Anthropomorphication seems to be a human tendency. Not to threadjack my own thread, and I'm not an expert in the area, but it's fascinating how people from diverse cultures throughout history frequently believed that an object could be inhabited by a protective spiritual presence. This particularly happened with weapons and tools. Modern psychology appears to support a theory of how this could have been perceived.
I experienced this on a ride once years ago. Dusk was approaching in a rural area, and I was alert for deer. There was an area where the farmer had not hayed the ditch. I was covering my breaks and scanning for trouble. But there was this blur in front of me that coalesced like a sci-fi special effect into a deer immediately in front of my bike. I went to do an emergency stop only to find that I already was doing a hard break. I didn't know why my bike was already breaking but I didn't hit the deer. This felt weird and lead me to some light research.
There is a phenomenon where the subconscious can cause the body to react correctly to an event before the conscious mind can perceive and analyze the situation. It happens more often in fast-moving stressful situations where the individual has training and experience such that the needed reaction does not require conscious analysis. A warrior, for example, might parry an enemy's sword before his conscious mind has determined that there is a threat. Based on this, the warrior might reach the conclusion that something other than himself caused him to parry, and one assumption may be that the warrior's sword did this on it's own or influenced his actions. This would explain how I reacted to the deer before my conscious mind could determine that the blur was a deer. And there's a lot of interesting reading on how the mind fills in blank spaces in our senses which likely explains the sci-fi effect I perceived.
