The part that really hit home for me was the following section, as it has personal relevance:
C. S. Lewis: A Biography by A.N. Wilson, "Chapter Ten–Mythopoeia (1929–1931)" wrote:
Owen Barfield, both in conversation and in writing, had already gone a long way in revealing to Lewis the fallacy of making sharp distinctions between ‘myth’ and ‘fact’. In his book Poetic Diction he had pointed out that in earlier times, those who first used language did not necessarily distinguish between ‘metaphorical’ and ‘literal’ uses of words. The Latin spiritus, for example, means breath. Modern rationalists might wish to distinguish between the ‘meaning’ of ‘spirit in some elevated sense’ and that of ‘merely breath’. But early users of the language would not have made such a distinction. When the wind blew it was not ‘like’ someone breathing. It was the breath of a divinity.
This powerfully confirmed the way in which Tolkien had been accustoming himself to think about the world ever since he grew to manhood. One of the great distinctions in his mythology is made between the Elves, who are ‘animist’ and ‘pagan’, and the Men, who are destined to move beyond this. The Elves, who will never leave the material universe and do not know what happens to Men when they die, are embodiments of language-users for whom the breath-wind-spirit distinction would be meaningless. By contrast, God willed that ‘the hearts of Men should seek beyond the world and should find no rest therein’.
Now, I've recognized myself as an animist in the anthropological sense for decades - it was, in fact, one of my main motives in creating both T-e and then IV: to see if there were any other modern animists out there who also used the Legendarium as a central myth (because you can't be a true animist without some sort of mythological
schema for the world). I'm also 'pagan' in this old sense of the word, before neo-Pagans corrupted its meaning, as I see that issue anyway. By which, I mean that every time a neo-Pagan mentions "¡¡¡The Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram!!!"†, I have to go look it up on Wikipedia, as I'm both anti-Western in sentiment (meaning I ignore 'Ceremonal Magic' and its cultural underpinnings in their entirety) and scientifically pragmatic in outlook (meaning that I don't think the sprints give a damn about symbols drawn on the floor, on paper, or anywhere else ‒ I know for a fact that the Salvia-people laugh at the very idea).
For me the last paragraph is not entirely accurate, though, and may not be so for the Eldar either. When I'm in "shamanic mode" I can certainly recognize a breeze as the breath of Manwë; I also simultaneously recognize it as the flow of a light fluid from an area of higher pressure in the local pool to one of lower pressure. I guess the big difference between my cognitive mode and what I've read many other people describe of theirs is that I don't feel a pull by either mode to achieve primacy. Each has its uses in different situations and (probably more importantly) as what I can only describe as "spark generators" for new ideas.
_____
† In all cases that I can remember, the breathless urgency and awe I've represented by the exclamation points is intrinsic to the original statement.
Lewis-Conversion.pdf
