quotations about animism
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
Animism is a monist metaphysical stance, based upon the idea that mind and matter are not distinct and separate substances but an integrated reality, rooted in nature.
EMMA RESTALL ORR
The Wakeful World: Animism, Mind and the Self in Nature
All paths lie together in the hand of god like a web endlessly woven, and yours and mine are no greater or less than the beetle's or the squirrel's or the sparrow's. All are held together.
DANIEL QUINN
Tales of Adam
Once the idea of a supernaturalistic creation is fully overcome, the idea returns that the universe must be self-organizing and therefore composed of self-moving parts. Also, insofar as dualistic assumptions are fully overcome and human experience is accepted as fully natural, it begins to seem probable that something analogous to our experience and self-movement is a feature of every level of nature.
DAVID RAY GRIFFIN
God and Religion in the Postmodern World: Essays in Postmodern Theology
We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose. Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.
CARL SAGAN
Cosmos
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
All life is a circle. The atom is a circle, orbits are circles, the earth, moon, and sun are circles. The seasons are circles. The cycle of life is a circle: baby, youth, adult, elder. The sun gives life to the earth who feeds life to the trees whose seeds fall to the earth to grow new trees. We need to practice seeing the cycles that the Great Spirit gave us because this will help us more in our understanding of how things operate. We need to respect these cycles and live in harmony with them.
ROLLING THUNDER
attributed, The Voice of Rolling Thunder
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
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
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
Animism is worth considering (a) because it exists, (b) because it addresses contemporary issues and debates, and (c) because it clarifies, in various ways, the argument that the project of modernity is ill-conceived and dangerously performed.
GRAHAM HARVEY
preface, Animism: Respecting the Living World
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
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
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
Animists are not so much people with a religion as people with a fundamentally religious way of looking at things.
DANIEL QUINN
Providence
Animism apparently cannot be defined within modern terminology without applying to it a set of unquestioned assumptions that are the fundaments of modernity, and in whose matrix we necessarily operate as long as we assume that the question is one of determining the "correct" distinction between life and non-life, self and world. These assumptions are already manifest when it is described, in a seemingly neutral terms, as the belief of some cultures that nature is populated by spirits or souls. The very meaning these terms carry within modernity imply that such belief is at worst mistaken--that is, failing to account for how things really are--or at best symbolic representations of social relations projected onto a natural environment that is indifferent to them.
ANSELM FRANKE
"Animism: Notes on an Exhibition", e-flux, summer 2012
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
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
[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 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