“The Great Spirit is in all things. He is in the air we breathe. The Great Spirit is our Father, but the Earth is our Mother. She nourishes us…..That which we put into the ground she returns to us.”
— Big Thunder Wabanaki, Algonquin
The following is a short and slightly edited extract from the second chapter from Hanzi Freinacht’s unpublished book ‘The 6 Hidden Patterns of History: A Metamodern Guide to World History’. The book is not coming out anytime soon, but a webinar on the topic of metamodern history and the six metamemes will be held this autumn, four weekends in a row November 2–25. More details about the course can be found here.
The introduction chapter can be accessed here. And the first chapter here.
Hanzi Freinacht: Across the tremendous range of human experiments that tens of thousands of years of animist cultures engendered, with a variety we can today only begin to comprehend, as evidenced by, amongst many other examples, the sheer hotpot of human cultural forms that is gathered only on Papua New Guinea (the favorite part of the world of so many anthropologists) — can one even speak meaningfully of such a thing as “the animist mind”? It’s a fair question, an important one.
Is the animist mind an entity that we could at least sketch the outline of and learn from, give its proper due, and even integrate into the farther reaches of modernity — without falling prey to wishful caricature, inappropriate cultural appropriation, and/or commercialization?
I believe and certainly hope we can; on the one hand it appears arrogant for us to claim access to a “general animism” when all animist cultures are precisely so localized and particular; on the other hand, it appears defeatist and as an insult to our joint and universal human experience to assume that the insights and connection to nature of animism are forever lost to all of the later metamemes. Again, the key difference between a “modern” and “metamodern” historiography, is that the latter takes all of the metamemes not as merely “objects of study” (“why are all these people so non-rational?” and so on), but as serious expressions of cultural life relevant and important to the development of one’s own culture, of one’s very sense of self. So I feel that we have to try, however provisionally. Otherwise, we are excluding this element of culture that is still inherent to all of us, still repressed and marginalized. I’m not interested in animism as a curiosity, but rather for what it can teach me, or teach us — for how it can help mend modernity itself.
With that in mind, let me try to take a kind of middle position on the issue of the “inherent spiritual experience” of animist life. More than one anthropologist has a soft spot for the mystical, the occult, the spiritual — at least since its overlap with Western counterculture in the 1960s and -70s. This is deeply reflected in the discipline’s way of perceiving and ethnographically participating in indigenous and particularly animist societies. Famous examples can be found in quotes like this one, by the wonderfully weird German researcher, Hans Peter Duerr, in Dreamtime (German original from 1978):
“The ‘dream place’ is everywhere and nowhere, just like the ‘dreamtime’ is always and never. You might say that the term ‘dream place’ does not refer to any particular place and the way to get to it is to get nowhere.”
Duerr argued that Western (Modern) science fails to take animist spirituality, or the occult in other pre-modern societies, anywhere near as seriously as they deserve: that there is real knowledge there, real explorations of the farther reaches of reality — not just whimsical or childish experience to be “explained” by a superior intellect — i.e. forms of knowing that “objectivity” is ill-suited to capture and comprehend. Dreamtime is about the borders of subjective experience, while the science we know today always stays firmly within the narrow confines of waking consciousness and its conceptual frameworks of self and reality. Animist spirituality, with its ready access to trance through rituals, to communion with nature, to shamanic intervention, and sometimes hallucinogenic drugs and practices, can and does break through boundaries unimaginable by the average doctor or engineer. And they may do so massively, and much more often than the rare glimpses of spiritual experience allotted to us in modern life — depending of course on the specifics of the animist culture.
In a similar vein, archeologists David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce have argued, in their 2005 book Inside the Neolithic Mind, that if you examine sites of Neolithic art in Europe and the Middle East, you see signs of altered states of consciousness pretty much everywhere.
Q: Well, at least it’s open to such interpretations.
HF: Yes, you’re right.
Indigenous mythologies speak a similar language: one that sounds decidedly psychedelic. Altered states, induced through shamanism, ritual, dance trance, and/or hallucinogenics, seem to have played a pivotal role in the evolution of the mind itself, of culture itself. Animist societies are arguably themselves psychedelically driven to a significant — and competent, and mature — degree that later societies are not. There may be deep wells of knowledge available to these societies that elude us today.
At the same time, this line of argument — taking on a more equal footing with the Animist metameme than did classical anthropology, viewing them as cultures that have knowledge that we lack — may also need to be tempered, to be balanced, in order to avoid unrealistic expectations upon animist life. We especially need to steer clear of a certain uncannily growing undercurrent of Western coveting of animist spirituality, with its consumerist, almost vampyric, Ayahuasca-tourism and so on. The high regard in which our hippie friends all hold Animist culture is not necessarily harmless: it arguably invites destructive forms of appropriation. Let me be clear to the point of sarcasm: rich, beautiful, hyper-feminine, sexy and athletic, “embodied” Burning Man ladies skillfully dancing by a virgin lake in the jungle, spreading their Goddess worship via YouTube, have nothing on the direct cultural expression of wrinkled faces of a simple and rhythmic clapping and singing taking place in the Kalahari desert. The !Kung people are not putting on a show; there is no connection in their rituals to Bali’s global elite party scene and Instagram. Such Western reenactments of animist spirituality certainly miss the mark, however universally human longings for connection that such reenactments may be stemming from.
So, from the other side of the argument, we may trace the classical sociological claim made by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, in their 1966 book, The Social Construction of Reality, that human life always returns to that mundane social construction that is “everyday life”. There is, indeed, no reason to believe anything is different in Animist cultures. Yes, they access spiritual states more readily; yes, their everyday life is less alienating and “stuck in the head”; yes, their holistic cosmologies are less weird to the human mind and thus facilitate a smoother sense of connection to the world… But no, the average member of animist societies does not consistently walk around in dreamtime, transfixed by elevated spiritual states during much of their waking lives. Let us be realistic about it: The animist mind is spiritually affluent, but its life does not entirely play out in the Garden of Eden.
It should further be qualified that while, yes, animist societies do tend to be spiritually richer than modern ones, the types of spirituality that emerge in hunter-gatherer societies do not correspond to the mind-transforming practices pertaining to the Postfaustian traditions, i.e. the mysticisms of the great religions. In small Animist societies with limited divisions of labor, there are no specialized monks or nuns, supported via larger communities of food donors, who refine practices of mind purification over centuries and millennia, through tens of thousands of intense practice hours per person, under the strictures of severe discipline and extremely incentivizing belief structures about the cosmic significance of their work. That stuff comes along primarily with the Axial Age (as we shall return to). In today’s neurological research into the brain states of spiritual experience, it is particularly the Tibetan Buddhist hermit Dzogchen practitioners that stand out. It is these people, uniquely, that can all but blow up the brain scanning equipment of modern researchers with strong, persistent Gamma waves (the fastest brainwaves, associated with peaceful bliss and compassion). But it is interesting to note that the Tibetan tradition — arguably the world’s most radical and tremendous in terms of measurable spiritual development — is one that has integrated many distinctly shamanic elements into its unique interpretation of Buddhism. So something can certainly be said in favor of the profound potential value to be found in integrating the animist mind within the frameworks of later metamemes. This is what the aim should be for our present situation.
Simply stated, I do believe in the animist mind as a useful category, from which true and relevant insight can be gleaned. It is something to rediscover, to revisit and critically reconstruct in the context of today’s larger societies, even if it is far from the only form of spiritual and cultural reconstruction necessary for metamodern cultures to thrive.
Q: What about magic? It’s not just spiritual experience, community building, and the embodiment of the natural world as non-verbal knowledge that constitute the animist mind: it is a deep relationship to magic, speaking to the world around us.
HF: Absolutely. Magical thinking is inherent to the Animist metameme. Here’s what I make of it.
Causality, as a form of reasoning to predict and interact with the world, is always under development. There isn’t one form of “rational mind” and one form that is magical. We’re all magicians, of different kinds, to different degrees. Causality is, viewed in this larger historical context, just another form of magic.
What the modern mind sees as “that’s just magic”, is the animist mind’s real reasoning. A big part of that has to do with the lack of differentiation into conceptual categories. In ethnomedicine, the study of medical practices of indigenous societies, there are many examples of how you can affect the healing processes of the mind and body by using the right words and objects (snake’s teeth and so forth). In the animist mind, language has not been separated out as something “exterior to” the world of objects. Objects have not been separated from subjects. So the world at large appears as something that can be talked to, as something in which each phenomenon has its own deep “essence”, and that such essences can be affected by conversation with the spiritual realm. You cannot “see” causes and effects, you have to infer them. Likewise, the animist mind infers the presence of spirits.
It’s here that spiritual states, in which one feels no separate self, and where “dreamtime” is experienced, play a special role: When the animist mind feels most connected to the world, this mind can enter into relationships with spirits that are believed to affect the course of real events. The name of one object sounds, linguistically speaking, like the name of something else, and by using that object and speaking the right words, you can affect the essence of another, seemingly related object or occurrence or phenomenon. It’s a form of causality, a form of reasoning — but one that meshes well with spiritual experience. And to a certain extent, such magic can do its magic, and truly work — through processes we would today perhaps describe as Placebo effects and the like.
Animist culture, through its very access to magic, was so superior to earlier forms of Archaic culture that it could spread across the planet over a comparatively short period of time: Animist cultures took hold on all continents and other species of homo were outcompeted. It is with this in mind that I named this chapter: Raindance did actually conquer the world. It’s not just cute; it’s that powerful. It is a form of reasoning that, in many ways, works. But note, again, that by inferring the presence of spirits, the animist mind has already removed some of the “essence” inherent to the phenomena themselves, and started to reason about invisible causal forces: it is, relatively speaking, a kind of secularization, of seeing wider causal patterns. Every metameme constitutes this kind of de-essentialization of the experienced reality from which it springs.
All of this does not mean that magical thinking of this kind is unproblematic in today’s world; it needs to be critically revisited and integrated with the realities today to serve us well. But that’s another story.
Q: Alright, so let’s talk more about the animist way of thinking.
In the past, it was common for scholars to subscribe to the, in my opinion, misled idea that indigenous people are somehow operating within a prelogical mentality and that they’re not fully capable of conscious, critical thinking. This mode of “primitive” thinking has, traditionally, been contrasted with the “rational” thinking of supposedly enlightened Westerners. Fortunately, this colonial way of thinking has largely been abandoned within academia.
And then “you guys” come along.
It’s not that I don’t acknowledge at least some of the findings within the field of adult development, or that I’m blind to the obvious fact that human beings can, under the right conditions, continue to develop cognitively throughout their adult lives. What I find really hard to believe is that entire cultures, that is, functional human societies that manage to survive in nature, were to function on a level of cognitive complexity akin to that of a child.
If we look at how indigenous people reason, and how they intelligently solve tricky problems — and how they over and over again have tricked westerners, I find that there’s little reason to conclude that they should be living in some kind of prelogical dreamworld.
HF: First of all there’s no one saying that animist societies don’t give birth to highly intelligent people, or that they aren’t able to have well-reasoned and rational conversations about how to solve problems. Cognitive complexity is, like intelligence, a highly hereditary property, and high-complexity individuals can be found in all societies (but in advanced ones they’re more likely to spend their days conducting high-complexity tasks defined within a stronger division of labor).
Secondly, since MHC Stage 8 Primary is the minimum requirement to properly understand animism, and since this is the first stage to enable simple logical deduction, I’m therefore not claiming that animist cultures operate according to a prelogical mode of thinking but rather the opposite.
Indigenous number systems can elucidate this point of “logical, yes, but not as abstracted” somewhat: while studies in so called ethnomathematics do tend to complicate the picture far beyond the proverbial “they could only count to one, two, many!”, it’s also true that larger number systems only emerged in larger societies, none of which were animist. We’re considering Mayans, India, China, Babylonia, and so on.
Now, whether animist cultures operate according to a rational mode of thought is a matter of how we choose to define the term “rational”. If we’re equating rational with MHC stage 11 formal, the ability to solve problems with one unknown using algebra, logic and empiricism, which is the minimum requirement to properly understand modernity, then this wouldn’t be the dominant mode of thinking in animist societies (but there would of course always be individuals capable at operating on this level of cognitive complexity). But if you simply equate rational with the capacity to critically evaluate evidence and make decisions based on experience and rough cost-benefit analysis, then animist societies, and their adult members, would certainly qualify. It should further be noted that human skills and faculties always develop in response to life conditions, and so the people who live most self-sufficiently in the natural world will also tend to be the most developed in terms of practical capacities. Throw a bunch of STEM Phds into the wild, cut them off from civilization, and see what happens — The Lord of the Flies probably doesn’t even begin to describe it. That also goes for animist cosmology: it’s more “rational”, in a deeper sense of the word, than mechanics and existentialism, because it imbues life in the wild with order, community, and meaning, while empowering and undergirding the practices that enable not only survival but thriving. It also doesn’t turn dogs and other animals into weird machines with no soul (looking at you, Descartes).
Given that animist culture is closest to how our minds and emotions spontaneously function (you don’t need to force feed it to people with twelve years of schooling for it to take hold), many (but not all) animist cultures are also more rational in the sense that they resonate more effortlessly with how human hearts and minds function, which means less cognitive dissonance, less alienation, and less decay of the mind and of social relations. Animism supports lifestyles for which we as a species, biologically speaking, are actually well-adapted (whereas pulling plows or maneuvering office life, tackling bureaucracy and digital security, not so much). Animism is rational because it tends to generate, for lack of a better term, relatively healthy expressions of the human condition.
All of this holds true until modernity comes along: When subsumed by the larger systems around them, animists tend to suffer from depression and other mental disorders to a degree comparable to other groups of equal status or vulnerability within these larger systems. As David Graeber and David Wengrow love to remind us, colonial history is full of people who were given the chance to live in both animist and modern cultures, and given the choice after having really tried both, most people will willingly escape from civilization and “go native” (as happens to the anthropologists themselves, every now and then). A slower and more rhythmic pace of life, less plotting and politicizing, less top-down control, more human contact, ongoing and non-repetitive movement of the body, fresh air and direct contact with plants and soil, lack of diseases derived from domesticated animals; it all adds up to make animist ways of life preferable.
The main project that “rationality” has to wrestle with under modernity is actually to one way or another reverse-engineer our way back to life conditions that approach the impossible ideals already present in many of the animist cultures. I’m not romanticizing here: hunter-gatherer life is not the Garden of Eden, the norms that regulate sharing and equality can be rather repressive and so on. But overall, yes, we have every reason to creatively reconstruct many elements of animist culture and integrate it. While leaving remaining animists alone, not least as indigenous land rights tend to mesh perfectly with environmental protection and bioregion preservation. I guess what I am saying is that “the savage” isn’t necessarily “noble”, but they are probably rational.
In response to this line of reasoning, modern observers have sometimes, almost gleefully, noted just how willingly indigenous peoples, animists included, have abandoned their ways of life to settle into the relative comforts of modernity, with handouts and modern jobs, once contact is established. But the fact that the rationality intrinsic to animist cultures can be thwarted by what are arguably slippery slopes of temptation, addiction, and quicker rewards hardly proves that members of animist cultures “given a choice” would make such choices. It is rather comparable to the way so many of us can slide into addictions of drugs or addictive digital apps, not least if we had no premonition where this leads us. And these “collective choices” of animist cultures do after all show up under circumstances where the trauma of contact is already a fact (you get hit by multiple epidemics, are pressured into a subjugated position, and have your cosmological beliefs undermined) as well as the active manipulation by members of modern societies who for different reasons may “need to manage” the indigenous populations.
Q: Alright got it: prelogical, no; rational, depends. Sometimes animist ways of life are “more rational”, I agree. But what about the notion that animists were supposed to live in some kind of dreamworld?
HF: Well, don’t we all?
I mean, the way in which modern people believe that there’s some kind of divine objective vantage point out there from where the true state of the world can be obtained. That’s a cute little dreamworld, don’t you think? Or, what about the way in which the postmodern folks believe that the world is inhabited by vicious spirits like the patriarchy, gender norms, and capitalism — that simply need to be deconstructed, or with another word, “exorcized”, in order to clean the world of their malicious presence. That’s a dreamworld at least in my book.
Or how about the fact that essentially, we only have access to the hallucinations that our nervous system and senses conjure up to represent the world around us, never the world in itself. Dreams, in a broad definition of the word, is all we’ll ever know.
Q: Get to the point.
HF: Alright. I assume you’re referring to the way some imagine indigenous people to be living in a haze of make-believe with no connection to the real world because of their spiritual beliefs and colorful mythologies. That’s obviously mistaken. It would be the same as assuming that modern Westerners went about their daily lives with nothing but Newtonian equations, Ricardian economic models, and legal textbooks to guide their behavior.
The cosmology of a culture is one thing. The practical day-to-day behavior of individuals is another. The first certainly affects the other, but the world would be a really weird place if people had to rely exclusively on the symbolic artifacts of their culture.
As such, people might live in a culture that’s full of sentient mountains, invisible daddies in the sky, or divine numbers with universal revelations, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t reason.
HF: In a way, the Animist metameme is the home we never left. It is, as I mentioned earlier, the only metameme we’re evolutionarily adapted to. We’ve had millions of years to adapt to a life of hunting and gathering, and then we’ve had around 50 000 years to develop a spiritual and cultural superstructure (I actually don’t like using the term “purification generator” for this one) to refine, enrich, and enhance this way of life. Animism is thus our first culture, a way of thinking and being that’s intuitive to our minds if we’re not taught otherwise, or not “corrupted” by civilization. Children, for example, will on their own develop ideas about an animated world and usually ascribe intentions and wills to inanimate objects. The thing is, our minds are simply wired for an animist worldview, and our bodies are adapted to the hunter gatherer way of life.
Consequently, one of the goals of metamodernism must be to find ways to reincorporate many of the social and cultural qualities of animism in order to increase our physical and emotional well-being, and to give us a greater sense of wholeness.
There’s a lot we can learn from indigenous cultures, and I’m not just talking about their knowledge about which plants have healing properties, and which ones can make you high. Indigenous societies have social design solutions that are, in terms of resource footprint, extraordinarily efficient. Indigenous societies can generate happy and healthy human beings with a fraction of the resources compared to modern industrialized societies. In a world that’s on a crash course towards a future where material resources will become scarcer and life will be even more chaotic and precarious than before, learning to make due with less, and still feel happy and resilient, will be vital if we are to survive as a species.
Nature preservation is another field where indigenous wisdom can help us, well, save the world basically. Indigenous cultures often have an abundance of vital knowledge about the ecosystems they inhabit and how to live in a sustainable balance with the land. This is of course something we should learn from. But extracting knowledge from indigenous people to help do something modern people remain notoriously lousy at can only take us that far. What I’m advocating is that we reinforce indigenous land rights so that the people who truly master the craft of nature preservation can function as custodians of the lands. It would probably be more efficient to have people with a deep connection to the land, rather than some faceless government organization, tend the health of the lands not used for agriculture. In addition, once people have a strong legal claim to a certain area, and the necessary protection to remain there, and have lived there for a longer time, they will also be much harder to get rid off in case the political winds change in favor of someone wanting to go full Bolsonaro on mother nature.
That more and more people are opening their eyes to indigenous wisdom is no mystery. As the multidimensional crisis of our modern civilization worsens, it will become increasingly evident that some of the keys to solving our problems are to be found within indigenous cultures.
Q: Alright Hanzi, nice try. I see you’re trying to give the Animist metameme as much cred as possible so as to prevent a shitstorm when the book comes out, well knowing that indigenous wisdom currently is the hottest hot and that people would come after you and kick your ass if you were to say that indigenous cultures were uncivilized or under-developed.
But at the end of the day, that’s still what you’re saying, right? I mean, the Animist metameme is, according to your model, on a lower stage of development, and the Modern one is on a higher stage. Sure, I get it, you’re no fan of modernity, you want for us to evolve to the metamodern stage, but that still implies that development is good and that indigenous cultures ought to evolve.
What’s your reply to that?
HF: First of all, and I reckon I’ll have to repeat this again and again, the metamemes model is not a normative model. A modern society is not necessarily better than an animist one, or a postfaustian one for that matter. It all depends. Modern societies can, as we all know, be severely pathologic. But so can animist ones. And there ought to be no doubt that certain modern societies manage to generate a lot of healthy and happy citizens and that everyone else would have a lot to learn from these, just like we evidently have a lot to learn from indigenous cultures, the great world religions, and so on.
Try to think of it in terms of complexity and maturity. The later metamemes are on a higher level of complexity. I think there can be no doubt that our modern global civilization is much more complex than a band of hunter gatherers. Yet, the later metamemes are also more immature. Our modern civilization has only been around for about 200 years, it’s super complex, but also super immature. Compare that with the aboriginal culture in Australia. They have been around for 40 000 years. Their way of life is relatively simple, but the wisdom that has accumulated over four millennia of surviving in the harsh environment of Australia is nothing short of astounding.
The reason for the apparent paradox that so-called “primitive” societies can offer us supposedly “advanced” moderns so much wisdom, is derived from the fact that our modern industrialized civilization is so young, barely an adolescent, while many of the indigenous cultures out there are aging sages with all the wisdom that comes with old age. But remember, there was a time when the aboriginals of Australia and the natives of North America were just as ignorant and reckless as us. They too caused mass extinctions and exhausted their natural environments. The reason that we today find such a refined awareness about the balance of nature among indigenous people is probably not because they concluded through deduction that nature would have certain breaking points. No, that’s not how humans usually work. Nature is a hard and unforgiving mistress, and through tens of thousand years there have inevitably been numerous cataclysms and collapses to grow wiser from.
Similarly, indigenous cultures have had tens of thousands of years to adapt and refine their social systems to the life of hunting and gathering. We, on the other hand, have only had a few generations to adapt to industrialization, and now even that’s over in many parts of the world and we have to adapt our social systems, gender roles, way of parenting, work life, and so on, to an entirely new digitized life style. It’s no wonder that we’re a bit lost.
So, my reply is that yes, the Animist metameme is a less complex metameme than the Modern one. But, that doesn’t make it better or worse, yet given the time it’s been around it certainly makes it considerably wiser than the later ones. As such, I’m not just paying lip service to all those hippies who think we should learn from indigenous cultures, I sincerely believe that there’s profound wisdom to be found that we won’t find anywhere else. Plus, the beauties lost from all metamemes are to be rediscovered if we want to reach a higher synthesis in a metamodern future.
If you wish to read the full chapter it can be accessed free of charge on the Metamoderna page here.
Best wishes,
Emil Ejner Friis
A webinar on the topic of metamodern history and the six metamemes will be held this autumn, four weekends in a row November 2–25. More details about the course can be found here.
Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian, and sociologist, author of ‘The Listening Society’, ‘Nordic Ideology’ and ’12 Commandments’. Much of his time is spent alone in the Swiss Alps. You can follow Hanzi on Facebook, Twitter, Medium and the Metamoderna website, and you can speed up the process of new metamodern content reaching the world by making a donation to Hanzi here.