Animism is the belief that everything is animate – that life, consciousness, and spirit aren’t only found in humans, but also in animals, plants, rocks, soil, water, wind, stars, and everything else in the world. The modern Western notion of “inanimate objects” is a made-up category, and nothing truly fits into it.
It’s sometimes said that animism is only found in indigenous religions, but as we’ll see time and again over the course of this article, animism of some kind was apparently universal among all cultures and all religions prior to the Reformation in sixteenth-century Europe. So in addition to giving an overview of the general characteristics of animism, this article is intended to highlight how even religions that are often thought of as being non-animistic, such as Christianity and Islam, are profoundly animistic in their own ways. Their animism has just been largely forgotten, by their detractors and sometimes even by their followers. At the end of this article, we’ll also consider why animism matters.
Personhood
Ever since the anthropologist A. Irving Hallowell introduced the term “other-than-human persons”[1] in his classic 1960 study of the Ojibwa people of the Great Lakes region of North America, “Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View,” the term and the concept have become mainstays of the scholarly study of animism.
In everyday speech, we use the words “human” and “person” as synonyms. But Hallowell’s reframing says that you don’t have to be a human to have the characteristics that define a “person:” sentience, emotions, agency, the ability to communicate, etc. It’s like the relationship between a square and a rectangle. A square is always a rectangle, but a rectangle isn’t necessarily a square. Likewise, a human is always a person, but a person isn’t necessarily a human. Anything in the world can be a person, too.
Hallowell is careful to point out that this animistic recognition of personhood in potentially anything and everything is something categorically different from our modern concept of “personification.” To “personify” a thing implies that the thing was originally (and correctly) perceived to be inanimate, and that personal characteristics were fancifully attributed to it later on. Animistic peoples like the traditional Ojibwa, by contrast, perceive personal qualities as inherent in things from the start. There’s no extra, contrived process involved. It’s just the way things are.[2]
Hallowell recalls his efforts to describe the modern materialistic (“scientific”) view of thunder and lightning to his animistic Ojibwa interlocutors. They patiently listened to him and considered what he had to say, but ultimately concluded that such an impersonal, mechanical view of thunder and lightning wasn’t in keeping with the personal nature of those phenomena as the Ojibwa naturally experience them. For the Ojibwa, thunderstorms are “Thunder Birds:” like birds, they fly through the sky in search of their prey, and like migratory birds, they arrive in the spring and depart in the fall.[3]
Thus, what historian of ancient Mesopotamia Thorkild Jacobsen writes of the animism of the Mesopotamians applies equally well to the worldview of the traditional Ojibwa (and that of other animistic peoples in general):
To understand nature, the many and varied phenomena around man, was thus to understand the personalities in these phenomena, to know their characters, the direction of their wills, and also the range of their powers. It was a task not different from that of understanding other men, knowing their characters, their wills, the extent of their power and influence.[4]
Jacobsen also uses thunder as one of his main examples: “The thunderstorm was a warrior; he flung deadly lightning, and one could hear the roar emitted by the wheels of his war chariot. The earth was a woman, a mother; she gave birth each year to the new vegetation.”[5]
Many animistic peoples don’t have an explicit concept of “personhood” in the sense in which Hallowell uses the word. Instead, the concept is simply implicit in the way they characterize and relate to things. Hallowell found this to be the case for the Ojibwa.[6]
But many animistic peoples have something close to an explicit articulation of the idea: a creation myth or set of myths in which all things were originally the same kind of beings, and became divided into different kinds of things later on, while still retaining their animate nature and their primordial kinship with all other animate things. For example, the Koyukon people of Alaska[7] and the Yamana or Yaghan people of Tierra del Fuego[8] describe all things as having been human in the beginning, and eventually becoming divided into different species and such through various mythical events. The Aranda people of Australia have a similar mythology, but consider all things, including humans, to have originally been undifferentiated “supernatural beings” rather than the different phenomena they eventually became.[9]
Yet such a creation myth or set of myths isn’t strictly necessary to convey the point that all things are “persons” and powerfully related to each other. Here’s an example of the same animistic view from a religion with a very different creation myth – specifically, a famous poem (“The Canticle of the Creatures”) by a thirteenth-century Christian saint, Francis of Assisi:
Most high, almighty, good Lord God,
to you belong all praise, glory, honor, and blessing!
Praised be you, O my Lord and God, with all your creatures,
and especially our Brother Sun,
who brings us the day and who brings us the light.
He is fair and shines with a very great splendor:
O Lord, he signifies you to us!
Praised be you, Most High, for Sister Moon and the Stars,
you set them in the heavens, making them so
bright, luminous, and fine.
Praised be you, O my Lord, for our Brother Wind,
and for air and cloud, calms and all weather
by whom you uphold life in all creatures.
Praise the Lord for our Sister Water,
who is very useful to us and humble
and precious and clean.
Praise the Lord for our Brother Fire,
through whom you give us light in the darkness.
He is bright and pleasant and very mighty and strong.
Praise the Lord for our Mother Earth,
who sustains us and keeps us,
and brings forth the grass and all
of the fruits and flowers of many colors.[10]
Saint Francis is far from a lone voice in Christianity. His poem articulates an animistic perspective that was taken for granted by more or less all Christians of the ancient world and the Middle Ages – eras in which Christianity was far stronger and more vibrant than it is today.
According to medieval Christian physics, for example, every action or motion in the world is purposeful. Everything has its “natural place” in the cosmos, and is ceaselessly striving to get there. This is why flames and smoke travel upward – their natural place is in the sky, and they’re trying to return to it.[11] Likewise, water, rocks, and dirt are always trying to return their own natural place, the ground, which is why they always fall downward until they reach the earth.[12] The saying “Nature abhors a vacuum” wasn’t just a metaphor, but a statement of fact, and was used to explain why liquid rises to fill a straw when someone sucks on the other end of the straw, pulling the air out and creating a vacuum that the liquid must fill until the sucking stops and it gets to return to the lowest place its container will allow it to rest in.[13]
According to this traditional Christian perspective, the ultimate “natural place” of all things is in God. Returning to God is the inherent meaning of life. Everything in the world is seen as being potentiality on its way to actuality, with Pure Actuality being nothing other than God himself. Animism, the meaning of life, and mystical spirituality (the quest for spiritual enlightenment, or, in Christian terms, “union with God”) are inseparable from each other.[14] Thus, the medieval Christian mystic Meister Eckhart could write:
[A]ll creatures seek rest by a natural tendency: whether they know it or not, they prove it in their works. A stone is never free of motion as long as it is not on the ground – it always seeks the ground. The same applies to fire: it strives upward, and every creature seeks its natural place. Thus they confirm the truth of divine rest, which God has injected into all of them.[15]
Animism permeated every aspect of medieval Christian life. In the legal sphere, for example, cases were frequently decided through “ordeals,” tests which pitted the testimony of the accused against the animate natural elements, which would participate in uncovering the truth of the matter. At the beginning of an ordeal, the officiating priest would address the elements as non-human persons and remind them of their duties – for example, “I adjure you, water, that you in no way accept this man if
there be any fault in him… but make him swim on top of you, and let nothing be done against you, not any witchcraft by which he is able to hide himself.” If the accused sank in the water, he was declared innocent, and if he floated, he was guilty.[16]
These examples of animism in Christianity could be multiplied endlessly, but these few should illustrate how the medieval Christian worldview and way of life has much more in common with the worldviews and ways of life of the other animistic peoples we’ve considered here than it does with the modern materialistic worldview and way of life.
Culture and Spirituality in Nature
One of the definitive characteristics of animate persons, as opposed to mere “inanimate objects,” is that persons have culture. The modern materialistic worldview deems “nature” and “culture” to be opposites, because it insists that nature is at bottom just a set of objects to be exploited. Only humans count as persons, so only humans can have culture. But from an animistic perspective, in which everything is a person, everything in nature has some kind of culture of its own, and there’s an overarching culture that encompasses both human culture and the cultures of the other beings who live in the same land. All are part of the same big society.
For this reason, Hallowell writes that “the world of personal relations in which the Ojibwa live is a world in which vital social relations transcend those which are maintained with human beings.”[17] And anthropologist Richard Nelson says that the Koyukon treat nature as a “second society” to which humans belong, with all the various members of that more-than-human society being united by a shared moral code:
The interchange between humans and environment is based on an elaborate code of respect and morality, without which survival would be jeopardized. The Koyukon, while they are bound by the strictures of this system, can also manipulate its powers for their own benefit. Nature is a second society in which people live, a watchful and possessive one whose bounty is wrested as much by placation as by cleverness and craft.[18]
Likewise, the ancient Mesopotamians saw themselves as part of a “cosmic state” in which everything in nature was a member, but only the gods were full citizens with voting rights in the general assembly. The other members, including humanity, were more or less just the subjects of the gods. The human state, which followed a similar structure, was humanity’s particular extension of this wider state.[19]
As part of this view that culture is an inherent property of nature, rather than something that exists apart from nature, animism holds that religion and spirituality are inherent properties of nature, too.
Nelson reports that the Koyukon have observed that the animals with whom they share their land observe religious taboos just like the humans do. For example, pregnant female beavers refuse to eat the bark from any fork in a tree branch, and bears who kill ground squirrels carefully set the internal organs aside before eating the meat of the squirrel.[20]
A particularly striking example of religious behavior among animals was told to Nelson by Chief Henry. While hunting caribou with his friend Linus, Chief Henry shot and wounded a young one. The rest of the herd ran away in fear. But shortly thereafter, the mother of the injured caribou returned. In Chief Henry’s words:
[S]he started circling it the way the sun goes around… At the end of that she put her muzzle where the blood was leaking down. She kept her muzzle down there for awhile. I don’t know what she was doing, maybe drinking its blood. And then she circled it the same direction again. And she put her muzzle on the other side where the blood was leaking down. And she kept her muzzle there for awhile. At the end she took her muzzle away. And all that time the calf was holding up its head. And it pushed out its muzzle and shook itself, like this. And then it took off and it looked like it was flying up river. And the late Linus said, ‘Look at that – she made medicine to her child.’[21]
This feature of animism has been described particularly beautifully by Black Elk, a twentieth-century medicine man of the Lakota Sioux tribe of the North American Great Plains, with regard to his own people. In one such passage, he relates how non-human persons find the same spiritual meaning in the symbol of the circle that his own tribe of humans does:
You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round…. The sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same, and both are round. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves. Our tepees were round like the nests of birds, and these were always set in a circle, the nations hoop, a nest of many nests, where the Great Spirit meant for us to hatch our children.[22]
And to cite just one more example, here’s a passage in which Black Elk discusses the spirituality of cottonwood trees:
I think it would be good to explain to you here why we consider the cottonwood tree to be so very sacred. I might mention first, that long ago it was the cottonwood who taught us how to make our tipis, for the leaf of the tree is an exact pattern of the tipi, and this we learned when some of our old men were watching little children making play houses from these leaves…. Another reason why we choose the cottonwood to be at the center of our lodge is that the Great Spirit has shown to us that, if you cut an upper limb of this tree crosswise, there you will see in the grain a perfect five pointed star, which, to us, represents the presence of the Great Spirit. Also perhaps you have noticed that even in the very lightest breeze you can hear the voice of the cottonwood tree; this we understand is its prayer to the Great Spirit, for not only men, but all things and all beings pray to Him continually in differing ways.[23]
Islam, too, places particular emphasis on this animistic view that everything in nature has culture, spirituality, and religion.
According to Islam, all created things are muslims with a lowercase “m.” That is, while they may not be followers of the specific human religion called “Islam,” which would make them “Muslims” with a capital “M,” they’re nevertheless servants of God by their very nature, since God created everything and has power over everything.[24]
The community of all Muslims is referred to as the Ummah, which, in addition to meaning “community” in a general sense, also connotes a religious institution. This makes the term vaguely akin to the Christian conception of “the Church,” for example. The Ummah of Muslims is bound together by their shared adherence to Islam’s divinely-ordained law, the Shariah. According to the Qur’an, the sacred scripture of Islam, all species have their own ummahs. Surah (chapter) six, verse 38 says, in the voice of God, “all the creatures that crawl on the earth and those that fly with their wings are communities [ummahs] like yourselves. We have missed nothing out of the Record – in the end they will be gathered to their Lord.”[25]
Since the Shariah is what binds the Muslim Ummah together, this also means that all species have their own version of the Shariah that’s appropriate for them. Their actions are often, if not always, matters of obedience to their own divinely-ordained laws. Thus, in the animism of Islam, even the predictable regularities in nature aren’t automatic or mechanical, as modern materialism holds them to be, but rather instances of creation obeying the Creator’s commands.[26][27]
From Islam’s perspective, this obedience is a form of worship in its own right. In this way, and in other, more spontaneous ways, all of creation worships God. Spirituality is something every animate person practices, not just humans. Recall Black Elk’s assertion that “all things and all beings pray to Him continually in differing ways.” The Qur’an makes the same claim in various passages. For example, the first verse of surah 57 states, “Everything in the heavens and earth glorifies God.”[28] Surah 24, verse 41 expands this message (brackets in the original): “do you not see that all those who are in the heavens and earth praise God, as do the birds with wings outstretched? Each knows its [own way] of prayer and glorification: God has full knowledge of what they do.”[29]
This animistic understanding of the relationship between Creator and creation is echoed throughout the writings of Muslim thinkers and poets, especially the Sufis, the mystics of Islam. For example, the thirteenth-century Sufi Rumi writes,
The darkness of the night and the brightness of the day, the beams of the sun and the light of the moon, the murmuring of the waters and the whispering of the leaves, the stars of the sky and the dust of the earth, the stones of the mountains, the sands of the desert and the waves of the oceans, the animals of water and land praise Thee.[30]
And to cite just one more example of this animism from the countless ones that could be cited from many different Sufis across time and space, here are the words of the eighth-century Sufi Rabi’a:
O God,
Whenever I listen to the voice of anything You have made –
The rustling of the trees
The trickling of water
The cries of birds
The flickering of shadow
The roar of the wind
The song of the thunder,
I hear it saying:
God is One!
Nothing can be compared with God![31]
The Hebrew Bible (or “Old Testament”), for its part, shares this animistic view that spirituality is something in which all of nature participates. This is brought out particularly clearly in the Book of Psalms. Psalm 66, for example, says straightforwardly, “All the earth worships you.”[32] Psalm 19, among many others, fleshes out that statement:
The heavens are telling the glory of God,
and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.
Day to day pours forth speech,
and night to night declares knowledge.
There is no speech, nor are there words;
their voice is not heard;
yet their voice goes out through all the earth
and their words to the end of the world.[33]
Indeed, as far as I’m aware, all religions that were established before the modern era – which, for a variety of reasons that would be impractical to go into here, are the only “religions” in the proper, traditional sense of the word – teach some version of animism. Despite religions’ sometimes dramatic differences on a great many issues, they all agree that all things possess life, consciousness, personhood, culture, and even spirituality and religion. By all indications, therefore, animism is an inherent, definitive characteristic of religion as such, not an optional feature of some religions and not others.
Conclusion: Why Does Animism Matter?
So, then, why does this apparent universality of animism matter? What difference does it make if we humans view other beings as sentient and spiritual, or if we instead view them as mechanical automatons, like the modern materialistic worldview holds them to be?
Well, for one thing, the presence or absence of animism makes a great moral difference. If everything in the universe is just a mindless object, it makes sense to treat it like a mindless object: to exploit it for whatever mundane benefits you can get out of it. But if, instead, everything is an animate person, it makes sense to treat it like an animate person.
Strictly speaking, of course, this is no guarantee that animals, plants, and other non-human persons will be treated well. Even when we see ourselves as having certain moral obligations to our fellow humans, we don’t always live up to those ideals in practice. Far from it. And it’s no different with our moral obligations toward nature. But at least in an animistic perspective, moral obligations toward nature are recognized, which greatly increases the chance that we’ll act in accordance with them. Comparing the modern environmental crisis to the state of affairs that prevailed back when more or less everyone in the world was an animist offers a compelling testament to this.
(For more on this point, I highly recommend animist philosopher Derrick Jensen’s poignant book A Language Older than Words.)
But animism also makes a dramatic spiritual difference in one’s life. It’s a reminder of divine immanence – how the same divinity that majestically transcends the world is also present within everything, no matter how humble, in the world. This is why animals, plants, and the other inhabitants with whom we share this world are animate persons with cultures and religions of their own: they all manifest the divine in some way or another. If they (and we) have spirits and/or souls, it’s because they (and we) partake of the Spirit or Soul that encompasses all things. As the philosopher Thomas Kasulis says of Shinto, one of the traditional religions of Japan:
It is not quite right to think that a kami [that is, a spirit] simply inhabits the tree. Such a limited view understands the physical tree to be one thing, the kami another, and the latter as somehow residing within the former. Put this way, the relation between tree and kami seems only external; one can analyze each separately and then puzzle over how they got related…. [E]ven when a kami is thought to inhabit a tree, it is not that the material tree thereby becomes spiritualized. Because of the omnipresence of kami, the tree was always spiritualized…. The world as we know it is not separate from the inherent nature of kami.[34]
The famed thirteenth-century Zen Buddhist philosopher Dogen makes the same point about the spiritual significance of animism in the language of Mahayana Buddhism (of which Zen is a part), wherein “mind” and “Buddha nature” are more or less synonyms for “the divine:”
Hence, all mind is sentient being: sentient beings are all being Buddha nature. Grass and trees, states and lands, are mind. Because they are mind, they are sentient beings. Because they are sentient beings, they are being Buddha nature. Heavenly bodies are mind. Because they are mind, they are sentient beings. Because they are sentient beings, they are being Buddha nature.[35]
Islam, too, treats animism as both a consequence and a reminder of divine immanence. In Islam, every created thing and event is said to be an ayah (plural ayat), a “sign” from God. The same word is used to refer to the verses of the Qur’an, so both nature and the Qur’an have the same message to convey to humanity. All things “speak” because God “speaks” through them, just as he “speaks” through the Qur’an.[36] As scholars of Islam Sachiko Murata and William C. Chittick put it,
[E]verything is a sign of God, which is to say that each thing teaches us about God. This teaching about God is not haphazard. The teacher is God himself, who creates the signs in order to reveal himself.[37]
Since all things are animated through their participation in the same divinity in which we, too, participate, animism is ultimately a powerful facilitator of the quest for spiritual enlightenment, the firsthand realization of our oneness with all things and with the divine. Since religions agree that the pursuit of enlightenment is the meaning of life, animism is an indispensable part of how we can live in accordance with the meaning of our lives. In other words, animism is an inherent part of what it means to be truly human.
References:
[1] Hallowell, A. Irving. 1976. “Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View.” In Contributions to Anthropology: Selected Papers of A. Irving Hallowell. University of Chicago Press. p. 368.
[2] Ibid. p. 367.
[3] Ibid. p. 369-370.
[4] Jacobsen, Thorkild. 1946. “Mesopotamia.” In The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man: An Essay on Speculative Thought in the Ancient Near East. Eds. Henri Frankfort & H.A. Frankfort. The University of Chicago Press. p. 134.
[5] Ibid. p. 135.
[6] Hallowell, A. Irving. 1976. “Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View.” In Contributions to Anthropology: Selected Papers of A. Irving Hallowell. University of Chicago Press. p. 381.
[7] Nelson, Richard K. 1983. Make Prayers to the Raven: A Koyukon View of the Northern Forest. University of Chicago Press. p. 16-17.
[8] Wilbert, Johannes (ed.). 1977. Folk Literature of the Yamana Indians: Martin Gusinde’s Collection of Yamana Narratives. University of California Press.
[9] Eliade, Mircea. 1973. Australian Religions: An Introduction. Cornell University Press. p. 44-48.
[10] Sweeney, Jon M. (ed.). 2015. Francis of Assisi in His Own Words: The Essential Writings. Paraclete Press. p. 88-89.
[11] Shapin, Steven. 1996. The Scientific Revolution. University of Chicago Press. p. 29.
[12] Burtt, E.A. 2003. The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science. Dover Publications. p. 18-19.
[13] Shapin, Steven. 1996. The Scientific Revolution. University of Chicago Press. p. 150.
[14] Burtt, E.A. 2003. The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science. Dover Publications. p. 94-99.
[15] Walshe, Maurice O’C. (transl.). 2009. The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart. The Crossroad Publishing Company. p. 248.
[16] Erickson, Carolly. 1976. The Medieval Vision: Essays in History and Perception. Oxford University Press. p. 108-109.
[17] Hallowell, A. Irving. 1976. “Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View.” In Contributions to Anthropology: Selected Papers of A. Irving Hallowell. University of Chicago Press. p. 381.
[18] Nelson, Richard K. 1983. Make Prayers to the Raven: A Koyukon View of the Northern Forest. University of Chicago Press. p. 31.
[19] Jacobsen, Thorkild. 1946. “Mesopotamia.” In The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man: An Essay on Speculative Thought in the Ancient Near East. Eds. Henri Frankfort & H.A. Frankfort. The University of Chicago Press. p. 135-137.
[20] Nelson, Richard K. 1983. Make Prayers to the Raven: A Koyukon View of the Northern Forest. University of Chicago Press. p. 20-21.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Neihardt, John G. 2014. Black Elk Speaks. University of Nebraska Press. p. 121-122.
[23] Brown, Joseph Epes. 1989. The Sacred Pipe: Black Elk’s Account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux. University of Oklahoma Press. p. 74-75.
[24] Murata, Sachiko, and William C. Chittick. 1994. The Vision of Islam. Paragon House. p. 135.
[25] Haleem, Abdel (transl.) 2005. The Qur’an. Oxford University Press. p. 82.
[26] Bakar, Osman. 2012. The History and Philosophy of Islamic Science. Islamic Texts Society. p. 71.
[27] Iqbal, Muzaffar. 2009. The Making of Islamic Science. Islamic Book Trust. p. 7.
[28] Haleem, Abdel (transl.) 2005. The Qur’an. Oxford University Press. p. 359.
[29] Ibid. p. 223-224.
[30] Schimmel, Annemarie. 1975. Mystical Dimensions of Islam. The University of North Carolina Press. p. 162.
[31] Upton, Charles (transl.). 1988. Doorkeeper of the Heart: Versions of Rabi’a. Pir Press. p. 58.
[32] Coogan, Michael D., et al (eds.). 2018. The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version. Oxford University Press. p. 834.
[33] Ibid. p. 797.
[34] Kasulis, Thomas P. 2004. Shinto: The Way Home. University of Hawai’i Press. p. 18.
[35] Dumoulin, Henrich. 2005. Zen Buddhism: A History, Volume Two: Japan. Transl. James W. Heisig & Paul Knitter. World Wisdom. p. 80.
[36] Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. 2007. The Garden of Truth: The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam’s Mystical Tradition. HarperOne. p. 46-47.
[37] Murata, Sachiko, and William C. Chittick. 1994. The Vision of Islam. Paragon House. p. 86.