Birds, Liminality, and Human Transformation: An Animist Perspective on New Animism
Issue: Vol 14 No. 1 (2012)
Journal: Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies
Subject Areas: Religious Studies
Abstract:
In many pre-modern, non-Western, and indigenous cultures, birds mediate between humans and a divine realm. In mythology and lore they are widely associated with the survival of death. Edward Tylor’s definition of animism identified a belief in spirits that survive death as a key conceptual error to be rectified by the advance of scientific rationality. Recent reconfigurations of animism as an ecological and relational worldview treat the notion of discarnate spirits as a projection of Western assumptions that locate mystery and divinity beyond the natural world. This essay responds by arguing for a degree of continuity between new animism and the spiritualist traditions denounced by Tylor. An autobiographical account of a sequence of encounters with the Common Kingfisher (Alcedo atthis) and other birds appears to confirm their reputation as psychopomps.
Author: Brian Anthony Taylor
References :
Abram, David. Becoming Animal. New York: Pantheon Books, 2010.
Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous., New York: Vintage, 1996.
Allen, Richard Hinkley. Star Names, Their Lore and Meaning. New York, Dover, 1963 [1899].
Armstrong, Edward. The Folklore of Birds. Boston: Houghton Mifflin,1958.
Bauman, Zygmunt. Sociology and the Postmodern. In The Bauman Reader, edited by Peter Beilharz, 173-199. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001 [1991].
Bird-Davis, Nurit. “’Animism’ Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology.” Current Anthropology 40 Supplement ( 1999): S67–S91. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/200061
Blain, Jenny. “Now Many of those Things are Shown to Me which I was Denied Before”: Seidr, Shamanism, and Journeying, Past and Present.” Studies in Religion 34, no. 1 (2005): 81–9. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/000842980503400105
Boss, Medard. The Analysis of Dreams. London: Rider 1957.
Bracken, Patrick, and Thomas, Philip. Postpsychiatry: Mental Health in a Postmodern World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There, Harmondsworth, Penguin,1972/1966.
Cocker, Mark, and Mabey, Richard. Birds Britannica. London: Chatto and Windus, 2005.
Crumley, Jim. Waters of the Wild Swan. London: Jonathan Cape, 1992.
Curry, Patrick, ed. Divination, Perspectives for a New Millennium. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010.
Eliade, Mircea. Myths Dreams and Mysteries. London: Fontana, 1968 [1957].
Eliade, Mircea. Patterns in Comparative Religion. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995 [1958].
Eliade, Mircea. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. London: Arkana 1989 [1964].
Ezzy, Douglas. “Religious Ethnography: Practising the Witches’ Craft.” Researching Paganisms, edited by in Jenny Blain, Douglas Ezzy, and GrahamHarvey, 112–28. Walnut Creek: Alta Mira, 2004.
Flaceliere, Robert. Greek Oracles. London: Elek Books 1965.
George, Andrew, trans. The Epic of Gilgamesh. London:Penguin Classics, 2003.
Gimbutas, Marija. The Living Goddesses. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Graves, Robert. The Greek Myths I. London: Penguin, 1960.
Greenbaum, Doris Gieseler. “Rising to the Occasion: Appearance, Emergence, Light, and Divination in Hellenistic Astrology.”In The Imaginal Cosmos: Astrology, Divination, and the Sacred, edited by Angela Voss and Jean Hinson Lall, 9–24. Canterbury: University of Kent, 2007.
Greenoak, Francesca. British Birds, Their Folklore, Names, and Literature. London: Christopher Helm, 1997.
Greenwood, Susan. The Anthropology of Magic. Oxford: Berg, 2009.
Gurney, O.R. “The Babylonians and Hittites.”In Divination and Oracles,edited by Michael Loewe and Carmen Blacke, 142–73. London: George Allen and Unwin 1981.
Hallowell, Irving. “Ojibwa Ontology, Behaviour, and World View.” Readings in Indigenous Religion, edited by Graham Harvey, 17¬–49. London: Continuum, 2002.
Hamilton-James, Charlie. Kingfisher: Tales from the Halcyon River. Rickmandsworth: Evans Mitchell, 2009.
Harvey, Graham. “Animism Rather than Shamanism: New Approaches to what Shamans ‘Do.’ “ In Spirit Possession and Trance: New Interdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Bettina Schmidt and LucyHuskinson, L 14–34. London: Continuum, 2010:14-34
Harvey, Graham. Animism, Respecting the Living World, London, Hurst, 2005.
Harvey, Graham, ed. Shamanism: A Reader. London: Routledge, 2003.
Hodder, Ian, and Meskell, Lynn. “The Symbolism of Çatalohöyük in its Regional Context.” In Religion in the Emergence of Civilization: Çatalohöyük as a Case Study edited by Ian Hodder, 32–72. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2010. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511761416
Ingold, Tim. “A Circumpolar Night’s Dream.” In The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling, and Skill by Tim Ingold, 89–110. London: Routledge 2000.
Irigaray, Luce. “Animal Compassion.” In Animal Philosophy; Essential Readings in Continental Thought edited by Matthew Calarco and Peter Atherton, 193–202. New York: Continuum, 2004.
Irigaray, Luce. “Practical Teachings: Love—Between Passion and Civility.”In I Love to You; Sketch for a Felicity Within History. New York: Routledge, 1996.
Irigaray, Luce. Prières Quotidienne, Everyday Prayers. Translated by Luce Irigaray and Timothy Matthews. Nottingham: University of Nottingham, 2004.
Jung, Carl Gustav. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Edited by Aniela Jaffe. London: Fontana, 1995 [1963].
Krell, David Farrell. Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings. London, Routledge 1993 [1978].
Lockwood, W.B. The Oxford Dictionary of British Bird Names. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Mannermaa, Kristiina. “Birds and Burials at Ajvide (Gotland, Sweden ) and Zvejnieki ( Latvia ) about 8,000–3,900 BP.” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 27 (2008): 201–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2008.01.001
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by Richard McCleary. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964.
Miller, Frank Justus, trans. Ovid. Metamorphoses, Book XI. London: Heinemann, 1933.
Morgan, Robert, and Glue, David. “Breeding, Mortality and Movements of Kingfishers.” Bird Stud 4 (1977):15¬–24.
Mynott, J. Birdscapes: Birds in Our Imagination and Experience. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.
Pollard, John. Birds in Greek Life and Myth. London: Thames and Hudson,1977.
Roper, Mark. “Halcyon: A Kingfisher in Gortrush Wood.” New Hibernia Review/ Iris Éireannach Nua 12, no. 4 (2008): 9-14.
Rowland, Beryl. Birds with Human Souls: A Guide to Bird Symbolism. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press,1978.
Rozwadowski, Andrzej. “Centering Historical-Archaeological Discourses: The Prehistory of Central Asian/South Siberian Shamanism.” In Belief in the Past: Theoretical Approaches to the Archaeology of Religion, edited by Davis S. Whitley and Kelley Hays-Gilpin, 105–118. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2008.
Ryōgi, Ōkōcho. “Nietzsche’s Conception of Nature from an East-Asian Point of View.” In Nietzsche and Asian Thought, edited by Graham Parkes, 200–13. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Serjeantson, Dale. Birds. Cambridge Manuals in Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Strathern, Marilyn. The Gender of the Gift, Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/california/9780520064232.001.0001
Taylor, Brian. Responding to Men in Crisis: Masculinities, Distress, and the Postmodern Political Landscape. Abingdon: Routledge, 2005.
Taylor, John H., ed. Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead: Journey through the Afterlife. London: British Museum, 2010.
Tillman, Caroline M. The Flesh Made Word: Luce Irigaray’s Rendering of the Sensible Transcendental. Janus Head 11, no. 1 (2009): 39-45. www.janushead.org/11-1/Tilghman.pdf .Thompson, D’Arcy. A Glossary of Greek Birds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930.
Trubshaw, Bob. Souls, Spirits, and Deities. Avebury: Heart of Albion Press, 2012.
Tylor, Edward. Primitive Culture, 2 Vols. London: John Murray, 1913 [1871].
Van Lommel, Pin. Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of Near-Death Experience. New York: Harper Collins, 2010.
Wallis, Robert. Shamans/Neo-Shamans: Ecstasy, Alternative Archaeologies and Contemporary Pagans. London: Routledge, 2003.
Wilkes, Barbara. “Reveal or Conceal?”In Extraordinary Anthropology: Transformations in the Field, edited by Jean-Guy A. Goulet and Bruce Granville Miller, 53–84. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006.
Woodward, Wendy. “Who is to Say that the Hen did not Speak? Bird Subjectivities in some Southern African Narratives.” Alternation 16, no. 2 (2009): 241–61.
Taylor, Brian. Responding to Men in Crisis: Masculinities, Distress, and the Postmodern Political Landscape, Abingdon, Routledge, 2005.
Taylor, John H. ed. Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, Journey through the Afterlife, London, The British Museum, 2010.
Tillman, Caroline M. The Flesh Made Word: Luce Irigaray’s Rendering of the Sensible Transcendental. Janus Head 11 (1) 39-45, Trivium, Amherst New Jersey. Www.janushead.org/11-1/Tilghman.pdf (accessed 17/4/12).
Thompson, D”Arcy, A Glossary of Greek Birds, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1930.
Trubshaw, Bob. Souls, Spirits, and Deities, Avebury, Heart of Albion Press, 2012. http://www.hoap.co.uk/souls_spirits_and_deities.pdf
Tylor, Edward. Primitive Culture, 2 Vols, London, John Murray, 1913 [1871].
Van Lommel, Pin. Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of Near Death Experience, New York, Harper Collins, 2010.
Wallis, Robert. Shamans/Neo-Shamans: Ecstasy, Alternative Archaeologies and Contemporary Pagans, London, Routledge, 2003.
Wilkes, Barbara. Reveal or Conceal? in Extraordinary Anthropology: Transformations in the Field, Jean-Guy A. Goulet and Bruce Granville Miller, eds. Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 2006: 53-84.
Woodward, Wendy. Who is to Say that the Hen did not Speak? Bird Subjectivities in some Southern African Narratives, Durban, Alternation 16, 2 (2009), 241-261.