"The typical spirituality of hunter gatherers is usually termed 'animism'. But animism is not a fixed and dogmatic creed in the way of 'book religions' such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Animism is more a spontaneous experience than a set of beliefs, theories and practices - characterised by general form rather than specific content...
For the animist their world is wholly 'peopled'. Nothing is indifferent to the human observer, and the observer is personally concerned by every entity. The animistic world is bound together on both sides by feelings - likes and dislikes, desires and fears. Each person is at the centre of a web of reciprocal emotions. Each person's place in the world is defined by this mesh, nothing is isolated and independent, every thing is linked to other things by affective bonds."
"Alienation, Neo-shamanism and Recovered Animism" by Bruce Charlton MD.
http://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/animism.html
It's the belief and way of living that knows that "all that exists lives" and that all that exists is connected in the web of life. Simple? Of course it is. Everything in the universe has an energy, a life, which interacts with other energies, other lives. I could say here that much of what's being discovered in quantam physics proves all this - but I really don't need that kind of proof. I can see it and feel it myself, intuitively, every time I step outside the confines of my anthropocentric training.
My direct experiences of the world tell me there are forces or powers that influence us. I'm sorry I can't prove this objectively. Maybe it can't be proven objectively. It's something we just have to know for ourselves.
We knew it as children before we'd been tamed too much. And we still get glimpses of it from time to time, even if our culture doesn't place these experiences in any meaningful context. This lack of context can make humans jumpy and nervous. People who've been trained to think of themselves as above creation have a hard time dealing with the powers of the universe, with the powers beyond their control freakery.
"If you step out of the radius of your campfires you feel that you are brought face to face with forces over which you have no control; you are surrounded by handiwork that is not man's, by swarming millions of creatures that live out their little lives without the faintest reference to you."
- Robert W.C. Shelford, "A Naturalist in Borneo"
Being a part of these forces and recognising the consciousness of these forces is animism.
Civilised humans recoil from this idea. They like to think they're above the insects and plants. That they're somehow apart from other animals and can be separate from the very forces of nature which shape them.
It is these people who invented religion - the complete antithesis of animism. Here the reverence for Nature, for Life, becomes codified and humans degenerate into 'piety' ('religio'). A culture which has started doing religion is a culture well on its way out of the Dreamtime of hunter gathering and into the nightmare of civilisation.
Civilisers have a lot of trouble when it comes to converting animists because the central ideas of religion are not already accepted. Hunter gatherers do not need pyramids to help them access the divine as they can feel that in the forest every day as they live. They don't accept ideas about sin and morality as they see nature in action and see it doesn't hold such views. Equality - a word often bandied around - is real in hunter gatherer societies, not just a platitude for ruling elites to feed us as they practice gross inequalities. No specialisation, no rank, no stations for people to adopt. When civilised people noticed the pride of primitive people, they were noticing this utter confidence. A self-sufficiency and energy quite absent from civilised societies.
The lack of self-sufficiency might stem from the domestication of plants, animals, minerals and themselves. When humans started breeding wheat and sheep and themselves, they became dependent on the crops, the priests and the gods - often vengeful (wreaking their crops) and always in need of placating. Nature to be battled and subdued, rather than partaken of and enjoyed.
Religion and agriculture grew together - both make us servile, where once we'd been humble. It makes us dependent, where once we'd been self-sufficient. It makes us easily manipulated by power elites where once we'd relied on our own experiences of Life. What a degeneration!
"In agriculture participation turns into manipulation. The game changes from one of chance to one of strategy, from reading one's state of grace in terms of the hunt to bartering for it, from finding to making, from a sacrament received to a negotiator with anthropomorphic dieties. This transition can be seen in a series of North Asian forms of the ceremony of the slain bear, from an egalitarian, ad hoc though traditional celebration of the wild kill as a symbolic acceptance of the given to the shaman-centred spectacle of the sacrfice of a captive bear in order to deflect evil from the village.
The transition from bear hunt to bull slaughter has been traced by Tim Ingold. Sacrifice does not seem to me to accommodate the 'problems of death' but to domesticate it. It reverses the gift flow idea from receiving according to one's state of grace to bartering, from the animal example of 'giving away' to the animal's blood as currency."
- 'A Post-Historic Primitivism' by Paul Shepard in "The Wilderness Condition - Essays on Environment and Civilisation" ed by Max Oelschlaeger, Island Press, (1992).
Animists don't need to sacrifice animals, build pyramids, placate gods or any of that other religious shite. They live here and now, experiencing the sacred in every part of the forest. In every aspect of daily life.
The deep need we have for experiencing this sacredness is perverted by religions (be your god Jaweh, wal-mart or 'Art'). Just like the need we have for rituals. Wild people spend much of their time in dance/song rituals. These can help sort out a problem, appreciate certain aspects of life, remind us how interdependent we all are, teach us how to live right, help us to recognise the power of the Dreamtime - the truth of the Dreamtime. And, especially, can teach us the dire consequences of living outside the Dreamtime. All the values of hunter gatherers are played out in a rich dance of meaning. We need these story-enactments in order to function well - in order for our communities to get on.
But religious rituals are empty formulas designed to obscure truths of existence and keep us even more slavish. Animism is not a religion then, it is a way of living, of thinking about ourselves and the world we are a part of. As different from religion as rape is from lovemaking.
Animism has been largely wiped out in Europe and most of North America now. Hundreds of years of forest clearing, farming and witch hunts have destroyed our native animist beliefs. Many Europeans try to re-member their animist heritage, but it's hard to do that in a place where little wildness remains and where most of the ancient knowledge has been destroyed. Once our natural environment is destroyed, our innate knowledge can no longer flourish. The seeds of knowledge find it hard to grow in concrete and plastic.
In other places, animism is suffering as wildness comes under attack and traditional hunter gatherers are encroached upon. Missionaries, ngo's and other aid workers work with governments and militaries to extingush animist beliefs by force. (They usually steal the children, put them in schools and teach the kids to hate their culture and disrespect their elders. This has been documented time and time again in many places.)
One missionary group ("People Groups") lists over 1,600 animist groups mainly in South America, Asia, Africa and India. Some of these groups are suspiciously large (how can you have a million people in a tribe?). But even allowing that many of these groups are actually civilised or semi-civilised, that's still a lot of wild animist people. As long as they can live in the forest as hunter gatherers then animism is the preferred way of life - the only truly harmonious way of life.
That missionary group, by the way, has no intention of letting these people continue to live like heathens. They are obsessed with locating all the savages and converting them. (See above for the usual methods of conversion)
Yet despite all efforts to eradicate animism, people still gravitate towards the old beliefs. They still instinctively know that "man cannot live on bread alone".
Aborigines (and sorry for lumping hundreds of different tribes together!) tell stories of a living land. A conscious land. Their task in childhood was learning how to fulfil their obligations and responsibilities to this consciousness. Only then are they mature grown-ups.
To the Aborigines, our world-view is childish and illogical. How would a plant know when to flower if it wasn't conscious? How would a rock know how to stay still? There are many different kinds of consciousness and only civilised humans think their one is 'better' and 'more advanced'.
It's the same childish view that separates the living from the non-living.
"The dust particle and the earth, the plant and the animal, are all sensitive...In pursuing investigations on the border region of physics and physiology, I was amazed to find boundary lines vanishing and points of contact emerge between the realms of the Living and Non-living. Metals were found to respond to stimuli; they are subject to fatigue, stimulated by certain drugs and killed by poisons."
- J.C. Bose, "Plant Autographs and Their Revelations".
Civilised people are amazed at these lack of boundaries, having been schooled to catagorise everything according to their human superiority complex. To them, rocks don't have any life and plants do have a bit. Animals have more life and humans have the most of all! Talk about simplistic! Who's the 'primitive' now?
But animists, immersed in life's energies, know that consciousness is present in all life forms. It is felt as a real, vibrant force. A source of joy and pleasure - a realness as far from civilisation as blood is to plastic.
How can a civilised person understand this? Confined by a language that operates primarily with nouns, not processes, and a lifestyle that is more conducive to slavish thinking than observant experiencing. The civilised person laughs at the 'primitive' beliefs in 'spirits' because he has no spirit left himself and cannot access the spirit of the world around him. His deadened, souless existence has killed any spirits that might have tried to animate him, leaving him free to work and worship at whatever destructive gods feet he has chosen. (Jahweh, Walmart, DVD - you're free to choose whatever god you like!)
If we are to destroy civilisation, we have to re-learn this 'spirit-that-moves-in-everything' (Stalking Wolf), the life that dwells in all places, the spark that animates us from deep inside and all around.
When we feel this spirit we cannot do harm. We cannot build and maintain civilisation. But when we refuse to acknowledge the interconnectedness of all beings and the power, beauty and consciousness of these connections we lose all sense of our place. We lose our wildness - our animating spark, and segregate places into sacred and non-sacred just like we segregated the living and non-living. A meaningless distinction, created by civilised people.
"All places and all beings of the earth are sacred. It is dangerous to designate some places sacred when all are sacred. Such compromises imply that there is a hierarchy of value, with some places and some living beings not as important as others. No part of the earth is expendable; the earth is a whole that cannot be fragmented, as it has been by the destroyers' mentality of the industrial age. The greedy destroyers of life and bringers of suffering demand that sacred land be sacrificed so that a few designated sacred places may survive; but once any part is deemed expendable, others can easily be redefined to fit the category of expendable. As Ruth Rudner points out in her article "Sacred Land," what spiritual replenishment is possible if one must travel through ghastly fumes and ravaged lands to reach the little island or ocean or mountain that has been preserved by the label sacred land?"
- Leslie Marmon Silko, from 'Tribal Councils: Puppets of the U.S. Government' in "Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit", Touchstone Books, 1997.
Some religions designate a church as sacred, some hippies say "Stonehenge", some conservationists say "sites of special scientific interest". An animist says "where you're standing right now". :
"Naturally then, the mountains, the creatures, the entire non-human world is struggling to make contact with us. The plants we eat or smoke are trying to ask us what we are up to; the animals are signaling to us in our dreams or in forests; the whole Earth is rumbling and straining to let us remember that we are of it, that this planet, this macrocosm is our flesh, that the grasses are our hair, the trees our hands, the rivers our blood, that the Earth is our real body and that it is alive."
- David Abram, in "Freeman the Fish Lover", Freeman House, Totem Salmon, Beacon Press, Boston, 1999.
We got to really live in the place where we are. We got to love the place we are. And you can't love something while keeping it enslaved. Only by accepting the consciousness, power and feeling of the place we live in can we truly love it.
How do we become a part of the community again? Can civilised people re-learn to be human?
Richard Wolff lived with the Sng'oi in the forests of Malaysia who have lived there for many years gathering wild foods and refusing to start up rubber plantations. Wolff spent years in the forests losing his civilised training, becoming wild.
"My perception opened further. I no longer saw water, what I felt with my whole being was a leaf-with-water-in-it, attached to a plant that grew in soil surrounded by uncounted other plants, all part of the same blanket of living things covering the soil, which was also part of a larger living skin around the earth. And nothing was separate...The all-ness was everywhere, and I was part of it. I cannot explain what went on inside me, but I knew that I had learned something unbelievably wonderful. I felt more alive than I had ever felt before. All of me was filled with being."
- Robert Wolff, "Original Wisdom", Inner Traditions, Rochester, Vermont, 2001 We don't have to go to the forests of Malaysia to wake up. Here now, in Ireland, we have our Dreamtime. When we wake up to it we'll know that it never went away, just bubbled below the surface for a while. Isn't it so beautiful to swim in this stream? To dream this dream. Til we return to where we came from before we took our present form. Passing through, that's all. Passing through. But hey, what a journey!