Today, I’m going to show another peek on one of the nearly-finished drawings from my upcoming print collection. It comes with a little etymology lesson. We borrow the word “genius” from the ancient Romans, who would have been confused to hear it used to refer to particularly intelligent people. An aspect of Roman mythology was animism: the belief that everything contained a little bit of spirit. The word “genius” simply referred to that spirit.
That’s one of the reasons why you see such a wide variety of gods and goddess peppering Roman mythology. There wasn’t just a river god, there was a god for every river. The church eventually absorbed the concept and the word “genius”, but kept strictly to the idea only of the individual human spirit, or soul. The idea that anything else might have a soul became heretical.
Only in the mid-1600s, during Renaissance era, did the word “genius” start to become associated with the concept of intelligence. Western society, in it’s slide toward the Enlightenment, had begun to place higher value on intelligence as the measure of the worth of an individual.
It’s noteworthy that “genius” is also the root of the word “genie”: those spirits that we tend to think of as living in inanimate objects and granting wishes. The interesting thing is, there are many other cultures that have kept animism as part of their modern religious tradition. In places like Japan, the traditional animistic Shinto religion has remained unbroken. If you have seen Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, or Spirited Away, you have seen animism alive and reflected in modern culture.
If you are into this stuff, like I am, check out the podcast: The Hidden Djinn, narrated by Rabia Chaudry! It’s a deep dive into the Arabic cultural history of the Djinn, and how they are another unbroken part of the animistic tradition, alive in a monotheistic culture. I flipped my lid when I listened to the first episode, it’s phenomenal.
My illustration shows a genius loci, the powerful protective spirit of a place. In this case, a grassy verge where a treasure has been mislaid.
There are only a few tiny little tweaks to correct on this illustration and it’s ready to go. That is – to make prints of!