The Return of the Gods

Animism is the beginning of a human sense of religiosity, of symbolic behaviors, cave drawings, burial practices, decorating or ornamentation. They often get grouped in with culture or art. You know, there might be ways of dressing that would mark some sort of religious category of person. Very difficult to separate out what's a religious impulse versus what's a purely artistic impulse versus what's a purely, sociological or cultural impulse. The animistic impulse is to represent forces of nature some kind of a way, symbolize things that are in the natural environment.

Atmospheric things like the weather, stars at night and the sun, you know, water, oceans, rivers, mountains, the moon, forests and groves, valleys, you know, you name it. All these geographic, environmental, atmospheric features, that are picked out as objects of some kind of veneration or awe or wonderment. Not just because of their practical relation to, you know, survival and reproduction, but also because of a basic spiritual or religious impulse that is just a kind of awe of the world full of intentions or purposes that are unknown and maybe even unknowable. So looking at these things and perhaps even wondering what are they all for. In the, history of philosophy, this is kind of, like, considered the encounter with the other, the inscrutable other, the fathomless other.

There is this void of information that has to be filled in with imagination. So we are the inheritors of those nerves. We are the inheritors of that generalized anxiety and that over hyper reactivity that is now undoing the linings of our stomachs and keeping us swimming in stress hormones in a society where we might not need to be quite so at the ready. One version of the origin of animism is about theory of mind. So that at some moment in the history of human evolution, tensionality was projected onto the objects and the activities of the world.

Modern scientific humanity does not see nature as anything but blind forces. And so there has been a meaning crisis declared this, callback to when there was supposedly a more, enchanted world full of purposes, full of meaning, full of intentionality, that is lost by the material reduction of the modern sciences. And why aren't people satisfied by the material reduction? Why is there this sense of loss, this sense of craving, for larger meaning and purpose in the world that used to be provided by such things as religion. Looking back at that original animistic impulse, it seems like something was missed, something else that was served by, seeing the world as full of independent intentionality that had to be imagined because they couldn't be directly known.

Does the imagination have purposes that aren't easily explained or easily reduced to material causality, some yearning, some desire? After animism, you get this continual personification of the forces of nature and of the animals, both human and nonhuman, being imagined as more and more like human intention. These animist gods are transformed into the gods of pantheons, and these sort of more organized and structured gods are, certainly still representative of the natural, world, but they are also personified so that they are more knowable and less other, so that the sun, Helios, is this, you know, guy in a chariot who makes the sun a little less inscrutable by personifying the sun as a guy in a chariot who, to drive himself across the sky every day in order for there to be day. And then you get personifications in many cultures of all kinds of things, like sickness, death, agriculture, war. And in general, pantheons are associated with sedentary rather than nomadic peoples, peoples who are, urbanized because they can stay in one place because of the greater and greater possibilities with, agriculture.

And so pantheons in general reflect a greater need also for hierarchy and organization and there to be a stratified society and the gods in their little boxes and in their little zones, but they also reflect a greater personification or a greater humanization, become more and more anthropomorphic, which you can see in the shift from the, titans to the Olympians in Mycenaean Greece. The Olympians are certainly more human like and also more involved in human affairs in general, oftentimes in detrimental ways, but also as helpers as, Athena is obviously a great help to Odysseus. But there is still a lot of otherness about these more humanized gods. They are capricious, they are unpredictable, and in general they are not great for uncertainty reduction. So you need a specialized class who can figure out the unscrutable otherness of these gods.

They can figure out how to correctly propitiate them so that you get the correct outcome. And they can explain to you why when things are going super shitty, it's because, some god is against you and you need to sacrifice in the correct way to that god to, fix things up. But thankfully, that priest knows just how to do it. They are specially trained and have been specially chosen by that god to perform the correct ritual for, the proper price. And so you can see just the continual stratification and specialization of society.

To get a specialized priestly class, often hereditary, but then you get this, educated class that gradually rises up to challenge their authority. In particular, in Athens, you get the development of philosophy beginning with the so called pre Socratics and then Socrates himself, and of course, Plato writing down his doings, perhaps fictionalizing them a bit, and then his student Aristotle, who in many ways is the precursor to modern science. But famously, these philosophers, particularly Plato, rejected the mythology, the ritual practice, the authority, of the priests, as well as of the poets, and their bardic presentations of these pantheons in favor of rational thought. In Plato, you get the concept of the one where the eternal forms reside as if in the mind of God, pristine and perfect unlike this fallen world. In Aristotle, you get this notion of the unmoved mover or the uncaused cause, the ground of cause, the, cause of every other cause, the necessary being, whereas everything else is a contingent being.

And then these developments in Athens get joined together with monotheistic developments in the ancient Near East. Sometimes we say Jerusalem in the metonymic sense of Jerusalem representing the idea of what had been a pantheistic god. So, for example, Yahweh having been a regional storm god to a particular group of Canaanites, through a very long process, becoming the only god, the one god, which seemed to demote all the other gods either to complete nonexistence or to the realm of demons. In the Hellenization of the ancient Near East, you get the joining of Jerusalem and Athens, and so you get the intermixing of Greek ideas about the one mixing with Yahweh to become the one God. And this intention of the one god is further purified by the sciences so that you get somebody like Baruch Espinosa equating god or the one material or the physical universe.

There is no personal intention. There is no subjective intention from which being or from which whatever there is comes. There is only the blind intention of physical causality, which was what Einstein meant when he said that his god was Baruch Spinoza's god. In other words, his god is the natural world. And then you get somebody like Ludwig Feierbach, who looks at the God of monotheism and sees it as a projection of human value, a projection of human intentions so that God is like the maximal or the ultimate human in some kind of a way, or ultimate personification of what human beings take to be valuable or ultimate or absolute.

Animism is the projection of intention into the natural world so that you get the personification of both natural forces and just like what's perceived to be outside of the human intention. The pantheons of polytheism are used to explain all kinds of personal intentions behind the world and its happenings, which both reduces, uncertainty, but also increases it because oftentimes these personalities are quite capricious, quite fickle, hard to propreciate, and hard to control in general. So in a sense, the otherness of the external or the outside of the self or the outside of the intention is reduced, which means that it's more coherent, seems more human, but it retains this, completely, irrational, inhuman unpredictability, this resistance to systemization, this otherness that Jacques Lacan calls the real. So there is plenty of room for imagination still because there's all this unknowability plus all of this imagined intention behind the otherness of the exterior world. And then all of this polytheistic uncertainty, all of these many purposes of polytheism, many intentions of the many gods gets projected into the one intention of the ultimate exterior other, the ultimate big other, which is the god of monotheism.

That sort of built into the rejection of the many gods, the many intentions of polytheism is the rational dialogue, the rational thinking, the rational inquiry of philosophy, which eventually results in a total rejection of intention in the rational and empirical sciences. But nowadays, you are seeing a sort of realization of the problem with reducing all intentions to physical causality. There are any degrees of freedom like choice or a conscious decision or a conscious intention or any degrees contained within an imaginal projection are illusions, illusions that are physically necessary. But this has left many cold and longing for the return of purpose, the return of the gods.