THE CATSKILL GEOLOGISTS BY PROFESSORS ROBERT AND JOHANNA TITUS - Scientific Animism

CATSKILL - Do religions evolve? That’s quite a thought! But, before we get into trouble with half of our readers, let’s explain. One of the broadest categories of supernatural beliefs is categorized as being among the various forms of what’s called animism, commonly found among indigenous cultures. Animists believe that everything has its own freewill spirit. You and we have an “essence,” and any nearby mountain has a similar spirit. So, do all the animals, rivers, lakes and trees: everything. They all have spirits. Throughout the modern world animistic views have come to be replaced by the modern religions that we are familiar with. 

Well, we geologists, like all scientists, do not deal with the supernatural. But there is something of a scientific animism in all the landscapes out there, all around the world including throughout our Catskills. Geologists are not an indigenous culture, but we feel something special, something spiritual about our science. There really is a sort of spirit in all of the rock units, each and every one of them. And that is the case with all the landscapes as well. Once again, we have some explaining to do, don’t we? We would like to pursue this today.

Let’s drive east on Rte. 23 until we cross Catskill Creek and come upon a long roadside outcropping of gray limestone. That bedrock, to us, has a spirit. We slow down and pull over. We get out and begin breathing salt air. It’s a full 400 million years ago and all around us are the clear aqua-colored waters of a shallow tropical sea – called the Helderberg Sea. That sea is a scientific certainty. It did exist – right there. But the animists in us look and see a soul in those waters. We literally feel its presence. That spirit survived even long after the sea itself disappeared. Later, it came to be petrified with the limestone bedrock from that sea. We continue to stand right there. The deeply scientific has blended with the deeply spiritual. We truly can’t have one without the other.

Let’s climb Slide Mountain. When we get to the very summit we soon become emersed in the spiritual. Slide Mountain has a spirit. It is almost overwhelming. That mountain’s soul is in its ice age heritage. We stand at the highest point of the summit and slowly turn a full 360 degrees. It’s a very long-ago noon, an Ice Age midday. All around is the gleaming, diamond-white of a brightly sunlit ice sheet. Again, this image is a solid scientific fact but, at the same time, a deeply felt, compelling spiritual experience.

There is no Catskills location more spiritual than the Catskill Mountain House ledge atop the Catskill Front. So much human history has occurred there. But we look over the edge of the cliff and see the sandstone strata of the Devonian age rivers that once flowed by. We can feel the currents that are recorded in the bedrock. Countless powerful floods passed this very spot. Vast numbers of plants and animals made this their home when this was a great delta ecology. The ledge is the ghost of one of the world’s most substantial fossil ecologies. There was so much life right here where all you see today is inanimate mineral material. That is the ledge’s true soul; that is its spirit.

We imagine that all sciences have to some extent similar spiritual aspects; it must be so much more in astronomy and cosmogeny. But all the branches of geology are so truly spiritual as to perhaps even be mystical. During the summer field seasons, we geologists find ourselves gazing into our nightly campfires. These are the kinds of thoughts that pass before us at those times.

Contact the authors at randjtitus@prodigy.net. Join their facebook page the Catskill Geologists. Read their blogs at “thecatskillgeologist.com.”