Animism
Animists believe that all matter is self-aware and is capable of thought and action. The soul, spirit, or sentience exists not only in human beings, but also in animals, plants, rocks, geographic features such as mountains and rivers, and other aspects of the natural environment. Examples drawn from various animist traditions include water sprites, vegetation deities, and tree spirits. Animism may also attribute a life force to abstract concepts such as words, names, or even mythological metaphors. Opinions differ on whether animism refers to an ancestral mode of religious experience common to indigenous peoples around the world or to a religion that exists independently of any cultural setting. The term animism, one of anthropology's earliest concepts, was defined in the late 19th century by Edward Burnett Tylor. It remains a useful term, even though the universalist views of the man who coined it have fallen out of favor. Multiculturalism has won the field, and a multiplicity of world cultures display many, most, or even all the fundamental attributes of animism.
Edward Burnett Tylor, unlike contemporary anthropologists, believed that all societies at specific levels of development are essentially the same, and that they develop in the same way. Nowhere in his writing does the plural “cultures” appear. In his view, culture is synonymous with civilization, rather than something particular to unique societies. In part, this universalist view was the result of his Quaker upbringing, which upheld the value of a universal humanity. Another result of his Quaker upbringing was Tylor’s refusal to accept the concept of race as scientifically significant in the study of culture. This was unusual in Victorian scientific circles. The biology of evolution was introduced by Charles Darwin in “The Origin of Species” (1859). Darwin expanded his theories to include human evolution in “The Descent of Man” (1871), which was published the same year as Tylor’s “Primitive Culture.” While Darwin concentrated on biology, Tylor focused solely on the evolution of human culture. In “Primitive Culture” he clearly defined culture, for the first time, as an object of study and provided a systematic method for studying it. He was, therefore, one of the founding fathers of scientific anthropology.
According to Tylor, the science of culture is based on three essential premises: the existence of one culture, its development through one progression, and humanity as united by one mind. In his view, all societies were essentially alike and capable of being ranked by their different levels of cultural advancement. Tylor maintained that all societal belief systems passed through three basic stages of development beginning with savagery, transitioning through barbarism, and ultimately to civilization. The earliest stage of savagery featured largely in Tylor’s study of culture. “Savage” derives from the Latin term for forest-dweller, and in the Victorian era it possessed both neutral and positive connotations in addition to the negative connotations that remain today. Societies within each stage of development have superficial differences that mask their fundamental similarity, and the anthropologist’s job is to identify the latter. Determining where the group stood on the hierarchical ladder of cultural development provided the context for interpreting all aspects of the society by comparing it with others around the world in the same stage of development.
For Tylor, the fact that modern religious practitioners continued to believe in spirits demonstrated that contemporary worshippers are no more advanced than primitive societies because they have excluded science from their understanding of the world. Tylor perceived the modern religious belief in God as a "survival" of primitive ignorance. Tylor, however, did not believe that atheism was the logical end of cultural and religious evolution, but instead proposed a minimalist form of monotheist deism. Deists believe that God, having created the cosmos as a closed system, remains detached from its operations. Deism tends to stress rational thought and science as a way of discovering truth. Quakerism, Tylor’s boyhood faith, shares many attributes with Deism. The founder of Quakerism, George Fox, believed that God was accessible to anyone by looking inward and being attentive to what he called the “inner light.” For deists, this inner light is the inherent rational capacity of the mind.
Below is a passage from the first chapter (“The Science of Culture”) of Edward Burnett Tylor’s “Primitive Culture.”
“Nowhere, perhaps, are broad views of historical development more needed than in the study of religion. Notwithstanding all that has been written to make the world acquainted with the lower theologies, the popular ideas of their place in history and their relation to the faiths of higher nations are still of the medieval type. It is wonderful to contrast some missionary journals with Max Müller’s Essays, and to set the unappreciating hatred and ridicule that is lavished by narrow hostile zeal on Brahmanism, Buddhism, Zoroastrism, besides the catholic sympathy with which deep and wide knowledge can survey those ancient and noble phases of man’s religious consciousness; nor, because the religions of savage tribes may be rude and primitive compared with the great Asiatic systems, do they lie too low for interest and even for respect. The question really lies between understanding and misunderstanding them.
Few who will give their minds to master the general principles of savage religion will ever again think it ridiculous, or the knowledge of it superfluous to the rest of mankind. Far from its beliefs and practices being a rubbish-heap of miscellaneous folly, they are consistent and logical in so high a degree as to begin, as soon as even roughly classified, to display the principles of their formation and development; and these principles prove to be essentially rational, though working in a mental condition of intense and inveterate ignorance. It is with a sense of attempting an investigation which bears very closely on the current theology of our own day, that I have set myself to examine systematically, among the lower races, the development of Animism; that is to say, the doctrine of souls and other spiritual beings in general. More than half of the present work is occupied with a mass of evidence from all regions of the world, displaying the nature and meaning of this great element of the Philosophy of Religion, and tracing its transmission, expansion, restriction, modification, along the course of history into the midst of our own modern thought. Nor are the questions of small practical moment which have to be raised in a similar attempt to trace the development of certain prominent Rites and Ceremonies—customs so full of instruction as to the inmost powers of religion, whose outward expression and practical result they are.”
Tylor believed that the defining trait of the primitive mind was its inability to think abstractly. Because numbers are abstractions, counting was limited to the concrete number of fingers or toes, for example, followed by “a lot” Language was nonexistent. Similarly, primitives could not group similar objects into abstract categories such as all trees, or all rocks, or all flowers. Instead, the primitive saw only individual trees, but could not bundle individual trees into the abstract category “forest” In this concrete existence each object had a unique identity or personality that could not be replaced by any other, so primitives inhabited a world of singular objects. They were also unable to comprehend events such as thunder and lightning in a logical fashion because they lacked the ability to formulate abstract natural laws. Instead, primitives projected their emotions onto the world around them as a means of explaining natural events. In response to the threat posed by thunder, for example, the primitive invents an angry supernatural being to explain it. When a tree ceases to bear fruit, the tree’s spirit must be unhappy. When a person gets sick, spirits associated with that person must be unhappy or angry. Tylor called the primitive belief in spirits “animism.”
Sociologist Auguste Comte developed the theory of positivism, in which he establishes that society progresses through three well-defined stages. These stages are the theological stage, the metaphysical stage, and the positive stage. Like Comte, anthropologist Tylor held that the progress of culture was a slow replacement of this magical thinking with the power of reason. He produced a narrative of human evolution that begins with global supernaturalism in the savage stage. Supernaturalism coexists with the development of language, laws, and institutions in the barbaric stage. In advanced civilizations, like Tylor’s own, reason and scientific thinking predominate. This is not a rational utopia since magical thinking persists in the present. The primitive tendency to imagine objects as having a life of their own exists even within the most civilized human beings, who might think in a moment of frustration that a broken watch was inhabited by an evil spirit. Tylor did not believe that modern culture is ideal, but he did view it as being fundamentally better than that of primitive culture.
Evolutionary anthropology came under fire at the close of the 19th century from within anthropology itself. There were numerous contributing factors, including a new emphasis on the importance of anthropologists doing their own fieldwork rather than examining the reports of others. The most important criticism was that of the American anthropologist Franz Boas (1858-1942). A German immigrant to the United States, he was influenced by German Romantic philosophy which included Herder’s insistence on cultural particularity. In 1896, Boas published an influential critique of Tylor’s science, “The Limitations of the Comparative Method of Anthropology,” in which he persuasively challenged the basic notions of psychic unity and independent invention upon which Victorian evolutionary anthropology rested. He argued throughout his work for cultural pluralism, for “cultures” in the plural, inaugurating the shift of anthropological thought from its traditional universalist stance to the new, particular theory of culture that characterized twentieth-century thought.
Many anthropologists ceased using the term animism since it had become associated with obsolescent early anthropological theories and religious polemics. In time, the term was also claimed by religious group, Indigenous communities and nature worshippers, who felt that it provided a good description of their own beliefs. Some have actively identified themselves as “animists.” The term was also readopted by various scholars, who began using it in a different way, placing the focus on knowing how to behave toward other beings (some of whom may not be human). As religious studies scholar Graham Harvey (author of “The Handbook of Contemporary Animism”) stated, while the “old animist” definition had been problematic, the term animism was nevertheless “of considerable value as a critical, academic term for a style of religious and cultural relating to the world.” Graham Harvey has written extensively about indigenous religions and animism. Harvey practices modern Paganism with druid orders and as animism with ecological activists. He is married and also participates in Jewish celebrations with his wife.
As noted, there is disagreement among scholars as to whether animism is merely a singular, broadly encompassing religious belief or a worldview in and of itself, comprising many diverse mythologies found worldwide in many diverse cultures. This is also a disagreement regarding any ethical position that animism may or may not hold. Does animism ignore questions of ethics altogether, or, by endowing various non-human elements of nature with spirituality or personhood, does it promote a complex system (“Eco-animism”) of ecological ethics? Animism is not the same as pantheism, although the two are sometimes confused and some religions are both pantheistic and animistic. While animists believe everything to be spiritual in nature, they do not necessarily see the spiritual nature of everything in existence as being united (monism) the way that pantheists do. Animism places emphasis on the uniqueness of each individual soul. In pantheism, everything shares the same spiritual essence, rather than everything having a distinct spirit or soul. The world features a multitude of ethic religions, both past and present, and most of these can be described as partially, or even entirely animist in nature.
Most religious traditions of Sub-Saharan Africa are basically a complex form of animism with polytheistic and shamanistic elements and include ancestor worship. In East Africa the Kerma culture display animistic elements similar to other traditional African religions. In contrast, the later polytheistic Napatan and Meroitic periods, with displays of animals in Amulets and the esteemed antiques of Lions, appear to be an Animistic culture rather than a polytheistic culture. The Kermans likely treated Jebel Barkal as a special sacred site and passed it on to the Kushites and Egyptians who venerated the mesa. In North Africa, the traditional Berber religion includes the traditional polytheistic, animist, and in some rare cases, shamanistic, religions of the Berber people.
In the Indian-origin religions, namely Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism, the animistic aspects of nature worship and ecological conservation are part of the core belief system. Matsya Purana, a Hindu text, has a Sanskrit language shloka (hymn), which explains the importance of reverence of ecology. It states: "A pond equals ten wells, a reservoir equals ten ponds, while a son equals ten reservoirs, and a tree equals ten sons." Indian belief systems worship trees such as the Bodhi Tree and numerous superlative banyan trees, conserve the sacred groves of India, revere the rivers as sacred, and worship the mountains and their ecology. Panchavati are the sacred trees in Indic religions, which are sacred groves containing five type of trees.
The banyan is considered holy in several religious traditions of India. The Ficus benghalensis is the national tree of India. Vat Purnima is a Hindu festival related to the banyan tree and is observed by married women in North India and in the Western Indian states of Maharashtra, Goa, Gujarat. For three days of the month of Jyeshtha in the Hindu calendar (which falls in May–June in the Gregorian calendar) married women observe a fast, tie threads around a banyan tree, and pray for the well-being of their husbands. Thimmamma Marrimanu, sacred to Indian religions, has branches spread over five acres and was listed as the world's largest banyan tree in the 1989 Guinness World Records.
In Hinduism, the leaf of the banyan tree is said to be the resting place for the god Krishna. In the Bhagavat Gita, Krishna said, "There is a banyan tree which has its roots upward and its branches down, and the Vedic hymns are its leaves. One who knows this tree is the knower of the Vedas." In Buddhism's Pali canon, the banyan (Pali: nigrodha) is referenced numerous times. Typical metaphors allude to the banyan's epiphytic nature, likening the banyan's supplanting of a host tree as comparable to the way sensual desire (kāma) overcomes humans
Shendao (“the Way of the Gods”) is a term originated by Chinese folk religions influenced by, Mohist, Confucian and Taoist philosophy, referring to the divine order of nature or the Wuxing. The Shang dynasty's state religion was practiced from 1600 BCE to 1046 BCE and was built on the idea of spiritualizing natural phenomena. Shinto is the traditional Japanese folk religion and has many animist aspects. The kami, a class of supernatural beings, are central to Shinto. All things, including natural forces and well-known geographical locations, are thought to be home to the kami. The kami are worshipped at kamidana household shrines, family shrines, and jinja public shrines. The Ryukyuan religion of the Ryukyu islands is distinct from Shinto but shares similar characteristics
Muism, the native Korean belief, has many animist aspects. The various deities, called kwisin, are capable of interacting with humans and causing problems if they are not honored appropriately. In the indigenous Philippine folk religions, pre-colonial religions of Philippines and Philippine mythology, animism is part of their core beliefs as demonstrated by the belief in Anito and Bathala as well as their conservation and veneration of sacred Indigenous Philippine shrines, forests, mountains and sacred grounds.
Anito (“ancestor spirit”) refers to the various indigenous shamanistic folk religions of the Philippines, led by female or feminized male shamans known as babaylan. It includes belief in a spirit world existing alongside and interacting with the material world, as well as the belief that everything has a spirit, from rocks and trees to animals and humans to natural phenomena. In indigenous Filipino belief, the Bathala is the omnipotent deity which was derived from Sanskrit word for the Hindu supreme deity bhattara, as one of the ten avatars of the Hindu god Vishnu. The omnipotent Bathala also presides over the spirits of ancestors called Anito. Anitos serve as intermediaries between mortals and the divine, such as Agni (Hindu) who holds the access to divine realms; for this reason they are invoked first and are the first to receive offerings, regardless of the particular deity the worshipper wants to pray to.
Animism is evident in Abrahamic religions. The Old Testament and the Wisdom literature preach the omnipresence of God (Jeremiah 23:24; Proverbs 15:3; 1 Kings 8:27), and God is bodily present in the incarnation of his Son, Jesus Christ. (Gospel of John 1:14, Colossians 2:9). Apologists state that animism is not peripheral to Christian identity but is rather its nurturing home ground. In addition to the conceptual work the term animism performs, it provides insight into the relational character and common personhood of material existence. With rising awareness of ecological preservation, contemporary theologians like Mark I. Wallace argue for animistic Christianity that includes a biocentric approach that understands God being present in all earthly objects, such as animals, trees, and rocks. Mainstream theologians would describe this animistic/pantheistic viewpoint as heretical.
Pre-Islamic Arab religion can refer to the traditional polytheistic, animist, and in some rare cases, shamanistic, religions of the peoples of the Arabian Peninsula. The belief in jinn, invisible entities akin to spirits in the Western sense dominant in the Arab religious systems, hardly fit the description of Animism in a strict sense. The jinn are considered to be analogous to the human soul by living lives like that of humans, but they are not exactly like human souls. Neither are they the spirits of the dead. It is unclear if belief in jinn derived from nomadic or sedentary populations.
Some modern pagan groups, including Eco-pagans, describe themselves as animists, meaning that they respect the diverse community of living beings and spirits with whom humans share the world and cosmos. The New Age movement commonly demonstrates animistic traits in asserting the existence of nature spirits.
A shaman is a person regarded as having access to, and influence in, the world of benevolent and malevolent spirits, who typically enters into a trance state during a ritual, and practices divination and healing. Shamanism is based on the premise that shamans are intermediaries or messengers between the human world and the spirit worlds. Shamans are said to treat ailments and illnesses by mending the soul. Alleviating traumas affecting the soul or spirit restores the physical body of the individual to balance and wholeness. The shaman also enters supernatural realms or dimensions to obtain solutions to problems afflicting the community. Shamans may visit other worlds or dimensions to bring guidance to misguided souls and to ameliorate illnesses of the human soul caused by foreign elements. The shaman operates primarily within the spiritual world, which in turn affects the human world. The restoration of balance results in the elimination of an ailment.
Ecologist and philosopher David Abram advocates a less supernatural and much more ecological understanding of the shaman's role. Drawing upon his own field research in Indonesia, Nepal, and the Americas, Abram suggests that in animistic cultures, the shaman functions primarily as an intermediary between the human community and the more-than-human community of active agencies—the local animals, plants, and landforms (mountains, rivers, forests, winds, and weather patterns, all of which are felt to have their own specific sentience). Hence, the shaman's ability to heal individual instances of disease (or imbalance) within the human community is a byproduct of their more continual practice of balancing the reciprocity between the human community and the wider collective of animate beings in which that community is embedded.
Animism entails the belief that all living things have a soul, and thus, a central concern of animist thought surrounds how animals can be eaten, or otherwise used for humans' subsistence needs. The actions of non-human animals are viewed as "intentional, planned and purposive," and they are understood to be persons, as they are both alive, and communicate with others.
In animist worldviews, non-human animals are understood to participate in kinship systems and ceremonies with humans, as well as having their own kinship systems and ceremonies. Graham Harvey cited an example of an animist understanding of animal behavior that occurred at a powwow held by the Conne River Mi'kmaq in 1996; an eagle flew over the proceedings, circling over the central drum group. The assembled participants called out kitpu ('eagle'), conveying welcome to the bird and expressing pleasure at its beauty, and they later articulated the view that the eagle's actions reflected its approval of the event, and the Mi'kmaq's return to traditional spiritual practices. In animism, rituals are performed to maintain relationships between humans and spirits. Indigenous peoples often perform these rituals to appease the spirits and request their assistance during activities such as hunting and healing. In the Arctic region, certain rituals are common before the hunt to show respect for the spirits of animals.
Some animists also view plant and fungi life as persons and interact with them accordingly. The most common encounter between humans and these plant and fungi persons is with the former's collection of the latter for food, and for animists, this interaction typically has to be carried out respectfully. Graham Harvey cited the example of Māori communities in New Zealand, who often offer karakia invocations to sweet potatoes as they dig up the latter. While doing so, there is an awareness of a kinship relationship between the Māori and the sweet potatoes, with both understood as having arrived in Aotearoa together in the same canoes. In other instances, animists believe that interaction with plant and fungi persons can result in the communication of things unknown or even otherwise unknowable. Among some modern Pagans, for instance, relationships are cultivated with specific trees, who are understood to bestow knowledge or physical gifts, such as flowers, sap, or wood that can be used as firewood or to fashion into a wand; in return, these Pagans give offerings to the tree itself, which can come in the form of libations of mead or ale, a drop of blood from a finger, or a strand of wool.
Various animistic cultures also regard stones as being persons. Discussing ethnographic work conducted among the Ojibwe, Graham Harvey noted that their society generally conceived of stones as being inanimate, but with two notable exceptions: the stones of the Bell Rocks and those stones which are situated beneath trees struck by lightning, which were understood to have become Thunderers themselves. The Ojibwe conceived of weather as being capable of possessing personhood, with storms being conceived of as persons known as 'Thunderers' whose sounds conveyed messages and who engaged in seasonal conflict over the lakes and forests, throwing lightning at lake monsters. Wind, similarly, can be conceived as a person in animistic beliefs. The importance of specific locales is also a recurring element of animism, with some places being understood to be analogous to persons.
In the early 20th century, William McDougall defended a form of animism in his book Body and Mind: A History and Defense of Animism (1911). Physicist Nick Herbert has argued for "quantum animism" in which the mind permeates the world at every level, writing “The quantum consciousness assumption, which amounts to a kind of "quantum animism" likewise asserts that consciousness is an integral part of the physical world, not an emergent property of special biological or computational systems. Since everything in the world is on some level a quantum system, this assumption requires that everything be conscious on that level. If the world is truly quantum animated, then there is an immense amount of invisible inner experience going on all around us that is presently inaccessible to humans, because our own inner lives are imprisoned inside a small quantum system, isolated deep in the meat of an animal brain.”
Werner Krieglstein wrote the following about his quantum Animism: “Herbert's quantum Animism differs from traditional Animism in that it avoids assuming a dualistic model of mind and matter. Traditional dualism assumes that some kind of spirit inhabits a body and makes it move, a ghost in the machine. Herbert's quantum Animism presents the idea that every natural system has an inner life, a conscious center, from which it directs and observes its action.”
In “Error and Loss: A License to Enchantment,” Ashley Curtis (2018) has argued that the Cartesian idea of an experiencing subject facing off with an inert physical world is incoherent at its very foundation and that this incoherence is consistent with, rather than belied by Darwinism. Human reason (and its rigorous extension in the natural sciences) fits an evolutionary niche just as echolocation does for bats and infrared vision does for pit vipers, and is epistemologically on a par with, rather than superior to, such capabilities. The meaning or aliveness of the "objects" we encounter, rocks, trees, rivers, and other animals, thus depends for its validity not on a detached cognitive judgment, but purely on the quality of our experience. The animist experience, or the wolf's or raven's experience, thus become licensed as equally valid worldviews to the modern western scientific one; they are indeed more valid, since they are not plagued with the incoherence that inevitably arises when "objective existence" is separated from "subjective experience."
Graham Harvey believes that animism's views on personhood represented a radical challenge to the dominant perspectives of modernity, because it accords "intelligence, rationality, consciousness, volition, agency, intentionality, language, and desire" to non-humans. Similarly, it challenges the view of human uniqueness that is prevalent in both Abrahamic religions and Western rationalism.
Animist beliefs can also be expressed through artwork. For instance, among the Māori communities of New Zealand, there is an acknowledgement that creating art through carving wood or stone entails violence against the wood or stone person and that the persons who are damaged therefore have to be placated and respected during the process; any excess or waste from the creation of the artwork is returned to the land, while the artwork itself is treated with particular respect. Graham Harvey, therefore, argued that the creation of art among the Māori was not about creating an inanimate object for display, but rather a transformation of different persons within a relationship. Harvey expressed the view that animist worldviews were present in various works of literature such as the writings of Alan Garner, Leslie Silko, Barbara Kingsolver, Alice Walker, Daniel Quinn, Linda Hogan, David Abram, Patricia Grace, Chinua Achebe, Ursula Le Guin, Louise Erdrich, and Marge Piercy.
