quotations about animism
The distinction between life and lifeless is a human construct. Every atom in this body existed before organic life emerged 4000 million years ago. Remember our childhood as minerals, as lava, as rocks? Rocks contain the potentiality to weave themselves into such stuff as this. We are the rocks dancing. Why do we look down on them with such a condescending air? It is they that are an immortal part of us.
JOHN SEED
Thinking Like a Mountain
Modern materialists and religious extremists alike lack the spiritual animistic reverence for non-human beings that every culture once understood as a given.
ZEENA SCHRECK
Beatdom, #11
All living things are individual instruments through which the Mind of the Universe thinks, speaks and acts. We are all interrelated in a common accord, a common purpose, and a common good. We are members of a vast cosmic orchestra, in which each living instrument is essential to the complementary and harmonious playing of the whole.
J. ALLEN BOONE
Kinship With All Life
All creatures are merely veils under which God hides Himself and deals with us.
MARTIN LUTHER
Watchwords for the Warfare of Life
Every purely natural object is a conductor of divinity, and we have but to expose ourselves in a clean condition to any of these conductors, to be fed and nourished by them. Only in this way can we procure our daily spirit bread.
JOHN MUIR
John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir
If we speak of matter as essentially inanimate, or inert, we establish the need for a graded hierarchy of beings: stones have no agency or experience whatsoever; bacteria have a minimal degree of life; plants have a bit more life, with a rudimentary degree of sensitivity; 'lower' animals are more sentient, yet still stuck in their instincts; 'higher' animals are more aware; while humans alone are really awake and intelligent. In this manner we continually isolate human awareness above, and apart from, the sensuous world. It takes us out of relationship with the things around us. If, however, we assume that matter is alive and self-organizing from the get-go, then hierarchies vanish, and we are left with a wildly differentiated field of animate beings, each of which has its gifts relative to the others. And we find ourselves not above, but in the very midst of this web, our own sentience part and parcel of the sensuous landscape.
DAVID ABRAM
Wild Earth, Volume 7, 1997
Part of our peacemaking was the realization that life is essentially no different in a man than it is in a paramecium, a fly, a salamander, or a deer. All share the same spark of life and spirit. All are part of the same superconsciousness, living in one place under the sun, connected by a frail umbilical cord to the nourishing Earth Mother.
TOM BROWN, JR.
Tom Brown's Field Guide to Wilderness Survival
Animism is by many regarded as the earliest form which religion took, and as the root from which was derived all religious beliefs which the world has known, and was also the earliest basis of all that is dignified by the name of culture.
GEORGE WILLIAM GILMORE
Animism: Or, Thought Currents of Primitive Peoples
A ghost is haunting modernity--the ghost of animism. It awaits us everywhere when we step outside modern reason's cone of light, outside its firmly mapped order, when approaching its frontier zones and "outside." We find it in the imagined darkness of modernity's outside, where everything changes shape and the world is reassembled from the fragments that reason expels from its chains of coherences.
ANSELM FRANKE
e-flux journal, summer 2012
I should begin by mentioning the degree to which animism has continued to pose, despite all attempts at scientific explanation, a serious riddle to Western epistemologies, and also a provocation to our embodied everyday perception and rationality. That inanimate objects and things act, that they have designs on us, and that we are interpellated by them, is a quotidian reality that we all implicitly accept--just as we accept, and indeed are animated by, the very milieus and contexts in which we operate. But to acknowledge, articulate, and conceptualize this fact is apparently a wholly different issue, which is problematic on all levels. The provocation embedded in the notion of animism is that it demands us to confront just that. Imagining animism therefore takes on the shape of the extreme, such that animism assumes the form of a caricature-version of the reality we normally take for granted: If things become active, alive, or even person-like, where does this leave actual humans?
ANSELM FRANKE
"Animism: Notes on an Exhibition", e-flux, summer 2012
Our beliefs are rooted deep in our earth, no matter what you have done to it and how much of it you have paved over. And if you leave all that concrete unwatched for a year or two, our plants, the native Indian plants, will pierce that concrete and push up through it.
JOHN LAME DEER
Seeker of Visions
We have the ability to look back and try and awaken the part of ourselves that has been buried by domestication: the civilizing process. We can see that there is something about the nomadic gatherer-hunter existence that just worked. We can see that this was broken down by sedentism, domestication, surplus, and those breakdowns would solidify further with horticulture, the creation of states, agriculture and even more so with industrialism and technological modernity. Something about these steps took away our autonomy. They made us dependent. Supposedly we were freed from the barbarism of self-determination toward the new Freedom of work and a world of stuff. We sold egalitarianism for plastic.
KEVIN TUCKER
Against Civilization
Animism is the belief that it's not only humans that possess a spiritual entity but everything around us. And I've felt that often. The earth is a grid; we're just part of it. If we plug back into ourselves, it seems to work out in the best possible ways. If you follow your gut instincts and try to really look at any situation you're in for what it is, and peel back layers of what you're supposed to think and what you're supposed to be, you can guide yourself through life in a positive way.
TONYA TAGAQ
"UNCHARTED: Inuk throat singer Tanya Tagaq talks Animism, Pixies and #Sealfies", Chart Attack, May 29, 2014
Animists are people who recognize that the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human.
GRAHAM HARVEY
preface, Animism: Respecting the Living World
This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals; Despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning god, have patience and indulgence toward the people; Take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men; Go freely with powerful, uneducated persons and with the young and with mothers of families; Read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told in a school or church or in any book; Dismiss whatever insults your own soul and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.
WALT WHITMAN
preface, Leaves of Grass
God writes His Gospel not in the Bible alone, but in trees and flowers and clouds and stars.
MARTIN LUTHER
Watchwords for the Warfare of Life
The "fear of things invisible," which is the natural seed of religion, has derived its germinating force from Animism. For the essence of religion is in the doctrine of spirits, beings of unknown, and, therefore, of dreaded potency, the force of which has declined as knowledge has advance.
EDWARD CLODD
Animism: The Seed of Religion
In the oldest religion, everything was alive, not supernaturally but naturally alive. There were only deeper and deeper streams of life, vibrations of life more and more vast. So rocks were alive, but a mountain had a deeper, vaster life than a rock, and it was much harder for a man to bring his spirit, or his energy, into contact with the life of a mountain, and so he drew strength from the mountain, as from a great standing well of life, than it was to come into contact with the rock. And he had to put forth a great religious effort. For the whole life-effort of man was to get his life into contact with the elemental life of the cosmos, mountain-life, cloud-life, thunder-life, air-life, earth-life, sun-life. To come into the immediate felt contact, and so derive energy, power, and a dark sort of joy. This effort into sheer naked contact, without an intermediary or mediator, is the root meaning of religion.
D. H. LAWRENCE
"New Mexico", Phoenix: the posthumous papers of D. H. Lawrence
A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish it but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
letter to Robert Marcus, a distraught father who asked Einstein for some comforting words after the death of his young son, Feb. 12, 1950
So we will share this road we walk,
And mind our mouths and beware our talk,
'Till peace we find, tell you what I'll do,
All the things I own I will share with you,
And if I feel tomorrow like I feel today,
We'll take what we want and give the rest away,
Strangers on this road we are on,
We are not two, we are One.
THE KINKS
"Strangers"