My personal definition of animism: the whole dang thing is alive and talking.
Posts in: animism
The fox squirrel's hymn
Proclus, as quoted in Corbin Alone with the Alone: For, in truth, each thing prays according to the rank it occupies in nature, and sings the praise of the leader of the divine series to which it belongs, a spiritual or rational or physical or sensuous praise; for the heliotrope moves to the extent that it is free to move, and in its rotation, if we could hear the sound of the air buffeted by its movement, we should be aware that it is a hymn to its king, such as it is within the power of the plant to sing.
Perspectives
Rachel and I were talking about near death experiences (NDEs) some time ago when we came to the question: should these accounts be understood as what will actually happen after death? To be clear, many of the experiencers do seem to believe everyone will experience something substantially similar to their NDE. At the time, I said to Rachel that I can believe NDEs are “real” (i.e., not hallucinations or lies or delusions) while also not believing they are photorealistic depictions of the afterlife.
Also, about that last post, could you monotheists please let the rank and file know this is a complicated question, please? Most of the Christians where I live think anything that isn’t fundamentalist Christianity is straight up demons. If we’re going to start encouraging a more enchanted world, then we also need to figure out how to avoid turning it into “Witch Trials 2, Now With Surveillance”.
I appreciate the nuance in “Christianity and the problem of the gods”. These issues are why I don’t find monotheism compelling. Even the most generous monotheism ends up twisting itself into knots. For me, John Michael Greer’s book A World Full of Gods is not only persuasive but somehow more natural
The monster of mechanism
Sometimes Hillman gets so close: The folly of reducing mind to brain never seems to leave the Western scene. We can never give it up because it is so basic to our Western rationalist and positivist mind-set The rationalist in the psyche wants to locate causes you can put your hands on and fix. Machines provide the best models for meeting this desire. Take them apart, find their inner mechanisms, and then adjust their functioning by modifying their ratchets, enriching their fuel, greasing their connections.
Memory is an Otherworld
Listen to this post: Memory is most commonly understood to be something like a computer hard drive. Experience is stored by the brain like a computer writes to a disk. When memory fails, it is a mechanical failure. Eventually the hard drive degrades to the point of unreliability. This is, like most machine models, wrong. Memory is a place, an Otherworld, which we visit. Like Imagination, Faery, and Dreaming, it exists alongside the waking world—sometimes parallel, sometimes not.
A talk with the ancestors
Hey, ancestors, I want to talk to you about mom. You all know she’s in assisted living and on hospice care now. She knows the end is in sight, though we can’t judge the distance. I think she felt that nearness yesterday after a visit with one of the hospice folks. I called her last night. She’s afraid she’ll die and go to Hell. We know that fear is groundless, but she very much does not.
The longlivers
After my recent post, I decided to look into the context of the Lewis quote on the longaevi from The Discarded Image. What follows is a summary, not intended to be thorough and, as usual, aimed at unapologetically pillaging ideas for my own use. To begin with, here is Lewis describing some fundamentals of the medieval model, into which he will later situate the longaevi: In the Mundas which God built of that raw material [the four contraries of hot, cold, moist, and dry] we find them only in combination.
Lost River country
The dark chthonic waters – essentially ancestral waters – rise from the unseen land of the dead into light and become visible. This process is controlled by ancestral agency, the waters becoming a medium through which ancestral presence surfaces and circulates. (Mark Nemglan) The part of southern Indiana I belong to is characterized by karst topography, where water flows through soluble limestone and forms sinkholes and caves. Sometimes the water even disappears underground in what is called a sinking stream.