Religion: East and West
So how was it that the spirit of the stag and his many elf and sprite cousins were run out of our world, to be replaced by a muscular grandpa sitting in the clouds?
It was probably a consequence of the rise of agriculture and animal husbandry. Hunter-gatherers could imbue their whole world with spirit – they could sacralize the environment that sustained them. But as soon as you till the ground, put some seeds in it and hope for rain, you also need to protect the land you’ve sweated over from the infringement of poachers. If you become dependent on the milk, meat, or labor of animals you have domesticated, you likewise need to maintain control of them and not let others purloin your bounty. Humans in this new economy needed to be able to own things – they required the concept of property.
It is awkward to own your gods – to in effect enslave them. To have a society with property, it is more comfortable to replace a spirit-filled world with a patriarchal figure that grants us the deed to parts of His creation. This God can grant us permission to claim and permission to rule – in the words of Genesis, to have “dominion.” Humans had to de-sacralize their world to make space for their new technology and its new God.
In most of Asia, however, monotheism did not prosper. Why?
There are probably multiple drivers (including the amount of cultural contact with the Abrahamic strain of monotheism, which has been by far the hardiest), but an important factor may be the nature of growing rice – the dominant crop in Asia – as opposed to wheat, barley, or rye: the more common crops of Europe. To grow rice, you need to engineer controlled flooding. That means sharing water sources and building, maintaining, and administrating intricate irrigation systems that might include dams, canals, and sluices. Asian rice growers were forced to cluster together and depend on community-wide action; European wheat growers, on the other hand, might more easily imagine themselves as rugged individualists.
Perhaps this is why the east developed a religious and moral tradition that emphasized interdependence, rather than a sacred personage granting deed to individuals. Without the jealous One-and-Only God at its center, the east was able to retain remnants of animism much more than the west, with traditions such as Japan’s Shinto, Mongolia’s shamanism, and the myriad river, mountain, and local deities of Hinduism and Buddhist Southeast Asia.
Despite the Abrahamic God’s jealousy, some traces of animism have managed to stow away in Western culture. The Catholic saints don’t inhabit nature the way the animist spirits of the east do, but because of their life stories, they can have their particular concerns and interests. For example, St. Francis is seen as the patron saint of animals, St. Anthony as the patron saint of lost items, St. Patrick as the patron saint of Ireland. Though the Church teaches that saints have no power of their own, they can intercede with God on behalf of petitioners. Orthodox Christianity also venerates saints. Similarly, Sufi mysticism recognizes Wali, or friends of God, and Hasidic Judaism attributes intercessional powers to tzaddikim (righteous ones) and rebbes (spiritual leaders.)
However, to look to monotheistic religions for vestiges of animism is like looking for desserts in a recipe book for diabetics – not a crazy thing to do but also not the first place you would look. Forms of animism live and prosper everywhere in our modern world.
Children are natural animists. They delight in ascribing consciousness to inanimate objects, as do the stories that cater to children: Goodnight Moon, The Little Engine That Could, and many other picture books turn sundry objects into unforgettable characters. In Schoolhouse Rock’s classic educational cartoon, I’m Just a Bill, a bill of U.S. law is turned into a character with aspirations and a personal history.
It’s not just children that revel in animism. Personification happens in poetry too. John Keats addresses a Grecian Urn he sees in the British Museum thusly:
Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time
You might object that this is animism in only the loosest definition of the word. Older children, at least, don’t think that a bill of law or a train engine has consciousness; it just tickles their imagination that it might. Likewise, Keats didn’t think the urn was actually a bride-to-be or a foster-child. But I doubt that our hunter-gatherer forebears expected supernatural behavior from a tree; they didn’t expect that its roots would become legs, and it would walk away to another place. Rather, they used their imaginations to understand and relate to the things around them.
I’ll admit: I’ve seen the spirit in a tree first-hand. Between the ages of 8 and 13 I lived in Kenmore, a suburb of Brisbane, Australia. There was a park right off Dumbarton Drive where I used to go to play cricket or swim in the creek. On one corner of the park, right by a bend in the water, there was an enormous Moreton Bay Fig, a tree native to Australia, probably at least 50 yards tall. Much of my childhood was spent climbing this tree, hiding in its winding wall-like roots, or just enjoying its shade. It was a perennial character in the lives of my childhood friends and me: a giant, craggy uncle always ready to play, always willing to bless.
When I returned to visit Brisbane in my fifties, some four decades after I left, I naturally returned to visit the tree, which of course was still there. I walked around its broad trunk. I touched it reverently. It was like visiting a cherished relative.
Do you ever see the spirit in things?
Go to your wardrobe closet and open it up. I guarantee you will find souls there: lives you’ve led, poses you’ve struck, seductions and disappointments, sacrifices and indulgences.
Do you have a car? Does it not have a soul?
Have you been back to your childhood home lately? Do you not have a psychic blueprint for it that assigns a spirit to each hidden cranny?
