On my daily walk in the local nature reserve, I often pick up a stick. It must be one of those survival instincts laid down in the genes a million years ago, an inner voice that says: "I'm alone in the woods, I must have a weapon." The instinct is irresistible, even when the most dangerous creatures in the woods are squirrels with no sticks.
At the end of my walk, unless this is a particularly good stick, worth keeping, I throw it away. At that moment, I feel just the tiniest pang of regret. While I was carrying it, the stick had become, in a small way, a special thing, a personal thing, my stick.
I believe that this is a universal human experience. It's the same with pebbles and shells we pick up on the beach, or old clothes or dead house plants. They take on a life of their own. Through sheer familiarity, they become somehow different from other pebbles or clothes or house plants. That's why it's so hard to get children to give up their favorite toys, especially their stuffed animals — and why not? A stuffed animal can be your best friend.
This attachment to physical objects is more than just nostalgia. It's a reminder that the animate and inanimate worlds are really very close together. Deep in our brains, probably in the same primitive region that produces stick-carrying behavior, we know this.
One of the most ancient forms of religion is animism, in which familiar objects, plants and creatures are believed to be inhabited by spirits of their own—- the spirit of the tree, the spirit of the rock, the spirit of the bear, and so on. When people lived closer to nature, they didn't make such rigorous distinctions between animal and human, alive and dead. The whole world seemed alive and meaningful to them.
These beliefs may sound primitive, but they have never gone away. Consider the totemic ritual that takes place right here after Thanksgiving, the great month-long shopping extravaganza.
The objects found in the mall and on the web are mass produced and commonplace, but in their mystical journey from the distant factory to the container ship to the store display they have become magic. What creates the magic is the power of the spirit lodged within them which makes each ordinary commodity seem so much more than the sum of its parts. Advertisers say it out loud: it’s not just a car, it's not just a pen, it's more than a perfume. Sometimes the language is even plainer: this shampoo has spirit, that piece of jewelry has magic, these CDs have soul. This is pure animism — the belief that material objects have special powers.
Every year, as the holidays approach, we see this devout relationship between people and things is raised to the level of a religious quest, as we search for the objects that will speak to us with the voices that we want to hear. Animism lives. It may be that our faraway ancestors were wiser than they knew in believing that the spirit of a thing is more important than the thing itself. After all, when it comes to holiday shopping, what you can’t see is invariably what you hope to get.
