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ANIMISM
Animism is the name given by E. B. Tylor, the founder of modern anthropology, to the system of beliefs about souls and spirits typically found in tribal societies, from the Americas to Africa to Asia and Australia. For Tylor, animism was the world’s most primitive religion.
Tylor identified two major branches of Animism (which he spelled with a capital “A”): beliefs about souls and spirits connected with the human body, and beliefs about spirits which had an independent existence. He published his book Primitive Culture (1871) at a time when Darwin’s ideas about evolution were very much in the air, and he believed that human psychology, together with human culture and society, had undergone evolution similar to that then being claimed for the physical body. This led him to arrange various soul and spirit concepts in a developmental sequence, beginning with souls connected with the human being, through independent spirits, to polytheism, and then to monotheism—the idea of a single high God, as one finds in modern Western religions.
Andrew Lang was the first to question Tylor’s developmental sequence, in The Making of Religion (1898), by pointing out that some very primitive societies had high gods. Although later study showed that these gods were not the supreme moral beings found in the great Western religions, nevertheless Tylor’s scheme had been successfully challenged. Questions about animism’s claim to be the earliest form of religion were also heard. Sir James Frazer, in The Golden Bough (1890), argued for a prior stage of belief in magic, and others hypothesized that belief in a psychic substance called “mana” had existed before beliefs in souls and spirits. However, since no societies with magic and mana but without souls and spirits have ever been found, this position is hypothetical at best.
Anthropologists today reject Tylor’s evolutionary orientation and developmental sequence, but recognize that the system of beliefs he described under the heading of Animism is widespread. Spelled with a lowercase “a,” animism is an appropriate label for the worldview characteristic of tribal societies around the world. This worldview is built upon the acceptance of the human being’s survival of death and of a nonphysical realm alongside the physical world, and to the extent that it helps to channel religious sentiment (and it certainly does), it deserves to be called a religion. The question of whether it was in fact humankind’s first religion cannot be answered.
As Tylor showed with example after example, the fundamental animistic soul beliefs are based on direct apprehension and experience of such things as sleep and dreaming, visions and trances—what today we would call out-of-body experiences, Near-Death-Experiences, and Apparitions. Observation and experiences of such events would naturally have suggested that the human being was composed of both physical and spiritual parts, and that the spiritual part, being detachable from the body during life, survived death. But this is only the beginning of the animistic belief system. Having survived death, the spirit might do more than simply go to the Land of the Dead (see Afterlife). It might, for instance, take control of living persons during Feasts and Festivals of the Dead (see also Possession), or it might seek to send messages to the living through specially trained persons, as in Mediumship. Shamans specialize in out-of-body travel and the direct contact with the spirits of the dead.
A spirit after death need not possess only living persons. It might lodge itself in various features of the natural world (such as trees or rocks) or in human-made objects (such as statues or spears), thereby imbuing them with a special power. The collection of beliefs about objects so imbued has been called “fetishism.” A special type of fetishism involves the spirit’s association with a ritual object, which is then propitiated, if not worshipped outright. Such is the case with ancestral tablets in China. In West Africa, ancestral shrines (in many cases, carved representations of human figures) serve a similar function (see Ancestor Worship). Similar carved figures may also serve for the temporary lodging of a shaman’s spirit helpers. Fetish objects do not always gain their power through association with a spirit, however. In West Africa, where fetishism is particularly strong, the power may also come from smearing the object with a special substance (see Fetish).
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