Imagine no religion

[TheMisfortuneTeller]

First, from The Golden Bough: a Study in Magic and Religion, by Sir James George Frazer (1922):

The very beasts associate the ideas of things that are like each other or that have been found together in their experience; and they could hardly survive for a day if they ceased to do so. But who attributes to the animals a belief that the phenomena of nature are worked by a multitude of invisible animals or by one enormous and prodigiously strong animal behind the scenes? It is probably no injustice to the brutes to assume that the honor of devising a theory of this latter sort must be reserved for human reason.

Second, just to clear up a point of terminology, I followed the supplied link to the Wikipedia definition of "Animism," where I found:

According to religious scholar Robert Segal, Sir Edward Tylor saw all religions, "modern and primitive alike," as forms of animism.

I agree completely with this usage of the more comprehensive term "Animist" in preference to the parochial and sectarian manifestations of received religious rituals that many people unconsciously assume when they -- loosely -- use the term "religious." "Catholic" or "Druid" makes no significant difference -- just a minor theological squabble about the number of invisible animist spooks involved. I don't think I need to further belabor the point.

More importantly, as opposed to the "one enormous and prodigiously strong animal" school of animism, rather than the "multitude of invisible animals" school -- sometimes referred to as Monotheistic Animism vs Polytheistic Animism -- Professor Tolkien opted -- in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings -- for the creation of a "Magical" world instead of an Animist or "religious" one. According to Frazer's monumental study, both the magician and the priest claim to believe in unseen animal -- or animated -- spirits (One or several) who they claim make the observable world work as it does. Both claim to believe that the magician and the priest can sway these animal spirits -- or spooks -- to make things turn out the way the magician or the priest want. They differ, however, in that the magician believes that he can compel, or coerce, the Spook-or-spooks to do what he commands through spells and enchantments, while the priest believes that only his ritual grovelling and begging can convince the Spook-or-spooks to look favorably upon him and his tribe instead of some other priest or tribe. Therein lies the distinction between "Magic" and "Religion" -- both forms of Animism, but differing in their advertised ways of dealing with the unseen Big-Animal or host-of-little-unseen-animals -- none of which exist outside the fanciful human imagination. I leave it to the interested reader of The Hobbit and/or The Lord of the Rings to determine which form of animist behavior best describes Tolkien's Middle-earth: Magical or Religious.