animism

121:7.12The Med­i­ter­ra­nean Ro­man Em­pire, the Parthian king­dom, and the ad­ja­cent peo­ples of Je­sus’ time all held crude and prim­i­tive ideas re­gard­ing the ge­og­ra­phy of the world, as­tron­omy, health, and dis­ease; and nat­u­rally they were amazed by the new and startling pro­nounce­ments of the car­pen­ter of Naz­a­reth. The ideas of spirit pos­ses­sion, good and bad, ap­plied not merely to hu­man be­ings, but ev­ery rock and tree was viewed by many as be­ing spirit pos­sessed. This was an en­chanted age, and ev­ery­body be­lieved in mir­a­cles as com­mon­place oc­cur­rences.

91:1.5Prayer is lit­tle as­so­ci­ated with an­i­mism, but such be­liefs may ex­ist along­side emerg­ing re­li­gious sen­ti­ments. Many times, re­li­gion and an­i­mism have had en­tirely sep­a­rate ori­gins.

86:2.6The sav­age looked upon all na­ture as alive, as pos­sessed by some­thing. Civ­i­lized man still kicks and curses those inan­i­mate ob­jects which get in his way and bump him. Prim­i­tive man never re­garded any­thing as ac­ci­den­tal; al­ways was ev­ery­thing in­ten­tional. To prim­i­tive man the do­main of fate, the func­tion of luck, the spirit world, was just as un­or­ga­nized and hap­haz­ard as was prim­i­tive so­ci­ety. Luck was looked upon as the whim­si­cal and tem­per­a­men­tal re­ac­tion of the spirit world; later on, as the hu­mor of the gods.

86:2.7But all re­li­gions did not de­velop from an­i­mism. Other con­cepts of the super­nat­u­ral were con­tem­po­ra­ne­ous with an­i­mism, and these be­liefs also led to wor­ship. Nat­u­ral­ism is not a re­li­gion—it is the off­spring of re­li­gion.

98:1.1The Salem mis­sion­ar­ies might have built up a great re­li­gious struc­ture among the Greeks had it not been for their strict in­ter­pre­ta­tion of their oath of or­di­na­tion, a pledge im­posed by Ma­chi­venta which for­bade the or­ga­ni­za­tion of ex­clu­sive con­gre­ga­tions for wor­ship, and which ex­acted the prom­ise of each teacher never to func­tion as a priest, never to re­ceive fees for re­li­gious ser­vice, only food, cloth­ing, and shel­ter. When the Mel­chiz­e­dek teach­ers pen­e­trated to pre-Hel­lenic Greece, they found a peo­ple who still fos­tered the tra­di­tions of Adam­son and the days of the And­ites, but these teach­ings had be­come greatly adul­ter­ated with the no­tions and be­liefs of the hordes of in­fe­rior slaves that had been brought to the Greek shores in in­creas­ing num­bers. This adul­ter­ation pro­duced a re­ver­sion to a crude an­i­mism with bloody rites, the lower classes even mak­ing cer­e­mo­nial out of the ex­e­cu­tion of con­demned crim­i­nals.