ANIMISM QUOTES III

quotations about animism

Neo-animism posits that the world is full of other-than-human "persons", including "salmon persons", "tree person", and even "rock persons". The concept of personhood implies relationality and reciprocity, as well as rights. Neo-animists want to see the rights of all "persons" respected. The term "other-than-human" persons was coined in 1960 by A. Irving Hallowell to describe the understanding by the Ojibwa people he studied that many more things could be a person than Westerners realize. The phrase was later adopted by many neo-animists. It is difficult for Westerners to understand the concept of "other-than-human" persons, especially when talking about (seemingly) inanimate objects like rocks. But for the animist, there is no such thing as inanimate matter. All matter is animate, and thus alive, at least in the sense that it is part of a complex self-regulating living system.

JOHN HALSTEAD

"Branches of the Deep Ecology Tree: Neo-Animism and Bioregionalism: Reuniting human and nature", Patheos, September 27, 2014


We belong to the community of life on this planet -- it doesn't belong to us. We got confused about that, now it's time to set the record straight.

DANIEL QUINN

Providence

Tags: life


It is a well known fact that even among highly cultured peoples the belief in animism prevails generally. Even the scholar may kick the chair against which he accidentally stumbles, and derive great satisfaction from thus "getting even" with the perverse chair.

HOLLY ESTIL CUNNINGHAM

An Introduction to Philosophy


Twentieth-century developments in science support a new animism. Developments in physics have led to a world of energetic events which seem to be self-moving and to behave in unpredictable ways. And recent studies in biology seem to demonstrate that bacteria and macromolecules have elemental forms of perception, memory, choice, and self-motion.

DAVID RAY GRIFFIN

God and Religion in the Postmodern World: Essays in Postmodern Theology


I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars,
And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren,
And the tree-toad is a chef-d'oeuvre for the highest,
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,
And the cow crunching with depress'd head surpasses any statue,
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.

WALT WHITMAN

"Song of Myself", Leaves of Grass

Tags: Walt Whitman


If we are to survive, we must learn a new way to live, or relearn an old way. There have existed, and for the time being still exist, many cultures whose members refuse to cut the vocal cords of the planet, and refuse to enter into the deadening deal which we daily accept as part of living. It is perhaps significant that prior to contact with Western Civilization many of these cultures did not have rape, nor did they have child abuse.... Would that we could say the same. It is perhaps significant that members of these cultures listen attentively (as though their lives depend on it, which of course they do) to what plants, animals, rocks, rivers, and stars have to say, and that these cultures have been able to do what we can only dream of, which is to live in dynamic equilibrium with the rest of the world.

DERRICK JENSEN

A Language Older Than Words

Tags: civilization


The deer aren't our prey or our possessions -- they're us. They're us at one point in the cycle of life and we're them at another point in the cycle. The deer are twice your parents, for your mother and father are deer, and the deer that gave you its life today was mother and father to you as well, since you wouldn't be here if it weren't for that deer.

DANIEL QUINN

The Story of B


Animism in itself was not yet a religion but contained the prerequisites from which religions were later formed.

SIGMUND FREUD

Totem & Taboo: Resemblances between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics

Tags: Sigmund Freud


Animism strongly involves necrolatry, which is the worship of the souls of the dead. Tribal people tend to regard the departed ancestors as part of the clan and fear the harm that the departed can do to the living. They especially fear that those who died unnaturally will come back to haunt them. Animism involves spirit worship, believing in the existence of personal spirits or demons, as well as impersonal spiritual forces in nature, which inhabit the earth, the air, fire, water, trees, mountains, and animal life. Life for the animist is dominated by a host of taboos and rituals to placate the spirits.

PETER HAMMOND

attributed, God's Next of Kin: Spiritual Genetics Defined


It is not just contemporary industrial society that is dysfunctional; it is civilization itself. We humans are born to be creatures of the land and the sea and the stars; we are relations to the animals, cohorts to the plants. Our well being, and the well-being of the very planet depend on our pursuance of our given place within the natural world.

CHELLIS GLENDINNING

Against Civilization

Tags: civilization


Animism is far from primitive, nor is it about pre-modernity because animism does not serve as a precursor to modernity. Rather animism is one of the many vitally present and contemporary other-than-modern ways of being human.

GRAHAM HARVEY

Animism: Respecting the Living World


Where the animistic habit is present in the naive form, its scope and range of application are not defined or limited. It will therefore palpably affect his thinking at every turn of the person's life--wherever he has to do with the material means of life. In the later, maturer development of animism, after it has been defined through the process of anthropomorphic elaboration, when its application has been limited in a somewhat consistent fashion to the remote and the invisible, it comes about that an increasing range of everyday facts are provisionally accounted for without recourse to the preternatural agency in which a cultivated animism expresses itself.

THORSTEIN VEBLEN

The Complete Works of Thorstein Veblen


[The] animistic perspective has a long and distinguished philosophical pedigree. For some eminent philosophers such as Spinoza and Leibniz, and more recently Alfred North Whitehead, it was inconceivable that sentience (subjective consciousness) could ever emerge or evolve from wholly insentient (objective, physical) matter, for to propose this would be to believe in a fundamental division or inconsistency within the very fabric of reality itself. Therefore each of these philosophers considered matter to be intrinsically sentient. The new animism that they espoused simply recognizes that the material world around us has always been a dimension of sensation and feelings--albeit sensations that may be very different from our own--and that each entity must be treated with respect for its own kind of experience.

STEPHAN HARDING

Animate Earth: Science, Intuition, and Gaia


Animism ... gives not only the explanation of a single phenomenon, but makes it possible to comprehend the totality of the world from one point, as a continuity.

SIGMUND FREUD

Totem & Taboo: Resemblances between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics

Tags: Sigmund Freud


From the animist point of view, humans belong in a sacred place because they themselves are sacred. Not sacred in a special way, not more sacred than anything else, but merely as sacred as anything else -- as sacred as bison or salmon or crows or crickets or bears or sunflowers.

DANIEL QUINN

"Our Religions: Are They the Religions of Humanity Itself?"


The nomadic gatherer-hunters live in an entirely sacred world. Their spirituality reaches as far as all of their relations. They know the animals and plants that surround them and not only the ones of immediate importance. They speak with what we would call "inanimate objects," but they can speak the same language. They know how to see beyond themselves and are not limited to the human languages that we hold so dearly. Their existence is grounded in place, they wander freely, but they are always home, welcome and fearless.

KEVIN TUCKER

Against Civilization


Animism had its origins in two universal human experiences: (1) the sense that something invisible yet all-important leaves the body at the moment of death, and (2) the suspicion that dreams and visions make contact with a higher reality. Once the belief in a spiritual realm was established, it was only a few short steps to positing the existence of spiritual beings that stand behind nature, and behind the world as a whole.

BRADLEY L. HERLING

A Beginner's Guide to the Study of Religion


Animists are not so much people with a religion as people with a fundamentally religious way of looking at things.

DANIEL QUINN

Providence

Tags: religion


We are all but symbols of some greater thing--totems of ourselves--subject to change and growth. When we forget that metaphoric sense of ourselves, we lose sight of the overall path.

S. KELLEY HARRELL

Gift of the Dreamtime


Everything that has ever lived, plant or animal, dates its beginning from the same primordial twitch. At some point in an unimaginably distant past, some little bag of chemicals fidgeted to life. It absorbed some nutrients, gently pulsed, had a brief existence. This much may have happened many times before. But this ancestral packet did something additional and extraordinary. It cleaved itself and produced an heir. A tiny bundle of genetic material passed from one living entity to another, and has never stopped moving since. It was the moment of creation for us all.

BILL BRYSON

A Short History of Nearly Everything