Animism and Plato

“Aminism: the doctrine that all natural objects and the universe itself have souls.”

This belief is shared by just about all “primitive” societies, by all “shamanistic” religions.

I have heard some dopey explanations for this: that it is a primitive way to explain gravity, why a rock moves downhill. It must be alive. Such theories to my mind have a fatal flaw: they require us to believe that primitive people are individually not as smart as we are. Surely they are.

I see a far simpler and more credible reason for animistic beliefs. I bet they are thinking like Plato. Plato believed that anything we perceive in the physical world, in order for us to recognize it as anything at all, must correspond to some mental original, eternal, preexistent in our minds.

In this sense, any physical thing must have a soul—a mental original that endows it with its being and its identity.

This mental original differs from the physical instance in that it does not come into being or die. Its identity is complete and perfect, by definition; and so it does not come from or become anything else. So it must be immortal, eternal. So it must preexist any specific instance of it, and cannot be generated by abstraction from our experience of the physical.

Now, “primitive” tribes also, interestingly, do not worship all physical things equally. They invariably have a special reverence for rocks and trees.

And this stands to reason, and confirms my thesis. Rocks and trees, among physical things, most closely approach this spiritual ideal form, because they are least prone to change and decay, most inclined to preserve the integrity of their identity.

Therefore they represent the spiritual generally. They are models of spirituality, have stronger spirits.

Extend this principle, and you hit most of the things held most sacred by animists and shamanists: mountains, turtles, preservatives like salt and spices, preserved foods, the sun and stars, the North Pole, gold, diamonds, evergreens ...