{"collection":"Shamanism - Sacred Texts Collection","full_text_available":false,"graph_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/api/page/sacred_texts_v1_sha_anim_anim03_htm/graph","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/page/sacred_texts_v1_sha_anim_anim03_htm","id":"sacred_texts_v1_sha_anim_anim03_htm","license":"unknown_pending_legal_review","rights_basis":"sacred_texts_v1_preview_gate_primary_text_only; acquisition-method/ToS and compilation-copyright questions still open, not resolved by this gate","source":"sacred_texts_v1","source_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/browse/sha/anim/anim03.htm","summary":"This is an early twentieth-century academic text in the tradition of comparative religion and anthropology, likely a chapter introduction to a broader study of animism. It opens with a 1916 news account of a dead captive snake in Japan whose grave attracted worshippers seeking cures for toothache \u2014 using this as a contemporary exhibit of animistic belief persisting into modernity. The author then marshals biblical examples (Jacob anointing a stone, Joshua's sentient stone witness, a meteorite worshipped at Ephesus) to argue that animism is not a relic of remote prehistory but a living and widespread cultural stage. Drawing heavily on E. B. Tylor's *Primitive Culture*, the text defines animism as the attribution of soul, sentience, and volition to all objects \u2014 stones, rivers, animals, tools \u2014 rooted in what the author calls \"unintegrated consciousness,\" a mode of thought in which the self is not distinguished in kind from the surrounding world. A distinctive claim is that this is primarily a *psychological* stage, not merely a religious one, characterized by the inability to separate substance from attribute, cause from effect, or self from other \u2014 with Hobhouse's formulation that animism and magic share the same intellectual foundation in this categorical confusion. The text's perspective is firmly evolutionist and carries the colonial-era assumption that \"civilized\" thought has superseded animism, making it of interest both as a substantive account of animistic belief systems and as a document of early-twentieth-century anthropological method and bias.","tags":[],"text":null,"title":"Animism: Chapter I. The Animistic Stage of Culture--the Case Stated","tradition":"Shamanism - Sacred Texts Collection","translated_text":null,"word_count":2558}