Animism

The concept of animism first appeared explicitly in Victorian British anthropology in Primitive Culture (1871), by Sir Edward Burnett Tylor (later published as Religion in Primitive Culture, 1958). His writings are preceded historically by those of the Greek Lucretius (c. 96–c. 55 B.C.E.) and the Roman Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 B.C.E.), among many others. "The doctrine of human and other souls" or "the doctrine of spiritual beings" constitutes the essence of Tylor's theory. The doctrine of souls is based on the foundational doctrine of "psychic unity," which affirms that all people, everywhere, for all time (or at least the past fifty thousand years or so), have the same capacity to comprehend all phenomena in the known, observed, and imagined universe by use of their own cultural symbols and languages. Tylor regards Spiritualism as a modern cult that lacks panhuman motivations of animism.

The idea of animism is that in all cultural systems people experience phenomena—such as dreams, visions, sudden insights, out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, and trances—that simultaneously conjoin perceptions of being "elsewhere" with the knowledge of being "here." Some thinkers explain this experience through a belief in the human soul, which they envision as distinct from but inextricably attached to the body until death do they part, so that animistic belief in the soul becomes part of every cultural system.

Robert Ranulph Marett (1866–1943), Tylor's successor at Oxford, introduced the concept of animatism to that of animism, extending the idea of an animating spirit similar to the soul to include many different forces in nature and culture (The Threshold of Religion, 1909). Such force is what makes a tree grow from a seed, the rain fall, or the sun shine—that which brings fertility and fecundity to the earth. Loss of such force results in death. People are in awe of such forces as manifest in volcanoes and earthquakes and especially in inert corpses. Out of the observations and awe of force in nature comes the universality of the sacral basis for religious experience, which Marett argued was prior to animism. Animism African man beside animist figure (sculpted from mud and bone and covered with feathers), Burkina Faso, c. 1979. Many indigenous cultures believe in spiritual beings, a concept first defined as animism by Sir Edward Burnett Tylor in 1871. Tylor proposed that animism derived from an attempt to explain certain phenomenon such as trances, dreams, and visions. © CHARLES LENARS/CORBIS and animatism are often not clearly distinguished, as many of Marett's ideas have been blended through time in philosophical and religious literature with those of Tylor and many others.

The Canelos Quichua native people of Amazonian Ecuador illustrate concepts of animism and animatism. Souls and spirits are ubiquitous and even spirits have souls. Those who interact intensively with the souls are the male shamans and the female potters, both of whom influence the conceptual system of one another through mutual symbol revelation. For example, when a shaman in trance dimly "sees" an approaching colorful, noisy spirit, a woman quietly, from the darkened recesses of the room, clarifies his emerging vision and names the actual spirit.

Human souls are acquired through both mother and father. Spirit essences are hierarchized into four essential tiers, easily represented as spheres encompassing one another. Sungui, the master spirit of the rain forest and hydrosphere, is the apotheosis of androgynous power. This male and female spirit takes many corporeal forms, the most prominent being the giant anaconda. This spiritual superpower must be controlled or it will overwhelm and inundate the world; Amasanga, master spirit of the rain forest, controls the power of Sungui. The corporeal representative of this androgynous being is the great black jaguar. In turn, rainforest dynamics are controlled by Nungüi, a strictly feminine spirit, master of garden soil and pottery clay, whose corporeality is manifest in the deadly black coral snake with a mouth too small to bite humans. The inner sphere is the human household, wherein the souls and spirits come together in a special system of human knowledge, vision, and imagery. Power flows downward through the spheres, and control of power is exercised upward from inner to outer spheres.