Sublime

Darwin had rediscovered the deep truth of totemism—the animistic assumption, common to countless indigenous cultures but long banished from polite society, that human beings are closely kindred to other creatures,

Enlightenment thinkers once disparaged animist ideas as backwards and unscientific. They considered them to be a barrier to capitalist expansion, and sought desperately to stamp them out. But today science is beginning to catch up. Biologists are discovering that humans are not standalone individuals, but composed largely of microorganisms on which

Traditional peoples also commonly lack the modern sense of the human self as indivisible, seeing it instead as penetrating and being penetrated by other beings in the world around.