quotations about animism
Children arrive animists. They learn about life, themselves, and empathy by imagining the liveliness of everything they come into contact with.
S. KELLEY HARRELL
Teen Spirit Guide to Modern Shamanism
There is no transcendent creator in animism, no god who set the clocks ticking and decides which ones to fix when they falter; nothing exists outside of nature. In other words, my philosophy does not require that I believe in something I cannot experience directly.
EMMA RESTALL ORR
The Wakeful World: Animism, Mind and the Self in Nature
Under animism, the idea of what is sacred is sought in places, objects, and actions believed to house a god or spirit. Thus animist religion is inextricably tied to nature. Traditional Native American indigenous religions fall under the umbrella of animism. Although different tribes have different religious mythologies, the tribal mythologies share similarities in terms of their views on the importance of connections not only among tribal members but also within the larger universe.
YORUBA T. MUTAKABBIR & TARIQAH A. NURIDDIN
Religious Minority Students in Higher Education
Increasing numbers of Pagans are identifying themselves as animists or naming their worldview as animism. Some Pagans use the term animism to refer to one strand within their Paganism, while others identify it as the most appropriate label for everything they do.
GRAHAM HARVEY
"Animist Paganism", Handbook of Contemporary Paganism
Perhaps one of the most striking examples of modern animism is supplied by the Malayans in their belief in a spirit in tin. They asy that the metal itself is alive, that it can move from place to place, can reproduce itself, and that it has special likes and dislikes. In extracting it from the ore, the tin-soil has to be both deceived and propitiated. The Pawang, or sorcerer, uses his arts so that the spirit may not know that the metal is being sought.
EDWARD CLODD
Animism: The Seed of Religion
Animism is the only way. Doing not reasoning. Reasoning changes with the wind. Doing is solid.
AVI SHAFRAN
"Yes, Orthodoxy Changes. No, That's Not 'Rewriting History.'", Forward, July 20, 2015
Twentieth-century developments in science support a new animism. Developments in physics have led to a world of energetic events which seem to be self-moving and to behave in unpredictable ways. And recent studies in biology seem to demonstrate that bacteria and macromolecules have elemental forms of perception, memory, choice, and self-motion.
DAVID RAY GRIFFIN
God and Religion in the Postmodern World: Essays in Postmodern Theology
The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.
CARL SAGAN
Cosmos
The deer aren't our prey or our possessions -- they're us. They're us at one point in the cycle of life and we're them at another point in the cycle. The deer are twice your parents, for your mother and father are deer, and the deer that gave you its life today was mother and father to you as well, since you wouldn't be here if it weren't for that deer.
DANIEL QUINN
The Story of B
It is not just contemporary industrial society that is dysfunctional; it is civilization itself. We humans are born to be creatures of the land and the sea and the stars; we are relations to the animals, cohorts to the plants. Our well being, and the well-being of the very planet depend on our pursuance of our given place within the natural world.
CHELLIS GLENDINNING
Against Civilization
As a Zuñi elder focuses her eyes upon a cactus and hears the cactus begin to speak, so we focus our eyes upon these printed marks and immediately hear voices. We hear spoken words, witness strange scenes or visions, even experience other lives. As nonhuman animals, plants, and even "inanimate" rivers once spoke to our tribal ancestors, so the "inert" letters on the page now speak to us! This is a form of animism that we take for granted, but it is animism nonetheless--as mysterious as a talking stone.
DAVID ABRAM
The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World
From the animist point of view, humans belong in a sacred place because they themselves are sacred. Not sacred in a special way, not more sacred than anything else, but merely as sacred as anything else -- as sacred as bison or salmon or crows or crickets or bears or sunflowers.
DANIEL QUINN
"Our Religions: Are They the Religions of Humanity Itself?"
Animism is not a belief but a world-view: The world is a sacred place and we are part of it. The factuality of this statement is not the issue. To say that the world is a sacred place is to make a statement about values, not facts. It's a statement about what you mean by "sacred," just as "money can't buy happiness" is a statement about what you mean by "happiness." To put it all very simply, Animism isn't a belief system, it's a value system.
DANIEL QUINN
Ishmael
The nomadic gatherer-hunters live in an entirely sacred world. Their spirituality reaches as far as all of their relations. They know the animals and plants that surround them and not only the ones of immediate importance. They speak with what we would call "inanimate objects," but they can speak the same language. They know how to see beyond themselves and are not limited to the human languages that we hold so dearly. Their existence is grounded in place, they wander freely, but they are always home, welcome and fearless.
KEVIN TUCKER
Against Civilization
Animism is far from primitive, nor is it about pre-modernity because animism does not serve as a precursor to modernity. Rather animism is one of the many vitally present and contemporary other-than-modern ways of being human.
GRAHAM HARVEY
Animism: Respecting the Living World
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 strongly involves necrolatry, which is the worship of the souls of the dead. Tribal people tend to regard the departed ancestors as part of the clan and fear the harm that the departed can do to the living. They especially fear that those who died unnaturally will come back to haunt them. Animism involves spirit worship, believing in the existence of personal spirits or demons, as well as impersonal spiritual forces in nature, which inhabit the earth, the air, fire, water, trees, mountains, and animal life. Life for the animist is dominated by a host of taboos and rituals to placate the spirits.
PETER HAMMOND
attributed, God's Next of Kin: Spiritual Genetics Defined
Animism characterizes tribes very low in the scale of humanity, and thence ascends, deeply modified in its transmission, but from first to last preserving an unbroken continuity, into the midst of high modern culture.
EDWARD B. TYLOR
Primitive Culture
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
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