Pagan Book Reviews

Animal Totem Astrology
Debbie Burns
Lansdowne, 2001
~78 pages

The concept for this book was really neat; the execution, on the other hand, fell far short of full potential. This was an attempt at a totemic zodiac, a combination of neopagan totemic qualities and traditional Western astrology, mixed in (supposedly) with some indigenous beliefs about the animals associated with certian birth months (though the source material pretty much confirms a basis in plastic shamanism.

The author explains the animals associated with each month (conveniently, they correspond to the twelve Western zodiac signs). She also brings in seasonal and time-of-day correspondences to try to show the qualities of people according to when they were born, all based on totemic qualities mixed with common astrological information.

Unfortunately, what could have been a really neat idea fell flat. I would love to see someone work with totem animals in association with Western astrology to create a new system–but I’d like to see it done in more depth. I highly doubt that what was described here is traditional to any tribe,a dn i think the author would have been much better off starting from scratch, studying both astrology and modern totemism, and then creating her own system based on these two areas of spirituality. Instead, she draws from some of the worst offenders of plastic shamanism, including Sun Bear and Jamie Sams, and perpetuates a whole bunch of drek. Her bibliography is barely over a dozen books, and almost all of them are New Age treatments of indigenous topics. She presents the whole thing as genuine “Native American” spirituality, in the grand tradition of her predecessors, and the whole thing ends up a train wreck.

I’m giving it an extra half of a pawprint, just because I like the concept (as long as it’s presented as a new system). But other than that, meh.

One and a half pawprints.
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