The tradition of animal spirits holds that particular creatures embody distinct qualities and serve as guides, guardians, or emblems for individuals and groups, a family of beliefs found, in very different forms, across many cultures. Its most anthropologically studied form is totemism, in which a clan or lineage stands in a special relationship to a particular animal species, treating it as ancestor, kin, and emblem, often with prohibitions against killing or eating it; the concept, drawn from Ojibwe (doodem) and Australian Aboriginal material, became a central topic of early anthropology through Durkheim, Freud, and later Levi-Strauss, who read totemic animals less as objects of worship than as a symbolic language, creatures "good to think with," a system of differences by which a society maps its own divisions. A distinct strand is the idea of a personal animal guardian obtained through vision or dream, prominent in many Native North American traditions (sometimes loosely termed the "spirit animal", a phrase now widely, and often inappropriately, borrowed in popular culture).
In modern Neo-Pagan and New Age practice these ideas have been reworked into the "power animal" or "totem" as a source of personal guidance. The underlying intuition is widespread: that the natures of animals, the cunning of the fox, the vision of the eagle, the endurance of the bear, offer a vocabulary for human character, kinship, and the sacred.