definition of totem
David Dalton
totemic spirit, which I call totemic someone. Also I want to know
if any natives or others consider their totems to be deities to them,
which I do. And does druidism or celtic shamanism have any tradition
of totems?
When I get a significant sign from a member of another species I say that
I have that species as a totem species and that the totemic someone of that
species, which (the totemic someone) I denote in capitals as Species
Name, is one of my totem deities. I also say that Species Name
is the totem too. Human is also one of my deities but I don't
consider Human to be a totem deity since the human species is my
species and not another species. Some may also have totems which
don't come from a current significant sign but may have come from
a distant past significant sign and which are totems to the tribe.
I don't have any totems of that form.
I define the totemic someone of a species as the smallest (in mass,
or if there is a tie in mass, in volume) someone which contains
the species (including the bodies of species members as well as
their spirits or energy bodies).
For more discussion on this see the web page
http://www.nfld.com/~dalton/deities.html
which is a subpage of my Salmon on the Thorns web page
http://www.nfld.com/~dalton/dtales.html
.
David