The animistic worldview

Part of the conceptual difficulty experienced both in anthropology and in the history of religions, when animism is to be placed among other systems of belief, springs not from the early association of animism with a speculative theory of religious evolution but directly from the huge variety of animistic cults. As a category, Tylor’s concept is more general than either polytheism or monotheism, and its meaning is harder to delimit—the word applies broadly to most of the “little religions” but suggests nothing of their varieties. For this reason, much use is made of subordinate labels, such as shamanism, totemism, or ancestor propitiation. These cults do not, in any case, constitute the whole religion of a people. They are, however, institutions that are not bound to one culture area—an Australian totemic cult does bear a “family resemblance” to an African one, though their differences also are many. Shamanism, with its reliance on ecstasy, is found from Greenland to India, and the propitiation of ancestors is not restricted to Africa and East Asia. It has long been recognized that the frequent recurrence of institutions fitting a certain pattern implies that there is a radically limited number of possible patterns, and, in this case, the premises of animism evidently have imposed the limitation. Animism attributes importance to categories of supernatural beings whose individual members are attached to particular places and persons or resident in particular creatures and are autonomous in their dealings. In such a system, each human encounter with the supernatural must work itself out as a distinct episode. Even where ceremonialism emphasizes an enduring moral relationship to certain supernaturals, people are likely to conceive of alternative powers whom they might seek in times of need. In a crisis, loyalties may shift: in West Africa gods have been sold to neighbouring villages, and in Melanesia a vision of European trade goods has inspired a series of new millenarian cults. The quality of openness lends itself to change and eclecticism, hardly ever to religious chauvinism.

Animistic creeds have in common an undertaking on the part of people to communicate with supernatural beings, not about metaphysics or the dilemmas of the moral life but about urgent practicalities: about securing food, curing illness, and averting danger. It is characteristic that genuine worship of a supernatural hardly is found. Creator gods often appear in myth but not in cult. In ancestor cults the most recently dead are the most vividly conceived—the original clan ancestor, for all his symbolic importance, is remote both from society and from the godhead. If animistic spirits anywhere exercise authority, they do so in particularistic, even egoistic, fashion, sanctioning individuals for ritual neglect or breaking taboos, not for acts of moral neglect or secular offense.

Animistic religions do not readily coalesce with systems of political authority and probably do not favour their development. When it is asked whether the association of animism with smaller and simpler societies proves it the natural (original) religion, the answer can only be that it is not known (and perhaps not knowable) what a prehuman or panhuman religion would be like. The problem is as difficult as reconstructing protohuman speech. If religion is taken as a pattern of serious relations between humans and supernaturals, then societies devoid of religion have not been found, and it may perhaps be concluded that religion is usually close to the vital centre of a culture, where the credibility of institutions is determined. The view of all nature as animated by invisible spirits—be they shades, demons, fairies, or fates—with which people could interact in meaningful ways may belong to the past, but philosophies that attribute powers of initiative and responsiveness to nature have not gone out of currency. The lesson of the study of animism is perhaps that religion did not arise, as some of Tylor’s successors believed, out of Urdummheit (“primal ignorance”) or delusions of magical power but out of humanity’s ironic awareness of a good life that cannot, by earthly means, be grasped and held. Animistic beliefs have everywhere engaged individuals’ susceptibility to private vision and enabled them to cope with it at the level of accepted meaning.