CHRISTIAN ANIMISIM
Animism is the word most widely used to describe humanity’s original spirituality and worldview. While it undergirds many of the world’s great faiths, it is also an understanding embraced by a wide variety of quite different peoples around the globe. Animism is found primarily among the worlds Indigenous and tribal peoples, but also among many living in large cosmopolitan urban communities, including Pagans, now far-removed from their primal origins.
From the outset we must recognise that the word animism is an artificial European construct with disturbing origins and intentions. It 1708 a German scientist Georg Ernst Stahl suggested that a physical element he called anima (from the Latin for ‘breath’) enabled living things to live. This word was later redefined, Anglicised and popularised as animism by Edward Tylor (1871), often seen as the founder of anthropology.[1]
What is Animism?
Tylor had the deliberate intention of displaying the spiritual understandings of Indigenous peoples as primitive, superstitious, childish and underdeveloped, because it was thought they believed that all animals, plants and seemingly inert objects were alive because a ‘spirit’ or a ‘soul’ possessed them. As European imperial expansion spread across the globe in the 19th century, the word animism became a powerful negative colonial stereotype used to describe many non-Europeans. It also provided a license for the physical and cultural destruction of Indigenous peoples worldwide.
So why are we still using this word animism?
In recent decades Tylor’s ideas have been radically challenged; the result has seen the emergence of a ‘new Animism’ where the sophisticated voices and understandings of Indigenous peoples have finally begun to be heard. While Animism will always be an artificial word, it is now proving useful as a point of reference to draw together Indigenous cultures: highlighting their shared core understandings, while at the same time honoring their wide areas of diversity.
Scholars have been understandably reluctant to ‘define’ Animism, however here are several brief definitions that have been used in recent writings:
Graham Harvey says, “Animists are people who recognise that the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship with others” [2] and “All that exists lives … all that lives is holy” [3]
The author Daniel Quinn says that for the Animist, “The world is a sacred place and a sacred process, and we are part of it” [4]
My personal definition of Animism is:
“Animism believes that everything that exists is both alive and sacred, with all things being interconnected and related: that the earth, along with each animal, plant, inert object and natural phenomena are persons (or potentially so); a community of creation requiring harmonious relationships between humans, their ancestors and wild nature, nurtured by respectful and sustainable lifeways”.
These points are developed in much more detail, from a Christian perspective, in the six points identified on the Homepage under the title ‘Essence of Animism’.
[1] Harvey G, ‘Animism: Respecting the Living World’, Hurst & Company 2005; 3-9
[2] Harvey G, ‘Animism: Respecting the Living World’, Hurst & Company 2005; xi
[3] Harvey G, ‘Animism: A Contemporary Perspective’ in B.Taylor (Ed), ‘Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature’, Continuum 2005; 81
[4] Quinn:D, ‘The Story of B: An Adventure in Mind and Spirit’; Bantam Books 1997; 189