#Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology

[brightgnosis]

This directly experienced terrain, rippling with cricket rhythms and scoured by the tides, is the very realm now most ravaged by the spreading consequences of our disregard […] Yet few [of these ravages] are as deep-rooted and damaging as the habitual tendency to view the sensuous earth as a subordinate space—whether as a sinful plane, riddled with temptation, needing to be transcended and left behind; or a menacing region needing to be beaten and bent to our will; or simply a vaguely disturbing dimension to be avoided, superseded, and explained away.

Corporeal life is indeed difficult. To identify with the sheer physicality of one’s flesh may well seem lunatic. The body is an imperfect and breakable entity vulnerable to a thousand and one insults—to scars and the scorn of others, to disease, decay, and death. And the material world that our body inhabits is hardly a gentle place. The shuddering beauty of this biosphere is bristling with thorns […] Thus do we shelter ourselves from the harrowing vulnerability of bodied existence. But by the same gesture we also insulate ourselves from the deepest wellsprings of joy. We cut our lives off from the necessary nourishment of contact and interchange with other shapes of life […]

For too long we’ve closed ourselves to the participatory life of our senses, inured ourselves to the felt intelligence of our muscled flesh and its manifold solidarities […] Only by welcoming uncertainty from the get-go can we acclimate ourselves to the shattering wonder that enfolds us. This animal body, for all its susceptibility and vertigo, remains the primary instrument of all our knowing, as the capricious earth remains our primary cosmos.

From Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology, published 2010; Dir. David Abram (My Review Here) (My Ko-Fi Here)

[noosphe-re]

The air is not a random bunch of gases simply drawn to earth by the earth's gravity, but an elixir generated by the soils, the oceans, and the numberless organisms that inhabit this world, each creature exchanging certain ingredients for others as it inhales and exhales, drinking the sunlight with our leaves or filtering the water with our gills, all of us contributing to the composition of this phantasmagoric brew, circulating it steadily between us and nourishing ourselves on its magic, generating ourselves from its substance. It is as endemic to the earth as the sandstone beneath my boots. Perhaps we should add the letter i to our planet's name, and call it "Eairth," in order to remind ourselves that the "air" is entirely a part of the earth, and the i, the I or self, is wholly immersed in that fluid element.

David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology

[ruibaozha]

sorry words are not very good. is okay to worship Nezha if not born into culture? any resources or link to intro to learning? respect and feel very connected to Nezha mythos and important symbolism, unsure if only ok to devote to deity for eastern tho. thank you for reading ask! sorry if rude or inconsiderate

Please do not worry, I’m actually happy you asked this. I hope Google Translate works well with me today.

The way Nezha is worshipped today is through a Daoist lens, which includes many rules and rituals as well as specific instructions to maintain an altar space. Daoism as a whole, and whichever deity you choose, your ethnicity and culture has no effect on if you can participate. Anyone can.

The very core of Daoism transcends culture and ethnicity, Daoism itself is the Chinese version of something universal. Put differently, wisdom and insight are not things specific to one ethnicity or cultural group, nor can it be “appropriated” with this in mind. It belongs to everyone with an open mind and open heart to learn and understand.

“Under the skies we are all one family.”

I would highly recommend becoming familiar with literature about this, and specifically, “Tao Te Ching” which was written by Lao Tzu. As for links, I did go through and ensure the information within is correct. I hope the articles translate properly for you.

and even this discussion thread was amusing to peruse through.

I hope this has been helpful for you, and anyone else that is curious about Daoism and how Deific Worship works. You are more than welcome to ask more questions if any of this became unclear. Best of luck!

[thorraborinn]

sonneve

How might you describe or define animism, or alternatively, do you have any recommendations for reading about it?

Graham Harvey defines it as understanding "that the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship to others." This is definitely a better definition than "the belief that everything has a soul" but you might also notice that it's vague to the point of including practically everything that doesn't include Aristotle's rational soul as a distinctive feature of humans. Harvey is aware of this (he even includes things like yelling at your computer as an animistic behavior). As soon as you start to narrow the definition more than that, it starts to exclude peoples and customs that it's trying to include.

Nordic Animism has a good short video that does like a drive-by description of animism and history of its study that comes from the same sorts of books that I'm going to mention: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_j9oPCE-Ns

Harvey edited a book called The Handbook of Contemporary Animism. If you were going to pick a single book to start with, you could do much worse than this. Very many of the authors are ones that you'd see recur frequently if you were to go deeper into studying recent anthropology related to animism. If chapters stand out, it would be a good idea to find that author's other works.

My personal favorite single book on the subject is How Forests Think by Eduardo Kohn. He has a lecture on YouTube that introduces some of the ideas in the book: https://youtu.be/mSdrdY6vmDo?t=102.

Kohn draws heavily on the works of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. Viveiros de Castro is one of the most important recent anthropologists in terms of him being the guy that everyone writing after him has to have an opinion about, whether positive or negative. It's a good idea to read him because he's going to come up in others' works. I personally find his stuff on Amazonian "perspectivism" very good. There's a collection of his essays called The Relative Native.

The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram is a good book about animism and phenomenology, kind of using ideas from Western philosophers like Husserl and Merleau-Ponty to derive something compatible with non-western animistic ideas. He has another book called Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology that I wasn't into but might be a good intro for some people.

There's like this whole scene of books about "entanglements" and use words like "response-ability"; it's not a bad idea to read one of them but I don't think it's necessary to read all of them; my favorite was The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. Donna Haraway has some books in this category that I know some people love but didn't do as much for me, admittedly possibly because of stuff I'd already read that was influenced by them. Here is also a good critique of these authors that I think preserves the positive while pointing out limitations: https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10180270.

Though only tangentially related to animism, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World by Zakiyyah Iman Jackson is not only good on its own but I think is important to read if you're also reading stuff that focuses on distinction or non-distinction of human from non-human.

Pantheologies by Mary-Jane Rubenstein isn't specifically about animism but intersects with and includes it. I think just reading through the first chapter is worthwhile (the rest might be better for others but it drew heavily on stuff I'd already read). She also has a bunch of stuff on Youtube.

I dunno if she uses the word, but some of Gloria Anzaldúa's work intersects with it, e.g. Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro.

I am a big fan of Katherine Swancutt, she has written a lot of articles and done a lot of book editing; her book Fortune and the Cursed: The Sliding Scale of Time in Mongolian Divination is not really about animism per se but is a very good read.

Also not about animism, but a good thing to read for anyone interested in it, is The Invention of World Religions or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism by Tomoko Masuzawa.

This is probably getting overwhelming so I'm cutting myself off even though there's other stuff that I would list otherwise. This stuff is currently very popular and well-funded in academia which means they are actually fairly widely available, including as audiobooks, for those who prefer those.

[forbidden-sorcery]

Our chest, rising and falling, knows that the strange verb “to be” means more simply “to breathe”; it knows that the maples and the birches are breathing, that the beaver pond inhales and exhales in its own way, as do the stones and the mountains and the pipes coursing water through the ground under the city. The lungs know this secret as well as any can know it: that the inward and the outward depths partake of the same mystery, that as the unseen wind swirls within us, so it also whirls all around us, bending the grasses and lofting the clouds even as it lights our own sensations. The vocal cords, stirred by that breath, vibrate like spiderwebs or telephone wires in the breeze, and the voice itself, laughing and murmuring, joins its song to the water gurgling under the grate. Only our words seem to forget, sometimes—or is it the one who speaks and writes them who forgets? The contemporary person sits enveloped in a cloud of winged words fluttering out of his mouth, delighting in their colored patterns and the way they flock and follow one another, becoming convinced that he alone is in blossom —that his skull alone bears the pollen that will fertilize the barren field, that the things stand mute and inert until he chooses to speak of them. Yet the things have other plans. Bereft of our attentions, their migratory routes severed by the spreading clear-cuts and the dams, their tissues clogged by synthetic toxins leaking into the soils and the waters, they nevertheless carry on. The rising temperatures seem to scorch their surfaces ever more frequently now, yet the things of the world continue to beckon to us from behind the cloud of words, speaking instead with gestures and subtle rhythms, calling out to our animal bodies, tempting our skin with their varied textures and coaxing our muscles with their grace, inviting our thoughts to remember and rejoin the wider community of intelligence.

David Abram - Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology

[dk-thrive]

There are so many unsung heroines and heroes at this broken moment in our collective story, so many courageous persons who, unbeknownst to themselves, are holding together the world by their resolute love or contagious joy. Although I do not know your names, I can feel you out there.

David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (Vintage, August 24, 2010) (via Whiskey River)

[juliansummerhayes]

Breathing involves a continual oscillation between exhaling and inhaling, offering ourselves to the world at one moment and drawing the world into ourselves at the next...

David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology

[shapingandreshaping]

It turns out groundedness requires actual ground. "(...) only in regular contact with the tangible ground and sky can we learn how to orient and to navigate in the multiple dimensions that now claim us."(Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology, David Abram) Your eyes reading this text, your hands, your breath, the time of day, the place where you are reading this - these things are real. I'm real too. (...) I'm an animal, I hurt sometimes, and I'm different one day to the next. I hear, see, and smell things in a world where others also hear, see and smell me. And it takes a break to remember that: a break to do nothing, to just listen, to remember in the deepest sense what, when, and where we are. (p.22 How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell)

This tangibility is something I search for in my work. The moments where I remember and realise I am made of flesh and that before me there were many others and that after me there will be many more, I encounter my place in the world as a collective. The family albums, stories told from mouth to mouth, the traces of older communities and connections remind me of this collective existence too, they inspire me to live in my time knowing I'm the continuity of a communal existence, I'm not alone I'm not just an individual.

Understanding how collective and personal cultural identities are formed can also redirect one's place in the world, challenging forms of identity, either by identifying to certain ways of being or by completely rejecting them. Human beings are subjective beings and as Jenny mentions, our encounters happen in the poetics of this subjectivity, it's where the magic of being human sparks.

We grow up with certain ideas being taught to us or by our own selves absorbing certain ideas around us, and as we grow older we slowly start to understand that nothing is still or absolute. (All About Love by Bell Hooks)

Language is a living example of this constant transformation in human beings.

I always felt strange because my language fluctuates as I learn more ways of communicating and more ways of being. I observe others and my language translates these observations. I felt strange for showcasing so much change in my language, becoming unable to being identified as one thing or another. My nationality is in my language but all the places I've visited, all the people I've encountered and all the ideas I get in contact with are also there. My multitudes of being are immediately exposed in my language.

My project is an investigation of cultural identities but not in the form of rules, or fixed historical facts or even for the purpose of preservation. My project aims to reach the humanity in these past stories from people I am related to. Choosing an intimate and subjective lens where through an investigation of their daily objects, writings, pictures, I reconstruct a history from my own perspective.

My family's histories and travels from my own perspective and interpretation is an exploration and demonstration of how we are influenced by factors outside of us that we absorb because we are not simply individuals, we are a collection of people, events, places and circumstances, that in our time we have the power to analyse and act upon.

The doors of the hidden pasts, journeys, taboos are being opened but we are not always paying attention.

[ksresearch]

Potential readings I’m looking at / found (official list to organise myself)

Library Books:

Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology // David Abram

Visualising Feeling: Affect and the Feminine Avant-Garde // Susan Best

The Body Keeps The Score: Mind, Brain and Body in the transformation of trauma // Van Der Kolk

Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology // Rozsika Parker

Locating the Sacred Feminine in relation to Western Feminist Theory and Eastern Philosophiesy // Wanda Barker

PDF readings found online:

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants // Robert Wall Kimmerer

The Well Gardened Mind: Rediscovering Nature in the Modern World // Sue Stuart-Smith

Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description // Tim Ingold

All Art Is Ecological // Timothy Morton

The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution // Carolyn Merchant

Videos / Podcasts / Other:

How To Land On Earth (YouTube video) // Tim Morton (9 minute mark about beauty, letting in the uncertain that has the potential to ruin you. Beauty is a tiny bit of death, that doesn’t kill you)

[brightgnosis]

The phrase that titles this book, “becoming animal,” carries a range of possible meanings. In this work the phrase speaks first and foremost to the matter of becoming more deeply human by acknowledging, affirming, and growing into our animality.

From Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology, published 2010; Dir. David Abram (My Review Here) (My Ko-Fi Here)

[noosphe-re]

Only by welcoming uncertainty from the get-go can we acclimate ourselves to the shattering wonder that enfolds us. This animal body, for all its susceptibility and vertigo, remains the primary instrument of all our knowing, as the capricious earth remains our primary cosmos.

David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology

[sparrownotes]

Owning up to being an animal, a creature of earth. Tuning our animal senses to the sensible terrain: blending our skin with the rain-rippled surface of rivers, mingling our ears with the thunder and the thrumming of frogs, and our eyes with the molten sky. Feeling the polyrhythmic pulse of this place—this huge windswept body of water and stone. This vexed being in whose flesh we're entangled. Becoming earth. Becoming animal. Becoming, in this manner, fully human.

David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology

[henbane-and-honeysuckle]

Approaching Plant Spirits, A Resource

The tradition I'm studying attributes animals and plants as spirit allies for each month. I'm working on reaching out to this month's tree spirit.

As someone who finds spirit sensing difficult, I tend to approach working with plant spirits for the first time by learning about their ecology first and then extrapolating magical qualities of the plant based on that information. I like this approach because it reminds me that the material and the spiritual aren't wholly separate (garlic is antimicrobial and also protective spiritually). I prefer my magic to be grounded in the physical, an Earthly cosmology* if you will

Well there's a great resource I've discovered for this kind of approach: Yale Nature Walk

It shows the different trees growing on Yale's campus with a surprising amount of useful information.

Natural habitat range, distinguishing features, photos of the tree throughout each season. And my favorite: the history, folklore, and resources section.

The website obviously doesn't have every tree you might want to look up but it has quite a lot. Might be a good place to start if, like me, you prefer to start at the macro level and build toward individual spirit relationships.

*I picked up this phrase from the book Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology by David Abraham

[forbidden-sorcery]

The old affinity between gravity and desire remains evident, perhaps,  when we say that we have fallen in love—as though we were off-balance and tumbling through air, as though it was the steady pull of the planet that somehow lay behind the eros we feel toward another person. In this sense, gravity—the mutual attraction between our body and the earth—is the deep source of that more conscious delirium that draws us toward the presence of another person. Like the felt magnetism between two lovers, or between a mother and her child, the powerful attraction between the body and the earth offers sustenance and physical replenishment when it is consummated in contact. Although we’ve lately come to associate gravity with heaviness, and so to think of it as having a strictly downward vector, nonetheless something rises up into us from the solid earth whenever we’re in contact with it.                 We give ourselves precious little chance to taste this nourishment that springs up into us whenever we touch ground, and so it’s hardly surprising that we’ve forgotten the erotic nature of gravity, and the enlivening pleasure of earthly contact. We spend our days walking not on the earth but on fabricated slabs suspended above office floors and basements; at our desks we ride aloft on our chairs; at night we drift to sleep on the backs of beds neatly raised so we needn’t be too close to the ground. If we venture out of doors, it’s commonly not to wander on foot; instead, we entrust ourselves to the fiery alchemy of the automobile, whose fevered cylinders and whirling tires loft us speedily to our destination without our needing to touch down on the intervening terrain.

David Abram - Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology

[juliansummerhayes]

“There are so many unsung heroines and heroes at this broken moment in our collective story, so many courageous persons who, unbeknownst to themselves, are holding together the world by their resolute love or contagious joy. Although I do not know your names, I can feel you out there.” ― David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology

Photo by Maciek Sulkowski on Unsplash

[dk-thrive]

Although I do not know your names, I can feel you out there.

There are so many unsung heroines and heroes at this broken moment in our collective story, so many courageous persons who, unbeknownst to themselves, are holding together the world by their resolute love or contagious joy. Although I do not know your names, I can feel you out there.

- David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (Pantheon; August 24, 2010)