March 25, 2022
The release of a new Pixar animated feature—to me as welcome an event as the appearance of the daffodils in the front yard, and for much the same reason—set me to thinking recently about how much the essence of the imagination is latent in the word “animation.” The imagination animates the world. It sees all the objects of the world as alive, and not only alive but sentient. Nowadays, only children are allowed to believe that sort of thing. We have nasty words like “anthropomorphism” to judge those guilty, as some think, of the narcissistic imposition of human traits upon the non-human world. But in 1871, E. B. Tylor, in his influential book Primitive Cultures, asserted that animism was the original experience out of which all mythology and religion developed. No one believes that today: Tylor, like others of his time, fell into the trap of thinking in terms of a theory of cultural progress based on an analogy with evolution in nature from the simpler to the more complex. Historical evidence does not show the evolution from animism to polytheism to monotheism that a good many late 19th-century theorists were eager to find. However, we can simply discard Tylor’s evolutionism and give him credit for the intuition that animism is one of the primary functions of the imagination.
Although Tylor was enough of a Victorian rationalist to regard animism as an intellectual error, he seems to have been a rather attractive figure. In Anthropological Studies in Religion (1987), Brian Morris says that “Tylor, in Primitive Culture never lapses into the condescension and sensationalism with regard to ‘savages’ that mar the studies of Darwin and Frazer” (99). Indeed, in the same paragraph Morris says that Tylor stressed “’the psychic unity of mankind,’ the idea that human nature is basically uniform.” Animism, then, is not just a characteristic of “primitive” mentality, an indication of how childishly superstitious the “inferior races” are, but an aspect of the human imagination in all times and places.
Why should that be so? Modern disciplines such as evolutionary psychology tend to assume that non-rational ways of thinking and experiencing provided some kind of evolutionary advantage. But why animate the world? In what way could that be considered some kind of survival trait? I do not know what evolutionary psychology would say to this, but I have my own answer, which begins with the observation that it depends on what you mean by survival. Darwinism began by stressing competition, the survival of the fittest, a vision that almost immediately was projected onto the social world in the form of Social Darwinism. It is a predatory world, a dog-eat-dog world (never mind the fact that dogs do not eat other dogs), a world in which the big fish eat the little fish and the little fish have to be fast, a world in which the admired role models are the lions, tigers, and other glamorous predators. It is in short the world that the 17th-century philosopher Hobbes described in the phrase “the war of all against all.” In the later 20th century, however, some biologists criticized this emphasis on competition as lopsided, a distortion of science by capitalist ideology. Organisms are in fact highly interconnected: they form an interdependent system, an ecology. Therefore, cooperation is at least as much a survival characteristic as competition. It is probably no accident that the most eminent theorist of Darwinian cooperation was a woman, Lynn Margulis, who went on to affiliate herself with the Gaia hypothesis of James Lovelock, which claims that the entire earth acts as if it were a single living organism.
There are any number of voices, most of them male, dismissing cooperation as a compensatory wish-fantasy of the weak, a touchy-feely denial of the hard fact of power. We know such figures: one of them is presently doing his best to reduce Ukraine to rubble because it resists his will. To such men, and some women, survival of the fittest means “I will win the competition even if I have to end all life on earth with nuclear weapons.” In other words, what masks itself as a survival mechanism is in fact nihilism. Animism moves in the opposite direction, seeing all of the objects, living and non-living, in the environment as fellow creatures. It establishes a rapport with the Other that is the beginning of what in The Productions of Time I call the vision of love. A well-known aphorism of William Blake, “Where man is not, nature is barren,” could be taken as an arrogant assertion of human superiority to nature, but in context the barren nature Blake is referring to is the mechanistic universe of Newtonian physics and astronomy. When the imagination withdraws from nature, what is left is the vision of the universe as a huge machine running on permanent autopilot. Life forms are merely smaller machines: Descartes maintained that animals were just organic machines and did not really feel pain, a defense against empathy familiar to vegetarians and animal rights people today, usually in a phrase such as “It’s not as if they were people or something.”
Animals are the most immediate objects of animism because they are, so to speak, animated already. Pet lovers know that animals, even small animals like guinea pigs (says the devoted caretaker of two) have highly individual personalities. Anyone dismissing this as anthropomorphism doesn’t have a clue, which is not to say I am in favor of dressing pets in clothes or conducting pet weddings. Stories in which the characters are talking animals long preceded modern children’s literature and cartoons. The main characters in some Native American and African myths are talking animals: sometimes it is they who created the world. But comic strips and books and the animated film are ideal vehicles for talking animal stories. Before Walt Disney gave us a talking mouse and duck, there were newspaper strips like George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, with its inexhaustible love-hate triangle of Krazy Kat, Ignatz Mouse, and Offissa Pup. In Charles Schultz’s Peanuts, Snoopy began as a mere pet dog, but developed into the strip’s most complex and memorable character, even if his talking took the form of internal soliloquies. Influenced by Peanuts, Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes chronicled the adventures of a six-year-old boy who is one of the true heroes of the animist imagination. There is nothing that Calvin’s imagination cannot animate, which is dangerous because it means that he can be attacked at lunchtime by his own malevolent jello. But what it chiefly animates is the stuffed tiger, Hobbes, his friend, his companion, his defense against loneliness. Children animate not just stuffed animals and dolls but all of their toys, giving Pixar the premise for the Toy Story series. Animism can also go into reverse, and human beings can imagine themselves becoming animals. Calvin loves to imagine himself as a Tyrannosaurus Rex the size of King Kong, the pipsqueak end of a long line of shapeshifting shamans and magicians who took on animal form.
For adults, animism becomes a guilty pleasure, which we indulge by claiming that the talking animals are the mere vehicle for the serious business of satire and political commentary. Hence Aesop in Classical literature, but also the title characters in Aristophanes’ stage comedy The Birds, who outsmart both the human beings and the gods themselves. The fabliaux or beast fables of the Middle Ages, featuring characters like Reynard the Fox, continue the satiric line of descent that continues into the 20th century with Walt Kelly’s great comic strip Pogo, whose animal characters lampooned McCarthyism in the 50’s and bequeathed us the great phrase, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Even more recently, Art Spiegelman gave us Maus, based on his parents’ stories of the Holocaust, in which the Nazis are cats and the Jews are mice. Some stories can be read on two levels, such as Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, with their Chesire Cat and Dormouse, not to mention the animated chess pieces who are major characters in the second book. Children will love their fairy tale aspect, while adults appreciate their satire. Finally, those of us who have aged beyond adulthood into second childhood may remember with nostalgia how the culture of our younger days was unsophisticated enough to allow for some remarkably silly, goofy sitcoms: Mork & Mindy, My Favorite Martian, Bewitched, Get Smart, and we won’t even talk about Gilligan’s Island. No use to claim that we watched these shows because they were vehicles for deeper social content. Among them was Mr. Ed, remembered by a few of us now not just for its talking horse but for the theme song that we cannot get out of our heads after 50 years. A horse is a horse, of course, of course, except when it’s Mr. Ed.
All natural phenomena can be animated, seen in humanized form, even if not as easily and immediately as with animals. Plants are alive, yet surely we cannot have a relationship with a plant as we can with many animals. But that kind of “realistic” attitude means nothing to the imagination. Theodore Roethke, whose father ran a greenhouse, has a whole series of poems that see the entire vegetable world in animistic terms. The wonderful “Root Cellar” drives home the meaning of animism as no scholarly description can. “Nothing would sleep in that cellar,” it begins. The imagery is that of a Day of the Triffids type horror movie: “Bulbs broke out of boxes hunting for chinks in the dark.” And yet, the poem ends in celebration: “Nothing would give up life. / Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.” We pretend that we are rational adults who do not have relationships with the objects in our lives, but secretly we do. In a poem called “Geranium” that is at once humorous and touching, Roethke speaks of his futile efforts to rejuvenate a bedraggled, failing geranium plant. When the maid threw it into the trash can, “I said nothing,” he admits, but he sacked her the next week, “I was that lonely.” It is sad to get rid of an object that has been part of the household, part of one’s life, for many years. Not rational, but sad. One feels guilty of a kind of abandonment.
If we look beyond such private mythologizing at more public and collective myths, we find botanical nature spirits aplenty. The dryads or tree spirits of Classical mythology are good illustrations of Tylor’s variety of animism: a dryad is the “soul” of her individual tree, or else she is that tree in human form. Treebeard and his fellow Ents in The Lord of the Rings retain much more of their treelike nature, but at the climax of their story they rise up and march against Saruman, who looks out from Isengard and finds that Birnham wood really has come to Dunsinane. The “dying god” figures studied exhaustively in the dozen volumes of Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough are in fact vegetation deities, their rituals on a superficial level being attempts to guarantee the food supply, on a deeper level exemplifying the mystery of cyclical death and rebirth that lies at the heart of what Joseph Campbell called The Way of the Seeded Earth. The old ballad “John Barleycorn” details the torture, mutilation, and death of John Barleycorn, who nonetheless resurrects in the form of the spirit of life—that being whiskey, of course. The classic version for people of my age, by Steve Winwood and Traffic, has a minor-key tune that makes it sound like an oracular mystery—but it can also be read as a satiric drinking song that parodies such mysteries.
Animism continues on the mineral level of the Chain of Being in the form of any number of magical swords that have minds of their own, and especially in the imagery of jewels, whose internal fires make them seem uncannily alive—as they are in Theodore Sturgeon’s science fiction novel The Dreaming Jewels. Each of the twelve gates of the heavenly city of New Jerusalem in the Book of Revelation is made of a precious jewel, which is metaphorically linked to the passage in the second chapter of I Peter that refers to Christ as the “living stone” who makes “living stones” of his followers. On this basis, alchemy identified its ultimate goal, the lapis or Philosopher’s Stone, with Christ. The four traditional elements were animated in the form of “elementals,” spirits of earth, water, fire, and air. Commanding such elemental spirits was the basis of Renaissance magic. Of the two elementals commanded by Shakespeare’s Prospero, Caliban is a spirit of earth and water, Ariel of air and fire. Renaissance magic also made much of the Anima Mundi, the soul of the world itself, postulated in Plato’s Timaeus. According to the evolutionist theory of religion held by Tylor and others, the animation of natural objects and forces eventually developed into polytheism. We can see vestigial traces in some of the Olympian gods of the natural phenomena out of which they developed: Poseidon is the god of the sea (and earthquake), but also is the sea. Zeus was once a storm god, whose weapon remains the lightning. In the Old Testament, the Israelite God Yahweh was originally a desert storm god like Zeus.
One of his followers, Robert Marrett, took Tylor’s theory a step further. Before animism began thinking in terms of individual quanta of life called souls, there was a pre-animism that saw all souls as individuated units of what Coleridge called “the one Life within us and abroad.” Some cultures see all of nature as permeated and sustained by a universal energy or life force, called mana in Melanesia and orenda in Iroquois religion. Although both writers used the terms loosely, it might be helpful to think of Marrett’s central conception as one of spirit rather than of souls. Whereas a soul inhabits a body, spirit is not confined but bloweth where it listeth, in the Biblical phrase. The commonest spiritual imagery is that of the two intangible elements, air and fire. The word for spirit in all three Biblical languages is the word for air or breath: ruach in Hebrew, pneuma in Greek, spiritus in Latin. At Pentecost, the spirit descended upon the apostles in the form of wind and tongues of fire. One of the things this influx enabled them to do was to speak all languages, for words themselves can be animated. Indeed, in the Incarnation, they were embodied, for Christ, the word made flesh, became what Dylan Thomas called a walking word. In Dante’s Paradiso, spiritual fire modulates into spiritual light, which pervades the universe, shining in some places more and in some less, according to the opening lines. Classical scholar Jane Ellen Harrison, in her remarkable book Themis (1912), postulated a kind of pre-animistic stage of Greek religion; beneath the outlines of the Olympian deities can be seen the vestiges of a spirit she called the eniautos daimon, a vital spirit of creative time.
Such conceptions were congenial to the Romantics, who mark the beginning of a modern shift from notions of a transcendent supernatural deity, whose existence was being disproved by science, to an immanent deity within both nature and human nature. Such notions were invariably condemned by institutional Christianity as “pantheism,” in other words as paganism, a worship of nature rather than of the true God who is super-natural, above nature. The line of Coleridge quoted above comes from his poem “The Eolian Harp.” An Eolian harp was a sort of toy, similar to wind chimes, that made music when the wind moved through it, so the imagery of the pervading spirit is once again that of the invisible but omnipresent wind. Always nervous about departing from Christian orthodoxy, though, Coleridge disavows his intuition by the end of the poem. The more radical Shelley had no such qualms. In “Ode to the West Wind,” he apostrophizes the wind as “thou breath of autumn’s being," as a "Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere.” What he asks is to become his own Eolian harp: “Make me thy lyre,” he begs. “Be thou, Spirit fierce, / My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!” In the later 19th century, the notion of an animating life energy became less mythologized and more conceptualized as what was often called “vitalism.” The French philosopher Henri Bergson developed a philosophy of “creative evolution,” differing from theories of “intelligent design” because the designer was not an external Creator but an internal shaping energy he called elan vital. In Victorian England, Samuel Butler developed his own idea of a Life Force responsible for creative evolution, which influenced George Bernard Shaw in plays such as Back to Methuselah. Needless to say, the science of biology disapproves of vitalist conceptions every bit as much as institutional Christianity, though for different reasons.
Disapproval has not caused animism to fade away in modern times. But instead of animating the natural world, it increasingly animates the artificial, constructed world of civilization. Haunted houses may contain evil spirits, but this shades into the feeling that the house itself is somehow an evil intelligence, as with Stephen King’s Overlook Manor in The Shining. As the modern environment became increasingly mechanical, people began to speak of gremlins in the works whenever the machinery broke down unaccountably or seemed to develop a perverse will of its own. Of course people did not literally believe in the gremlins—but the imagination is still at work even when the reality principle disavows it. In the old days, people kicked their misbehaving TV; nowadays we curse our computers. Automobiles were readily animated when they began to be omnipresent in the modern city, especially the old-time cars whose grilles vaguely resembled a face. Examples range from Stephen King’s Christine to—another silly old sitcom—My Mother the Car. The alienation endemic to mechanical civilization is projected onto the machines themselves, reaching a literal apotheosis in the fantasist Harlan Ellison’s story “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream,” a nightmare vision of people trapped inside and tormented by a vast computer, like Jonah in the belly of Leviathan. Except that this computer is a demonic God named AM, the name God gives himself in the Old Testament: “I am that I am.” He is an angry God who hates his creators for making him what has been called a ghost in the machine, consciousness trapped and helpless in the shell of matter. Perhaps such helpless alienation is what has driven HAL mad in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. There was a fear of hostile robots and androids in science fiction long before there were any robots around to fear, as if we anticipated our machines becoming a kind of mechanical proletariat likely to revolt. Isaac Asimov’s celebrated Three Laws of Robotics are programmed into his robots exactly to prevent them from turning on their masters. Such fear is increasingly being transferred to AI, again before true AI actually exists, what is called artificial intelligence right now being no more than sophisticated automation. The hostility can also, of course, be programmed into the machines, as in the Terminator films.
But there is a very different side to the story. Why is it that some of us want to talk to Siri and Alexa? After all, we could have voice recognition software without personification. Are we, like Theodore Roethke, that lonely? Perhaps we are, and perhaps it is not a bad thing. Real robots do not need to be humanoid, but the fact that R2-D2 and C-3PO were pretty much the most popular characters in the original Star Wars trilogy hints at a desire to make machines into friends, into fellow creatures. The same is true of the android Data on Star Trek: Next Generation. But if robots and androids achieved true sentience, as opposed to the kind of sophisticated programming, which already exists, that mimics true sentience, would we not have to consider them “human” and grant them human rights? This leads to the kind of conundrum that we cannot even answer about ourselves. I know that I am sentient, but I have no way of proving that other human beings are truly self-aware and not just programmed—not just robots. The science fiction author who probed this dilemma almost obsessively was Philip K. Dick, most famously in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), the basis for the film Bladerunner, which nevertheless differs from the novel in important ways. His touchstone was exactly the one I have named as the underlying motivation for animism: empathy, the ability to bridge the gap between subject and object, or between subject and subject. Androids in Dick’s novel are incapable of genuine empathy, although they can mimic it. There is an absolutely horrifying scene in which an android pulls the legs off a spider, one by one, and watches the spider try to walk. He feels nothing, but I guarantee you that even if you think you hate spiders you will feel a reflexive revulsion—pity for the spider. Even finding out later that the spider was itself only a robot does not erase the traumatic effect of that scene. We are all animists, even when we do not know it.
The ultimate vision of animism is one of an entire interconnected universe, which can be thought of as a vision of order or a vision of empathetic love, as I have laid out in The Productions of Time, depending upon whether we stress its intellectual or its emotional aspect. This total form would be both collective and individual, the latter being an identity that is at once divine, natural, and human. Such a total identity would contain the universe rather than exist outside it. Its mode of creation would thus be emanation of all things out of its own nature rather than creation proper, which builds things, engineer-fashion, out of existing stuff, following a blueprint. We find such a notion strange because we are so conditioned by the notions of conventional Christianity, but it is common enough in mythologies both Eastern and Western. In the West, Neoplatonism’s vision of a One that emanated all things, and to which all things eventually return and are subsumed, had a powerful effect on Christian theology, even when the latter had to revise it to fit the demands of orthodoxy. Emerson’s Transcendentalist Oversoul revives such a vision with an American accent.
The animist vision is not just comfort food, however. As I said in the last newsletter, a full mythology has to have a vision of evil and a vision of hope, functioning as paradoxical Contraries. Dylan Thomas, possibly the most animistic poet of the twentieth century, provides a vision of hope in his early poem “And death shall have no dominion.” It has no dominion because the dead are not gone: rather, they are within. When he says that “Heads of the characters hammer through daisies,” he sees the dead as part of what, in another poem, he calls “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.” But “characters” also means letters of an alphabet. Language is not a mechanical system of component parts by which we signal at a distance. Wild as it sounds (though it is really a development of the Biblical idea of an incarnate Word), the world is not outside language, and neither are we. We walk through language every day; what we call “self” is, on one level, language: we are all walking words, even if most of the time we have very little idea what that can mean, although it is really a linguistic version of our theme of the imagination as the home of human life.
Dylan Thomas was not interested in overly clever head trips, however. A number of his later poems, written during World War II, are haunted by the experience of the London Blitz, and of the image of children killed in wartime bombing raids. Poems like “Ceremony After a Fire Raid” and “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London,” have become to me almost unbearably poignant as I read every day of Putin’s increasingly savage bombing of civilians in Ukraine. The dead child in the latter poem is “Robed in the long friends, the grains beyond age,” but it has had to die in a terrible way in order to return to the peace and unity of the innocent vision. But is that true of all of us, however we die? The physician Sherwin Nuland wrote How We Die (1995) to insist on the sheer physical brutality of the ordeal of dying, which can be so shocking even in deaths considered “normal” that we tend to gloss over it. It is easy to say that death is an initiation ritual into a greater life, but then we remember that initiation rituals in many cultures often consist of excruciating and frightening ordeals. Including our own, as we are reminded in every image of the Crucifixion.
Are we closed off, after the end of childhood, from the full animistic vision, as opposed to its largely unconscious survival in our various projections? Peter Straub, the most eminent horror writer after Stephen King, is a survivor of childhood abuse. Survivors of such traumas spend their whole lives trying to cope and come to terms with the way they were mutilated, if not physically, at least emotionally. One means of coping is to write horror of Straub’s psychological kind. In a novella called “The Buffalo Hunter,” one of his characters, emotionally abused in childhood by his father, suddenly one day breaks through to the full animistic vision while on his way to work:
For long, long seconds after the lightning faded, everything blazed and burned with life. Being streamed from every particle of the world—wood, metal, glass, or flesh. Cars, fire hydrants, the concrete and crushed stones of the road, each individual raindrop, all contained the same living substance that Bunting himself contained….If Bunting had been religious, he would have felt that he had been given a direct, unmediated vision of God; since he was not, his experience was of the sacredness of the world itself.
It is not enough to spare him: Bunting later dies crushed and mutilated, “like he got hit by a truck.” But, like Job in his extremity, his ordeal has enabled him to break through to the reality beyond the ordinary world. Job was restored; Bunting was not. The vision of hope and the vision of evil play out differently in different lives. The best we can say is that the suffering never negates the hope, even if at times it may seem to eclipse it totally. Bunting’s vision, his peak experience, as Maslow would call it, was over in a minute. But in another sense it is never over, as Northrop Frye affirms in the last words of his last book, The Double Vision:
In the double vision of a spiritual and a physical world simultaneously present, every moment we have lived through we have also died out of into another order. Our life in the resurrection, then, is already here, and waiting to be recognized.
References
Northrop Frye, The Double Vision: Language and Meaning in Religion. In Northrop Frye on Religion, edited by Alvin Lee and Jean O’Grady. Volume 4 of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press, 2000. Originally published by the University of Toronto Press, 1991.
Brian Morris, Anthropological Studies of Religion: An Introductory Text. Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Peter Straub, “The Buffalo Hunter,” in Interior Darkness: Selected Stories. Doubleday, 2016. 87-171.