The Lost Totems: A Journey Back to Meaning
A totem is not just a symbol. It is a marker of identity, a connection to something larger than oneself. In many cultures, a totem is an animal, a plant, or an object that carries deep significance—something that represents a group, a lineage, or an individual’s inner nature. A totem is not chosen arbitrarily; it reveals itself over time, through experience, through intuition.
Long before corporations stamped their logos onto everything, before people built their identities around brands, humans found meaning in these personal and tribal symbols. A totem was a way of saying, This is who I am. This is what I belong to. This is what gives me strength.
Today, totems have been replaced by artificial stand-ins—status symbols, fashion choices, digital avatars. But the human need for something deeper has not disappeared. The question is: Have we lost our real totems? And can we find them again?
The Structure Beneath the Symbols
The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss saw totems not as mystical objects, but as structural elements of human thought. He argued that totems were part of the way people made sense of the world—markers that helped organize society, identity, and relationships. Totemism, in his view, was not just about animals or spirits; it was about patterns. The way humans divide the world into categories—sacred and mundane, self and other, belonging and exile.
Even though we no longer see ourselves as “Wolf Clan” or “Eagle Clan,” this structuring instinct has not left us. It has simply mutated. Today, people form identities around sports teams, political parties, online subcultures, and consumer brands. The modern world still assigns totems—only now they are sold to you. A real totem is not something you buy. It is something that calls to you.
If Lévi-Strauss revealed the hidden structure behind totems, Mircea Eliade showed us what we lost when those structures were stripped of their meaning.
Eliade and the Sacred Return
Mircea Eliade, a historian of religion, believed that modern life had banished the sacred. He wrote about the distinction between sacred time and profane time—how ancient societies saw life not as a meaningless sequence of events, but as a cycle filled with meaning, ritual, and cosmic significance. In the past, totems were part of the sacred. They were more than just symbols; they were living bridges between the human and the divine, the personal and the eternal.
Eliade’s argument is simple: when we lose our totems, we lose our grounding. We drift in a world that feels increasingly empty, where every experience is just another transaction, where everything is interchangeable. Without sacred markers, people search for meaning in synthetic totems—corporate brands, influencer identities, mass-produced narratives. But these things do not anchor the soul. They only pull it further away from itself.
And yet, Eliade also offers hope. The sacred is never truly lost—it is only forgotten. A real totem never disappears; it simply waits to be recognized. It reveals itself in moments of connection, memory, and intuition.
Perhaps your totem is an object you have always carried, even when you had no reason to keep it. Perhaps it is a place you are drawn to, without knowing why. Perhaps it is an image or an animal that has followed you through life, appearing again and again.
The moment of recognition is not logical; it is something you feel in your gut. The sacred does not argue—it simply appears.
The Journey Back
If the modern world has stolen your totems, it has not destroyed them. They are still there, waiting. But finding them requires something rare in an age of distractions: attention.
Look closely at your life. The real totem is not in a store, not on a screen, not in the latest trend. It is in the moments that have stayed with you, the images and objects that have always meant more than they should.
Lévi-Strauss taught us to see the structure. Eliade taught us to recover the sacred. But the only person who can find your totem is you.
And once you do, the world will not seem so empty.