We may not think of media as having anything to do with ecology, or animism, or the spiritual beliefs of Indigenous oral cultures – but after reading David Abram’s 1996 The Spell of the Sensuous, it becomes indisputably clear that these things are inextricably linked.

Abram’s core argument is a tapestry of interrelated ideas which weave together to completely change the way we think about our conscious experience and the land around us. The Spell of the Sensuous is about a specific way of seeing and understanding the world – not through our abstract knowledge of scientific facts, but through our direct, conscious experience through our senses that we all live in every day of our lives. This way of understanding is inextricably tied to reciprocal interactions with animals, plants and the land around us. Abram argues this is the way that Indigenous oral cultures understand the world to this day, and shows how a sect of philosophy known as phenomenology began to rediscover it. Abram tells the story of how we lost this understanding through the development of writing and abstract thought, how we began to ignore what our senses tell us & cut ourselves off from communication with things that aren’t human or human-made. We’ll get there, but let’s start where it all began – the natural world.

We learn that animals evolve in ecosystems; intricate webs of relationships between different species of animals and plants that all evolved alongside each other. But we forget that we are not exempt from this rule; that we are animals. We may also forget that our senses are not just for listening to music or watching movies – but are instead a system that evolved to be the interface for these inter-species relationships, as they did for all animals. We forget that the purpose for which our senses evolved was to experience and interact with the natural environment – our ears are tuned not to the entire frequency spectrum, but to the range of animal calls. What else did our eyes evolve to see but the trees and animals around us, the world of things that are not us? Abram calls this the “more than human world” – the natural environment, as seen directly through the lens of our senses – a world of communication between humans and non-humans. We’ve left this world, for only the past few hundred years, but our senses have not changed.

But what is this way of understanding – this thing you’re experiencing at this very moment – the world as we understand it not through objective facts or scientific knowledge, but through our eyes and ears, nose and brain and body? What can we learn from this world we directly percieve through our senses? In 1913, Austrian mathematician Edmund Husserl set out to answer this question, founding a new field of Philosophy that studies the phenomena we perceive directly with our senses – phenomenology.

Science and experiment have given us unimaginable insight into how our world works. They allowed us to cut past bias and falsehoods and learn truths about the world beyond what we can perceive with the senses – like atoms, soundwaves and DNA – leading to a monumental shift in the way we think about the world. But, Abram argues, with this shift in our knowledge came a shift in our culture and psychology – the the assumption that these technical, mechanical truths come before the conscious experience you’re having right now – that your entire life can be reduced down to a set of facts; to particles, chemicals and synapses firing in the brain – that your mind is not an inseparable part of your material body, but a but another immaterial thing, consciousness, that exists somehow beyond the body.

Phenomenology isn’t counter to science; it isn’t saying these things we’ve discovered through science aren’t real – It is saying that our direct, conscious experience through our senses is also worthy of exploration. After all, this is how you experience every moment of your life, along with every other living animal. This world of perception isn’t a lie, It isn’t an illusion concealing the real world. It is a real world, full of interactions, through our senses, between ourselves and everything around us, from animals to plants to the land. Hence Abram’s term – ‘The More than Human World.’

Abram has a deeper purpose for bringing up phenomenology in his book – a connection he noticed as he lived alongside cultures from the Koyukon peoples of northern Alaska to the Balinese of Indonesia – this ‘phenomenological’ way of viewing the world; understanding reality purely as we see it through our senses without abstract rationalization, was exactly how these peoples thought and lived. We’ll go over an example of this kind of thinking soon, but first, let’s talk about an experience Abram had, living in rural Indonesia.

Abram describes an encounter with a water buffalo. Finding himself staring face to face with this huge creature, he noticed something strange – without language, there was an extremely simple way he and the buffalo could communicate. The buffalo let out a loud exhale, and Abram responded with his own exhale. Mimicry; this tendency animals have to repeat the sounds and gestures of other animals may seem purposeless, but Abram argues mimimicry accomplishes one simple thing, for both animals – it affirms that you are sensing the other animal, and that the other animal can sense you. It is a way even animals can say, without words, “I am alive, and I know you are alive too.” Abram argues that these indigenous cultures; ones constantly foraging for food in forests or carefully watching and being watched by deer as they hunt, ones not surrounded by man-made structures and systems, are more aware of this reciprocal relationship.

Back to our example of phenomenology. To understand what this way of thinking really means, let’s take an example from Philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty – 

Think about what it’s like to look at a bowl. You can never see the entire bowl at once. To your eye, the bowl exists only as one section of its entire surface, until you turn your head to see more of it. A part of the bowl you couldn’t see before now comes into view, and that part of the bowl you saw earlier disappears from view. In objective, scientific terms, the entire bowl does exist statically all at once, but through your conscious experience – through your senses, you can never see it all at once. Through your senses, the bowl isn’t something static. To your eye, it changes form – it has multiple forms depending on your perspective. And the only way for those forms to reveal themselves is in response to your own senses, in response to the placement of your own body.

This way of thinking feels bizarre to us – somehow so foreign it feels incomprehensible or at the same time so obvious it feels pointless. But Abrams argues it may once have been more common to think of a bowl, or a tree or rock, as something dynamic, not static. To our eyes, even objects aren’t cold, static, unchanging things. In a strange way, they respond to us. And it was this realization that led Abram to connect phenomenology with something else that was shared by almost all of the cultures he visited – animism.

Unlike the belief in an all-powerful, immaterial god, Animism is the belief that everything around us has a spirit. That word, spirit, may trip us up here – to our culture, that word may have the connotation of a ghost; something intangible, immaterial, beyond our world or our dimension of being. But, Abram points out, Animistic cultures don’t see spirit that way. Yes, they view things like rocks or rivers as having their own spirit, as being alive, but not in the same way a plant is alive – just like a plant is not quite alive in the same way an animal is alive. Here, spirit is purely material – it isn’t about transcendence or intangibility, it is about response and reciprocity. This is what connects Merleau-Ponty’s example to Abram’s experience with the buffalo. Think about how Abram exhaled in response to the buffalo, and the buffalo exhaled in response to him; both affirming that they could sense and were sensed by each other; both literally affirming that they were each alive. To an Animistic culture, this example of a bowl may work in much the same way – a person moves their head to reveal another side of the bowl, and to their eye, the bowl shifts to reveal another side of itself; both affirming that they could sense and were sensed by each other; both affirming that they were each alive. A bowl may not be alive in anywhere near the same way a buffalo is alive, certainly not in the way our culture would use the word alive, but to an Animistic culture, both the bowl and the buffalo have a spirit.

But why do all of these cultures, thousands of miles apart, all just coincidentally think this way, and develop these animistic beliefs? It may make more sense to ask, Abram argues, why doesn’t our culture see things this way? Perhaps our ancestors shared this understanding of the world, until something changed in our perception. Each one of the Indigenous cultures that Abram lived with had one thing in common – they were oral cultures; they had not developed writing. It does not at all seem clear at first how developing writing could have stopped us from seeing the world through the conscious experience of our senses, and from believing everything around us has a sort of dynamic spirit. To understand, Abram brings us to the turning point of alphabetic writing; to when the ancient Greeks adopted writing from the ancient Hebrews.

Writing began, like cave paintings, with simple pictures of the world around us, such as Aztec logograms and Egyptian hieroglyphics. In semiotic terms these were iconic, not symbolic – they referred directly to our natural world; oxen and birds, people and objects. The Egyptian written word for ox – “aleph,” was simply a picture, or icon, of the animal itself. This icon was adopted into the early writing system for the Sinaitic languages, like Hebrew and Phoenician, and later by the Greeks. But the Greeks spoke an entirely unrelated language with different sounds, belonging to the Indo-european family. They had to take these icons, which each had cultural connotations, names & meanings, and signified plants and animals, and transplant them into an entirely foreign system of meaning. They had to repurpose these icons into symbols. Before, each Phoenician or Hebrew letter or icon related directly to what it signified; the natural world. Each icon visually referred back to different non-human animals and plants; to that web of relationships in the ecosystem. These new Greek symbols were now arbitrarily related to what they signified – which was now no longer non-human elements of the natural world, but human-made sounds. Abram argues that this shift, the invention of the alphabet, was not only a shift in language, but a shift in our psychology.

Abstract means unable to be perceived by our senses – separate from the world of our conscious, sensuous experience. For a culture that is constantly immersed in the web of relationships of the land around them – hunting animals, gathering plants and observing the world with their entire range of senses – the concept of some entirely other immaterial, abstract space simply would have no reason to cross their minds. Oral stories, like that of the Navajo, or aboriginal Australians, simply didn’t make sense without their ties to the land in which they took place. You cannot tell a story that takes place nowhere, so you must specify where it took place. This is the view held by the oral cultures of today, and the view we once all held before writing. But for the Greeks, who were beginning to adopt a system of writing without reference to the world of non-human things we see with our senses, who were beginning to transition into sedentary agricultural societies, who were beginning to build urban cities and view the land as a set of resources, it became possible to conceive of a new kind of space – an abstract space. Oral stories began to be written down, set in stone and passed from culture to culture. We began to write stories that were not tied to a specific place – they could be read by anybody, anywhere, and could make sense even though they were not specified to take place anywhere.

Greek philosophers like Aristotle and Plato, growing up in this new culture, inspired a monumental shift in our thinking – that there was a world of pure ideals, an abstract world completely beyond the land in which we evolved and all of the non-human inhabitants we perceive through our conscious experience. And, even more importantly, that our conscious experience itself, or soul, could exist outside of the body itself – that our brain and eyes and ears and nose and body did not require each other, but could exist without each other.

You might not know it, but the culture in which you grew up has carried the torch of this abstract, empirical, scientific way of understanding. These new kinds of societies began to develop technologies, new ways of using the land as resources, that did not require the direct interaction inherent in hunting and gathering. Later, they expanded on this abstract, immaterial conception of the world and developed scientific methods of inquiry that revealed hidden, mechanical processes that we can’t see – that are beyond the world of our perception. While there are thousands of years and all sorts of other developments between us and the ancient Greeks, this moment where they shifted from oral to written culture marked the moment where the world lost its spirit. A bowl, or even a plant or animal, was no longer a dynamic, shifting, responding thing – it existed as an ideal form in abstract space, beyond our senses – our senses only limited us to seeing different parts of its true form. Our senses could no longer be trusted – they were an illusion that obscured an abstract, static, unresponsive world.

But though this view is shared by scientific inquiry, and is not at all untrue, it is also true, as phenomenologists argue and Indigenous cultures experience, that our senses are not lying to us. The world is dynamic. It is not an unchanging, unfeeling set of resources to be turned into human made objects. It is full of birds whose songs we hear and who can hear our voices, and trees who show us only a part of their branches until more are revealed in response to our movement. Though a monumental shift in our thinking brought about by alphabetic writing has hidden this fact from us – we are animals. Though we have left our ecosystem, stopped seeing and hearing and reciprocally speaking and responding to things that are not human, our senses are the same as they were. They evolved to hear and see and interact with the other animals around us. As a consequence of this, if we pay careful attention to how we feel the world through our conscious experience and set aside for a moment what we know about it, we might find that everything seems to be listening, and responding.