The name Animism was given by EB Taylor, the founder of modern anthropology, to the system of beliefs about souls and spirits typically found in tribal societies, from the Americas to Africa to Asia and Australia. For Taylor. Animism was the world’s most primitive religion.
Taylor identified two major branches – beliefs and spirits connected with the human body and beliefs about spirits which had an independent existence. He published the book Primitive Culture in 1871. This was a time when Darwin’s ideas about evolution were very popular.( First comprehensively detailed in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, the theory argues that traits are passed down through generations, and organisms with variations best suited to their environment are more likely to survive and reproduce. [1, 2, 3]).
Taylor believed that human psychology, together with human culture and society, had undergone evolution similar to that. This led him to arrange various souls and spirits concepts in a developmental sequence, beginning with souls connected with the human being, through independent spirits to polytheism, and then monotheism.
A man named Andrew Lang was the first to question Taylor’s developmental sequence.
In his book Making of Religion, published in 1898. He pointed out that some very primitive societies had high gods, although later studies showed that these gods were not the supreme moral beings found in the great Western religions. Questions about animism’s claim to be the earliest form of religion were also thought to be true by Sir James Fraser, who published the book The Golden Bough in 1890. He argued a prior stage of belief in magic, and other hypothesized. Thoughts that believed in psychic substances called manna had existed before beliefs in souls and spirits. Because you could not prove this belief, it was hypothetical at best.
Anthropologists today reject Taylors evolutionary orientation and developmental sequence. But they do recognize that the system of beliefs he described under the heading of. Animism is widespread. This world view is built upon the acceptance of the human being, survival of death and of a non physical realm alongside the physical world and to the extent that it helps the channel. Religious helps to channel the just sentiment. It deserves to be called a religion. The question of whether it is in fact human kind’s first religion cannot be answered.
Taylor believed the fundamental animistic soul beliefs are based on direct experience of such things as sleep and dreaming, visions and trances.
What today we would call out of body experiences and near death experiences. In the Animism belief, having survived death, the spirit might do more than simply go to the land of the dead. It might for instance take control of living persons during feasts and festivals of the dead, Or it might seek to send messages to the living through specially trained persons, as a medium, a shaman or some specialized person who is knowledgeable of out of body travel.
His belief goes on to say that parts of the body. And it’s EXEXUVIAE, such as hair, nails, and even excrement, are instantly connected with the dead, and remain in connection with the person after they have been cast off. The same may be true of the aft after birth or the prepuse removed in circumcision. All these items must be carefully buried or otherwise disposed of, lest they be found and used against. Used to be against someone by people with evil intent. In many places the soul is thought to perch on the crown of the head, and practice things such as scalping and head and head hunting.
Totem animals may sometimes act as guardian spirits for persons.
Sometimes also guardian spirit is a deassed person in the community, or perhaps part of the same person. Who has been reincarnated? For the animism believer, the world abounds with spirits, entities, and of various sorts. Most have no direct connection with living or deceased persons, though they may transform themselves into animals or human beings, or make themselves felt in some way. Prominent or dramatic natural features such as volcanoes, Whirlpools or giant rocks may be held to be possessed with spirits, who must. He must leave food or drink too, lest they harm persons who come near them. Water spirits and forest spirits are especially common. The animistic world is also populated. By all kinds of monsters such as WINDIGO. Of the Algonquin Indians. It is doubtless from ideas of this sort that the beliefs of elves, fairies and other beings of Western folk were developed.