My animist taxonomy
Animism is an easy perspective to state, and a hard one to fully conceptualize. “A world full of persons, only some of them human” leaves aside the extents of what the others are. Some texts I read state that all living things (but only living things) are persons, are ensouled, others talk about the spirits of the natural world, still others say “everything has a spirit”… but perhaps don’t agree on what is covered in “thing”.
For my part, as I’ve said before, “everything” means literally everything: all things you could even theoretically think of, and beyond. Of course, this causes another problem. That’s a very large set of things. So large, that it’s hard to think about without some sort of structure. And that’s just one of the reasons why I find myself drawn to creating an animist taxonomy, a grouping of those things using common factors, that helps talk about them in part and in whole.
Taxonomy-creation is actually an important part of my day-job work as well. Consistent labels and groupings help people make sense of things, and the very task of creating a taxonomy requires one to think deeply about what they’re categorizing. I always find that I come away from this sort of work with a better understanding of the topic than when I went in. Creating a good taxonomy is also always, on some level, subjective. I make no promises that my taxonomy will map to your own understanding, but I hope it will at least give you food for thought, and help you see where I’m coming from myself.
The first step is deceptively simple-looking: Just what are we taxonomizing? I’ve said ‘things’ a lot already, to the point that it’s feeling awkward. Talking about a taxonomy of “spirits” brings with it baggage and assumptions, I may say “everything has a spirit”, but someone else might read that and be stuck on animal spirits, or spirits of the dead. The word I tend to prefer, when speaking with the most generality, is “beings”. On one level, a being is simply something that “is”. But in practice it usually connotes a level of aliveness or agency, which are not a bad start if we’re talking about animism. You can form a relationship with a being, and my approach to animism is fundamentally relational. Therefore, it makes sense to ask: what are the sort of relationships we can be in with other beings?
One of the most fundamental that comes to mind for me is something I call apprehension: how we experience the beings around us. Can you get an understanding of them with your physical senses, or are they only experienced mentally? Considering this question provides an excellent starting-point for relationship and categorization alike. Some beings are material and others are not; I call the second category “imaginal”. But both material and imaginal apprehension are themselves massive categories. Within the material it’s (usually) straightforward to differentiate between living and non-living. Unlike some animist perspectives, I do resolutely consider the non-living and even the artificial to be sorts of beings that can be related to as persons. The specifics of the relationships are different, as are the considerations of how they interrelate with other beings, but I see no reason to exclude something from the discussion of animism simply based on its origin. The vast scope of imaginal beings also begs for subcategorization, since it includes all concepts (some of which are commonly personified, like Justice, and others of which aren’t, like the number 342), as well as personages of myth and fiction.
This distinction of material from imaginal, based simply on the senses, is useful day-to-day, but it’s also helpful to consider the places where the story becomes more complicated, because that itself shades the relationships involved. We don’t have direct sensory impression of something as small as a single quark, or as large as the entire universe. Our understanding of even material objects becomes more imaginal as our relationship with it becomes less direct, though it’s important to understand that the underlying materiality is still there. Thus, apprehension shouldn’t be taken as a strict binary, but as a sort of spectrum, an important factor in play with others.
Consideration of these extreme-scale beings points in the direction of another useful consideration when trying to understand and categorize beings: Containment. The universe, even considered as a material object, contains countless others, and conversely the material meaning of a single quark only makes a difference in the sense that it’s contained in larger constructs: nucleons, atoms, and on upward. The Earth, something that any animist is comfortable considering as a being, contains and is made up of a myriad of ecosystem-beings and the myriad of smaller living beings that make up each of them. Containment is one of the most fundamental sorts of relationships between beings, and a good understanding of relationships is key to understanding the animist universe.
Containment also provides more connections between the physical and imaginal worlds. Even if I only consider myself on a material level, it’s clear that I contain my thoughts and imaginings, just as much as I contain my organs and microbiome. Conversely, my experience of another material person quickly goes beyond the merely sensory, the conceptual person, the way they act in the world, contains not just their materiality, but their imaginal works, the effects of their interactions with others, and more. A good foundation of relationship must take into account all of these.
The consideration of apprehension and containment provide a starting-point for getting to know a being, but in practice, the most important sort of categorization is likely the nature of the relationship itself; its role in your life. This is the place where you arrive at categories familiar to the spiritworker, like “god”, “ally”, and “ancestor”. There are more than these, any of which could be an essay in itself, but let’s take those three as examples. I think of “god” as a sort of job description: a being who’s willing and able to intercede in your life across a broad conceptual scope. The fact that the scope is conceptual means that gods are imaginal, a contrast with ‘ally’, which might be any being with whom you’ve formed mutual bonds of support. They could be material or not, an imaginary friend or a flesh and blood one. Finally, my understanding of “ancestor” comes largely from the meaning of that word: a being who’s “gone before”, by definition conceptual in the sense that our relationship with them hinges upon their effects in the material world even when they’re no longer in it themself. (And, of course, not all roles and relationships are positive ones, though how to recognize and handle difficult ones is another topic beyond the scope of this particular essay.)
Role categories can also shed light on traditional cosmological frameworks, such as the ideas of “upper”, “lower”, or “middle” worlds where imaginal beings might dwell. To me, this is less about a specific location where they dwell, and more about the sort of work they’re likely to do in relationship with us; do they draw us toward abstract perfection? Do they help in our day-to-day lives? Do they connect us with mysteries and truths that we might simply walk over without seeing, otherwise? The connections to direction are clear in analogy, but what’s more important is how these inclinations reflect the roles that they play in their webs of relationship. Understanding of those roles can then guide us in how to reach out in search of our own relationships, and what to expect when we begin to forge one.
There’s so much more to say about how I understand the beings around me, both individually and collectively. Apprehension, containment, and role are just some of the first things I consider, an outline view that helps me to start to fill in the picture when I need to. But my goal with any being is to know them better, to understand what sort of relationship that we ought to have, or already do have. These are tools in my toolkit, and perhaps they’ll be useful in your toolkit as well.