Geology Reference
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of reality itself. Therefore each of these philosophers considered matter to be intrinsic-
ally sentient. The new animism that they espoused simply recognises that the material
world around us has always been a dimension of sensation and feelings—albeit sensa-
tions that may be very different from our own—and that each entity must be treated with
respect for its own kind of experience.
But if animism is indeed such an archetypal, primordial mode of perception, how did
it come to be suppressed in such an effective and pervasive way in Western culture?
What drove animism underground, and what have been the effects of its loss? The story
of how animism vanished is complex, intricate, and difficult to fully unravel. Some
theorists, such as Paul Shepard, suggest that the separation began with the widespread
adoption of agriculture during the Neolithic (new stone age) period some 5,000 years
ago. Shepard argues that agriculturalists developed a fearful attitude to undomesticated
nature because their crops were continuously susceptible to pests, floods, droughts and
other natural misfortunes, and because these early farmers had to expend a great deal
of effort to prevent wild vegetation from taking over their fields and pastures. There is
evidence that this fearful attitude was linked to the worship of wrathful masculine gods
who were distant from nature and who had to be constantly placated in order to keep the
more-than-human world under control. It seems to me that in the Neolithic era our spon-
taneous animistic sensibilities gave way to a dualistic animism, in which crops, fields
and domesticated livestock had to be protected from the surrounding wilderness. Ac-
cording to author Roderick Fraser-Nash, the precursor of our word 'wilderness' comes
from the concept of
wildeor,
from the 8thcentury Beowulf epic connoting a mixture of
'will'—self-willed, uncontrollable nature and
deor
, meaning savage beast. Hence 'wil-
derness' is the place where uncontrollable dangerous beasts lurk, darkly threatening the
agriculturalist's world.
Cultural ecologist David Abram holds that the advent of formal writing sys-
tems—and, in particular, the emergence and spread of the phonetic alphabet—was a ma-
jor factor in the breakdown of the animistic experience. In his topic
The Spell of the Sen-
suous
he demonstrates that phonetic reading involves a displacement of our instinctively
animistic style of perception away from surrounding nature to the written word, such
that the printed letters on the page begin to speak to us as vividly as trees, rivers, and
mountains once spoke to our more indigenous ancestors. Writing and reading, accord-
ing to Abram, involve a sublimated form of animism: while our indigenous forebears
once participated, animistically, with animals, plants, and indeed every aspect of the ex-
pressive cosmos, we now participate exclusively with our own human-made signs and
technologies.
Such a thesis helps explain why the richly animistic and nature-based polytheism of
ancient Greece slowly transformed, in the 4th century BCE, to the more rational world-
