The concept of spiritual power in East Asian and Canadian Aboriginal thought

Abstract

A distinction is often made between animism, a belief that everything has a soul or spirit, and animatism, which refers to a belief in a generalized, impersonal power that permeates all of reality. Although the distinction seems to be useful, most traditional societies probably include elements of both. Some concepts, such as mana or kami, can be either animistic or animatistic, depending on whether one is focused on a specific object such as a sacred tree or on the essential oneness of the spiritual power that is found in everything. Moreover, the distance between animism and animatism is not that great; from the recognition that everything in the cosmos has a soul (as in animism) it is only a small leap to the position of animatism that everything in the cosmos shares the same spiritual power. These theoretical points are illustrated with ethnographic information provided by the three authors of this article.

Introduction

A distinction is often made between animism and animatism. Animism is a concept popularized by the British anthropologist, Edward Burnett Tylor (1871), who defined it as a belief that everything has a soul or spirit. He considered animism to be typical of most traditional societies and the first phase in the development of religion. The term animatism was coined by British anthropologist Robert R. Marett (1914) to refer to a belief in a generalized, impersonal power over which people have some measure of control. It has been applied to the concept of life force, energy flow, or spiritual power that permeates all of reality and can be concentrated more highly in certain things than others. Examples are mana in Hawaii (Codrington, 1891), prana in Hinduism (Frawley, 1999), pneuma in ancient Greece (Van der Eijk, 2005: 131–132), elan vital in Western philosophy (Bergson, 1907), qi in Chinese thought (Ho Peng Yoke, 2000), kami in Japanese Shinto (Ono, 2003), and the concept of Buddha Nature in Mahayana Buddhism (Reeves, 2008). This concept is also found in North American Aboriginal thought. It has been applied to concepts such as wakan, manitou, and orenda. Ake Hultkrantz (1979: 11–14), however, argues that such concepts are not necessarily equivalent to the concept of mana. Thus, they should be used with care.

It will be argued in this article that the concepts of animism and animatism are not mutually exclusive but lie on a continuum. To understand this continuum, it is necessary to describe a broader context. Philosophical forefathers in the Western tradition, such as Descartes, perpetuated a distinction, known as Cartesian dualism, between the spirit on one hand and the body-brain-mind on the other (Ziccardi, 2012). This was largely a compromise with the Church that allowed the Church sole domain over spiritual matters, whereas science was allowed to deal with the investigation of the body-brain-mind. While this compromise served to help protect science from interference from the Church, it was a disservice to knowledge in that it perpetuated a false distinction between spirit (that cannot be investigated because it has no material substance) and the body-brain-mind (that has material substance). In brief, at one end of the continuum is a materialist world view in which everything can be explained without reference to spirit. At the other end of the continuum is a spiritual world view in which everything is viewed as an expression in the phenomenal world of a universal spirit. In its most radical form, spiritual power is not something that permeates people, animals, plants, etc. or that is possessed by material objects. Rather, all material phenomena are spiritual in their very nature. In other words, spiritual power provides the ontological basis of being in the world. The concepts of animism and animatism fall on this continuum between materialist and spiritual world views, with animatism, in its emphasis that spiritual power provides the ontological basis of everything, being closer to the spiritual end than animism.

The distance between animism and animatism is not as great as one might think. Brazilian anthropologist Viveiro de Castro (1992) has developed what he calls multinaturalist perspectivism, based upon his research on the animistic cosmologies of Amerindian groups. An analysis of Amerindian myths reveals that at one time the inhabitants of the cosmos shared a human condition that later differentiated into humans, animals, plants, and artifacts. Although these differentiated beings have different external forms, they share an inner human form associated with a soul. This theme is further developed by Descola (2005: 38) when he argues that ‘animism is … anthropogenic in the sense that it produces all that is necessary for non-humans to be treated as humans’. The refusal to draw a sharp line between animals and humans is found in many other traditional societies. For example, Harvey Feit (1995: 183–184) says that ‘Cree do not radically separate the concepts of ‘human’ and ‘animals’. In their everyday experience in the bush they continually observe examples of the intelligence and will power of animals. They express this by saying that animals are ‘like persons’. Feit (1995: 87) goes on to say that in Cree belief, ‘Animals themselves used to be ‘like us’, and in the ‘long ago’ time of the legends they could talk with one another and with humans’. Once animals and plants, and in many cases, so-called ‘inanimate’ objects are recognized as having souls, it is not a big leap to the concept of a universal soul that unites everything in the cosmos. This, of course, is the essence of animatism.

These theoretical points will be illustrated with information from the senior author’s fieldwork, mostly conducted in Japan and China, as well as with Aboriginal healers in Canada, two of whom have been asked to express their views directly on the topic at hand.

The concept of spiritual power in East Asia

In his own research, Young has encountered the concept of spiritual power in China and Japan. Qi is a Chinese term used to refer to all types of energy. Liang and Wu (2010) describe qi as the vital force which is behind all things in the universe and which is found within all material substances. The term gong refers to an accomplishment that is achieved with steady practice. In the context of health and healing, the concept of qi usually refers to energy that moves through the body and can be accessed through acupuncture points. Illness results from stagnation of qi energy, and healing results from encouraging this energy to resume movement. Qi is not restricted to the body, however. It enters the body in the form of food, air, and even electricity, as in the case of an acupuncturist who plugs wires hooked to acupuncture needles into a wall socket. Kaptchuk (1983: 35) defines qi ‘as matter on the verge of becoming energy, or energy at the point of materializing’. A qigong master meditates or performs qigong exercises for the purpose of accumulating energy in his brain, which he then uses for healing purposes. When qi is transferred across space to a patient it is referred to as external qi. In brief, the concept of qi in China is more akin to animatism than animism in that it is impersonal and broadly distributed.

Although the term ‘qigong’ did not come into general use until the twentieth century, it has a documented history of approximately 2500 years, and may go back much earlier (Holden and Meyer, 2011). Qigong was largely a secret tradition that existed within martial arts systems or the religions of Buddhism and Daoism, although some health-related exercises were available to the general public (Yang, 2016). Yang divides the history of qigong into four major periods. Little is known about the earliest period, from the early 12th century BC until the introduction of Buddhism from India in 206 BC, during the Han dynasty. In 1122 BC, the Yi Jing (Book of Changes) introduced the three natural energies of Heaven, Earth, and Man. The study of their relationship was the first step in the development of qigong. Later developments in this early period largely stressed methods of breath control. The second period, from the Han dynasty to the beginning of the Lian dynasty (206 BC to 502 AD) saw the introduction of Buddhism, which brought qigong theory and training practices as they related to attaining Buddhahood. In China, Buddhist insights and practices were combined with Daoist principles and, to a lesser extent, Buddhist practices from Tibet, into a secret tradition that was not available to lay persons. The third period, from the Liang dynasty to the end of the Qing dynasty (502–1911), qigong was adopted into Tibetan meditation and martial arts, which became widespread in China. Though qigong exercises became more popular in the population at large, the esoteric doctrines and practices remained secret. In the fourth period, from the end of the Qing dynasty to the present, qigong became one of the most widespread movements in China, largely because it was promoted by the Communist Party as a unique Chinese healing tradition (Palmer, 2007).

In the 1980s and early 1990s, Young went to China on three different occasions with a graduate student, Grant Ingram, to attend conferences on traditional Chinese medicine and to document how traditional Chinese medicine was being combined with modern Western medicine in Chinese hospitals and clinics. In the 1980s, qigong was being studied in special research institutes set up for that purpose. At conferences Young attended in Beijing, he witnessed qigong being used for different purposes. On one occasion, he witnessed a qigong practitioner standing behind a reclining patient whose lower limbs were paralyzed as the result of an accident. Because of his position, the qigong master could not be seen. As the master moved his hands, the legs of the patient also moved, in a form of physical therapy that after several months of use is reportedly able to encourage nerve regeneration and restore at least partial mobility to paralyzed limbs.

Soon afterwards, Young and several other volunteers from the audience were invited on stage, where they stood in a line facing the audience, with the qigong master standing behind where he could not be seen. After several minutes of silent moving meditation, the qigong master started moving his hands. In response, participants all started moving their arms and hands in unison. Although Young felt that he had the ability to resist if he wished, as long as he remained relaxed, his arms and legs seemed to move on their own accord.

On another occasion, Young had a severe stomach condition that was threatening his ability to give a paper on his own research since he had to use the bathroom every few minutes. Conference organizers introduced him to a famous qigong master in the audience who agreed to assist Young. The master sat with arms upraised for several minutes, meditating, in a posture of supplication. He then held the palm of his hand over Young’s abdomen, after which he pointed his index finger at an acupuncture point on the hand between the base of the thumb and the index finger. As a result of this treatment, Young’s stomach problems immediately cleared up and he was able to deliver his paper and even attend a greasy Peking duck banquet that evening. Fortunately, he was symptom-free for the remainder of the conference.

By the time of Young’s final research trip to China in the early 1990s, the qigong research institutes had disappeared and public displays of qigong were prohibited because the large crowds attending mass healing ceremonies were regarded as political events. At one conference Young attended, a qigong master would treat a small group of people in a hall. When a policeman approached, a warning was issued, and everyone dispersed until the policeman was gone, after which the group re-assembled and healing continued.

The Japanese also utilize the concept of qi, called ki in Japanese. The concept of spiritual power provides the basis for the Japanese concept of kami, which seems to be more or less identical to the Polynesian concept of mana. Kami is spiritual power that is found in everything and may be concentrated more highly in certain things than others, such as horses, foxes, waterfalls, or large trees. Varley (2000: 9) describes kami as ‘a polytheistic host that, on the one hand, animalistically inhabits nature and, on the other hand, is intimately associated with people and their most basic units of social organization, such as the family and the farming village’. Though kami can be invoked by Shinto priests for healing and protection, kami (perceived as individual spirits) can also take revenge if not treated with respect. Though usually described as a polytheistic religion, various Shinto priests have told me that at a more sophisticated level, kami is, in essence, a single substance that permeates all of reality. It is probably more accurate to regard Shinto as encompassing both animistic and animatistic beliefs. When kami is perceived as an impersonal force that permeates all of reality, it is at the animatistic end; when kami is perceived as a particular deity such as a fox spirit that can either help or harm individuals, it is at the animistic end.

The concept of kami is similar to the Buddhist concept of Buddha Nature – a key doctrine of Mahanaya Buddhism. It is based upon a 5th century text, the Mahayana Mahaparinirvana Sutra (2013), which was translated from Sanskrit into Chinese. Buddha Nature is found in everything. To be more precise, Buddha Nature provides the ontological basis of everything. In Buddhist thought, an individual is only part of Buddha Nature but Buddha Nature is all of the individual. Doumoulin (1987: 111) says, ‘Buddha Nature comprises all physical and mental reality. No kind of being is potentially more real than any other kind. All beings are Buddha-nature to the same extent’. Buddha Nature is manifested in the constant flow of energy as phenomenal reality is created, destroyed, and returned to its original source. Thus, the concept of Buddha Nature is basically impersonal (not associated with individual spirits or deities) and thus is closer to animatism than animism. In fact, I would place it at the opposite end of the continuum from materialism in that it is a belief in the all-encompassing nature of Spirit.

The concept of spiritual power in Canadian Aboriginal thought

Young’s research with Native healers has been primarily with Clifford Pompana, Lakota healer from Manitoba, and Russell Willier, Cree healer from northern Alberta. Pompana’s understanding of spiritual power will be discussed first, followed by a discussion by Willier on how he perceives this concept.

Background for Pompana

The Siouan-speaking Dakota population inhabits the Great Plains and prairie regions of central North America (Elias, 2002). At one time, they ranged across western Wisconsin through Minnesota, northwestern Ontario and eastern Manitoba. At time of contact, the former were located along the Mississippi River, had semi-permanent villages and practiced horticulture, as well as hunting and gathering. The Nakota, who occupied the territory between the Mississippi and lower Missouri rivers, hunted big game. Further west along the Missouri, the Lakota were nomadic buffalo hunters. By the early nineteenth century, the Dakota had withdrawn from their northern territories as the Cree and Ojibwa moved in from the east.

The Dakota are divided into three linguistic groups: the Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota, each of which is divided into seven ‘campfires’. After the Minnesota Uprising of 1862, the US military drove at least three bands of the eastern population into Canada, where they arrived at Fort Garry and the Red River settlements (Elias, 2002: xvi). They were allowed to stay but were not allowed to participate in the treaties of the 1870s. Early in the spring of 1863, those who had survived in North Dakota moved to the Red River settlement, pursued by the American army, which was refused permission to cross the border. Nevertheless raids across the border succeeded in capturing some of the refugees. From the Red River settlement, the Dakota moved to other areas. By the winter of 1864–1865, the various Dakota bands had distributed themselves across the Northwest in a pattern that largely remains to this day (Elias, 2002: 26). Today, the Lakota occupy several small reserves in Manitoba and Saskatchewan as well as one in Alberta. In the following discussion, all three peoples are referred to collectively as Dakota.

The Dakota became commercial farmers, woodworkers, cattle ranchers, resource exploiters and labourers, occupations that are still carried on today. Their most important ceremonies include the pipe ceremony, the sweat lodge ceremony, the vision quest and the Sun Dance. In 1996 the Dakota in Canada numbered about 12,500 living in twelve reserve communities. The Dakota Ojibway Tribal Council was established in Brandon, Manitoba in 1974 and was the first federally recognized tribal council. Today the Council represents eight bands including the Dakota Plains and the Long Plain nations.

Clifford Pompana is from the Sioux Valley Dakota Nation in Manitoba, with a population of 2,300. David Young was privileged to supervise Pompana’s Masters thesis at the University of Alberta: Inipi Kagapi: Cognitive symbolic interpretation of the Dakota Sweat Lodge ceremony, completed in 1995 (Education and Research Archive University of Alberta). Young later completed a vision quest (four days without food or water for four subsequent years) under the supervision of Pompana. Each morning of the vision quest, Pompana would visit Young and ask him if he had had any visions during the night. One morning Young replied that he had not experienced anything important. Pompana persisted by asking Young to describe anything he had seen even if it did not seem to be important. Young said that he had seen a very large body of water with a log floating on it. A beaver or muskrat kept coming up and depositing mud on the log. Pompana was amazed. He said, ‘I have been praying all my life to have that vision. It is a depiction of our creation myth!’ At other times, Young experienced various spirits and thus came to feel that he had first-hand knowledge of some of the things Pompana was talking about. Young and Pompana collaborated on a paper (Young et al., 1996) concerning the ‘grandfathers’.

Pompana’s understanding of spiritual power

Wakan tanka means Great Mystery – a universal, sacred, mysterious power (Deloria, 2016). The Great Mystery, from which everything comes and to which everything returns, has always existed. It manifests itself on our earth through the Grandfathers and Grandmothers, who exist in us, as well as in things like rocks. There are sixteen Great Mysteries that make up Wakan tanka, which has a force, Taku wakan skan skan, that causes things to join together or to fall apart. This force, or energy, was originally used to create the earth out of chaotic raw materials known as inyan. This original inyan consisted of four original Grandfathers or Wakan akantu (Wi, sun; Skan, energy; Maka, earth; and Inyan, rock). This original highest level subdivided twice to form the present sixteen Great Mysteries.

Taku wakan Skan skan, means something in sacred movement, as when energy is released in the sweat lodge to bring about healing. The skan in skan skan refers to the original, primordial energy involved in the creation of the earth and in everything else that changes. In other words, skan is the Creator, which is part of Wakan tanka.

There is a difference between a Grandfather or Grandmother and a spirit. Spirits are basically messengers of the Grandparents. When we see a Grandfather, such as an eagle circling in the sky, it is a projection to which we provide and attach energy. This projection is possible, however, because the eagle is a Grandfather. Thus, the spirit eagle is, in a sense, a joint creation of the individual who projects it and the Grandfather it represents. Once it has been created, the eagle is endowed with power that it can use to heal us, the recipients.

The six great sacred ceremonies, such as the Sun Dance, Sweat Lodge and the Pipe Ceremony, are used to encourage the Grandfathers to show their power or life force in our world and consciousness. For example, in the Sweat Lodge, the Rock Grandfather releases its energy or breath in the form of steam that heals and renews us. The Lakota term for sweat lodge is inipi, which means a place where an individual is given renewed life – a rejuvenation process.

As a healer, my rituals are designed to activate healing energy in the immune system. The healing is actually done by the Grandfathers and Grandmothers who reside within us, awaiting our call for help. Their spiritual power, or life force, is aroused by the ritual. This life force, in turn, activates the immune system. Although spiritual energy can be used for good – to heal, it can also be used, as in anger, to throw a culture off balance. A healthy culture, like a healthy individual, depends upon internal energy being balanced.

In brief, spiritual power has both personal and impersonal aspects. The Grandfathers and Grandmothers can be regarded as individual spirits, whereas the power that is used by Wakan tanka, such as skan, is found in everything and is involved when energy is used for creation or destruction, or when it is released in the Sweat Lodge ceremony for healing purposes. Wakan tanka itself can be regarded as both a deity and as a mysterious power that permeates all of reality.

Background for Willier

The Cree are a branch of the Algonquian family. On the basis of habitat they are generally designated as Plains Cree and Woods, or Swamp, Cree (Curtis, 2015). Russell Willier is a Woods Cree, a subdivision of Woodland Cree. In Alberta, the Woods Cree are usually called Bush Cree. Prior to the 18th century, Woodland Cree territory extended as far north as Churchill, Manitoba (Helm, 1981). After the arrival of Europeans, participation in the fur trade pushed Swampy Cree into the Plains while many Cree remained in the boreal forest and the tundra area to the north. Their livelihood consisted primarily of hunting moose, caribou, smaller game, geese, ducks and fish. Later, during the fur trade period, they exchanged local products such as meat, furs and other items for European goods. Today, the Woods Cree are still partially dependent upon the hunting of moose, elk, beaver and waterfowl. Fishing is also still of great importance, as is the collection of Saskatoon berries, blueberries, and otter berries.

Plains Cree adopted the use of horses and subsisted primarily through hunting buffalo. By the 18th century, they served as middlemen in trade with tribes to the west. The acquisition of guns allowed the Cree to expand their territory, driving other tribes further west and north. Today the Cree are the largest aboriginal group in Canada. Their most important ceremonies include the Sweat Lodge Ceremony, the Vision Quest, the Shaking Tent Ceremony and the Sun Dance.

Willier lives on the Sucker Creek First Nation, located on the southwestern shore of Lesser Slave Lake at Enilda, about 22 kilometers east of High Prairie, Alberta. The band has a registered population of 2,099 (as of March 2003) and almost 6,000 hectares of reserve land (Sucker Creek First Nation official website). Willier is the descendant of Moostoos, an influential elder and healer who signed Treaty 8.

Young first met Russell Willier when he went to the Sucker Creek Reserve in northern Alberta in the early 1980s with a team from the Provincial Museum of Alberta (now the Royal Alberta Museum) to document Willier’s traditional brain tanning procedures. After a few days, Young learned that Willier is a shaman. Young was particularly interested in shamanism because of his background in anthropology of religion. He asked Willier if he could document his healing practices. After fasting and meditating, Willier granted permission. Young and two of his graduate students, Grant Ingram and Lise Swartz, began a five-year program of working with Russell Willier on this topic. This involved spending a good deal of time on his reserve, observing his healing practices, as well as dozens of tape-recorded interviews. The result of this research was the Psoriasis Research Project which documented Russell’s treatment of 10 non-native patients with psoriasis, recruited through advertisements in a local paper.

This research resulted in several journal articles, two television programs, and a book (Young and Swartz, 1988a; Young and Swartz, 1988b; Young et al., 1989; Young, 1995; Young et al., 2000; Young, 2011). At that time, the book was quite controversial, so a chapter on Willier’s medicines had to be removed. By 2015, times had changed to the extent that it was possible to publish a sequel, A Cree healer and his medicine bundle: Revelations of indigenous wisdom – Healing plants, practices and stories (Young et al., 2015), which includes photographs and descriptions of the medicinal plants used by Willier.

Russell Willier’s concept of spiritual power

It is important to distinguish between different kinds of spiritual power, which makes it impossible to classify Cree thought as either animistic or animatistic. It is both. At the top is the Great Spirit, the Creator. Then there are the main Grandfathers who are the Great Spirit’s helpers such as Fire, Thunder, Wind, and Water. These are the Elemental Spirits that were with the Great Spirit right from the beginning. Then there are animal and plant spirits that are not nearly as powerful as the Elemental Spirits. When one seeks their help, they can appear in any form, such as the top half of a person so they can communicate with humans. These Grandfather and Grandmother spirits carry requests to the Great Spirit and return with information or spiritual power that can be used for healing purposes. This spiritual power should not be confused with the spirits that carry it.

Everything has spiritual power. Everything is alive – even rocks. The spiritual power in plants is what enables them to heal. Again, each plant species has a spirit that manifests itself in actual plants of that species, but the Grandmother or Grandfather spirit is not the same as the spiritual power possessed by actual plants. That power is released by using the plants in the proper way and through appropriate ritual. If medicinal plants are used outside of their appropriate ritual context, they will not be effective. If an Indian kills a moose, he doesn’t kill the moose spirit. It can always come back as an actual moose. In the meantime, it is up in heaven.

Another type of Grandfather is a person who has died. You could ask him or her for help, but their help is unpredictable. You would not be able to hold that spirit and use its power for your own purposes.

Then there is the spiritual power associated with protectors: animal protectors and something you carry with you, such as a little bag of tobacco, to protect you from curses.

Spiritual power can be used for good or evil. When a bad medicine man curses someone, the spiritual power is carried by a bad spirit. But the evil power in the curse must be differentiated from the spirit that carries it. The job of a healer is to cause a curse sent to his or her patient to miss its mark. Sometimes, it can be reversed and sent back to the person who sent the curse in the first place.

All of these spirits have different personalities, just like any human. There’s a little difference in every one of them.

Conclusion

The distinction between animatism and animism seems to be a useful one. It is misleading, however, to classify individual societies as being either animatistic or animistic; most traditional societies probably include elements of both. Animism and animatism can be situated on a continuum, with a material world view at one end and a spiritual world view at the other. Animism emphasizes individual spirits or deities such as the Grandfathers or Grandmothers in Aboriginal thought, whereas animatism emphasizes impersonal spiritual power that permeates all of reality and that can be used for either good or evil purposes. Where a particular concept lies on this continuum depends partly upon the role of the entity conceptualized; it also depends upon the conceptual leaning of the individual employing the concept. Some concepts, such as kami, can be either animistic or animatistic, depending upon whether one is focused upon a specific object such as a sacred tree or whether one is emphasizing the essential oneness of the spiritual power that is found in everything. Moreover, the distance between animism and animatism is not that great; the recognition that everything in the cosmos has a soul (as in animism) allows humans to see essential similarities among people, animals, plants and inanimate objects. From there, it is only a small leap to the position of animatism that everything in the cosmos shares the same spiritual power.