Animism

Various types of animism

The companies animists can be monotheists and/or polytheists. I.e. they could allot a heart to each object while believing in a single creative god.

Two major types of animism are distinguished:

the Shamanism which considers that only rare people can enter in communication with the divinities through fright;

the Voodoo, a design which considers that it is the divinity itself which comes to take possession of the individuals.

Tylorism

Edward Burnett Tylor (1832 - 1917) is one of the first sociologists to have established an interesting theory on the animism. Today, its theories are discussed, but it does not remain about it less than the tylorism posed paramount basic concepts which made it possible to better define and target the animism.

Thus, the animist believes in the existence of spirits or geniuses cohabiting with the men and who to him are revealed each day by mysterious events taking part in his daily life.

At the time of Dream S, Fever S or under the effect of Drug S, the animist considers that it is divided into two parts: the body which undergo deteriorations of state, and the heart, which escapes from it to go in a elsewhere . The subject saw fictitious events, sees things which do not take place but, for the animist, if these visions exist there, under his eyes, at particular times of its life, then they exist permanently in one elsewhere, independently with itself. There are thus for the animist two realities: tangible and body and another intangible exit of the field of the spirits.

For example, for him, the fact that one can see at the time of visions the image of dead beings proves that deaths always exist in another form after death.

On the basis of this basic design, one quickly includes/understands the conceptual advance established by the animist: if an individual can duplicate himself (since the man can attend two realities), then the man has a share of itself which can go where good seems to him, in the past, the future and elsewhere even. Besides this belief relates to also the animals, plants and objects (logical conclusion, since those also exist in our dreams: that means that they also exist in the spiritual world ). That joined the concerns of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross on the experiments of brought closer death.

However, the theories of Tylor are called in question in the hierarchisation even of the various religious thoughts which it had tried to establish.

Thus, the sociologist, although having succeeded in defining and tracing contours of the reflection animist, tried to pose on this one a mosaic thought typically . For the tylorism, the monotheism would be then the consequence of the thoughts animists. It would not consequently act more than one intuition or of a vision of God, such as it appears to the animists, but of an intellectualization of the thought animist.

The hierarchisation of Tylor is carried out in this direction:

the animism : this design would be the starting point of the religious thought and would be found at the companies known as primitive.
the Fetishism : often confused with the animism, fetishism would be in fact a idolâtrée version of this last. The man would consequently allot a divine dimension to the terrestrial elements before joining together them in the Pantheon S which would control the human destiny. This phenomenon rises logically from the animism as being a observation of the impotence of the man to control the events of its dreams and are delirious. The spiritual world, inaccessible to the influence of the man, is then regarded quickly as superior with this last…
the Polythéisme arranged hierarchically : clean with the “semi-civilized” people. One allots a capacity increasing to certain divinities to depends on the others which are lower to them. The divinities in question become gods. Moreover, these divinities undergo an important personification during this evolution (cf the Greek Mythologie).
the Monothéisme : who affirms the existence of only one and single creative God and manager of the world. It is the choice of a higher divinity in the Pantheon and than one goes up at the stage of supreme and absolute divinity. The monotheism would be thus the result of any religion to the eyes of the tylorists.

It is however not rare to meet within civilizations animists a paramount god, former to the remainder of the spirits, and thus a thought of the monotheist type. In Greek mythology (in its hesiodic design ): the improvement of the Greek gods goes even towards a multiplicity and not a unicity of those. At the beginning of the Cosmogony, there are only two paramount divinities, while thereafter the Pantheon widens in a considerable way, specializing the role of each divinity…

James George Frazer and Marcel Mauss goes against the theories tylorists, by drawing up a clear distinction between the worship of the spirits and the religions, worships of divinities who would be located “on another plan”.

The animism, unlike the religions, does not try to gather the people nor is not subjected to a truth alone and indivisible. The animisms are multiple. They have analogies, but also differences in not very distant clans geographically. For this reason, it is good to announce that the totems do not have function of icons nor of Idole S, but of bond symbolic system between nature and crowned.

Quotations

“the animism is the base of the religion, since that of the savages until that of civilized” E.B. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1903, I, p.426;

“the animism is the belief which the natural beings have of the spiritual forces which live them and which their give a superhuman power” . E.B. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1903, I, p.427; & 1924 1871 Primitive Culture. 2 flights. 7th ED. New York: Brentano' S.

Homonym in the medicine of the 18th century

The doctor Georg Stahl is at the origin (in 1720) of a medical theory called Animisme ; to summarize to the extreme, it was a question of explaining why the heart had a direct influence on health.

External references on the animism to the XVIIIe century

Detailed explanations of what one called '' animism '' at the XVIIIe century on the site of Imago Mundi

See too

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