Nearly every spirit animal site gives you one animal per zodiac sign. Twelve animals, twelve paragraphs, done. I found that unsatisfying enough to spend the better part of a year on the alternative, and the alternative turned out to be 192 animals and considerably more reading than I had bargained for.
Where this started
I took one of those twelve-animal quizzes and got the wolf. So did a friend sitting next to me, who is nothing like me in any respect I can identify. We were both born in the same five-week window, and that was the entire basis on which we had been handed the same animal.
That bothered me more than it probably should have. A zodiac sign tells you something real, but it tells you something enormously broad, and any Scorpio who has read a generic horoscope already knows this. Personality type tells you something narrower and more behavioural, but strips out everything symbolic and seasonal that makes astrology worth reading in the first place. I wanted to know what happened if you crossed them.
Twelve signs multiplied by sixteen types is 192. I did not fully register what that number meant until I was about forty animals in and realised I had committed to writing four times more than I had assumed.
The rule I set myself
Every animal within a sign had to belong to the same broad family, so the sixteen would read as variations on one idea rather than a grab bag. Leo is entirely cats. Aries is wild sheep and goats. Aquarius went almost entirely to the deep sea. Where I broke this rule it was deliberate, and you can see the joins.
This constraint is the single best decision I made, and I nearly abandoned it twice. It is easy to find one animal that captures Leo. Finding sixteen distinct cats, each mapped to a different way of moving through the world, means going a long way past the lion into the marbled cat, the caracal, the Pallas's cat. That is where the research actually starts, and it is where the project stopped feeling like a quiz and started feeling like a bestiary.
How I chose them
Each sign began with whatever family matched its traditional symbol. The Ram gave Aries its wild sheep. The Bull gave Taurus its wild cattle. Cancer's crab opened onto the whole strange world of shelled and soft-bodied marine animals, which I did not expect to enjoy as much as I did.
Once the family was fixed, the job became finding sixteen members genuinely different from each other. Not sixteen names, sixteen behaviours. It is not enough that the Nubian ibex and the Alpine ibex are different species; they had to solve different problems in different ways, and those solutions had to map onto something you might recognise in a person.
Sometimes the animal came first. I read about wolverines for an hour one evening for no particular reason and came away certain one belonged in Capricorn, because a wolverine's willingness to take on things several times its size is a very specific kind of stubbornness. Sometimes the type came first and I went hunting. Gemini's ISTP needed something that changes its surface without changing itself, which is how a gecko ended up in a sign otherwise full of birds.
What I cut
Far more than made it. Three categories went early:
- Domestic animals. Dogs and house cats carry so much personal association that they drown out anything a description can add. The one exception is a sand cat, which is genuinely wild and looks like it wants to sit on your lap, and that tension is the point.
- Animals with nothing to say. If I could not find something genuinely interesting about how the creature lives, it did not earn a slot, however good the name sounded. I lost several favourites this way.
- Repeats. All 192 are unique. This was much harder than I expected in the water signs, where the candidate pool overlaps heavily between Cancer, Scorpio and Pisces.
The mythical animals were the argument I had with myself for longest. I wanted this grounded in real zoology. But four signs have symbols that are themselves hybrid or legendary, and pretending otherwise felt like a dodge. So Capricorn keeps its sea-goat, Sagittarius keeps its unicorn, pegasus and kelpie, Pisces keeps its selkie, and Libra opens on a phoenix. Around a dozen of the 192 are creatures of legend. The rest you could in principle go and see.
The part I keep changing
It is not finished and I have stopped pretending it will be. Entries get rewritten when I find better natural history, when a description reads as flattery rather than observation, or when an animal turns out not to be what I thought it was.
Leo's ESTP slot held a lioness for months before someone pointed out the obvious: a lioness is not a species, it is a female lion, and the sign already opened with a lion. The natural history section had nothing to say that the first entry had not said better. It is now the Asiatic lion, which survives in exactly one forest in Gujarat and has a far more interesting story. I should have caught it myself.
A handful of other entries are queued for the same treatment, mostly ones where I leaned harder on a nice name than on the creature behind it. Those will get worked through over the coming months.
The mythology sections, and why some are short
These are the ones I am most careful with, and the ones I have rewritten most often.
Where a real tradition has a documented story about an animal, I name it. Narasimha in Hindu tradition. The lion capital Ashoka raised at Sarnath, which is now India's state emblem. The selkie in Orkney and Shetland folklore. Where no such story exists, I do not invent an attribution. The note gets written as legend with no nation attached, because making up folklore and assigning it to a real people is a small dishonesty that would quietly undermine everything else on the page.
This is why some mythology sections are three sentences and others are five. A few of these animals were simply not known to the cultures whose myths I could actually verify, and I would rather write three honest sentences than five invented ones.
What is next
Continued revision of the weaker entries, which is slow and unglamorous and the thing most likely to improve the site. Per-sign pages so the bestiary can be browsed rather than only discovered through the quiz. And eventually a short reading list per sign, because several of these animals deserve far more than my few hundred words.
If you spot an error in a natural history section I would genuinely like to know. The contact page reaches one person, and corrections get made.
I research and write the Zodiac & Soul bestiary — all 192 entries, the natural history and the mythology behind each one. More about the project on the About page, or say hello via contact.