In short: Animism is the understanding that everything is alive, aware, and has its own spirit — people, animals, plants, rivers, stones, weather, the lot. It’s not a religion or a belief system with a founder or a text; it’s closer to a description of reality that most of our ancestors, everywhere on earth, took for granted. It’s also the oldest and most widespread worldview in human history, and it’s the ground that shamanic practice grows out of.
Animism doesn’t ask you to believe anything on faith. It’s built on relationship — the idea that a mountain, a river, or a fox has its own presence and can be related to much as another person can, rather than being treated as inert background scenery for human use. This isn’t a fringe or primitive idea being revived for effect; it was the default human worldview for the vast majority of our species’ existence, and it remains the living worldview of indigenous cultures across every continent today.
We’re one part of a much larger web of relationships, all of it aware, all of it worth listening to.
For animists, humans aren’t separate from or above the rest of the living world — we’re one part of a much larger web of relationships, all of it aware, all of it worth listening to. That single shift in orientation — from “resources to use” to “relations to be in right relationship with” — is the foundation everything else in Therapeutic Shamanism is built on.
The word “animism” itself was coined by a Victorian anthropologist, Edward Tylor, who treated it as a primitive stage religions grow out of — a framing modern animist scholarship has firmly overturned. Contemporary scholars such as Graham Harvey argue animism is better understood as a sophisticated relational way of engaging with a world full of persons, only some of whom are human — not a failed first draft of “real” religion.
Sources:
- Courses: First-Steps course — “Introduction & What Is Shamanism”
- Books: Book 1, Chapter One (“What is animism?”)
- Blogs: “What is shamanism?” (blog)
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