Part One: Faith

Chapter One: Elementary My Dear

1.8 Animism

Perhaps the feeling of nakedness that is attributed to Adam and Eve is best understood as a parable representing the feelings of isolation, or “nakedness”, that came with our self-awareness. They became aware of themselves as individuals. It became apparent that they were individual and separate from the world around them. (I shall argue later on that this feeling of separateness is an artificial construct - a side effect of language - that we have yet to dispel as myth, and that remains the primary reason for the disassociating world view that seems prevalent in our species, and is at the root of many of our fears and anxieties.) And concurrent with this awareness, came the awareness, or ability to conceptualize our own mortality. Our knowledge of our own eventual death was achieved; gone for good was any possibility of maintaining the “blissful” ignorance of the purely animal state of being. It should not be difficult to imagine how that feeling of vulnerability might have felt similar to being exposed, or being “naked”.

At some point in our evolutionary development, the earliest members of the Human Race began to project this newly evolved sense of “self” out into the world around us. Since “we”, as self-aware individuals, can only realize ourselves in the singular, or as one unique position in space, separate and distinct, it is understandable that our conception of the spirits existing in the Unseen World would closely resemble the spirit that existed within ourselves. We perceived them as individuals. Individuals with very much human qualities. It was not, given the sophistication of the early human mind, unreasonable to assume that the spirits existing in nature had the same basic characteristics as a human individual.  Animism¹ began to grace everything around us with spirit.

Compton’s Encyclopedia² describes animism as “A religious belief that everything on Earth is imbued with a powerful spirit, capable of helping or harming human needs...” and that “This faith in a universally shared life force was involved in the earliest forms of worship. The concept has survived in many primitive societies, particularly among the tribes of sub-Saharan Africa, the aborigines of Australia, some islanders in the South Pacific, and North American Indians.” The word comes from the Latin anima, which means “breath of life” or “soul”.

The word animism carries a slightly different connotation in different scientific disciplines. In psychology and biology, for example, it conveys the idea of Mind as a distinct and separate process from the physicality of the brain, yet at the same time utilizing the brain and nerves for it’s expression.  In philosophy it is also called panpsychism³ and posits the notion that all things in nature posses a spirit. Animism was coined by the 18th-century German physician and chemist Georg Ernst Stahl who used it

“to describe his theory that the soul is the vital principle responsible for organic development. Since the late 19th century, however, the term has been mainly associated with anthropology and the British anthropologist Sir Edward Burnett Tylor, who described the origin of religion and primitive beliefs in terms of animism. In Primitive Culture (1871) Tylor defined animism as the general belief in spiritual beings and considered it "a minimum definition of religion." He asserted that all religions, from the simplest to the most complex, involve some form of animism. According to Tylor, primitive peoples, defined as those without written traditions, believe that spirits or souls are the cause of life in human beings; they picture souls as phantoms, resembling vapors or shadows, which can transmigrate from person to person, from the dead to the living, and from and into plants, animals, and lifeless objects. In deriving his theory, Tylor assumed that an animistic philosophy developed in an attempt to explain the causes of sleep, dreams, trances, and death; the difference between a living body and a dead one; and the nature of the images that one sees in dreams and trances.”

- "Animism," Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia 2000 http://encarta.msn.com © 1997-2000 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Before you could say “Jumping Jehovah”, spirit was just about everywhere animating, or giving life to, everything. In people. In animals. In plants. Even in inanimate objects like stones or plants, or in sacred places such as glens, fields, or water falls. Spirit, like that which dwelt inside ourselves, was seen to be the animating (and invisible) force that animated all of nature.

This expansive if not chaotic view seems an acceptable one for a culture that had yet to develop any truly complex organizational skills. Once humans learned to organize and centralize, so then too did they reflect this “improvement” in their concepts of spirit and probably lead directly to the idea of deities. Deities who would represent the central organizers of the various animating energies. “Chiefs” of the spirits who would organize their energies in much the same way as the Chief of the earthly tribe or group was given the role of administering the duties of the individual members - a clear case of anthropomorphism? (don‘t panic: see the Side Track directly below) And as specification came to be incorporated into this increasingly organized social grouping, the priests would come act as the direct intermediaries to those deities. It would be thousands of years more before that concept of organizing deity would come to be incorporated into one, or monotheistic, Deity.

Side Track: We were speaking moments ago about the importance of words and their usage. I must introduce here a word that many of you may already know. Even so, a little refresher may prove helpful. The word is Anthropomorphism. OK. Now don’t freak out. It’s really not that bad. But it is an essential concept for the discussion at hand and for those that will follow. So let’s tackle this thing slowly. First, lets try to pronounce this new word we are going to need. AN THROW POE (like Edgar Allan) MORE FIZZ UM. Try it several times. It took me a few times to get it to comfortably roll off my tongue. Now lets look at the literal, dictionary, definition: “Attribution of human motivation, characteristics, or behavior to inanimate objects, animals, or natural phenomena.” In other words we make something “human like”. We morph (change) it into something anthro (man - like anthro plogy, the study of man), or manlike.

As we would do much later with deity, we anthropomorphized (wink, wink, nudge, nudge! Know what I mean?!) spirit, assuming all spirit (and later Deity) to experience itself, and express itself, in roughly the same was as we experience ourselves. We would assume that all spirit would have qualities and behaviors similar to ours. Thus, spirits could often be mischievous. Or they could be helpful. Or the spirits could get very angry. And be horribly destructive and spiteful.

#1 animism: (Amer. Her. 3rd Ed.) 1. The attribution of conscious life to natural objects or to nature itself. 2. The belief in the existence of spiritual beings that are separable or separate from bodies. 3. The hypothesis holding that an immaterial force animates the universe.  [Back to Text]

#2 From Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia © 1998 The Learning Company, Inc. [Back to Text] © 1998 The Learning Company, Inc. [Back to Text]

#3 panpsychism: (Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary) The theory that all nature is psychical or has a psychical aspect; the theory that every particle of matter has a psychical character or aspect. “Fechner affords a conspicuous instance of the idealistic tendency to mysterize nature in his panpsychicism, or that form of noumenal idealism which holds that the universe is a vast communion of spirits, souls of men, of animals, of plants, of earth and other planets, of the sun, all embraced as different members in the soul of the world.” --Encyc. Brit.  [Back to Text]