Abstract

As animal representations gain academic popularity, it is time to wonder whether they are connected to a spiritual factor, if there is any. This article starts from the concept of totemism in order to introduce totemic animals, whose role is to link the natural to the divine. Totemic animals take the shape of specific real animals, thus absorbing the many cultural meanings that have been constructed around them. It is the purpose of this article to explain that a totemic animal is a literary figure which acts as a catalyst for a spiritual subject to experience what could be referred to as animal spirituality. For this reason, this article presents an analysis of some of the features of totemic animals, with interspecies communication being the most salient one. This approach is applied to totemic animals in literary texts so as to examine how they trigger the spiritual experience. Three poems by Mexican writer José Emilio Pacheco and two by Miren Agur Meabe and Guadalupe Grande are studied to illustrate both the diversity and the richness of the modes of representation of totemic animals, as well as how they call for deeper research.