Animism or Pantheism?

Yesterday I wrote about the meditation I went to and how we were honoring the Earth and the "elementals" (air, fire, water & earth)

I was online Googling this and that, trying to find images to go along with that posting, and discovered it was quite difficult to find any artistic representation of the four traditional symbols for the four elements, at least all four together (air = sylph, a sort of nymph of the air; fire = salamander, a fire lizard but not a dragon; water = undine, a mermaid-like creature; and gnome, a small entity such as a leprechan or tree spirit - except for the salamander, the elementals are humanoid in many respects) 

What I kept finding were either scantily clad women (in colors of indigo or silver, red-orange, blue, green) or odd little cartoons/toys; however, I did find an image of Pan, an ancient forest deity, that led to a link that I followed to a Wikipedia page about animism...

Pan's goat legs are hidden from view

"Animism in the widest sense, i.e., thinking of objects as animate, and treating them as if they were animate, is near-universal."

"The biologist Rupert Sheldrake has supported a form of animism which David Skrbina calls "a unique form of pansychism". Sheldrake in his book The Rebirth of Nature: New Science and the Revival of Animism (1991) has claimed that Morphic fields "animate organisms at all levels of complexity, from galaxies to giraffes, and from ants to atoms". In his book The Science Delusion (2012) he wrote that the philosophy of the organism (organicism) has updated the ideas of animism as it treats all of nature as alive."

It is sometimes confused with pantheism:

"Pantheism is the view that the Universe (or Nature) and God (or divinity) are identical. Pantheists thus do not believe in a personal, anthropomorphic or creator god. The word derives from the Greek (pan) meaning "all" and the Greek (theos) meaning "God". As such, Pantheism denotes the idea that "God" is best seen as a process of relating to the Universe.  Although there are divergences within Pantheism, the central ideas found in almost all versions are the Cosmos as an all-encompassing unity and the sacredness of Nature."

There's Pan again, considered by many to be the source of the nature deities, including the Green Man and perhaps even the Devil (the horns, however, are a reference to his association with sheep and goats, and go along with the rest of his anatomy). Pan, depicted here gathering grapes, was also associated with Dionysos/Dionysus (a.k.a. Bacchus, Greek and Roman god of wine, vegetation, pleasure and festivities.)

Robbins' fourth novel, published 1984

If you haven't read Tom Robbins' "Jitterbug Perfume" you should put it on your list for the summer. It is an absurdly and weirdly wonderful love story entwined with corporate espionage, time travel and the god Pan. 

image of Pan :  http://www.theoi.com/Georgikos/Pan.html

Now go out there and worship some trees or something!