Animism

[MrRING]

Animism is often equated with primitive or uneducated thought, but why is that? Is it really more absurd, or less intellegent, than other belief systems?

From Winkpedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism

Animism is the belief that personalized supernatural beings (or souls) inhabit all objects and govern their existence.

Animism (from animus, or anima, mind or soul), originally means the doctrine of spiritual beings, including human souls. It is often extended to include the belief that personalized, supernatural beings (or souls) endowed with reason, intelligence and volition inhabit ordinary objects as well as animate beings, and govern their existence (pantheism or animatism). This can be stated simply as "everything is alive" 'everything is conscious" or "everything has a soul".

Modern Neopagans sometimes describe their belief system as animist. One example of this is the idea that the Mother goddess and Horned god consist of everything that exists. Pantheists equate God with existence, a similar concept.

The term is also the name of a theory of religion, proposed by the anthropologist Sir E. B. Tylor in his 1871 book, Primitive Culture.

And here is a guy who has a page trying to put a spin on a modern American animism revival:

http://hpwsys.com/dave/

And here is a wild-eyed anti-animism Christian site:

http://religion-cults.com/Ancient/Animism/Animism.htm

 

[Anonymous]

By chance I recently picked up at a booksale "The tomorrow of death;: Or, The future life according to science" by Lois Figuier (also called "The Day after Death" in some editions). It's a swedish translation, published in the late 1870-ies, and I'm a sucker for old books.

I started reading it yesterday and the fisrt chapter deals with the nature of the human soul, mainly the relation between the body and soul, between materia and spirit. The author is of the idea that we consist of a mortal body made of matters, but that our soul is immortal and will survive the body. Animism is one of the theories (along with materialism) that he spends a lot of time debuking. It's interesting to get the 1800-century view on the argumentation, by a beliving christian too.

In this "verison", not much attention is placed on the animalism idea of "soulful" plants, animals and objects, but rather the idea that the soul of every person is running everything in the body... being responsible for every heartbeat, muscle tension and breath through consensius action.

 

[Anonymous]

Animism is a tricky thing, at least for me. Even as a neopagan I'm on the fence about it. I tend to think that plants and animals have some form of soul, which is why I thank my herbs when I harvest. That said, I don't thank the pig that my Italian sausage comes from, but I recognize that I'm eating what was once a living being and what might have been, in another life, a human.

 

[theredmeanie]

It's interesting to think about other 'things' than ourselves having a soul, spirit or a nature. We've all heard about houses that have a presence of good or evil, and we've all seen malevolent looking trees. We talk about spirit in a totally abstract way (the spirit of the age, dark ages).
I like the buddhist notion of objects having latent nature that is only revealed by interaction; a scalpel for example: a surgeon reveals one aspect of it's nature, a twisted psycho reveals another. It was all there to begin with.

Is it all just projective identification?

 

[Yithian]

Animism isn't that big a step from Pantheism, a world view I have a great deal of sympathy with.

I suppose the distinction is that in the former every individualised thing has a complete soul or spirit in itself.

It is, in some sense, 'complete'.

How far can we push this though?

Does every atom have a soul, does every particle?

How substantial does a 'thing' have to be to be granted a soul?

Every thought?

If i break a stone in two, do they split this soul or spirit?

Does a river have a spirit? Does it change over time? Where does this spirit reside if the matter of its 'body' is protean?

Many questions, few answers.

 

[skinny]

bump

I've gradually surrendered to the (to me) obvious reality of a living cosmos outside of the human perspective for a few years now and this video just bumped up my consciousness of how it works that there is person-ness outside the human. I like to think I had always intuited this paradigm without it being linguistically allowed in my brainways, probably because of my rigid protestant younglife, and I have always felt relationship to country and to landform and to creature in varied levels of equal measure.

Gordon here talks about Animism as a cosmology with heartbeat in a way I'd never heard before. I've had his book now for over a year and I'm visiting a chapter about every other month or so and forgetting it so I can come back after and do a read through quick and go oh yeah that's what he meant.

Gordo focuses his subject on a place @Mungoman knows very well, Lake Mungo, and introduces us to the concept of ancient living place as eternally curated museum and of ancestor as living, through the characters of @Mungoman and @Mungowoman. He references both blackfellas and whitefellas throughout, so get ready for cries of appropriation before too long.

Please enjoy the conversation he has with your mind.

 

[Yithian]

bump

I've gradually surrendered to the (to me) obvious reality of a living cosmos outside of the human perspective for a few years now and this video just bumped up my consciousness of how it works that there is person-ness outside the human. I like to think I had always intuited this paradigm without it being linguistically allowed in my brainways, probably because of my rigid protestant younglife, and I have always felt relationship to country and to landform and to creature in varied levels of equal measure.

Gordon here talks about Animism as a cosmology with heartbeat in a way I'd never heard before. I've had his book now for over a year and I'm visiting a chapter about every other month or so and forgetting it so I can come back after and do a read through quick and go oh yeah that's what he meant.

Gordo focuses his subject on a place @Mungoman knows very well, Lake Mungo, and introduces us to the concept of ancient living place as eternally curated museum and of ancestor as living, through the characters of @Mungoman and @Mungowoman. He references both blackfellas and whitefellas throughout, so get ready for cries of appropriation before too long.

Please enjoy the conversation he has with your mind.

Very interesting.

I'm not sure about his sneers at mere chronological time, however; it's horses for courses and I'd rather my heart surgeon be future oriented and focused suitably on the precise duration between my breaths and beats than immersed in a continual present of becoming.

Equally, there may well, as your man believes, be great wisdom to be gleaned (he would have learnt/received) from a synoptic view of existence that does not privilege (or even distinguish) present or future over past.

I don't see these two perspectives as mutually exclusive, nor do I suppose they are the only two productive lenses we can select from among according to our particular field of concern.

Where I do have difficulty (due, no doubt, to my ignorance) is that what we in the West have come to think of as mere 'things' may/should be granted personhood when they have agency: when they have acted to effect. I like this as a starting point (it begins to answer at least one of my questions in the old post above), but hasn't been fully explained.

Certainly, I can see the storm whose lightning starts a fire that destroys a wood, or the fertile soil that nourishes growth which feeds wildlife, as perhaps, viewable as having agency (do Sufists think similarly?). My problem is that (within the confines of that video) every example of such agency given is one in which Man interacts with 'things' and 'things' with man; the agency he discusses is exclusively the agency to influence Man, his body and his mind.

If Mankind were to go extinct—or to go wider, if all consciousness were to perish in some catastrophe—would these non-human 'persons' persist?

He states emphatically that lakes are persons, but is he claiming their personhood as an objective fact, or rather as a useful strategy to achieving a superior worldview? Rather how environmental campaigners seek personhood for rivers or whales in order to afford them legal protections...

Does he think the personhood of objects with agency is conditional on the presence of other consciousness to grant it? One assumes not, but he has not justified the alternative here.

Does his book fill in these blanks?

 

[skinny]

If Mankind were to go extinct—or to go wider, if all consciousness were to perish in some catastrophe—would these non-human 'persons' persist?

All consciousness is far broader than human experience. I think that’s kind of his main point. Persist in the sense of some human perceiving it? Ah there’s the rub.

I reckon he intimates that animist cultures accept that agency is inherent in the non-human / pre-human / post-human cosmos. Agency is the cosmos, in a way. We’re part of it but not central to it’s emanation. That’s hard for west to welcome, as you are no doubt aware over there in Occident.

Don’t think he says as much in this video, but it gets fleshed out a bit more in Ani.Mystic.

Thanks for raising the convo on this subject. I’m keen to explore all questions raised but the iphone is ifuckt

ill be at a keyboard n an hour or twoI

 

[skinny]

I'm not sure about his sneers at mere chronological time

I do not sneer at it either, but I do acknowledge the Indigenous paradigm of concentric time. You're born as a drop in a pond. Then the ripples emanate out to contact those of your Ma n Da n then the rest of the Fam. People you come into contact with are circular resonances of their own with connections to their relations. And so it goes. It's contact with people, not linear progress, that shapes existence. I am in alignment with that.

 

[Mungoman]

Very interesting.

I'm not sure about his sneers at mere chronological time, however; it's horses for courses and I'd rather my heart surgeon be future oriented and focused suitably on the precise duration between my breaths and beats than immersed in a continual present of becoming.

Equally, there may well, as your man believes, be great wisdom to be gleaned (he would have learnt/received) from a synoptic view of existence that does not privilege (or even distinguish) present or future over past.

I don't see these two perspectives as mutually exclusive, nor do I suppose they are the only two productive lenses we can select from among according to our particular field of concern.

Where I do have difficulty (due, no doubt, to my ignorance) is that what we in the West have come to think of as mere 'things' may/should be granted personhood when they have agency: when they have acted to effect. I like this as a starting point (it begins to answer at least one of my questions in the old post above), but hasn't been fully explained.

Certainly, I can see the storm whose lightning starts a fire that destroys a wood, or the fertile soil that nourishes growth which feeds wildlife, as perhaps, viewable as having agency (do Sufists think similarly?). My problem is that (within the confines of that video) every example of such agency given is one in which Man interacts with 'things' and 'things' with man; the agency he discusses is exclusively the agency to influence Man, his body and his mind.

If Mankind were to go extinct—or to go wider, if all consciousness were to perish in some catastrophe—would these non-human 'persons' persist?

He states emphatically that lakes are persons, but is he claiming their personhood as an objective fact, or rather as a useful strategy to achieving a superior worldview? Rather how environmental campaigners seek personhood for rivers or whales in order to afford them legal protections...

Does he think the personhood of objects with agency is conditional on the presence of other consciousness to grant it? One assumes not, but he has not justified the alternative here.

Does his book fill in these blanks?

I think that ALL life - even the lichen on our rocks, the bacteria under our nails and in our G.I.T. - are all the essential ingredients in the pudding called Earth (veering ever so close to the idea of Giai here).

 

[Mungoman]

I've got a four hour drive today - food for thought Skinny - thanks mate.

 

[Analogue Boy]

I don’t have many thoughts about animism but everbody is confident until they come across a big monkey with a shotgun.

 

[Frideswide]

or a

until they come across a big monkey with a shotgun.

Barrel.

The ones throwing the barrels are the worst.

 

[Mungoman]

Is animism just Old, old knowledge of the awareness of inherent energy in all things? Science from a distant and past age?

There is the idea that a full moon is beneficial to plant life. We know now, that it is the fact that a three day period either side of the full moon is awash with partial reflected EM spectrum, giving plants an extra boost. There is willow bark being an anodyne. Rumex for constipation, and conversely, diarrhea. Bread poultices being effective in festering situations. Bush remedies with simple ingredients.

All of these members of the plant Kingdom that are beneficial to us gets me thinking that we've been here before, We've had a herbal pharmacopea for thousands of years, and these old home remedies incline me to think of medicinal knowledge without the pharmaceuticals...so we make do in the ashes of our civilisation, and that knowledge is remembered, or handed down to the next generations.

And animism with it's belief that there is 'life' in all things on this planet is maybe another factual hint of what once was..?

 

[skinny]

Bloody hard to come at, isn’t it. This language and culture have been incredibly useful but can’t seem to accommodate Animist science and routine. It’s not as if it was once accepted and then empirical process ejected it. It has always been in every populated zone of life, yet euro-centric neural pathways have hardened to all but the empirically approved ‘facts’, petrified, as it were. I am an empiricist myself, but I have allowed for neural expansion - I exercise my mind and my philosophy. Those are living things too.

Bloody EngLish! Poor vessel for this stuff.

 

[Mungoman]

Bloody hard to come at, isn’t it. This language and culture have been incredibly useful but can’t seem to accommodate Animist science and routine. It’s not as if it was once accepted and then empirical process ejected it. It has always been in every populated zone of life, yet euro-centric neural pathways have hardened to all but the empirically approved ‘facts’, petrified, as it were. I am an empiricist myself, but I have allowed for neural expansion - I exercise my mind and my philosophy. Those are living things too.

Bloody EngLish! Poor vessel for this stuff.

Language is so limiting, isn't it Skinny...

You're right - animism in its various forms has been chugging along as an undercurrent to the extremes of contemporary invention quite nicely. And it seems to me to be obvious what it is and how it fits...which got me thinking of genesis (Yeah...I KNOW!!!).

In the beginning was the word ( the written word?) and the word was good (knowledge being so beneficial)...which makes me wander through those labrynths of my mind and consider whether prior to the genesis of Abramic belief, whether we have been here before...I think I should leave it there eh...

I can understand the pureness of animism and its simple logic - Now...I wonder if that gentleman that they nailed to a cross was one of those ultra savants who just understood that simple logic and could see between the atoms (so to speak) and...create with that awareness (thus, producing miracles).

Where DOES the mind go when it wanders...and wonders.