Transcript for Animism is Normative Consciousness (Re-mixed, Re-musicked, and Re-released)

Hi everyone, I'm Josh and this is the Emerald. Currents and trends through a mythic lens. The podcast where we explore an ever-changing world and our lives in it through the lens of myth, story, and imagination. The Emerald, all that's happening on this green jewel and space. Hey, everybody. First of all, I want to welcome our new listeners. We've gotten a lot of new listeners over the last couple months. And I just want to say welcome. Welcome to the Emerald podcast. Welcome to the Emerald podcast community. And for those who are new listeners, do be sure to go back and check back episodes going back a few years now. There's a lot of treasure to be found in those older episodes. And I also want to say to the new listeners that this podcast really runs on Patreon support. It's what allows me to do this podcast full-time. It's what allows this fairly unique vision of storytelling and sound editing and audio acoustic mythopoetic journeying to be possible. It's what helps me pay for studio time and pay the musicians that I work with and spend hours twiddling away on flutes and temporas to make this all possible. So if you're interested in supporting this artistic vision, it means a lot and it goes a long way. And you can find out more at patreon.com slash the emerald podcast. Patronage starts as low as $6 per month. And all patrons receive access to two monthly study groups in which we dive deep into the topics that I explore on the podcast. It's a really wonderful community that's developing around these conversations. And I invite you to be a part of it. Patreon, PAT, R E O N dot com slash the emerald podcast. Also letting people know that I will be offering once again a year-long course entitled The Mythic Body. starting in October 2023 and continuing on till September 2024. It's a chance to take a slow, long, deep dive into the mythic and to really start to establish a foundation of knowledge of mythos and animacy and ritual protocol that can form a good basic foundation for whatever tradition you practice. It's about waking up creative flow, waking up ancestral sense faculties, waking up wonder, deepening our understanding of the animate world and our relationality with it. It has application for how we approach our wilderness exploration, how we approach daily ritual and whatever practice tradition we're in. how we approach our creative process, how we approach our somatic work, how we approach our work with others. So, if you're interested in this deep foundational mythic dive, send an email to themythicbodyatgmail.com and you'll be on the list. If you're already a podcast patron, you don't have to send an email, you'll receive the info automatically. If you're not yet a podcast patron and you want to receive info specifically on the Mythic Body Course, then again send an email to the MythicBody at gmail.com. Applications will go out in June. There is an application process involved and then there will be informational and orientation meetings later on in the summer for those who are wanting to attend. And because we have a lot of new listeners, I wanted to reissue an episode, an episode that is really foundational in understanding what this podcast is all about, what the vision is that we're working with here. It's an episode called Animism is normative consciousness. And I recorded it first a couple of years ago. Before I really started to dive deep into the musical foundations of the podcast and utilize music as storytelling and sonic journeying tool within the podcast, which you'll hear in a lot more of the recent episodes. So I decided in honor of this reissue. to make it not just a reissue, but also a re-mix. And I went back and I added new music to this episode. So for new listeners and listeners who've been around for a few years now, I think you'll enjoy the re-mix remaster reissue of this foundational episode. Animism is normative consciousness. Animism is normative consciousness. The title of this episode speaks for itself really, for 98% of human history, 99.9% of our ancestors lived, breathed, and interacted with the world that they saw and felt to be animate, imbued with life force, inhabited by and permeated with forces, with which we exist in ongoing relation. This animate vision was the water in which we swam. It was consciousness in its natural dwelling place, the normative way of seeing the world in our place in it. It wasn't a theory, a philosophy, or an idea. It wasn't actually anism. It was felt experience. It lived in bones and bloodstreams. In her replicated hair's rising to meet a world of equally vibrant myths, it lived in tongues and teeth, in spines and eyes, in points of meditative focus found in downward and upward gazing. It lived in the gurgling of streams, the pounding of drum beats, the sound of breath makes as it passes through nostrils. It was an ongoing discussion that took place most often without words. It was simply how things were, which is why it has been commonly understood across the entire world for all of time. We'll explore what this animate vision specifically means a little further on, but it's important to get a few things really clear right at the beginning. One is the scope and scale that we are talking about here in terms of time. So again, if you're a human being and I take it by the fact that you're listening to this that you probably are, then at least 99.9% of your ancestors were animist. 99.9% of your ancestors, the vast, vast majority of your ancestors lived in the Paleolithic, the long golden age of the animate. Perhaps for this episode we'll call it what it really should be called, the Normative Era. If you line up a thousand people and 999 of them see the world one way and one of them sees it differently, who is Normative, the 999. To put it in more stellar terms, the comet neo-wise, which arrived in the skies for a few weeks earlier this year, it appears once every 6800 years. So that means neo-wise has appeared in the sky 50 times since what science tells us is the dawn of anatomically modern humans. Only one of those times falls into what we call recorded history. This means paleolithic is the rule, we're the exception. the normative era extends over 98% of our history. Then for a very short period of time from the dawn of large-scale agriculture in major urban centers, say really from 3000 BCE until about 500 years ago, we have what we'll call the era of dismantling the animat. And so normative was animism until this point that the cultures that were losing it even communicate to us and their myths and epics, something's going on here that's not quite right. The Greeks tell us in real time about the loss of animacy. They lamented as it's happening. You can see in their texts the Nymphs and Nihads go from living presences, interacted with, spoken to, worshiped, felt, to ideas and concepts. metaphors and symbols. The living forces of the world reduced words on a page, frozen in impersonal marble. And then only in the last 500 years, a tiny sliver, one tenth of one percent of human history, do we find in the western world what we could call the post-animate era, the age of dead matter? One tenth of one percent of human history, which of course also happens to coincide with an era of unprecedented global destruction. But as we'll see, the animate does not go quietly. It pervades human experience. It finds its way into children's cartoons and fairy tales and folklore and Disney and Pixar films. It forms the substrate of many of the world's religions, which are structural shells that house deep animist cores. It thrives across the Indian subcontinent. It houses itself in backyard spirit houses across Southeast Asia. It lives in Sub-Saharan African grows and the favelas of Brazil, where the Orishas dart about and revels play. It lives on because it pervades us. It is the default somatic way of experiencing reality, which only fades when our relationship with our own body is fade. When we construct thicker and thicker walls between us and moonlight, between our bare skin and the morning mist, the animate waits for us. Weights for a tingle to travel to spine in the woods as we hear a strange noise. It lives It lives just under a dead layer of postmodern skin. So yeah, in terms of time, animism is the norm. and it's also the norm in terms of geographic scope in terms of space. Name me a culture other than the postmodern one we inhabit in this tiny sliver of one tenth of one percent of human history that does not see a world that is alive with forces infused with life, teeming with vibrancy that is not aware of confluence as in the landscape with which it is in relation that does not feed the spirits every single day. You can't. because it's simply the way it is. From the Aleusian Islands to New Zealand, across the blue Pacific to Hawaii and back. From the Calahari and the Namib deserts to the Verdant Congo basin, the homes of Ashoci and Oshun, to the Serengeti to the sands of Arabi. From northern Sweden to Siberia to Sri Lanka and Japan to Vietnam to Easter Island to Peru to the Hudson Bay to the tip of Tierra del Fuego. all across the world for all time, south to north low to high. High, the roof of the world itself, in fact, is populated with nature spirits. Zaz and Lu and Mole, who the Tibetans have names for, interact with, feed, placate, sing to, and so is the Amazon basin, and so is the Jordan River, and so is the Congo. Seven pages, it took the Spanish explorer Ramon Pane to list the names of all the classes of the animate beings that the tiny people identified in plant, entry, and stream, and stone, and sea. and don't even get me started on the Greeks. The Greek universe was animate from the smallest sprout to the continents themselves. It's no accident when Greek writing appears on the scene we find first and foremost descriptions of an animate sentient world. Every grove and cave and spring and peak and aisle in Greece inhabited by forces that had been individually meticulously felt experience named and honored over thousands of thousands of years. The vastness, the all-pervasive nature of this is worth repeating. The specific songs for specific forces specific rituals for specific confluences determined by celestial time and by earthly ebs and flows. Wevy serpent spirits whose dominion is water from Africa to India to Vietnam to Australia. The commonality is worth repeating, so that an illusion islander would instantly recognize what a Siberian shaman was up to when their gaze lifted skyward to the beat of the drum, and the Siberian would recognize the Amazonian. and the Hawaiian and the Jewitic. The only one they wouldn't recognize, the bastard descendant of the last one-tenth of one percent of human history. They wouldn't recognize Elon Musk, or Karl Marx, or Karl Rove, or Stalin from Eisenhower, or Deepak Chopra from, as they call him in Bill and Ted's excellent adventure, Sigmund Frude Dude, because we're the exception. We're non-normative. This is why, in a speech from 1980, Indigenous activist Russell Means is quoted as saying that neither Marxism nor capitalism nor science nor modern Christianity have any resonance with him, because all or extensions of deanimated worldviews, there are forces at work in the world, and in nature means says that the modern European mind cannot even comprehend. Thirdly, animism is normative in the sense that so deeply is an ingrained into the human heart, and mind, and I, so deeply inherent is animism, that there wasn't even a word for it until the 1800s. It was never described as anything other than simply the way things are, the water. in which we swim. This is highly important for reasons we'll get into in a minute. Because it means that when postmodern culture looks at animism, it does so through the lands of isms. It does so assuming that animism must be like the world of the postmodernist, an abstract overlay of belief that is applied to the world through mental constructs and not simply the felt somatic experience of the way things are. So now we've established some terms, we've established what we mean by normative, and we've possibly gotten some critics ready to argue, but really this episode isn't about arguing. It's about feeling. What I really want to convey here, in addition to this simple breadth and scope, is a feeling. a feeling that all of us have had, a feeling of deep tingling, breathy, relationality that exists between us and the land, the sky, the rivers, the oceans around us, a feeling that is so fundamental, so familiar, so primal, so foundational that we wander like a lost children without it, and that it just might be the thing that saves us in the end. Animism is normative consciousness. Today on the Emerald. You felt it. I know you have. All but the deadest of us have felt it. For us, now, animism can seem abstract. It can seem far away. Until, says Anne Row, we find ourselves lost in the woods at dusk. We take a wrong turn on the trail, walk into an unfamiliar stretch of forest. Then it's amazing how quickly animism returns, or perhaps we feel it when the temple bell rings, and the drums sound and the voices rise in honor of the forces of broken tree. Or perhaps you felt it when you heard a story of dark woods and moaning oaks. Perhaps you felt it when you were out backpacked. And after the phone battery dies, and you get a little space from your emails, and it's just you now in the natural world. And you spend a few nights amid the creaking trees and the whispering winds, and the griggle of water, and you sweat a bit of tension out of your limbs. That's an important piece. And the fog of agitated thought starts to dissipate. and things start to settle into their primeval flow and nature ceases to be a backdrop ceases to be scenery and becomes instead the matrix within which you move and think and breathe and abstract thoughts about what you have to do next Wednesday or what that email you got from your boss really means start to melt away and instead you find yourself interacting with the world directly Not through a veil of thought but directly, gathering wood and lighting fire and drinking water and preparing food. And maybe singing at night or arranging stones and little circle. And your senses start to wake in, and little details of the forest begin to shine out of you. And being becomes something very different than being in a world of only humans and screens. Being becomes something that is an agreement somehow between you and the larger world. And that larger world is an extension of you. and you are an extension of it, and there is a confluence, a meeting place between you and the world. And in that meeting place, things move, and things shine, and everything is alive. And why when we get out into nature, do we start to experience things this way? We start to experience things this way, because animism is normative, consciousness. Myself, I grew up among animists who probably didn't even know they were animists. The Zen Buddhist tradition I grew up in, imported to the West, was primarily focused on silent meditation. But scratch, just below the surface, into the co-ons and stories and chance, and a whole animate world revealed itself. A world of shapeshifters inhabiting fox bodies and self-sacrificial parrots and talking monkeys. A world of mountain ogres and hungry ghosts and feast days for spirits. Even the drum we played to provide a steady rhythm for chanting was carved in the shape of a whale. An animate world alive with beings. When we went to India when I was 13 that animate world exploded into its full glory. A cosmos and natural world teeming with gods and goddesses. With animate beings, stones and trees imbued with life. worshiped right at the center of village life. As I study Tibetan Buddhism in my teenage years, I gazed upwards that Skye is populated with DACA's and DACA's dancing beings. You can see them in certain clouds. Those wispy-serious clouds that you find in the taco paintings set against Azure Skye. Like the fleeting dance of an ephemeral sentient light, high and clear. The more I looked, the more I found, The traditions of the Lakota sweat lodge, which I was introduced to by some friends, spoke of the stones as grandfathers, songs rang out in honor of thunder and nation. In the Taoist martial arts, I learned of Shen, spirit, and its movement through the body. In the writing of Keats and Tolkien and Wordsworth and Callridge, the animat sparkled and lived. My Brazilian cupweta teacher told me that going upside down sends us into the spirit world, the world of the Orishas. All of this showed me something. Animism isn't gone. It's alive. It is in fact the greatest living, cultural commonality between people all across the world still today because animism is normative consciousness. Dig a little and you find this animacy everywhere you look The monotheistic traditions are utterly full of it. Modern day Christians turn up their nose at indigenous visions of theo and thropic beings, half humans, half animals, and then take a look at their own church walls and what's painted there. Luminous beings with human bodies and bird wings. The hybrac traditions are teeming with the angelic forces of the natural world. The Islamic world is populated with fiery spirits, the gin, which still graced the big screen and films like Aladdin. numerous categories of gin are known and described. Their behaviors are well documented, supplicating them as a time-honored tradition. And here's a fact for you, 54% of Icelanders will tell you that elves exist. I'm not going to use the word believe for reasons I'll explain later. But according to an academic paper published in 2000 titled The Elves Point of View, over half of Icelanders say that elves exist. As one Icelandic lady quoted in the Atlantic summarized quote, if this was just one crazy lady talking about invisible friends, it's really easy to laugh about that. But to have people through hundreds of years talking about the same thing, it's beyond one or two crazy ladies. It's part of the nation. So why wherever I travel, whatever tradition I encounter, from British poetry to Nigerian ifa, to Western alchemy, to the Kabla, to the songs of Orfias, why do I find this animate vision? Why in every home I visit from India to Cambodia do I see household guardian deities staring back me with big round eyes because animism is normative consciousness. For all that we think that we're beyond animism, our modern world is totally steeped in it. In children's cartoons, the trees are full of eyes, even teacups and saucers have eyes and voices. Animals talk, trees do too. Mushrooms have a life all their own. I've seen some weird shit says Alice to Dorothy in that popular meme, meaning she's gone down the rabbit hole into the world where all things talk. the realm of fairy itself with its animate stones. This fairy realm is something that humans perpetually envision, describe, and seek. We cannot get away from it even if we try. For example, why do ads for technology hardware and networking systems insist on showing us a pulsing world of luminous, animate, glowing connectivity? Why do visions of future technology show us floating, animate icons, and bewed with some mystic life force? glowing like the white stone of Revelation. Why, when the first generation of internet users came of age, did they immediately populate the internet with memes focused around what, talking animals? In fact, we hear sometimes that the internet is simply an excuse for cat videos, wall cats, cats that lure us in with their witty banter. Why do cartoon anime characters have these big, lamp-like eyes, these wet, shiny eyes? Why do we treat Hello Kitty with such adoration? animate, anime, right? Why in the early 2000s was there an onslaught of indie rock bands all named after animals. Grizzly bear, panda bear, band of horses, fleet foxes, deer hoof, deer tick, deer hunter, wolf parade, the crystal wolves, wolf mother. Why at the height of the age of reason, Victorian England was the best-selling book of book on fairy stories. How come every time we try to move away from the animate do we find it completely surrounds us? Why? because animism is normative, conscious, enough. So, animism, let's look up the word in the dictionary. They Oxford English Dictionary defines animism as, quote, the attribution of a soul to plants, inanimate objects, and natural phenomena. Yeah. So the use of the word inanimate right there in the definition is what we might call an inherent bias. It's a logical fallacy known as circular definition. In other words, to categorize people as animist requires a pre-existing worldview in which everything is assumed to be inanimate. And therefore, in that view, for a person to think that the world is animate must require some abstract belief system laid over the top of an inherently inanimate world. As Nareet Bird David says, the entire way we relate to animism in the modern world is based on the, quote, insistence that the Western experience of the material world as inanimate entities is normative and mature. It's pretty widely known at this point that the word animism is a modern construct. Animist cultures don't call themselves animist. Quote, the animist perspective is so widely held and inherent to most indigenous peoples that they often do not even have a word in their languages that correspond to animism or religion. The term is an anthropological construct, and it was constructed rather recently. Interestingly enough, it came into common parlance through the founder of cultural anthropology himself, Edward Tyler. Speaking of inherent bias, here's what Tyler said about animism. He says animism is, quote, a mistake about the nature of the world in which people believe in souls or spirits or discourse about non-impirical beings. Animism was the first significant theory that humans thought and taught to their descendants. Animism began and continues as a way of trying to make sense of the world. It is a myth Democratic mode of discourse that explains life and events to those not yet fully acculturated to the practice of rationalist science. And of course, as Graham Harvey says, only Tyler's generation in colleagues had gained sufficient scientific ability to look back in time and look around at contemporary cultures to see the mistake that had been and was still being made. So, let's go back to our line of 1,000 people. And really, the utter hubris it takes for one person to say to all the other 999, well, you're all categorically wrong. All the Aboriginal elders, dating back 60,000 years, all the Celtic Sears, thousands of years of druidic lineage, all the Euruban priestesses and the coyson dancers and the old monk ladies feeding the forest spirits. and the Sami drummers and the Tungus shamans and the Weechal journeyers and the Pueblo turtle dancers and save Homer and Virgil and all the great authors of the classics and all the romantic poets and all the bars and all the brahmanas chanting the Vedicans and all the village spirit mediums and the Inuit whale singers and the composers of the Heida epic and generation upon generation upon generation 99.9% of humanity, all of you are wrong. You clearly just needed to have a way to explain the world, so you came up with some abstract belief system about talking trees and stones in life force. And now that we have science, we don't need any of that, because the world is made up of lifeless hunks of colliding matter, and that's all there is to it, and you're wrong and we're right. Yeah. So that's an audacity that I would not venture to have towards my ancestors who managed to survive for 300,000 years and knew a whole lot about a whole lot of things that have since gone downstream. But here's the heart of it. When modern Western science encountered animism, absolutely everywhere, they assumed that its prevalence said something about the people in question. They never paused to consider that the fact that they were the only ones who did not see the world in this way said more about them than about the 99% of people who did. The fact is the 99% were normative. They were not because animism is normative consciousness. Let's talk about the word belief for a bit. That's another word that you don't find a whole lot in indigenous cultures, belief. The assumption with the word belief is that there is the empirical material world and then everything else exists as a set of abstract principles that you either assign validity to or you don't. You believe that Qi or Prana or life force exists even though you haven't seen it. You believe that there is a nymph that inhabits that spring, even though you haven't seen her. You believe through some set of inferences and abstractions, you believe in unseen forces even though you haven't seen them. Of course, this view can only arise in an era already steeped in abstract thought, in what Henry Corbin called the dead body of an angel. It assumes a pre-existing separation between human beings in the natural world. How about this? Our ancestors interaction with the natural world included the experience of what we now call unseen forces, because we don't see them anymore. They did. They saw them. Anthropologists David Lewis Williams spent his career demonstrating that the nature of religious or spiritual experiences not based on thinking things up, but on direct experience felt in heightened states of awareness. Take it way back to Episode 2 of this podcast to the Siberian people watch a man grow horns as he's shamanizing. That's not an idea or a thought. It's not a belief. The Tungus shaman climbing the world tree and suckling from the reindeer mother isn't a belief. It's something he experienced in trance. The energy that rises in the Koi-san dancer isn't something they believe. It's something that rises so tangibly that they have names for all of its stages. They've described all the auditory phenomena that come along within. The force of it brings such potency that bodies are doubled over noses erupt bleeding. They don't have to believe it's real. They feel it. They know it. They understand it. They understand how to access it. They understand the dangers that come with it. They understand the safeguards that need to be put in place in order to access it in a healthy way. They understand how to treat it respectfully. They understand what rhythms call it. Animism isn't an abstract belief. It's not an idea. It's something you experience. It's you on the camping trip, humming in tune with the waters. It's feet pounding on the clay of the Kiva Floor. It's the sweat that springs from the Yogi's neck. It's the eyes rolling back into the head of the Sri Lankan trance dancer. It is the convulsions of the village trance medium and I've seen those convulsions you tell me that some abstract idea. It's the high heat of the drumming, the cries of Jima, Jima. It's 300,000 people on pilgrimage to see a single tree. It's Zorba, exhorting to his dear friend, comet once. I've found a small green stone. It's life, the force of life. The force of radiance, kinetic energy, energy everywhere permeating all things. The scientists might say yes, but that's just the light on the water. Yes, but that's just endorphins from dancing. Yes, holy light, holy water, holy endorphins, holy vectors of the skull. These things aren't separate. They aren't material over here and abstract belief over here. They are seamless experience. the body of the angel alive and humming. anthropologist Tim Ingold says this, hunter-gatherers do not as a rule approach their environment as an external world of nature that has to be grasped intellectually. Indeed, the separation of mind and nature has no place in their thought and practice. And to perceive the world in this way, as he says, to perceive the world as a seamless continuum means that you are already situated in a world. This is his quote, and committed to the relationship this entails. In other words, questions about belief only arise once you have extracted yourself from this world of relationships and dwell instead in the world of abstract principles and thoughts. This abstraction, this extraction, this slaying of the angel as Corbin puts it, is the exception rather than the rule, because animism is normative consciousness. What must it have been like for the Greeks to watch their nymphs turn to stone and real time, to witness the deanimation of their own world, to see a world become increasingly reliant on holy contraptions, to see the thing itself become less important than the idea or essence of the to watch stories go from living, vocalized entities to abstractions, carved, and stone. It goes something like this. You start out living completely immersed in nature, utterly dependent upon, say, a local spring for your survival, and that spring is dear to you. It's where you walk with empty clay vessels every day to get water. And that journey there takes time. It might be a mile or more from your village. And several villages might depend on that spring. So to reach this spring is a journey. You have to walk through thorny brush and olive grove and stony outgropings to get there. And the soft padding of feet and the buzzing flies and the hot laid afternoon sun. And the bleeding goats, the bells clanking around their neck. There's a hypnotic rhythm to the journey to the spring. You might even find yourself singing along to the rhythm of your own footsteps. And the trotting of the path is like the repetition of an old song. And the song, the footsteps, the heat, the song combined to take you into a state. You know the state I'm speaking of, because you've felt it. And so when you reach the spring, you are already perceiving things with a little more shine. a little more lucidity, and then there's the spring. The very heart of your life, the source of everything, the source of the food you eat in the songs you sing. Maybe it's a small pool among the rocks, and children are splashing in the water that runs out from them, and the water sparkles in the sun at hold an hour, and the rocks around the spring grow with ivy and laurels. This is your medicine chest. The spring grows with medicine that takes you into even further heightened states of perception. The laurels are the plant of visions, which is why they're worn in a reef next to the temples of the skull, and perhaps why the temples of the skull are called temples. But that's another story. And the ivy coils around the ceremonial thiruses, and on certain moonlit nights, they're singing and drumming around the spring, and wild cries of ecstasy. and the chanting of stories in the singing of myths and the trances thick-lic honey and the water of the spring is sweet. And so the spring is a place of intimacy, of flow, partially because of the life-giving water that bubbles up right from the ground and partially because of the state you are in when you perceive it. You've been in ecstatic states and drank the water of the spring and moonlit revelry. You've stumbled back to that spring with throat parched after a long journey into the mountains. You've slaked your thirst at that spring when life has been hard and food scarce. You offered that spring food when crops failed and when relatives passed on to the next world. You have a relationship with that spring that spans the spectrum of your own consciousness. From the flow of grief to the honey of trance, the spring is there. the two meet in a meeting place, your perception, and nature itself. They meet in a seamless continuum, and in that seamless continuum, it's not difficult to see the nymphs and nihads who live there. Remember, the word nymph means a swelling, a welling up. The word nihad means float. Even with our postmodern fog of abstract ideas clouding our eyes, I bet you've seen the welling up. I bet you've seen the nymphs. I bet you've seen the nymphs that live where light meets water. In his authoritative book on animism, Graham Harvey says that animism is about actual relationships rather than possible once. The nymph of the spring is not an abstraction. It's about a real relationship, a conjoined relationship, what is ultimately an inseparable relationship. We are bound to water sources like we are bound to family members, only a society that rejects its own families would reject the spring as a living person. As Russell means that the materialist tradition of de-spiritualizing the universe is very similar to the mental process which goes into de-humanizing another person. For those in relationship with the spring, to experience the spring as a person, to see as orfias did nymphs swarming around a spring makes perfect sense. We are talking about the meeting place of us in the larger world, and the larger world breeds, and the larger world moves, and the larger world speaks, and the larger world flows, and the larger world has points of energetic confidence, the way a body does, and every specific place reflects the whole, and we reflect the whole, and the whole reflects us. Personhood is everywhere. Agency is everywhere. Springs and watersheds have agency just as we do, probably more. There's no quality of personhood that is not equally reflected in land and sky and spring and stone. It is not a mistake to see persons everywhere. It is not a mistake to see beings. It is a reflection of right relationship. Why would we not see this world as persons with whom we are in relation? The world is full of persons say the Ojibwe, only some of which are human. Because personhood is a wider category than humans, rock persons, bear persons. Here's Harvey again. Quote, persons are related beings constituted by their many and various interactions with others. Persons are willful beings who gain meaning and power from their interactions. Persons are social beings who communicate with others. Persons need to be taught by stages, some marked by initiations. What it means to act as a person. We have never been separate, unique, or alone. It's time to stop deluding ourselves. Human cultures are not surrounded by nature or resources, but by a world full of cacophonous agencies. I eat by many other vociferous persons. We are at home and our relations are all around us. The liberatory good life begins with a respectful acknowledgement of the presence of persons, human and other than human, who make up the community of life. This personhood is everywhere. It infuses everything. It is even in sap and bloodstreams and nostrils where two gods live sipping air for us from the vibrant ethers. There is a field, say, some tantras that surrounds the body that is made up of living, animate, protector deities as numerous as the individual scales on a suit of armor. Each with its own throne, each surrounded in a halo of fire. There is coyote and cornwomen, b-boy, and pollen girl. There are nymphs, and nihads, and dryads, and undines, and nereads, and sirens, and such. There are nagas, and mole, and blue, and davas, and dacas, and dacinis, and gundarvas, and kicharis, and skull bears. The Tibetan tantras will turn your field of vision into a teaming world's gap of sentience, populated by copper-crowned kings, and jackal-faced yoginis. There are gin, and seraphim, and cherubim, Electrum, metatron, and Elohim. This world of consciousness is populated. When you dream, you dream of persons. When you write fiction, you write stories of persons. Attempts to write fiction from the perspective of non-human still results in stories from the perspective of personhood. When Tonka painters sketched the tiniest details of the ornaments of a great host of persons that span the cosmos from the depths to the heights, they're painting nature as it is populated with persons. The world is the body of a great being made up of beings, beings within beings, within beings, within beings. This is the natural way of seeing it. Why? Because animism is normative consciousness. But what happens to the relationship between us and the spring is the city's grow and the water source is diverted. There is less and less time to spend journeying to the spring to begin with. Maybe you no longer go yourself to the spring. Maybe you pay someone to do it for you. Or maybe you get your water from Fiji from halfway across the ocean. There's a postmodern proposition if there ever was one. And there is so much less time for honoring things. And the mechanisms which once led you to experience the spring as a familial person, the footsteps, the goat bells, the buzzing of insects, the songs are less available. And the stories and hymns are all written down now. It preserves them, yes, but it means very simply that nymphs now become ideas rather than persons. You can think about nymphs without ever interacting with them. Just as my son knows the word for owl before he's ever seen an owl. And the body of written story that has passed down through generations further and further removed from the moonlight on the spring, from the wild cause of ecstasy, from the laurel reaths at the temples, means that we can analyze the stories and songs as nothing but abstract thoughts or beliefs. We can dissect the myth the way we dissect a corpse, without ever having witnessed the living thing. This is exactly what Henry Corbin meant by the world of rational abstract thought, living on the dead body of an angel, the angel's corpse, in which the angel is animacy, is this vision of personhood, is the portal between us and the natural world, the portal to the real. The angel and Friedrich Durinmacht's poem, an angel comes to Babylon, describes this vision of animacy, quote, I see molded in the plants, the animals, that which lives in the formless stars, in raptured, and burning with visions. The death of this angel of animacy is the death of cosmic personhood, of living, abulient, radiant, relationality, in favor of the abstract ration. It's also the death of a massive part of us. In 1999, Canadian scholar Paul Khalili published a bizarre brilliant and nearly inaccessible screen on the loss of the animate called The Angels Corpse. He says, quote, the sophistication of the thinking mind has come about at the cost of a figurative lobotomy, where the part of our psyche that allowed us to come into direct contact with real angels. was liquidated. Unlike previous errors in human history, when angels were vital to human culture by means of their ability to transmuteate the invisible into the visible and vice versa. Today, during these final months of the second millennium, the angel is dead. The mortal remains of the angel are signified by the overpowering predominance given to rational abstraction. What this means is that we have lost the cognitive faculty that in the past allowed humans to experience an angel affinity. In other words, if the angel is a corpse, then so is part of our psyche, which in reducing the angel into mortal abstraction has in turn annihilated itself in the wake of the angelic death. So let's return for a moment what Russell means said that there are forces at work within nature that the modern mind can't even comprehend. We can't comprehend these forces because they live and play in the relational space between us and the natural world. And we've decided that this type of cognition, what Corbin called super sensory cognition, isn't necessary. We've liquidated this part of ourselves in favor of the abstract realm of ideas, angels, spirits, persons, stone beings, nymphs. Live precisely in the place where the individual consciousness meets the world. They are a living confluence. This is why Kalili says this, quote, precisely because the angel is purported to occupy an interworld, located somewhere between heaven and earth, or to be more exact, where transcendence collapses from its height and folds together with immanence. Imagining the angel implies finding the point. at which imminence and transcendence are in a relation of juxtaposition. That is a heady way of saying that when you take away the context of the path and the footsteps and the buzzing insects and the light on the water and the saws and the transrich rules and the deprelationality and interdependence from the spring then the nymph becomes an idea rather than a presence. and we lose our ability to see them. I think about Angels wrote Eugenio Montale in his poem Satara scattered here and there on Observe. And if no one sees them, it is because other eyes are needed which I do not have. Other eyes are needed. We assume that the forces of nature described by our ancestors were unseen, again, because we don't see them. The pressing question is, have we lost the eyes to see? As historian Paul Vain once said, when one does not see what one does not see, one does not even see that one is blind. This different way of seeing this ancestral animate seeing, conjunctive seeing, the seeing of nymphs and angels, the seeing of the personhood of things, was described by a Connecticut college professor named F.E. Crans. When Crans introduced his reorientation thesis in front of his colleagues in 1985, he knew there would be skeptics. As Tom Cheatam says, quote, Crans was cautious and reticent about his thesis that the ancients experienced the world in a way radically different from ours. He knew he faced an uphill battle making his case. Crans expressed many times his ruffle awareness of the generally disbelieving scholarly response. And what was so radical about what Crans said? He said simply that the conjunctive mind experienced by our ancestors was, in fact, normative consciousness, and that our way of seeing the detached materialistic, objectified way of seeing is, in fact, the anomaly. The thrust of my argument, Grant said, is not that there were different theories about the same seeing and knowing, but rather that there were different seeings and noings. Different eyes through which the world was seen, eyes that saw a world not separate, teeming with luminous persons, a way of seeing that has been largely lost. All of this led crants to state that modern thought is, quote, different from even alien to all previous thought. And there is nothing normative or even normal about it or us. Why? Because animism is normative consciousness. Much has been written about how and why this animate vision was lost. Some point to decart. For Henry Corbin it was a 12th century thing. Yet the Greeks described this loss as it was happening over 3,000 years ago. David Abram singles out the development of written language, which certainly shifts our focus from confluences of Nymphs to confluences of letters, from Nymphs' felt presences to Nymphs' concepts. This loss has mostly occurred, of course, in the West, and what is called modern industrialized civilization. Nymphs fade when cities grow, because our basic relationality At least on the surface changes, when we do not have as much daily interaction with the spring, the spring, even though we are just as dependent upon it, fades in mind and memory. But it's not so simple to pinpoint exactly when and where the loss occurred. It's not totally a west-east thing or a north-south thing. At the same time, when Tyler that British anthropologist was busy poop-poeing animism, William Butler Yates was busy exclaiming that the Irish still maintain their relationship with the ferries of the countryside. At the height of the age of reason, College and Wordsworth were reveling in an animate vision, and the British public was deeply along for the ride. If we say this split happened with their cart, then what about Blake's angelic visitations? Instead of trying to highlight one point, we can say instead that there are choices along the way that we have made and that we make. Times, when we choose again and again to flee from the immediacy of the moment, as individual people in this culture, Much has been sacrificed in the name of progress and convenience, and we may find if we're not finding it already that fashioning a life focused on convenience isn't convenient at all. Time and time again, the very things that are conducive to animate vision are the things that we sideline. We sacrifice the raw immediacy of the hunter gatherer. for the security of having grain stores for the next year, and then we find that mines that are too forward-focused can't see the animate anymore. We sacrifice the journey to the spring and all the context it brings. In favor of this same convenient forward vision, we sacrifice the feeding of the spirits, in favor of spiritualities that seek to take us beyond. We sacrifice our relationship to place, our adherence to ritual, the rhythm of slow and steady growth, The valuation of carefully cultivated heightened states of perception. The very things that allow us to see the presence of nymphs and angels. The church made nymphs illegal. Science made them irrelevant. World War I and World War II marked a profound loss for this animate vision. For if it's one thing the nymphs will not stick around for, it's bonds. A nymph might venture to an old Greek battlefield to shed a tear for a soldier dying of a sort stroke. but bombs? Why would they be party to such idiocy? Once human beings know that they have the power to destroy the entire world, it's difficult to raise our eyes again to nature in the same way. It's difficult to find proper alignment. The spirals of self-obsession and shame that come with such a change are difficult to overcome. We become overlords that can do little but hang our heads to the consequences of our own self-generated world. So these are choices we made and that we make along the way. And to start to recover this animate vision is also a choice. And this is the good news portion of the episode. For fundamentally, as we said at the beginning, it still lives the animate lives. Everywhere we turn, if we look, we see the sparkle of the animate. and we are all naturally inherently animists. This doesn't mean that we have to run to the nearest rock and embrace it and pretend that we hear it talking. We can't force an animate vision. Some in the new age movement have certainly tried. What we can do is slowly methodically, purposefully, start to reshape our lives and our communities so that we prioritize those things that allow the animate to shine through slowly, methodically, purposefully take our attention to building structures that foster presence, relationality, ritual reconnections. and that value the confluence, the place where we meet nature, where the light of the imaginal shines. This vision, now you've heard me say, in so many episodes, is profoundly necessary for many reasons. For this episode, I'll summarize it very simply. If the world is already seen to be dead, then how can we possibly save it? Why would we save it? If the world is dead, then we're dead too. But it is said, Paul Kalili writes, that the corpse of an angel leaves a beautiful floral perfume. A scent for us to follow. Perhaps like Oracle's breathing, the laurel fumes over the springs at Delphi, perhaps we can follow this scent to the place of animal vision. Perhaps we can wake the angel up. Wake. Angel. Wake, animate vision, wake, elm, and oak, and ash, and willow. Wake, old forgotten stones. Wake sees a bristling coral. Wake, nymphs, and nihads, ondines, and aerates, sea beings, and cloud nations, and sky-farers, and naga's of the rills, and streams, wake with voice, and plumes of fairy fire, and stir these dead and hearts so that they see. Stir these dead and hearts so that they see. Author David Quinn writes, anyone who views the world as a sacred place, and humans as worthy of a place in a sacred place. is an animus. Why? Because animism is normative consciousness. I hope you enjoyed this musical reimagining of animism as normative consciousness. Special thanks to CD Bay for providing some new vocals for this episode and you can find CD Bay's music on Spotify. It's SIT, IBE. I used Janae Rogers, wonderful song, your body, my name in this episode as well, and her music can be found at Vine Music on Instagram. And Ben Murphy from the School of Mythopoetics provided some background vocals. This episode contains reference to many books, articles, songs, etc. These include, Imaginal Love by Tom Cheatom, the 1992 film Thunderheart, starring Val Kilmer and John Trudeau, an account of the antiquities of the Indians by Ramon Panay, orfias the song of life by Anroe, animism revisited by Nareet Bird David, Satara, Poem by Eugenio Montale, San Talk by Tyson Yaka Porta, Native American religious and cultural freedom and introductory essay by the President and Fellows of Harvard College in Diana Eck, Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazanzakis. The Angels Corpse by Paul Kolele, fantastic metamorphoses other worlds by Marina Warner. The book of Revelation from the Bible, Russell Means speech at the 1980 Black Hills International Survival Gathering you can find it easily online. Why so many Icelanders still believe in invisible elves by Ryan Jacobs writing in the Atlantic, October 29, 2013. An angel comes to Babylon, a poem by Friedrich Durin-Mot, animism respecting the natural world by Graham Harvey, the film Billenthead's excellent adventure, and of course the ubiquitous memes of the law cats. I never knew if it was law cats or LOL cats, and I still don't.