The Flown Bird Society part 2
Spirits, nonhumans, and relationships therewith
The story (The Animistic Stance part 1) so far.
Beth struggles to develop a career in field biology. She has a contract to search for Yeti in the Nepalese foothills, where she stumbles through a portal to a new physical reality. There she meets Sridar, a Nepali man searching for other portals. He plans a secret team that will try for some breakthrough understanding of the world’s oldest religious practice: Animism. He believes the other reality that he calls Elsewhere will be the right place for his team to do its work. Beth, reluctant yet hopeful, becomes his first recruit when he offers to relieve her poverty. We rejoin the story as Beth and Sridar have their first working meeting in Elsewhere, along with new recruit, Micheal.
Elsewhere: A Meeting of the Flown Bird Society
“Typically, the animist takes particular features of the natural world as endowed with personhood or some form of interiority ...” — Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(If you don't look up, Beth thinks, this just seems like temperate broadleaf forest in a dry-winter climate. Not a climax community: the trees not tall enough for that, and too much shrubby undergrowth. The bare black trunks and stems branch finely, consuming the space but sometimes leaving gaps. As if something invisible was stuffed into those voids, holding back the growth. The forest floor has the same pattern: dense litter and debris mixed with unaccountable empty spaces. We are too surrounded to see the horizon, but the visible sky is bizarro. It looks closer than normal, with faint textures that don't match any cloud types or colors. Out of the corner of your vision, they move in slow arcs and pulses. Behind the opaque sky the brightness is erratic. If we are on a planet you would expect a smooth path for the sun and a clear day/night cycle. And if we are not on a planet then we surely aren't on Earth. Yet the plant life is just not that different from ours.
Micheal breaks the silence as he looks over her head, still taking it in for his first visit to Elsewhere. To Beth, he is irritatingly unflappable, like he's seen it all. He's done fieldwork, of course, but not at any place this weird.)
Micheal: We ought to just grab some environmental DNA, take it back, and see what lives here, at least learn if we are still on Earth. I hear the AIs can deduce amazing …”
(Sridar and Beth speak up at once, their voices colliding.)
Beth: We agreed to keep this a secret for …
Sridar: Both of you, promised …
Micheal: Aye, we 'greed tae nae say. Ye ken a'm juist trolling ye? Where’s th’ troost?
Beth: Maybe we should also agree not to talk rot in a funny accent. Besides, local DNA — if there is any — is always on our skin and clothes when we return through the portal. And, even worse, we bring our own DNA, and food, and trash with us when we come here.
Micheal: That’s assuming the portal doesn’t clean us up as we go through.
Sridar (wanting to move on to business): Did either of you read in the *Guardian* about the Spotted Hyenas in Harar? The people feed them in the city streets because the hyenas also supposedly eat djinn. So the people trade dealing with cast-off entrails and bones for freedom from supernatural djinn mischief.”
Micheal: So there should be djinn DNA in the hyena scat, right? I mean, if spirits can be eaten, then they ought to have DNA. Dinnae ye think?
Beth: I think everything to do with animism is complicated.
Sridar: Yes, but we agreed earlier that the core idea is simple. Animism is about the extension of personhood — meaning animated entities with agency — to non-human persons.
Micheal: As we anthropologists have defined it.
“… the way humans perceive animals and other subjectivities that inhabit the world - gods, spirits, the dead, inhabitants of other cosmic levels, meteorological phenomena, plants, occasionally even objects and artefacts …” — Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism
Beth: There are so many kinds. Some of those nonhumans are ordinary parts of the everyday world: like animals, rocks, and winds. Others are extra-ordinary but sometimes can be seen: like djinn or fairies. A third group are invisible, intangible spirits, and some of those are ancestors of the others.
Sridar: And those invisible spirits may serve as the vital force of one of the other kinds, or not. And, these spirits might or might not take over or possess a human or nonhuman person.
Beth: I make that 3 kinds of nonhuman persons, each possessed or not, plus invisible spirits who don’t possess others, but some are ancestral. So that’s 8 cases to explain. How do you even get started understanding something like that?
Micheal: Maybe there’s just one kind of thing: spirits. Invisible agents who do a bunch of different stuff, including the animation of bodies.
Sridar: Not every nonhuman person involves a spirit. Sure, the raven might be animated by the raven spirit. A witch doctor might be possessed by a spirit. But some entities just are: like elves or djinn. And how do we classify ghosts or demons? What about shapeshifters? Or gods and demigods? Do they all have a separate spirit? I think Beth is right that there are many different cases here.
Beth: I'll go this far. It’s unrealistic to have only one theory to explain animism and all of the supernatural. What makes animism worth tackling is that it has a kind of unity. As you anthropologists say, there’s the concept of nonhuman personhood. And there's the kinship, the connection of human persons with other aspects of nature. That we only truly enter into nature by having personal relationships with its objects and events.
Micheal: We've also called it the relational epistemology: that we know things by relating us to them, them to us. Like I-Thou instead of I-It. And to my earlier point, all these persons or entities have some kind of motivating essence called spirit.
“We do not first personify other entities and then socialize with them but personify them as, when, and because we socialize with them. Recognizing a ‘conversation’ with a counter-being — which amounts to accepting it into fellowship rather than recognizing a common essence — makes that being a self in relation with ourselves.” — Nurit Bird-David, Animism Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology
Beth: Okay, for animists then, anything can have its own spirit. Suppose we assume that. But there is no coherent theory of spirits. For example, there are unattached spirits that want to possess an entity that another spirit already possesses. That alone raises several perplexing issues. Is it like musical chairs, and one spirit can only displace another in a body? Do the spirits have to fight, like in classic demonic possession and exorcism? Can two spirits share a body, as some claim?
No — let me finish. If all wolves are possessed by the wolf spirit, is that one spirit that divides into parts for each wolf, or is it many wolf spirits, one for each wolf? And somebody needs to explain to me how bodies can be just unimportant husks that any spirit can take over. We know that every biological body has evolved to operate in particular ways: humans are not ravens are not grasses. What kind of universe would produce such specialized beings but then allow just any old spirit to possess them? The bodies still have to survive in the life they are designed for. It makes more sense that spirits must specialize: rock spirits, bear spirits, and so forth. But then, you see, they couldn't jump from one species to another. It wouldn't work.
Now, say I go through some ceremony, enter a trance, and the voudon spirit, Papa Legba, starts riding me. What makes him decide to arrive? To leave?
Micheal: Because you invited him. Or because he has something to tell you. He leaves when his business is done.
Beth: Okay, but is he talking to me the person, or to my spirit? Why couldn't he just tell my spirit the message without all the trance drama? If his job is to answer human questions, what does he do on his time off? In fact, do spirits talk to each other at all? There's supposed to be this vast realm of spirits out there. And they are tied to our world's beings in intricate ways.
Micheal: For Amerindian cultures, among others, spirits do have their own cultures and some kind of mental lives. They have their own reality, though it strongly parallels ours.
Beth: So do they have purposes beyond their animation of our world?
Micheal: Beth, Beth, really ...
Beth: I am still not done. And I am not overthinking this! Chaos may be a principle of universal reality, but incoherence is not. Incoherent systems are a contradiction in terms. The physical world's relationship to spirits seems incoherent. That means we don't understand it. And, if I may finish my thoughts: for godsake why are some spirits evil? Why do the machinations and conflicts of the gods and spirits look just like ours? Maybe it's because we only made them up.
Micheal: Cultural anthropology has made its peace by accepting different people's experiences at face value. Experience simply is what it is.
Beth: And yet your field struggles with contradictions as a result. It resorts to dressing them up in jargon borrowed from philosophy and postmodern argle-bargle. The lesson for me is that if you want to be a science, then you have to keep looking for the coherence.
Sridar: Beth, we are with you on this; it's why we are here. Right, Micheal?
Micheal: True. And we can discuss spirits or whatever without interference from peer reviewers.
Sridar: Remember the story by that photographer called HA who claimed to visit the world of spirits?
Micheal: The Saugatuck Cosmology. That some now believe to be an account of real experience dressed up as a fairy story inside an art catalog. The actual artist gave his name, but the alleged writer, calling itself Sentient Artifact, only left traces in obscure blog posts, and its true identity isn't known. It might have been an AI; the story was bizarre enough.
Sridar: Yes. When I read that story I had already found our portal. Here on the other side in Elsewhere land there are no visible spirits. But in the Saugatuck story, the artist entered an entirely different reality that was swarming with spirits who called themselves the Ckami. And clearly those spirits were animistic, so I wondered whether there was any connection between our portal experience and HA’s, but so far ...
Beth: So far this place is no fantasy land. In a way, that’s comforting. I’m not ready for anything as weird as that. You’ve read that story, haven’t you Micheal?
Sridar: It’s partly how I found Micheal online. Anyone who had read that obscure book would be fringe enough, curious enough.
Micheal: And I’ve had a profession that can allow me to isolate for long periods. As does … Beth, how did he find you?
Beth: We met …
Sridar: … in the field. While I was still in Nepal, roaming the mountains. How could I not recruit someone who was hunting a mythical creature? Listen, I am just being the messenger. It takes a lot of money to set up a losing hotel in the deep bush and operate it like a spy agency.
Micheal: So what is the story behind our rich puppet master?
Sridar: I know very little. All communication being by dark channels. I was the first person recruited. I have sniffed no devious intent. Our benefactor worries about what knowledge of the portal might mean for humanity. Maybe the knowledge gets out and is seized by culture wars, or even sparks a real war. You both were quite willing to swear to secrecy.
Micheal: But now there’s no plan that I can see to actually explore the place. To seek out who or what lives here.
Sridar: Not as yet. The Sponsor is cautious, perhaps to a fault. But it wants us to first take a fresh look at animism. Because it’s a kind of human knowledge that would naturally connect with other realities. We can do that while also sitting here kind of keeping a toe in the water. We'll benefit from the quiet and privacy while being reminded that our knowledge of reality needs a lot of updating. The search for more recruits has been modified to follow this lead.
Beth: So there will be more of us? And why call it the Flown Bird Society?
Sridar: Others will come, though, I expect, only a few. The name is because we disappear from everyday lives. Maybe the Sponsor is a Beatles fan, you know: "This Bird Has Flown."
Micheal: Speaking of moving on — it's getting darker here and I, for one, am mentally worn. We should return whence we came, through that dark hole to the Last Chance Inn. Will I see the sparkles again when we go back?
Beth: Inside your mind it's too dark to read, Micheal. But probably not.
The Problem of Evil, Part One
(Sridar and Micheal are sitting at the Inn’s fire pit, near an entrance arch saying, Last Chance Inn — La Posada de Última Oportunidad. They speak quietly while the nocturnal forest, 50 feet away, loudly wakes up. A bat flutters above, touched by the firelight.)
Micheal: … why animism is making yet another comeback.
Sridar: I don’t think it is that surprising. Anyone not caught up in extractive economic activity, in ego separation from reality, or in subject-object duality, will have some interest in connecting with nature and preserving it. And that shows up in so many ways. My uncle Sudip …
Micheal: The shaman.
Sridar: Yes, the dhami-jhankri. People always came to him for help, and sometimes he had to protect them from evil: from witches who consort with evil. His was a dangerous life. When I went away to University, I stopped believing in evil spirits, just like most people in the world have done over the last 500 years. Carl Sagan said that if one believes in spirits only then one can be demon-haunted. Bertrand Russell made a similar point.
Micheal: As have many others. However, comparative ethnography has found the struggle against evil spirits to be very common, maybe universal. Also common is the shaman-like role of mediator with the spirits.
Sridar: So can we really return to some modern version of animist beliefs without opening a door to Evil? Kinship with nature sounds good until you remember that most things in nature consume other things; that death and decay are the foundation of life.
Micheal: I think people, lots of them, everywhere, believe the door is already open. You know the saying, 'Hell is empty?' The twenty-first century was supposed to be the end of history, the dawning of better times. Instead, it began a new age of anxiety, breaking out into the Ego-Ragers Revolt and the Civil Conflict.
Sridar: All the more reason to figure out whether our oldest beliefs can help us achieve some measure of peace.
Onward !