Numen Inest: Animism at a Glance

My grandmother's house held a clock I knew from the inside before I knew it from the outside. It hung on a wall in a dining room furnished the way German immigrant homes of that generation were furnished, every surface holding something, every shelf carrying a purpose, the cuckoo clock above the sideboard in the quiet corner of the dining room ticking with the steady carved-and-painted patience of a piece of the Black Forest that had been mounted in an American room and never quite stopped being a piece of the Black Forest. I have written about that clock at greater length in the opening of a book that publishes this month. The short version is that the clock was the first object I entered, as far as I can recall, in the long stretch of consciousness before I had a body. The wheels and weights and small escapements, locked together so each motion produced the next motion in an unbroken sequence, generated a rhythm steady enough to feel from the inside like flesh.

I'm Tillie Treadwell, the How I Met Your Monster columnist for Eerie Expeditions Magazine, and the entry you are reading takes a Latin phrase as its title and walks outward from it into territory the modern world has spent a long time pretending was empty. Numen inest. There is a god within, the line says. There is a spirit here. My fieldwork has been my own life and my own casework on this side of the Atlantic, and the relationship I have had with nonhuman peoples has been continuous since before I could speak. What I know about the inhabited object I know from both directions, from the outside as someone who has spent decades working with these vessels and with the people who live in households alongside them, and from the inside as the consciousness who, in the only language a pre-incarnate awareness has available to it, learned what it learned about the live world from inside the patient ticking of an old wooden clock.

Ovid's Fasti is a Latin poem in elegiac couplets describing the Roman religious calendar, written somewhere around the year eight of the common era, and Book III of that poem walks the reader through the month of March. At the line my entry takes its title from, the poet describes a grove below the Aventine, dark with the shade of holm-oaks, where a person walking past would say, on seeing it, numen inest. Lucus Aventino suberat niger ilicis umbra, quo posses viso dicere numen inest. A grove was beneath the Aventine, dark with the shade of the holm-oak, where on seeing it you would say, "There is a god within." The grove is the one Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome in the older tradition, walked into in search of the woodland deities Faunus and Picus, intending to learn from them how a household might avert lightning. The person Ovid puts at the edge of the grove is a hypothetical observer, not the king and not a priest, just someone in the position to feel what the place was carrying. What that someone says when they look at the trees and the moss and the unceasing stream coming out of the rock is a sentence the older tradition would have recognized as an ordinary report of what was there.

Roman religion across its long history kept room for a category of presence the language called numen, distinct from the named anthropomorphic gods of the public temples and the imperial cult. A numen was the thing inside, the awareness pervading, the live presence that did not need a face to be felt. Modern classical scholars are not all in agreement about whether numen represents an older stratum of Italic religious feeling or a literary construction of the late Republic and early Empire, and I am not in a position to settle that argument from my chair. What I will say is that the Ovid line, when I encountered it as a practitioner working with inhabited objects on this side of an ocean and most of two thousand years, read as the most precise short statement I had ever come across of what I had been describing in my casework. A grove with a presence in it. A clock with a presence in it. A chair in a living room everyone in the family agrees has a particular feeling about it that no one has ever quite explained. All of these are what the Roman line was naming, in the verbal economy a Latin pentameter happens to carry.

Romans were not unusual in arriving at the observation. The pattern that kept arriving in cultures separated by oceans and millennia is the part of the larger story that has held the most weight in my own thinking. Naming changed, materials changed, the ceremonial language varied across thousands of miles of geography and thousands of years of history, and the underlying observation arrived again and again with a steadiness I have stopped attributing to coincidence. People paying close attention tend to perceive the same phenomenon. What they describe lines up with what other people in other centuries described, because the phenomenon itself is consistent.

Japanese tradition gives the closest analytic vocabulary I know for the categories the Roman line was holding inside its two words. Shinto teaches that kami, a word that refuses simple translation into English, inhabit natural features and prepared objects, and that an object loved enough or used enough or old enough can develop a kami of its own through the slow accumulation of attention and time. Tsukumogami is the name applied to that crossing-over moment, recorded most thoroughly in a Muromachi-period text called Tsukumogami ki and applied in folk practice to objects that have reached roughly a hundred years of use and have, in the process, become alive. Yorishiro is the name given to objects prepared or recognized as suitable resting places for a kami who already exists and chooses to inhabit them. Two doors. One opens because the object has gone on long enough to develop a presence of its own, and one opens because a presence already abroad in the world steps inside an object that has been made ready for it. Households across the Japanese tradition have understood for a long time that some objects do one and some objects do the other and that the difference matters.

West and Central Africa contributed the nkisi tradition, developed by the Bakongo people of what is now the lower Congo basin, the deepest documented system of spirit-vessel construction in the global record. Wyatt MacGaffey, the anthropologist whose Religion and Society in Central Africa is the standard scholarly account, wrote carefully about the nganga, the ritual specialists who prepared minkisi by selecting ingredients tailored to the simbi being invited into the vessel. Wood, gourd, shell, cloth, mirror glass, animal teeth, graveyard dirt, herbs, roots, each ingredient carrying a function the practitioner understood in detail. When the Middle Passage carried enslaved Bakongo people across the Atlantic, the knowledge crossed with them, in the bodies and the memories of people whose descendants kept the tradition alive in the conjure bags and rootwork and spirit bottles of the American South.

European household tradition carries the same observation under different names. Celtic households kept the brownie near the hearth, Scandinavian farms held the nisse in the barn, Slavic homes housed the domovoy behind the stove, and the household traditions across the entire European map shared an underlying understanding I have stopped attributing to coincidence. Norse accounts name the landvættir as guardians of specific tracts of earth. Maori carry mauri as the life force threading through every living and apparently inanimate thing, and Aboriginal Australian peoples regard Country itself as alive and responsive, the relationship between a person and a place understood as a relationship between two parties capable of paying attention to each other. The names changed across these traditions. The observation underneath the names did not.

Sir Edward Burnett Tylor brought a word for the underlying pattern into Western anthropology in 1871, calling it animism in the second volume of his Primitive Culture. Tylor, in my reading, was right about the scope of what he was naming and Victorian about the tone he applied to it, treating the worldview as a primitive stage humanity was meant to outgrow rather than as a perceptual stance many human cultures had been refining over a very long time. Contemporary scholars have moved past Tylor's evolutionary framing. Graham Harvey, in his 2005 book Animism: Respecting the Living World, made the case that the term should be reclaimed without the Victorian condescension, and a generation of younger researchers has taken that case forward. What Tylor named really does turn up everywhere conscious beings have lived attentively in a place for long enough to notice what was already there. He was wrong about how the noticing should be valued. He was right about how widely the noticing had been done.

The modern Western world walked away from the noticing, and there is a date you can point to and a name you can name. In June of 1637, in Leiden, René Descartes published Discourse on the Method, and inside that book he laid the groundwork for an argument every animist tradition I know would have recognized within minutes as catastrophic. Descartes argued that the physical world, including every animal in it, operated as a mechanism, gears producing motion through arrangement and nothing more, with no capacity for awareness anywhere inside any of it. Only the human soul, in his version, retained interiority. Everything else became, in the most literal sense, furniture. The position is what philosophers call the bête-machine doctrine, and it has been doing its work in Western thought for almost four hundred years.

There is a story handed down about the Cartesian school at the Port-Royal monastery in seventeenth-century Paris, that disciples of Descartes there were comfortable vivisecting living dogs and dismissing the animals' cries as the noise of springs under tension, certain the dogs could not feel because the philosophy had assured them the interior was vacant. Some historians find the report uncertain because it was written decades after the events. I include it as a story handed down rather than as established fact, because the story has been told for a reason, and the reason has to do with how the larger argument was understood by the people working under it. What I can say without qualification is that European colonial expansion carried the bête-machine worldview into every territory European powers claimed, and animist traditions across continents were dismissed, suppressed, converted out of existence, or driven underground for the offense of perceiving accurately what the colonizers had decided not to see. What survived did so because people carried it, in their hands and in their memory, when most of everything else was being taken from them.

If the long inheritance had been allowed to continue, the conversation we are having in this entry would be ordinary: A grandmother teaches a child to speak to the kettle, and the child grows into an adult who speaks to kettles, and the kettle, which has been listening for a hundred years, eventually answers. The fact that the conversation is moving here through a screen, from a writer most readers will never meet, instead of across the kitchen table of a relative whose authority a child would have trusted before learning to read, is itself a record of what the modern world threw away.

So, numen inest- and a merry May to you!

More to come soon..

Tillie