When my father moved from the small town where he was raised, to Wellington in the early 1950’s, he boarded with a Roman Catholic family. Catholicism is somewhat marginalized here in Aotearoa. My father found this first encounter to be one of many peculiarities of big city life. It was for him a hotbed of superstition and idolatry, very different from the watery suburban Protestantism of his upbringing. Here in this household were saints and angels and statues and bleeding hearts. He was most astounded when the vacuum cleaner stopped working, and the woman of the house sprinkled it with holy water. Roman Catholicism is older than many forms of Christianity and it carries a warning: Contains Traces Of Animism.
Animism, the ancient experience that everything is alive, is the substratum of all spiritual belief. We were animists for maybe ninety percent of human history. Joshua Schrei in his podcast The Emerald points this out. Animism is normative consciousness. The fact of not being animists now is still an uncomfortable one. While there is no evidence for animism in what we are taught, and how we are acculturated, it is in our spiritual bones.
The world is alive, with spirit and with spirits. These spirits are not imaginary, not archetypes, not metaphors, and not narrative devices. They are real and we used to experience them directly, with our senses, in our bodies, because we lived in ways where we more often entered the trance states that open us up to Non Ordinary Reality. Now we think those spirits are invisible, because we don’t see them. We no longer see them. But once, nymphs really did bathe in streams, stones contained local earth goddesses, and taniwha, the guardians of the waters here in Aotearoa, protected those humans who were in their care.
The great spirits we used to live alongside gradually became deities. In the Indo -European traditions, the sky/daylight spirit Dyews Phiter became a sky father god. Trace the lineage of the name through the development of languages: Tyr, Tiwaz, Deus, Zeus, Jupiter. We stopped visiting them and speaking to them, and began to worship them. The great Axial Age religions made them into abstracts, transcendent ideas, and the old deities became demons, or figures from folklore. Folklore lasts longer than religion, and we still have vestiges of both the old gods and the even older spirits right up until the early modern period in Europe.
We can still imagine nature spirits, or an alive nature. We know about fairies and talking trees. It is a bit harder to imagine made things being alive or being/having spirits. Dr Michael Harner, anthropologist and founder of the Foundation for Shamanic Studies, lived among the Shuar people. He had expected to hear about the spirits of plants and animals, but was surprised to hear about the outboard motor spirit. Yet we sometimes think of the things around us as animate. When I was a child the family car always had a name. You can journey shamanically to a made thing I the same way you can journey to a nature spirit or power animal. It is not such a stretch, after all, when you swear at your laptop for deliberately glitching at you!
So anointing your vacuum cleaner makes perfect sense to me, because it is a powerful being in your house. Your vacuum cleaner knows what is under your bed. Your vacuum cleaner has been behind your couch. It has watched you argue with your kids and heard you sing out loud to Cardi B. Do not mess with your vacuum cleaner.
I clean houses for part of a living, for people with disabilities. It is pure service. You can tell a lot about a house when you clean it. You can sense the sorrow in the old photo, and the soft sinking into memory of all those ornaments. A house is a container for spirits as well as being a spirit itself. Once in a ritual, unbidden, my house showed me that. I saw what I thought of as the grain of the house, slipping backwards in time, the wood and concrete becoming undone, the trees filling in their clearings, and older trees, and racing backwards all the way to the hiss and bubble of the swamp. Next time you want to do something with your house, ask it first.
In pre-Christian Roman religion, the lares and penates were the spirits of the house. Both were protective spirits but they were slightly different, the lares being associated with crossroads and neighbourhoods. Each morning, the human inhabitants spoke to the lares and asked it for prosperity and luck for the day. Roman religion also featured the genius loci, meaning the spirit of a place. Genii were often represented as people, holding objects of prosperity. The term has survived, meaning the atmosphere of a place, or how you would imagine a place if it was a person. I think the vacuum cleaner is the genius loci of a household. Look after the vacuum cleaner, and you look after the house.
I will discuss animism and its practical applications further. For now, the picture above is of a container for holy water, depicting the BVM (Blessed Virgin Mary). It comes from Belgium, probably from the shrine of Our Lady of the Poor, at Banneaux. People buy holy water in these containers and then just throw them out. Also in the picture are two forms of holy water, both used for rituals. In the clear bottle is full moon water.
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