by Daniel Quinn
I am never disappointed with the gods, because I never expect them to take my side against others.
Don’t misunderstand me. The fact that the gods don’t take our side against others doesn’t imply that we have to do the same. The horse doesn’t wait for the gods to intervene when it’s attacked by a puma; it uses all its strength and every weapon it possesses to save its life. We’re free to do the same—as free as any other creature. If a lion attacks us, the gods will not defend us, because they’re no more on our side than they are on the side of the lion, but we’re at liberty to defend ourselves with whatever weapon we can wield. Our best weapon of defense is of course our intelligence. If there’s a cancer growing inside of you, the gods aren’t on your side against it, but that doesn’t mean you have to throw up your hands and allow it to destroy your life; defend yourself against it with every resource you can bring to bear.
People have written to me to ask: “What can I do about the spiders that invade my house? May I kill them or do I just have to put up with them?” Such questions can always be safely referred to our neighbors in the community of life. A dog or a chimpanzee or a sparrow cannot be mistaken in such matters; they cannot mislead themselves with false, convenient arguments. Ask your dog what he does with the fleas that invade his coat, and he’ll show you: He does his best to rid himself of them. You can do the same, without apology. The gods will not take your side against the rest of the world just because you’re human, but they will also not take the side of the rest of the world against you just because you’re human.
As you see, the so-called Problem of Evil doesn’t exist for me. As I explained in Ishmael, what the gods know about good and evil is this: Whatever they do is good for one but evil for another, and it can’t be otherwise. If the quail eats the grasshopper, then this is good for the quail but evil for the grasshopper. And if the fox eats the quail, then this is good for the fox but evil for the quail. The gods obviously can’t make a rule like “No quail may eat a grasshopper” or “Quails deserve to be protected from foxes.” Grasshopper, quail, and fox all live in the hands of the gods for a time, and not one of them has cause for complaint or disappointment. The same is true of us. As I said in The Book of the Damned, “Every life in the community is owed to the community—and is paid back to the community in death. The community is a web of life, and every strand of the web is a path to all the other strands. Nothing is exempt. Nothing is special. Nothing lives on a strand by itself, unconnected to the rest.” This applies to us as well.
Most Takers are terrified of death. To die is considered a great tragedy.
Most Takers are terrified of death. To die is considered a great tragedy among them. They’re terrified of it because they’ve worked so hard to distance themselves from it, to eliminate it from their lives. (To eliminate it as a firsthand experience, I mean; they love to experience it vicariously, sitting in front of their television sets.) When I say that they work hard to distance themselves from death, I don’t mean from their own mortality. They distance themselves from that too, of course, but that’s not what I’m talking about.
People who live in close contact with the community of life also live in close contact with death. To forestall your immediate first thought, I’m not saying that this makes them insensitive to it. Quite the opposite; they’re more sensitive to death than we are, because they see very clearly, every single day, that the life that flows through them is taken from the creatures around them; it comes from nowhere else. If they’re to live, others must die. This isn’t peculiar to them, this is true of every creature in the community of life (green plants excepted, of course). When we (who distance ourselves as far as possible from the general community of life) open up a frozen dinner and stick it in the microwave, we’re totally unconscious of the fact that the life we derive from this meal originally belonged to others. It’s quite different for the hunters who carry a deer back to camp. They knew this creature in life, and they know that they took its life so that they and their families could live. They know very well that, in consuming the deer, they’re taking the life of the deer into themselves. In fact, in a very real sense, the deer hasn’t died at all; the deer has simply become them, and in the same sense they have become the deer. Long before we did, the ancient hunters knew that you are what you eat.
When the hunter takes the life of a deer, this is not a crime or an act of cruelty. That deer is on its way to becoming a human being. And if the hunter should fall prey to a lion, then that hunter is on his way to becoming a lion. The entire community is woven together in this way. Everything that lives has its life from others; there is no other way to get it (unless you happen to be a green plant, as I say). Everything that dies is life for some other—every single thing.
I should add that this is just as true for vegetarians as for anyone else. Vegetarians who feel morally superior because they never eat animals are exhibiting what might be called kingdomism, in effect assigning a greater sacredness to members of their own kingdom (the animal kingdom) than to the plant kingdom. As the animist sees the world, everything that lives is sacred, the carrot no less than the cow. If there is any single doctrine that might win universal agreement among animists, I think it would be this, that the gods love everything that lives and have no favorites. If the gods have as much care for me as they do for a dandelion or a dragonfly, I’m perfectly content.
Perhaps the best words I ever wrote outside of Ishmael were these in The Book of Nahash:
To each is given its moment in the blaze, its spark to be surrendered to another when it is sent, so that the blaze may go on. None may deny its spark to the general blaze and live forever. Each is sent to another someday. You are sent; you are on your way. I am sent. To the wolf or the lion or the vulture or the grasses, I am sent. My death is the life of another, and I will stand again in the windswept grasses and look through the eyes of the fox and take the air with the eagle and run in the track of the deer.
What? Do I consider myself an animist? Yes, I suppose so, but what does this mean? I don’t go to an animist church or say animist prayers or vote the animist ticket or try to convert people to animism. All these things are foreign to the animist sensibility. No one can stand up and say (truthfully), “I am the Animist-in-Chief of the world, and only I am empowered to speak for it.” No ritual is needed to make you an animist if you wish to become one. There is no animist creed to which all animists subscribe, no animist theology that articulates the nature of the gods, no animist catechism that will supply answers to all questions. I suppose such things could be trumped up by somebody. If people can make money off shamanism, I’m sure they can figure out a way of making money off animism as well.
To each is given its moment in the blaze, its spark to be surrendered to another when it is sent, so that the blaze may go on.
Animism isn’t a collection of practices and doctrines that are drawn upon for special occasions. It isn’t an aspect of life that can be separated out and isolated from all others. Animists are not so much people with a religion as people with a fundamentally religious way of looking at things. This is not at all to say that animists are uniformly saints—kindly, sweet, gentle, and so on; this is as great a distortion as to say that they’re uniformly savages—bloodthirsty, cruel, murderous, and so on. The Iroquois were animists, but (by most civilized standards) they were not nice folks. I recommend the film Black Robe to people who imagine that all Leavers are saints (or who imagine that I’m saying that all Leavers are saints). What I said in Ishmael stands: There is no One Right Way to live. What we find among Leaver peoples is that each has a way that works well for them. We may not like one particular way, we may think it atrocious and cruel, but it’s their way, not ours, and the most murderous culture in human history is hardly in a position to set itself up as the moral policeman of the world.
It may be that the hour I had at Gethsemani is the core religious experience of the animist life. What I mean is that this experience is sufficient
to account for the existence of animism as a world religion. I’m not saying this well.… I’ll put it this way: Anyone who has this experience is an animist from that moment on. Anyone who has this experience knows that the world is ablaze with divine life, and that’s the center of the animist vision. I don’t imagine that the tree out there “has a spirit in it.” What I know is that that tree is ablaze with divine life—which isn’t the same thing at all. I don’t need to see that fire again to know this. I’ve already seen it. An hour’s sight of it is enough for a lifetime.
Animism is the only world religion that doesn’t need to scurry to get aboard the environmentalist bandwagon. It was there long, long before the bandwagon started rolling among the Takers.…
Are the others scurrying? Oh, yes, I’d say so. A couple years ago, Carl Sagan produced an article for Parade magazine in which spokespersons for all the major religions (not including animism, of course) declared that they’d “always” been environmentalist in some sense or other. I’ll do the gentlemanly thing and suggest that perhaps they’re out of touch with their own historical roots. All the major world religions (always excluding animism, of course), are founded on these notions: that man and man alone was the desired object of creation, that man occupies a preeminent place in the order of creation, that man has a value in God’s eyes that is transcendently greater than that of all other creatures, that this world of matter is illusory, transitory, and worthless.
Animism is the only world religion that doesn’t need to scurry to get aboard the environmentalist bandwagon.
Of them all, Judaism is the least otherworldly. Its mystical tradition recognizes the need to “leave room”—for one’s spouse, for one’s children, and, by easy extension, for all living creatures. Of them all, Christianity is the most insistently man-centered. God did not give his only-begotten son for anything in the world but the people in it. Christ very definitely did not come to save the whales.
John the evangelist summarizes the Christian view very succinctly: “Anyone who loves the world is a stranger to the Father’s love,” and of course, “The whole world lies in the power of the evil one.” I don’t doubt for a moment that there are many in this tradition who would say this is exactly what I experienced that day at Gethsemani: the power of the evil one.
The “majors” have no authentic message of their own concerning the degradation of our environment, the diminishment of biological diversity, the destruction of the creative processes that brought forth and sustain life on this planet, the end of speciation (which, to the mind of the animist, is creation itself), the extinction of species—even of our own species. These concepts are simply not in their theological vocabulary. Why should they be? From their very foundation, these religions were about making people holy, were about uniting mankind with a god unthinkably remote from the sordid moil and muddle of mere biological survival. They can rewrite their prophets’ lines to give them an environmentalist spin, but I frankly doubt that this will save them. Their irrelevance in the contemporary world is not one of appearance; it goes right down to the bone.
* In Ishmael, “those who leave the rule of the world in the hands of the gods” (in other words, “primitive” peoples).
† In Ishmael, “those who have taken the rule of the world into their own hands” (in other words, the people of our “advanced” culture).
THIRTEEN
As I pointed out in Ishmael, we Takers are a desperately lost and needy people. It was this neediness, I think, that first made us yearn to be loved by God (an idea completely foreign to the animist mentality) and that made us dream of eternities of bliss after lifetimes of emptiness. If anything, our sense of neediness has grown even more overwhelming in recent decades. In addition to needing to be loved by God and to save our souls, we nowadays need to deepen our spiritual awareness, to raise our consciousness, to wield supernatural powers, to bend spoons with our minds, to grow our brains, to enhance our performance, to draw on the right side, to believe in the value of our creativity, to become more cosmic, to learn to fly, to investigate past lives, to have out-of-body experiences, to achieve lucid dreaming, to learn healing massage, to amplify our archetypes, to make our fantasies concrete, to explore our myths, to get rid of toxic introjects, to find our personal sacred site, to heal our inner child, to improve our experiential focusing, to be rebirthed, to take part in intrapsychic activities, to have a primal, to engage in cognitive restructuring, to indulge in cosmic play, to tune in to the godhead, to spend time on the astral plane, to have an intuition workout, to enhance our ch’i, to contact our spirit guide, to tap into the hypnagogic state, to increase our thanatological awareness, to have a soul reading, to visit a sacred energy vortex—and this hardly scratches the surface. Don’t think I’m making fun of these things just because I put them into a list; to the people who engage in them, these are all as real and important as achieving nirvana or saving one’s soul.
The neediness of the Takers is so immense that many people imagine that this neediness is itself the problem that is threatening the world. I’ve actually had heated arguments with people who insist that one or another or some combination of the above is all that is needed to save the world or that saving the world can only be accomplished by one or another or some combination of the above or that one or another or some combination of the above is an absolutely essential prerequisite to saving the world.
The sun is at the horizon. It’s time for us to finish.
If nothing else, I hope you’ll carry this idea away with you: Attend to your needs, but don’t confuse attending to your needs with saving the world.
There was a time when I thought I could say to people: “Forget yourselves for a while, because the world is in dire need of your attention. For a while stop looking for ways to enhance your inner life and start looking instead for ways to ensure that—twenty years from now, fifty years from now—our children and grandchildren will have a decent world to grow up in.” I’ll still say it, but now I say it knowing that this is too much to ask of most people.
It doesn’t matter, I’ll ask it of a few.
I hope the things I’ve given you here will enrich you as a person, but I hope you see that I haven’t given them to you solely for your personal enrichment.
What the beetle said to me was: “You’re needed there.” You, too, are needed there.
Following the deer into the forest was an immensely enriching experience for me, but I wasn’t called to it so that I could be enriched. The beetle didn’t say, “What you need is there.” What the beetle said was: “You’re needed there.”
You, too, are needed there. I mean you who broke into my house in the middle of the night to talk to me. But I also mean you who hear these words. I mean you who will someday read these words. On this I don’t hesitate to ask you to believe.
Believe me, you’re needed there.
———
The secret they wanted to impart to me was not a secret until we made it one. It was known to the first of our kind to tread the face of the earth. It was known to every generation thereafter and never doubted, until we began to doubt it, some ten thousand years ago.
We’re not strangers in a strange land here. This is the secret I learned. We’re not aliens, not outsiders. We were born in the sea, three billion years ago. The deer and the beetle are our kin.
We’re not invaders from space. No one gave us this planet to take care of or to use as we please. We grew out of the community of life the same way shellfish did, the same way mosquitos did.
The world doesn’t belong to us, we belong to it. Always have, always will.
We belong to the world. We belong to the community of life on this planet—it doesn’t belong to us. We got confused about that, now it’s time to set the record straight.
We belong to the world, and this is why we’re needed. No species can set itself apart from all the rest or make itself the ruler of all the rest. That won’t work. All must belong.
That’s what we’ve got to work on. We’ve got to find our way back into the community. We’ve got to stop living like outlaws. When we begin to do that—when we begin to acknowledge that the world needs us and that we belong to it, not it to us—I think our feelings of desperate loneliness and neediness will begin to evaporate, all by themselves.
I think maybe needy people are just people who don’t feel needed.
Well, I say to you: Feel needed.
Feel needed, because you are.
This exaltation, paean, or anthem (my vocabulary—restricted as it is to Taker recognitions—provides no exact term for such an object) was written in about 1982. It represents a fusion of the insight that overtook me in the hills of Kentucky in 1954 with the understanding I subsequently gained of the animist vision of the universe. I didn’t deliberately refrain from addressing it to any divine being. Only later did I recognize this aspect of it as an authentic expression of the animist sensibility.
KINDLER AND REKINDLER
of universes, the fire burns forever. It is the flame of life that courses through all generations from first to last, that burns without consuming, that is itself consumed and renewed inexhaustibly, life after life, generation after generation, species after species, galaxy after galaxy, universe after universe, each sharing in the blaze for its season and going down to death while the fire burns on undiminished. The fire is life itself, the life of this universe, of this galaxy, of this planet, of this place and every place: the place by the rock and the place under the hill and the place by the river and the place in the forest, no two alike anywhere. And the life of every place is god, who is the fire: the life of the pond, god; the life of the tundra, god; the life of the sea, god; the life of the land, god; the life of the earth, god; the life of the universe, god: in every place unique, as the life of every place is unique, and in every place the same, as the fire that burns is everywhere