was all an elaborate play of my imagination, I wouldn’t be especially bothered.
What’s more important to me is how totemism affects my life and the world around me. If my practice and my relationships with the totems are making me a better person and making me a more effective steward of the environment, I’m doing things right. Whether that’s due to spiritual beings or an ongoing story I tell in my mind seems irrelevant to me. (Of course, this does not prevent you from having a different opinion on the matter.)
Does every animal/plant/fungus
have a totem, or only certain ones?
In my experience, every species of living being has a totem, as do the various minerals, chemicals, forces, and other phenomena of nature. This includes extinct beings, microscopic ones, and there are even totems of interstellar nature. Keep in mind that the extinct totems no longer have a physical link to our world, and so their perspective on what we experience may seem very alien to us, especially if the extinction was a long time ago. I did some work with dinosaur totems, and while we can agree on certain things like “mass extinction events are no fun,” the ones I talked to were often positively baffled by peculiarly human behaviors (to include our mad rush toward the sixth mass extinction event). On the other hand, age does have some benefits of perspective, and the late Cretaceous totems who saw their species destroyed in the K-T event (when a giant asteroid hit the Earth and wiped out much of the life on it) had a lot to say about how much we were taking the planet for granted.
Some people have asked me whether fantastic beings have totems as well, such as Jackalope or Unicorn. In my opinion, it’s mostly a matter of semantics. The archetypal beings who watch over mythological animals and the like have much the same role as their “normal” counterparts—watching over their young, embodying the stories we tell about them, and so forth. It’s up to you whether you want to consider these as totems or assign a different name to them.
Does everyone have a totem?
While it’s possible for anyone to try working with totems, not everyone automatically has one assigned to them. There’s not some Bureau of Totemic Guidance that determines which totem will adopt each newborn baby. Many people do not follow spiritual paths that include totems; some people in Pagan or nature-based paths find they work better with other sorts of beings like individual spirits, fey, and so forth. If you work through this book and absolutely cannot make a connection with any totem, it could be that other beings are better suited for you or that your totem(s) don’t feel quite ready to make themselves known to you just yet. Don’t worry—I’ve known people who didn’t find their first totem until they were well into their sixties. There’s no such thing as “too late,” only “just right.”
I also want to reiterate that what I refer to as “totemism” here is not the same as indigenous totemisms worldwide, whether in the Americas, Europe, Australia, and elsewhere. Indigenous totemisms tend to be group-based, so in those cultures it can be generally said that yes, everyone has a totem associated with their family, just as in many places everyone has a last name they’re given at birth. They may have additional guardian or guiding spirits throughout their lives.
Nonindigenous totemism like what I write about blends these two concepts out of necessity. As a white American who grew up in the Midwest in a Catholic family that had little to do with nature, let alone nature spirituality, I had no conception of a family totem. It could be that Gray Wolf, who came to me at such a young age, is a long-lost familial totem, but without a lot of research I can’t verify that for sure. However, I allied myself with these archetypal beings early in my pagan path and they’ve continued to work with me since then, even though I’m a staunchly solitary practitioner.
So my path is very much an individual-based one. I’ve included some practices later in this book for potential group work with totems, such as a family or a coven. The one-on-one work is still important even in group situations, so it remains the main emphasis of this book.
How many do I get?
One of my great frustrations with nonindigenous totemism is the emphasis on prescriptive approaches. The whole “Everyone has X number of totems” idea is a good example. The value of X in that particular equation ranges from one totem (the monogamous solution!) to two (one on the left, one on the right) to four (one for each of the cardinal directions) or five (cardinals plus center). Sams and Carson, in their popular Medicine Cards system, came up with the number nine.8
I think there’s no set number. Some people really do only have one totem they work with throughout their lives. Others may have a few or even a dozen. I have worked rituals and meditated with hundreds of totems in my life. Most of them don’t have as strong a connection with me as Gray Wolf or Red Fox, but just as with our human relationships, totemic relationships vary as well. (I’ll talk more about these relationships later.) Don’t stress yourself out if you “only” have seven totems and you have no idea who the other two are, or if you’ve found nine and suddenly a tenth wants to say hi. You aren’t trying to complete a checklist here.
Do they ever change?
Just as with human relationships, totems can come and go. Domestic Horse was a significant part of my life for a few years in my teens but didn’t stay permanently. Conversely, Red Fox showed up in my twenties to help me through a tough period of my life and decided to stick around afterward. If a totem leaves, it doesn’t mean that you’re a horrible person or they hate you. It may be that they have nothing else to teach you, or they may have more pressing matters to deal with regarding their own children. I’ve included a ritual in chapter 5 to help ease the changes that may occur when a totem moves on.
Do I have to like my totems?
Some people assume that their favorite animal is their totem. While in some cases this may be true, you may also end up with totems that you never had a connection with before. You may even actively dislike some of them, especially the totem of an animal or other being you don’t care for in everyday life.
I hate poison oak with a passion. I’m very sensitive to urushiol, the oil in poison oak and poison ivy that causes skin irritation and itching, so all it takes is me barely brushing by a plant to end up with a nasty rash. But I’ve had to come to respect the totem Poison Oak and its children because they’re great teachers on boundaries and how to maintain them. Poison oak plants don’t leap out and grab people but they do make sure no one tries to eat them, thereby preserving their leaves and other parts from damage.
Occasionally you may end up with a totem you fear, particularly an animal totem. An overly simplistic explanation often given in nonindigenous totemism is that it’s a shadow totem, one that shows you your dark side and helps you come to terms with it. That’s one possibility but as said elsewhere, I don’t advise pigeonholing totems. A totem of a feared animal may be there to show you something entirely different or even ask you for help. Don’t make assumptions based solely on your fear, but do take the opportunity to face your fear if you can, so you can see what’s on the other side.
Are totems harmful?
Over the years I’ve heard stories of spiritual practitioners encountering hostile beings in their work. Sometimes these spirits attacked them during meditations; a few people claimed that the damage carried over into their physical lives. Admittedly I’m skeptical about these being anything other than internally-based psychosomatic responses rather than a “psychic attack” explanation. In any spiritual work I recommend that everyone keep a sharpened Occam’s Razor in their kit—in other words, keep in mind that the simplest (and most mundane) answer is the most likely.
I have only rarely met with a truly hostile totem. One of the most notable examples was a number of years ago when I was exploring work with the totems of extinct species. I did a guided meditation to get in touch with Dodo, whose children were slaughtered by the thousands by European explorers in the 1700s until not a single one remained. When I approached the totem, it was sitting on top of a pile of dry and cracked dodo skulls, weeping bitterly. It attacked angrily when it saw me, chasing me off of its island. The sign was very clear: that particular totem wasn’t in any mood to talk to me; however, I neither ended up with any physical effects, nor any string of bad luck in my waking life.
In cases where people feel as though a spiritual being has “cursed” them, I tend to figure that it’s a case of confirmation bias—if you expect something bad to happen, then you’re more likely to emphasize any negative occurrence in your life. Generally these can be traced back to perfectly normal courses of events and choices, and it’s highly unlikely that anyone (spiritual or otherwise) is out to get you when you have that most human of experiences colloquially summed up as “s**t happens.”
What methods can I use to find totems?
Some of us have it (relatively) easy in that we know at least one of our totems from an early age. Those who don’t still have several options.
One of the most common methods people use is physical encounters with beings in nature. Perhaps they see an animal or plant that catches their eye, or they have an especially memorable experience climbing a mountain. In these moments of connection the totem reaches out to them. This does not, however, mean that every encounter in nature means a totem is afoot. My favorite example of this is red-tailed hawks. A person may see a hawk up on a phone line by their house every afternoon starting in spring. They may even think “Hmmm, what does that hawk mean?” What they don’t consider is the fact that red-tailed hawks are territorial birds that migrate back to their homes in spring to breed, and that one pair works together to maintain their territory while they raise their young. Our yards make great hunting grounds for them to catch mice and other tasty rodents, and the phone line is a convenient perch. So for the most part all that hawk really “means” is that you have new avian neighbors raising their kids in your area. If you believe there’s more to the story than that, I recommend guided meditation to ask the totem directly.
Dreams are related to nature sightings, except they occur when we’re asleep. There are countless books chock full of stereotyped meanings for different things that appear in our dreams, like what it portends when a cow shows up in your dream.
The problem with this is that dreams are highly personal both in their symbolism and their content. Most dreams are simply our mind’s way of filing away our waking experiences; our unconscious mind likes to speak in symbols and abstracts, hence how weird dreams can be to our waking selves. Most dreams don’t have any particular significance beyond whatever we place upon them.
The other issue is that what a particular symbol “means” in a dream may vary from person to person. Let’s look at a domestic dog, for example. To someone who loves dogs, that dream canine may be a portent of good news, companionship, or simply a happy memory of a childhood pet. To someone with a severe phobia of dogs, dreaming of a dog may be the onset of a terrifying nightmare. This is a rather extreme example, but just as totems don’t have the same lessons and experiences for everyone, neither do dream symbols have specific meanings.
There are occasional dreams that seem too important to ignore, sometimes called “Big Dreams.” They’re the sort of dream you wake up from knowing that there was more to it, and can’t shake it off once you’re fully awake. If a Big Dream centers around an animal, plant, fungus, etc., it may be worth it to contact its totem to see if there was a message in there for you.
Another popular method is totem cards. These are decks of anywhere from about forty to eighty cards, similar to tarot cards, each one having a different sort of animal on it (less common are plants, fungi, and various other natural phenomena). You’re supposed to shuffle the cards, pull out a certain number, and lay them on the table. Purportedly, this tells you who your totems are. The trouble, of course, is that there are a lot more than eighty totems out there. What happens if your totem is, say, Black Longspine Sea Urchin, but the only invertebrates in the deck you have access to are “Bee,” “Butterfly,” and “Spider”?
Most of these decks don’t have cards for specific species.9 Looking at our token invertebrates above, there are more than twenty thousand species of bee worldwide, twenty thousand or so butterfly species, and thirty-five thousand species of spiders. Each species has its own behavior, habitat, and in some cases migration patterns. We think of bees living in colonies in hives, but many bees are solitary and live in burrows in the ground or old wood. And the lessons of a ground-hunting spider like Carolina Wolf Spider may be very different from those of a web-weaver like Australian Redback Spider, or the aquatic Diving Bell Spider, whose children live entirely underwater and carry a bubble of air with them as they go about their business.
The method I prefer is guided meditation. I’m not talking about a pre-written script where everything is already decided down to what the totem tells you. Rather, I use a more general set of directions with each meditation, enough to get you focused on the meditation at hand and then allowing you plenty of freedom to interact with the totems you encounter. When you do a guided meditation, you aren’t going into the depths of the spirit world; the settings are in-between places partway between our world and that of the spirits. Proper journeying into the spirit world is a much more complicated and potentially risky business I won’t be approaching for now.
Guided meditation also allows for more complex discussions than simply “What’s my totem?” It’s a great way to talk to your existing totems about things they need help with, and it’s also an opportunity for totems you may not even have thought of contacting to reach you. In short, I prefer this method because of its flexibility and potential for deeper work. If you don’t have a lot of experience with guided meditation, please see Appendix D for some helpful tips.
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Allyson has been seeing a lot of fly agaric mushrooms lately. This fungus, with its well-known red cap and white spots, may be called a “toadstool,” but she’s more likely to see them with tiny insects crawling around them (no toads so far). The mushrooms have been popping up frequently in her wooded back yard, and she thinks she’s seen more of them randomly in her everyday life on book covers, t-shirts, and even a greeting card at a nature shop. One night she has a dream about a giant fly agaric mushroom that towers over her home; there are other mushrooms of various types underneath it, but it’s the one she notices the most. The next day she decides to contact the totem Fly Agaric to see if there’s anything more to these odd occurrences. In her meditation she very quickly finds this fungus totem, again reaching high above her. It tells her that while it doesn’t have anything for her, she should talk to the totem of the soil in her yard, which supports fly agaric as well as other fungus species. In speaking with Soil, Allyson finds out that some unhealthy influences have been introduced to the ground there. Once she comes out of the meditation, she finds her next door neighbor spraying their lawn with chemicals that drift over into her yard. They have a conversation about this, and the neighbor agrees to not spray within a certain distance of Allyson’s yard. That night, Allyson dreams of Fly Agaric again, but this time the totem is small, the size of one of its children, and Allyson feels a sense of contentment.
Why Work with Totems, Anyway?
If you’ve picked up this book it’s likely that you’re interested in totemism—but can you put a finger on why? I’ve already mentioned a few reasons for exploring this sort of nature-based spiritual path but I’d like to expand upon them a bit more.
Reconnecting with Nature
In the first chapter, I made the argument that most humans see themselves as separate from the rest of nature, an attitude that has had devastating effects on the environment and ourselves. As some of us seek to reconnect with our nonhuman neighbors, totems provide a “bridge” between us and the rest of the natural world. They are intermediaries between their species and everything else in the world, humans included. For that reason, they’re already used to communicating with us and helping us better understand our nonhuman neighbors.
It’s not always the most obvious totems who are spreading this message of reconnection either. One of my fungus totems is Black Mold. Mold is a pretty pernicious problem here in the damp Pacific Northwest, and I’ve had it crop up in bathrooms in more than one home I’ve lived in. I was pretty distressed when I saw it for the first time, and I knew it would be a couple of days before the landlord would be able to come in and clean the mold up. But even as I stared at the black spots on the ceiling, I felt a little nudge in my intuition and I allowed myself to pay attention to it.
Black Mold took the opportunity to remind me that just because I lived in a human-built shelter, it didn’t mean I was separated from nature. It also helped me to be more mindful of the conditions I was living in; I had to adapt to bathrooms with poor ventilation and treat them a little differently than I was used to because of the increased moisture retention and decreased air flow. Just as animals that live outdoors need to care for their homes to keep them from becoming less effective, so too do I need to keep my own shelter in good working condition.
Totemism won’t automatically make everyone more connected to nature. But those of us who do choose to incorporate totems into our spiritual practices often find we can’t help but become reintegrated into the planetary dance of seasons and cycles. We rekindle our love for the world around us and act with more responsibility toward it.
The Power of Mythology
Humans are storytellers; we share lessons, ideas, and morals through our stories. The natural world has always provided us with a rich fabric for our stories, myths, and folklore. When we tell a story about an animal, the totem of that animal species then “includes” the tale in itself; the story becomes a part of it. Totems are then able to help us not only access that legend or myth but also to help us understand the animal behaviors and relationships that inspired the storyteller in the first place.
You can learn a lot about the contentious relationships many Europeans and their American descendants have had with wolves over the centuries by exploring the Big Bad Wolf. This caricature of Canis lupus may be found chasing pigs, goats, and even human children in stories from Germany, France, and elsewhere, and it has carried even further by modern media. The totem Gray Wolf has helped me to connect that character to the deep fear and misunderstanding about wolves that run in my culture’s psyche and how it has negatively affected the very real, flesh-and-blood wolves that are now highly endangered in many places in the world.
Because they embody these stories and the natural history behind them, totems can also help us to write new myths about them and their children. For several years I’ve written myths about totems like Gray Wolf, Wolverine, Arctic Fox, and many others. I especially like writing about animals that have been unfairly maligned either because they’re predators or are otherwise inconvenient for our needs. I meditate with the totems in mind and we write the story together; they inspire me and I choose the words. In this small way I try to change the way my culture views these misunderstood beings.
For Mutual Benefit
Most of the material available on totems promises us that we can gain lessons and tools from the totems all to help us change our lives for the better. While we shouldn’t focus on that aspect exclusively, there’s nothing wrong with asking for help.
When humans create rituals and other spiritual practices, we can call on totems (among other beings) to join us in these rites. Sometimes it’s an invitation to a celebration where the goal is simply to enjoy each other’s company and be happy about something good in the world. Other times we’re asking the totems to help us with something, like a challenge we face or a lesson to be learned. Whenever I want to find a job or other work, I ask the totems American Badger and River Otter to help me out. I call on them in a ritual I do before starting my job hunt: I ask Badger to help me stay tenacious, strong, and patient; I ask Otter for help finding work I would enjoy and reminding me to take time out to play no matter what I’m doing.
It’s not just about what we humans can get out of the bargain; totems do not exist only to impart great wisdom upon us. Their main concern is care for their physical counterparts, and an often-neglected part of totemic practice is asking how to give back to the totems and their children and doing what we can to help them. Several of my bioregional totems guided me to become more responsible for the land I live on and near, and part of that included adopting a stretch of the Columbia River shoreline north of Portland. Several times a year I pick up trash and other detritus and test the water for pollutants. Doing so helps animals that might otherwise mistake the litter for food, and it gives data to organizations that help keep the water from getting more polluted, which is good for every being that relies on the river.
“It Just Sounded Interesting”
Curiosity is a valid reason for stepping onto a particular spiritual path. Maybe an animal or other being showed up in a dream and you wondered whether it was a totem trying to get your attention. Or maybe you’re in a stage of spiritual exploration and totemism is a subject that calls to you, even if you can’t exactly say why. You might even have gotten this book as a gift and decided to give it a try for the heck of it. Whatever your way, don’t think you have to leap in with both feet in order to be a genuine totemic practitioner.
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Josie is recovering from a bad bout of depression. One of the exercises her therapist had her do was to make a list of parts of her life she felt like she’d let go of and wanted to return to. At the top of the list she writes “spirituality.” She had gone to church with her family as a child, but now in her twenties she’s interested in branching out a bit. She happens to pass by a metaphysical bookstore on her way home from work one day and decides to take a peek. She ends up buying a few books, including one on animal totems. She’d always liked animals but this is the first time she’s thought of them being a part of her spiritual life. When she gets home, she curls up with her supper and the totemism book and begins to read …
There are plenty of other reasons you might like to work with totems. Perhaps you’ve already identified one or two totems that have made themselves known to you and you want to find out more about working with them. Or you might already be following a nature-based spiritual path and want to bring in totems to some of your practices. Your reasons are your own; you aren’t limited to the ones I’ve mentioned here.
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Now that I’ve introduced you to some of the totems, in the next chapter we’ll take a closer look at how they’re all connected and how to start creating relationships with them.
6. While I will largely be talking about the totems of extant species and those native to this world, if you happen to meet, say, Hyaenadon Gigas or Domestic Pig as totems of your bioregion, you can still use the material in this book. They might have a little different perspective than their living and/or wild counterparts, but they may be able to give you some unique perspectives on the land.
7. It could be argued that “Planet” and “Moon” could just be lumped in with “Asteroid” and so forth under the totem “Space Rock,” especially in the wake of the controversy over whether Pluto is a planet or not. I believe totemism is in large part human conversation with the rest of nature, and so we do contribute our categorization to the matters at hand.
8. The Medicine Cards (St. Martin’s Press, 1999) are also a very good example of something to avoid in nonindigenous totemism—appropriation. Sams and Carson, among many other predominantly white authors, tout their work as “Native American.” In actuality these works are usually mishmashes of random bits of lore taken from assorted indigenous American cultures and slapped together with some New Age material: The Medicine Cards, along with some vaguely racist content (choice quote: “All of our petroglyphs [in North America] speak of the Motherland, Mu, and the disaster that brought the red race to North America … .” (201) There’s already enough misinformation about indigenous American cultures as it is without people making such inaccurate and hyperromanticized claims like that. If you want Native American spirituality, figure out which culture you’re talking about and then find a way to talk to them directly, if they’re open to it. (Okay, rant over.)
9. I have developed a thirty-four card deck that can be used to get in touch with the totem of any species of animal out there, not through specific species cards, but through more generalized traits like what continent the species is native to, what phylum it’s a part of, and so on. The readings are interspersed with guided meditations, and while it’s a more involved process than just laying out a few cards from an eighty-card deck, it’s much more thorough and, in my experience, accurate. The deck is not available commercially, but I do explain how to make your own in my book DIY Totemism: Your Personal Guide to Animal Totems (Megalithica Books, 2008).