why would that be the case? because it cant physically touch the moon? why can’t it just believe the moon is just another animal?
If you said a group of humans believed the moon was a big animal, and that at certain cycles they had to coax it away, that would undoubtedly be spiritualism. The fact that it is a behavior unique to elephants among non-human animals, who we already know to practice funerary rituals involving burial and grave goods, means that it crosses a bar for spiritualism to me.
but i didnt say it was a group of humans, we’re talking about elephants. i dont think it makes a ton of sense to apply human logic to elephants when we already know elephants use branch waving to scare off other animals in their environment. just my opinion.
Our understanding animal cognition is obviously always going to have a lot of speculation. It’s the best we can do. Judging by what standards we have available to us and placed in the context of other ritual behavior they practice, I think the most reasonable conclusion is some sort of proto-spirituality.
Remember that through most of history there was no line between the natural and the supernatural, the spiritual and the material. Requiring a strict set of criteria that demonstrate elephant belief in non-material phenomena is a very modern, western way of viewing spirituality. The vast majority of cultures would recognize this behavior in elephants as reflecting their own worldview and way of thinking to a certain extent.
We can’t objectively prove elephant spiritualism until they have complex language, but I think through observation and conjecture we can consider it a reasonable speculation.
