This name was given by the founder of modern anthropology, E. B. Tylor, to a belief system about souls and spirits that is fairly typical of the tribal communities of America, Africa, Asia and Australia. According to Tylor, animism can be considered the most primitive religion in the world.
Tylor distinguished two main types of animism (by the way, the researcher himself wrote this word with a capital letter - Animism): beliefs about souls and spirits associated with the human body, and beliefs about spirits leading an independent existence. Tylor published his book Primitive Culture (1871) at a time when the ideas of evolution now associated with Darwin's name were literally in the air. The founder of anthropology was convinced that human psychology, along with human culture and society, also passed a certain evolutionary path, just as it happened with the physical human body. Such views allowed the scientist to determine a kind of historical sequence in which those concepts that humanity associated with souls and spirits developed. This sequence originated from the souls associated with a person, and then, through the concept of spirits leading an independent existence, went the way to polytheism, and then to monotheism, i.e. ideas about one supreme God, which unites all modern religions of the West.
Andrew Lang was the first to question the validity of Tylor's evolutionary sequence, pointing out in his Making of Religion that some very primitive communities had their own "higher gods." Later studies showed that the gods that Lang spoke about were not a complete analogue of the Almighty in the great religions of the West, thus they managed to cast a shadow on the validity of Tylor's theory. There were also voices questioning whether animism should be considered the earliest form of religion. Sir James Fraser, in his book The Golden Bough (1890), disputed that mankind believed in magic at an early stage of development. Other researchers have suggested that belief in a certain physical substance called "mana"existed before the emergence of beliefs associated with souls and spirits. However, due to the fact that it was not possible to find such communities whose members would believe in magic and mana, but did not believe in souls and spirits, such assumptions remained a hypothesis.
Modern anthropologists reject the evolutionary orientation of Tylor and the sequence of the development of beliefs developed by him, but admit that the system of beliefs described by him, united by the name "Animism", is quite common. Now the word "animism" is written with a small letter and is understood by this a set of beliefs characteristic of the tribal communities that have survived to this day. Such a worldview is based on the idea that a person's life continues after his physical death and that along with the ordinary (physical) world there is also the otherworldly (non-physical) world. And to the extent that this worldview gives a certain direction to the religious feelings of people (and there is no doubt that it gives such a direction), it can be considered a religion. However, all this does not allow us to give a final answer to the question of whether animism was really the very first religion that originated in the bowels of human history.
As Tylor has shown in numerous examples, the fundamental animistic beliefs associated with the soul are based directly on concepts such as sleep, dream visions, and trance states. That is, what we today call feelings on the deathbed and feelings of detachment. Relevant observations and experimental studies indicate that the human being is composed of physical and spiritual components. The spiritual component can leave the physical shell during life and continue to exist after death. However, this is only the beginning of a system of animistic representations. After the physical death of a person, the spirit is capable of more than just going to the Land of the Dead (see Afterlife). He can, for example, control the actions of living relatives during holidays and festivals,dedicated to the dead (see also Obsession), or is able to somehow forward messages to the living through people with special skills (that is, through mediums) For example, shamans are credited with the ability to come into contact with the spirits of the dead and travel out of their physical shell.
After death, the spirit does not need to move into any of the living people. He can settle in various places of the nature around us (for example, in trees or rocks) or in objects of artificial origin (say, in statues), thereby endowing them with special power. Beliefs associated with objects with magical power are called "fetishism." A special kind of fetishism connects the spirit with one or another ritual object, which, as a result, begins to be worshiped. This is the case with the ancestor tablets in China. In West Africa, ancestral shrines play a similar role (as a rule, these are images of people carved from wood) - see Worship of the ancestors.
Such figures are sometimes used by assistants of shamans, explaining to people that the shaman's soul is temporarily moving there. However, not in all cases the acquisition of miraculous power by one fetish or another is associated with the spirit. In West Africa, where fetishism has taken especially deep roots, people believe that magical power can be imparted to an object if it is lubricated with a special compound (see Fetish).
This also includes the idea that everything connected with the human body and the vital activity of the human body (hair, nails and even excrement) retains this connection in the future, even after these parts are separated from the body. The same can be said about the placenta and about the foreskin removed during the circumcision. All parts of the human body mentioned are carefully buried or hidden in some other way so that they cannot be found by sorcerers or sorcerers and used with malicious intent. Many tribes believed that the soul resides in the crown of a person's head. This is what gave rise to such traditions as hunting for scalps, chopping off heads. This was seen as a way to rob the enemy of the soul. Cannibalism is also often associated with the desire to master part of the spiritual essence of the person being eaten. For this reason, in some cases, cannibalism was an integral part (before it was outlawed) in various funeral rites and rituals. For the same purpose, after cremating the body of the deceased, the resulting ash was mixed with water and drunk by those present.
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The idea that a person can have several souls is also quite common. Different souls are kind of “responsible” for different functions of the body (some of them may be associated with bones, the other with the respiratory organs, the third with the intellect, etc.). They can live in different places of the human body (in the crown, skin, liver), and their fate after physical death can be different (one, for example, remains in a grave with a corpse, another goes to the Land of the Dead, and the third returns to the world of the living and possesses some child). The Yakuts, for example, believe that a man has eight souls, and a woman has a family. In some communities, people believed that men and women have different souls, or, for example, that the soul of each of its parents passes to each child being born (that is, each person has two souls). Since these souls can reincarnate in different ancestral lines, the souls inherited from the parents, as it were, gave the child two different inheritances. It was also believed that the name of a person often has spiritual power, and therefore in many genera of the Eskimos, the name expressed a certain type of soul.
It is not surprising that in communities living in closer contact with nature than is the case in the modern Western world, not only people, but also animals and even plants were endowed with souls. At the same time, in some tribes it was believed that all animals, without exception, have a soul, while in others only certain species of animals were represented as animate. By analogy with human souls, animal souls could migrate into the body shell of other animals of the same species. In addition, human souls were endowed with the ability to transmigrate into animals, as well as receive a new life, settling into children (see Reincarnation). In other cases, humans have acquired a kind of spiritual connection with certain species of animals. The area of animistic beliefs that relates to the relationship between humans and animals is called totemism.
Totemic animals sometimes act as guardian spirits of people. Sometimes the functions of a guardian spirit were attributed to the spirit of one of the deceased members of a given community, or even some part of the spirit of a deceased person. But more often than not, a separate spirit was considered the guardian.
From the point of view of an animist, the world around us is simply teeming with a wide variety of spirits. For the most part, they are not directly related to living or dead people, although they can infuse animals or people, or in some other way declare their existence. Those natural phenomena that are associated in the mind of a person with the drama of the situation (volcanoes, whirlpools, even giant rocks) are the habitat of spirits. For this reason, they should, if possible, be propitiated, otherwise they can harm the people who are near them. The most numerous are the spirits living in the water and in the forest. The animistic world is also inhabited by myriads of monsters (which, for example, is the Windigo of the Algonquin Indians). There is no doubt that it was from such representations that the beliefs associated with elves, fairies, etc. developed.
Animism is more than just a collection of tricks related to souls and spirits. Animistic representations have their own logic and consistency, which makes it possible to call animism a "belief system". In the modern world, it is difficult to find a community that adheres to completely animistic ideas, but some parts of such a system are found in many places. This suggests that animism is a very ancient way of human perception of the world around us, and that a long time ago it was he who was the most widespread.
Andrew Lang objected to Tylor's model for the evolution of beliefs, but not to describe such beliefs. And here Lang went further than Tylor, arguing that the dreams and visions of clairvoyants therefore led to beliefs associated with souls and spirits because they were truthful. This is also confirmed by the studies carried out since then, leaving no doubt that the vitality of animistic representations is due to the realistic perception of the surrounding world inherent in them.
