What is Animism?

BY SOFO ARCHON

What is animism, and why does it matter in the world today?

To find out, watch my latest video (or scroll down to read the transcript).

Transcript

Before all religions, there was only one religion. That religion has been called animism.

Animism is often defined as the belief that everything that exists has spirit. But there are some scholars who define it differently. They say that animism is the belief that all that exists is spirit. And this is the definition that I’m going to use here.

Animists view everything that exists in the world as alive. Not just humans or animals or plants, but also rivers and mountains and forests and clouds. And they don’t view them just as alive, but as sacred. Everything that exists is unique, has inherent value, and plays a tremendously important role in the well-being of nature and in its unfolding. Everything that exists, according to animists, is an inseparable part of the spirit that resides in everything and underlies all existence.

Immersed in this worldview—seeing the world as alive and sacred, and seeing themselves as inseparable from it—animists respect and revere nature. They do their best to protect it, to take care of it, to serve it, and certainly not to destroy it.

Now, to a modern human being, animism sounds like a ridiculous thing. According to our dominant culture, the world is not alive. Mountains are not alive. Clouds are not alive. A belief that those things are alive is considered irrational or stupid. Things are not sacred. There is no spirit. What is sacred about a mountain, or what purpose does a forest have to fulfill? Because of that worldview, however, modern humans are destroying the planet. They are cutting down rainforests. They are blowing up mountains. They are polluting the land and the sea and the air.

If we would see the world as alive and sacred, would we do that? If we would see ourselves as inseparable from nature, would we destroy it? We would not, because we would see ourselves as part of nature, or we would see nature as an extension of ourselves. We would see nature as our larger body. This is how people used to view the world for tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of years.

Animists use a lot of different practices to reconnect us to the truth of who we are and what the world is—practices such as fasting for days in natural surroundings, taking plant medicines, or giving thanks to the world for all the gifts it has offered us; expressing our gratitude to the sun, to the rivers, to the wind.

This is the purpose of religion: to bring sacredness back to life. Not that sacredness ever left, but we have forgotten about it, and religion is reminding us of that. In fact, the very word religion comes from the Latin religare and means that which binds us back or reconnects us.

In most of today’s religions, we can still find traces of animism. Although those religions tend to separate us from nature and from reality, they do contain traces, but one has to study them deeply to identify them.

For example, you have many esoteric traditions that say that God is everywhere, or that God is all-seeing. Some people take those phrases literally, but one can also take them symbolically to mean that spirit is everywhere, and we are dwelling in it.

In Christianity, we find teachings like that of Jesus, who says, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” People tend to see this teaching as a moral prescription or a moral rule, but I think its meaning is much deeper. It is that what we do to others, ultimately we do to ourselves, because we are intrinsically connected to them.

In Buddhism, you have similar teachings. Buddhism talks about interconnectedness and interdependence. People tend to view those as different selves having relationships with each other, but in Buddhism one learns that the separate self does not exist, or that the self is made of relationships. The self is relationship and nothing else. We are inter-existent.

In Buddhism, you also have the notion of karma. People tend to understand it as some external cosmic referee that is judging us and will punish us or reward us depending on how we act throughout our lives. But in reality, karma refers to the simple reality that we are inseparable from the world, and therefore what we do to the world, we are ultimately doing to ourselves. If we harm another person or the natural world, we are harming ourselves. If we help someone else, we ultimately help ourselves, because there is no separate self. We are all one, or not two. There is a singular reality that we all partake in.

Unfortunately, most religions separate people from the world. As people started to feel separated from nature—something that happened at least ten thousand years ago when people began to domesticate plants and animals, to control and dominate them, and to view them merely as resources for their own benefit—”God,” the spirit that animists believed in, or rather knew, took a very different form.

Spirit was within everything. It was everything. But with time, it became separated from matter. You had the spiritual world and the material world, the mind and the body, the worldly and the otherworldly. In the beginning, you had many spirits. Then you had many gods. Then you had just one God that created the world but is separate from it.

So religions as they exist today are very different from what they were meant to be. They are, in a sense, anti-religion, because instead of connecting us to the reality of who we are and what the world is, they disconnect us from it. They bring us further away from it. But if we want to see suffering end in this world—if we want to see people living in harmony with each other and the natural world, if we want to see people living joyfully, peacefully, and healthily—then we need to go back to animism.

If people ever stop destroying the world and do not annihilate themselves in the process, but instead start living at peace and in harmony with nature, then only one religion is going to remain: the original religion, animism. The first religion that ever was is going to be the last one, too. Because if people truly care about nature, that means that they have reverted to animism. Only once people start seeing the world as alive, as enspirited, as sacred, and as inseparable from themselves, will they truly care for nature and do their best to protect it and to see it thrive.