Spirit

Spirit simply means an other-than-human person. Graham Harvey defines animism as “the label given to worldviews in which the world is understood to be a community of living persons, only some of whom are human. (An older use of the term to label a putative ‘belief in spirits’ is less useful.)” The usual reference to “tree spirit,” for example, seems redundant; “spirit” simply indicates a person. Trees represent a particular kind of person (or “spirit”); referring to a “tree spirit” simply projects Western dualism (body & soul) onto a monistic perception (tree).

Irving Hallowell introduced the term “other-than-human person” in his description of Ojibwe animism, noting that notions of animate or inanimate took center stage in Ojibwe language, just like gender in Romance languages. Hallowell famously asked one Ojibwe elder if “all the stones we see about us are alive.” The elder responded, somewhat amused, “No! But some are.”

Ojibwe specifically, and animists generally, accept and treat as persons everything they encounter that acts like a person—regardless of its nature. This includes humans, but it also includes animals, plants, and even some rocks, weather systems, stories, and so forth. In this understanding, recognizing persons has much more importance than the objective state of “being” a person.

In the first chapter of Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram recounts an anecdote from his time in Bali, when his hostess put out a palm frond filled with rice at the corner of the building, as an offering to the household spirits. He became curious enough to watch the palm frond for a while, and soon, he saw the grains of rice begin to move! And then, he saw the “spirits”—ants, carrying away the grains of rice!

The idea became less strange as I pondered the matter. The family compound, like most on this tropical island, had been constructed in the vicinity of several ant colonies. Since a great deal of household cooking took place in the compound, and also the preparation of elaborate offerings of foodstuffs for various rituals and festivals, the grounds and the buildings were vulnerable to infestations by the ant population. Such invasions could range from rare nuisances to a periodic or even constant siege. It became apparent that the daily palm-frond offerings served to preclude such an attack by the natural forces that surrounded (and underlay) the family’s land. The daily gifts of rice kept the ant colonies occupied—and, presumably, satisfied. Placed in regular, repeated locations at the corners of various structures around the compound, the offerings seemed to establish certain boundaries between the human and ant communities; by honoring this boundary with gifts, the humans apparently hoped to persuade the insects to respect the boundary and not enter the buildings.

Yet I remained puzzled by my hostess’s assertion that these were gifts “for the spirits.” To be sure there has always been some confusion between our Western notion of “spirit” (which so often is defined in contrast to matter or “flesh”), and the mysterious presences to which tribal and indigenous cultures pay so much respect. Many of the earliest Western students of these other languages and customs were Christian missionaries all too ready to see occult ghosts and immaterial spirits where the tribespeople were simply offering their respect to the local winds. While the notion of “spirit” has come to have, for us in the West, a primarily anthropomorphic or human association, my encounter with the ants was the first of many experiences suggesting to me that the “spirits” of an indigenous culture are primarily those modes of intelligence or awareness that do not possess a human form.

As humans we are well acquainted with the needs and capacities of the human body—we live our own bodies and so know, from within, the possibilities of our form. We cannot know, with the same familiarity and intimacy, the lived experience of a grass snake or a snapping turtle, nor can we readily experience the precise sensations of a hummingbird sipping nectar from a flower, or a rubber tree soaking up sunlight. Our experience may well be a variant of these other modes of sensitivity; nevertheless we cannot, as humans, experience entirely the living sensations of another form. We do not know, with full clarity, their desires or motivations—we cannot know, or can never be sure that we know, what they know. That the deer experiences sensations, that it carries knowledge of how to orient in the land, of where to find food and how to protect its young, that it knows well how to survive in the forest without the tools upon which we depend, is readily evident to our human senses. That the mango tree has the ability to create or bear fruit, or the yarrow plant the power to reduce a child’s fever, is also evident. To humankind, these Others are purveyors of secrets, carriers of intelligence that we ourselves often need: it is these Others who can inform us of unseasonable changes in the weather, or warn us of imminent eruptions and earthquakes—who show us, when we are foraging, where we may find the best food or the best route back home. We receive from them countless gifts of food, fuel, shelter, and clothing. Yet still they remain Other to us, inhabiting their own cultures and enacting their own rituals, never wholly fathomable. Finally, it is not only those entities acknowledged by Western civilization as “alive,” not only the other animals or the plants that speak, as spirits, to the senses of an oral culture, but also the meandering river from which those animals drink, and the torrential monsoon rains, and the stone that fits neatly into the palm of the hand.

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My exposure to traditional magicians and seers was gradually shifting my senses; I became increasingly susceptible to the solicitations of nonhuman things. When a magician spoke of a power or “presence” lingering in the corner of his house, I learned to notice the ray of sunlight that was then pouring through a chink in the wall, illuminating a column of drifting dust, and to realize that that column of light was indeed a power, influencing the air currents by its warmth, and indeed influencing the whole mood of the room; although I had not consciously seen it before, it had already been structuring my experience. My ears began to attend, in a new way, to the songs of birds—no longer just a melodic background to human speech, but meaningful speech in its own right, responding to and commenting on events in the surrounding Earth. I became a student of subtle differences: the way a breeze might flutter a single leaf on a tree, leaving the others silent and unmoved (had not that leaf, then, been brushed by a magic?); or how the intensity of the sun’s heat expresses itself in the precise rhythm of the crickets. Walking along the dirt paths, I learned to slow my pace in order to feel the difference between one nearby hill and the next, or to taste the presence of a particular field at a certain time of day when, as I had been told by a local dukun, the place had a special power and proffered unique gifts. It was a power communicated to my senses by the way the shadows of the trees fell at that hour, by smells that only then lingered in the tops of the grasses without being wafted away by the wind, by other elements I could only isolate after many days of stopping and listening.

See also

• Native
• Shapeshifting

Further Reading

Books

• Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World
• Harvey, Graham. Animism: Respecting the Living World

Online Articles

• Abram, David. “Awakening What’s Wild Within Us ”
• Abram, David “The Ecology of Magic ” (First chapter from Spell of the Sensuous)
• Sheridan, Joe & Roronhiakewen “He Clears the Sky” Dan Longboat. “The Haudenosaunee Imagination and the Ecology of the Sacred ”