🌜✨🌟….Anthropomorphism, the attribution of human form and character …..ascription of a human attribute of personality to anything impersonal or 'irrational" enters the English language in 1793 via the French. Animism , the attribution of a living soul to inanimate objects and natural phenomena “, occurs a century later in the present sense made familiar by the anthropologist Tylor's Primitive Culture (1871). The first is an emissary into English of the French Enlightenment with its acute sensitiveness to the irrationality of religion and its investment in the Cartesian world of dead and impersonal objects. The second is a product of Victorian progressive scientism. Both are heritages of nominalism. Both deprive that mode of experience to which they purportedly refer of its native validity. So we shall not use the terms anthropomorphism and animism but rather the term personifying to signify the basic psychological activity- the spontaneous experiencing envisioning and speaking of the configurations of existence as psychic presences- and hopefully thereby save this authentic activity from being condemned as personification.
Personification is a psychologism. It implies a human being who creates Gods in human likeness much as an author creates characten out of his own personality. These Gods depict his own needs; they are his projections. Personification cannot imagine that these psychic presences (Gods, daemons, and other persons of the mythical realm) have autonomous substantial reality. It cannot imagine that an author, say, is driven to bear the messages of "his" characters, that it is their will that is done, that he is their scribe, and that they are creating him even while he creates them. An author's fictions are often more significant than his own reality, containing more psychic substance, which lasts long after their "creator" has gone. An author creates only by their authority. The notion that literary fictions have an inherent autonomy is itself visioned by means of a personified Muse, without whose aid the entire writing venture becomes precarious.
All three terms- anthropomorphism, animism, personification - contain one basic idea: there exists a “mode of thought” which takes an inside event and puts it outside, at the same time making this content alive, personal, and even divine. These three terms by saying that human beings tend to imagine things into souls, are actually describing a manner of soul-making. But by calling this activity a "mode of thought" it becomes an act we perform- conscious or unconscious- rather than something we immediately experience. Where these three terms assume thought makes soul, personifying recognizes soul as existent prior to reflection. Personifying is a way of being in the world and experiencing the world as a psychological field, where persons are given with events, so that events are experiences that touch us, move us, appeal to us.
But as Van der Leeuw has said we waste breath trying to disprove the theory of animism. It can, however, be seen through as a psychological statement saying less about the soul of primitives than about the primitive soul of those writing about them. Animism is an anthropological report about the soul of anthropology. “In its entire structure and tendency," says van der Leeuw, “this theory suits the second half of the nineteenth century far better than it does the primitive world."
The theory of animism represents a condition of soul (anima) which cannot find soul except as projected into infantile behavior, psychopathology of fetishism, the common people of the collective mind, or the dark places and peculiar behaviors of exotic peoples in distant islands or insane asylums. Through these concepts —personification, anthropomorphism, animism-- reason could indeed make stones live again and even create souls and Gods. The rational tradition, having lost its base in the psyche, was trying to Rediscover it through the anthropology of animism. “ 🌟✨🌛
BlissNinja 