Chapter V — Animism
§ 1 What Is Animism?
If, when the cohesion of the hunting-pack had weakened, belief in Magic by giving authority to elders became very influential and useful in primitive societies, still greater in subsequent evolution has been the power of Animism. For belief in ghosts led in time to the worship of ancestors, and then especially to the worship of the ancestors of chiefs or heroes, some of whom became gods; and the belief in gods strengthened the authority of chiefs and kings who were descended from them, and helped to maintain the unity of the tribe or nation from generation to generation and from age to age.
In anthropology, the term Animism is usually employed to denote the proneness of savages and barbarians, or people of unscientific culture, to explain natural occurrences, at least the more remarkable or interesting—the weather, the growth of crops, disease and death—as due to the action of spirits: (1) ghosts (that is, spirits that have formerly been incarnate); (2) dream-spirits, that have temporarily quitted some body during sleep or trance; (3) invisible, living, conscious beings that have never been incarnate. This may be called Hyperphysical Animism. Sometimes, however, “Animism” is used to denote a supposed attitude of savages and children toward all things, animate and inanimate, such that they spontaneously and necessarily attribute to everything a consciousness like our own, and regard all the actions and reactions of natural objects as voluntary and purposive. And this may be called Psychological Animism. These two meanings of “Animism” are entirely different: it is one thing to regard an object as moved by its own mind, another to attribute its movement or influence to a separable agent which for the time possesses it; it is one thing to regard an object as having an anthropomorphic consciousness, another to believe that that consciousness is a distinct power capable of quitting it and sometimes returning, or of surviving its destruction, or of existing independently. Even if the doctrine of Animism in the second sense were granted, it would remain to be shown how men came to conceive that the consciousness of a thing can be separated from it, and exist and act by itself, and even with greater powers than it had before—contrary to the opinion of Don Juan,
“that soul and body, on the whole,
Were odds against a disembodied soul.”
Savages do not always regard a separable spirit as necessarily belonging even to human nature. Dr. Seligman writes that, among the Veddas, a few old men “were by no means confident that all men on their death became yaku” (veridical ghosts). Influential men and mediums would do so; but for the rest, at Godatalawa it was determined by experiment. The ordinary man was invoked soon after death, and desired to give good success in hunting; and if much game was then obtained, he had become a yaka.155 Messrs. Spencer and Gillen tell us that, according to the Guanjis, a woman has no moidna (spirit part).156 Major C. H. Stigand says “the Masai have no belief in a future state for any but chiefs”; the common dead are not even buried, but merely thrown out into the bush.157 Among the Omaha, though each person has a spirit that normally survives the body, still, a suicide ceases to exist.158 In Tonga the souls of the lowest rank of the people (Tooas) died with their bodies.159 The human spirit, then, is not necessarily believed to enter upon a life after death; still less is the spirit of an animal. On the other hand, it is held by many tribes that something inherent in weapons, utensils, food and other objects, a “soul” or soul-stuff, may be separable from them and go to Hades or serve as the food of spirits, although the things themselves are not regarded as having a spirit or intelligent life.