animism

The hunter-gatherer worldview in Jiang's model: humans, trees, animals, material reality, and spiritual reality participate in one life cycle.

Jiang uses animism for the belief that all living beings share one source of life, possess souls, and participate in a spirit-world order.

The belief that every living thing has a soul, all living things are interconnected, and balance must be maintained among them.

Jiang defines animism as an early religion in which humans, trees, animals, and other living conscious beings are interconnected in a cycle of life, death, birth, and rebirth.

Jiang frames human religious history as moving from animist interconnection, to mother goddess fertility, to polytheistic city competition, to Christian monotheism.

Jiang says IVC people pushed south and merged with local animism, creating Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, and many other religions.

Jiang says animism is the distant past behind this nostalgia: hunter-gatherers saw themselves as the same as trees and animals, part of Mother Nature and the life cycle, inhabiting both material and spiritual realities.

Jiang says Buddhism comes from animism, then became concrete through the IVC experience of Mesopotamian and Egyptian war, inequality, and corruption as abhorrent violations of human experience.

Jiang presents early human religion as animistic: humans, animals, and plants all come from one Mother Goddess source, which grounds an egalitarian and compassionate social order.

Gimbutas's Mother Goddess is presented as a symbol of the unity of all life in nature, making animals, plants, water, stones, tombs, caves, birds, fish, hills, trees, and flowers sacred.

Jiang defines animism as the belief that humans, animals, and plants share one source of life from the mother goddess and that every living being has a soul.