Guest Post: Aidan Grey on An Introduction to Animism

Native people, running through the jungle naked, feathered headdresses on, and arrows nocked. That’s what most people imagine when they think of animists – they’re those indigenous, non-Westernized, potentially cannibalistic people. But that’s not quite true. Certainly, many indigenous people are animists, but not all of them, and more surprisingly, there’s a growing number of animists here in the Western, modern world.

Animism is usually described as the belief that all things have a soul. That suffices, from an academic point of view, but from an experiential one, it doesn’t quite have the oomph and significance that I get from my relationships. It’s the difference between the actual relationship with Mom and the idea that “she’s just your Mom”. The latter is accurate, but really, there’s so much more to that word that what you just said.

The world is full of people: human people, cat people, oak people, wind people, rock people, thought people, and so on. When it comes to trying to understand the world, Animism presupposes that everything else is a person, and approaches its ethics, ritual, and theology from that direction. “How should you treat another person?” is a central question. Who, or what, that person is, is of secondary importance at best.

Which then comes to an even better way of understanding Animism – at least, I sure think it is. Since that whole “soul” thing is pretty ambiguous, and the People thing is kind of blunt and doesn’t necessarily include the nuances, I usually say that the world is full of relationships. These aren’t just the connections and associations you get in the whole “Web of Life” concept, these are actual relationships with people who have their own agendas and wishes and likes and problems. These are relationships that are particular to YOU as a distinct individual, relationships with everything that affects your life, from the other people at your work to the beings you’ve eaten or that you wear. Animism is intensely practical that way.

One thing that Animism isn’t, though it’s often expected, is Shamanism. The idea of a shaman is incredibly complex, since it’s transitioned from one specific group to the whole world, and since it’s changed quite a bit along the way. Most pagans know that it comes from a Tungusic language. What they don’t know is that the Evenki, the tribe that the word comes from, used it to refer to specifically someone who captures spirits and binds them to their will. That’s not really a good description of most of what we commonly call Shamanism, is it?

Like it or not, Shamanism now seems to mean something along the lines of a set of techniques which enable someone to travel to another world or worlds to fetch help or healing for individuals or communities. Given that so many Western shamanic traditions are rooted in transpersonal psychology, it’s not even strictly necessary to involve spirits at all – they can just be mental constructs, and the whole system will still work fine.

While you can be an animist and practice shamanic techniques / shamanism, clearly shamanism doesn’t require animism. Conversely, animism doesn’t require shamanism. You can be an animist without believing in other worlds at all – animism is about the relationships here and now with the spirits around you, not about going to other worlds.

Do these two systems of thought complement one another? Sure do. But it still stands – animism isn’t shamanism isn’t animism. Which is all well and good, but mostly splitting hairs, since pretty much every animist tradition has some kind of specialist who communicates with and bridges between the spirits and their community. That’s the shaman – who applies shamanic techniques for animistic reasons.

That’s animism in a nutshell. One of them, anyway – like Neopaganism, it’s not one thing only, the same for everyone. It shares other commonalities with Neo paganism– frequently persecuted by monotheistic traditions, and seen as weird and creepy by plenty of mainstream folks, but also incredibly life-affirming, celebratory, mystical, and tolerant. Face it, if the whole world is full of spirits, of every conceivable kind, then just who am I to say “no” to someone else’s Spirits and Gods?

For me, at least, Animism is distinct from most Neopagan traditions, however, in one major way: it’s technically atheistic. Which is kinda funny, because animism and hard polytheism have a lot in common – the quibble is really about where the line between spirit and deity lies. To an animist, there’s no satisfactory answer, so they’re all spirits. To the Neopagan, there is an obvious line. Regardless, the Western Animist is clearly Neopagan to everyone I’ve run into. It’s a new thing in the spectrum of Neopaganism, but just another one of those millions of ancestral traditions that are attracting people more and more today, another way of connecting with the world around us.