our coming-into-animism
our journey into animism was taken through multiple threads that intertwined in our life, in a very nonlinear way. they often overlapped temporally, built up on top of each other, reinforced each other, engaged with each other. sometimes we hold entirely different and even contradictory views, and this is not a problem to us. really even separating them into discreet things is kind of erasing the intricate and rich relationships between them as we went thru out life, but we are trying to make things at least kinda coherent. they are presented in no particular order.
thread of the harp: celtic animism
like many people who have been completely stripped of any kind of meaningful cultural or spiritual fulfillment by whiteness and capitalism, and burned by a christian upbringing, many years ago we began experimenting with paganisms of various kinds. our exploration started with wicca, but very quickly we realized that wicca was not for us; it was too gendered, too binaristic, and the "all your gods are secretly just my 2 gods wearing silly hats" thing about it REALLY rubbed us the wrong way..much later, after a period of experimentation with secular witchcraft, discussed in another thread, there was a period of time where we found celtic reconstructionist paganism, and we spent a long time exploring this, and ultimately the conclusion we came to is that we cannot be a "celtic reconstructionist" in the strict sense. the burden of research, the burden of language-learning, and the ambient expectation that we drop everything that doesn't fit (a woefully incomplete) historical record was just too much for us.
but aspects of CR influenced who we are now; irish mythological motifs show up in our life in many ways. and in particular the fact that the gauls, gaels, gallaeci, and other celts were animistic. and then we started taking a second look at hellenic paganism, and began noticing those same animistic themes there too- nymphs, dryads, gaia, ouranos.
we have always been very wary of cultural appropriation since learning about it, and so it kinda came as a revelation that animism wasn't just a thing closed off to indigenous worldviews we can never be a part of, that there was animism in europe too, a long time ago, and that it to some degree, survived even, through beliefs in the fae. there were ways of being animist that were not appropriative.
thread of the river: the rights of nature movement
the rights of rivers, and more broadly the rights of nature movement helped bring us into animism. the movement asserts that it is in the common heritage of us *all* to view rivers as people, and in setting aside those old beliefs to instrumentalize and manipulate the rivers for economic gain, we have caused significant environmental damage alongside significant cultural damage.the rights of rivers movement aims to give legal rights and representations to rivers, and especially to in sure that indigenous people get to have a say in legal guardianship over rivers that they relied on for thousands of years.
it's been expanded into various other rights of nature movement which seek legal rights and legal personhood for other aspects of the land, and its fascinating in how it essentially asserts a legalistic animism.
thread of the abacus: rationalizing myself into animism
while exploring earth sciences and teaching myself botany, i came into yet another animism:i was reading about perception and communication in plants, about planning in spiders, about learning in slime molds, about language in bees, about culture in birds, and ultimately, the feeling i had was that humans insisting they are the only sentient beings in the universe was actually LESS logical than the far more simple base assumption that every living thing was, to some degree, sentient.
the sentience of a plant or a bacteria might not look like that of a humans but it doesn't make it any less valid. and where is the line drawn, we thought? a rock and a river have memory, in a way. couldn't they be experiencing the world too, in a way utterly different from humans?
we stumbled into "panpsychism" basically. we came to believe that some kind of Awareness, the capability for experience, is just a fundamental part of being matter existing in the universe, because it frankly felt like LESS mental gymnastics than "human conciousness (+ some animals they like, if they are being generous) is somehow uniquely special and stands alone". "matter generally is Aware, and we as animals are simply experiencing a very complex iteration on that fact about matter" is, if you think about it, no less absurd a claim than "awareness just Happens at some point as you crank the arbitrarily defined 'organism complexity' knob"
when we feel like we have to set aside our spirituality for a moment and be a strictly evidence based observer, we don't leave our animism totally behind, we bring this more physicalist/materialistic animism with us into that headspace even then.
the gaia hypothesis, the idea that the biosphere of the earth essentially functions as a single organism with self regulating systems (which occasionally falls to illness from Their own body, such as the sickness we find ourselves in now) has also contributed to our animistic beliefs in the scientific domain.
thread of the sewing kit: making it up
then we proceeded to explore "secular witchcraft" for a while, which was some kind of an improvement for us, we suppose. this phase taught us a vary important lesson: it is PERFECTLY OKAY to just MAKE SHIT UP. it can be *fulfilling* even. it was during this phase of witchcraft that we started constructing from our imagination a pantheon of personal gods, and personal rituals surrounding them.as time went on, we began constructing more and more strange and beautiful things for our own spiritual fulfilment. mythologies. legends about local places. ways of leaving offerings for the world. beliefs about local spirits. it ultimately didn't matter to us whether they were true, what mattered was if they were increasing or decreasing our feeling of connection with the world.
and in making up these ways of interacting with the world around us, our practices and beliefs became more and more animistic. the creek or the boulder was also a little local spirit, someone we'd leave offerings to. it was liberating, to know that these practices were truly ours. we didn't lift them wholecloth from anyone, we largely sought to make rituals and stories that are original (though to deny that there is no influence from numerous practices would be both dishonest and atomizing, erasing our interconnection with the world)
eventually things blossomed into something perhaps a little peculiar, the practice of constructing worlds, paracosms, in our mind, constructing cultures and mythologies that have a kind of internal consistency, and using those worlds as a cultural lens through which to view our own; incorporating beliefs and mythic language from these constructed worlds into our own life. this is something we find intensely fulfilling, and we view these constructed worlds not just as something inanimate but rather, yet another kind of living being, someone we are in conversation with as we build them.
thread of the stuffie: autism and animism
as we find ourselves unmasking our autism more and more, one childhood behavior that we have allowed ourselves to engage with once again was our hyperempathy, an experience many autistics have, of relating to various "inanimate" objects, feeling bad when they are hurt.this was something we cut ourselves off from, an emotion we suppressed, and allowing ourselves to feel it, encouraging it even, is something we have found importance in. for so long we had been refusing to listen to the parts of us which felt for Things
i think a lot of autistic people are just kind of naturally animistic in a way. many of us have that tendency built into us, due to hyperempathy, or due to not feeling human to begin with
why i think animism is important
to me, its not just a matter of "spirituality" or personal, individualized fulfillment. one thing i have come to believe as i explore this more is that these beings do not exist 'for me' in particular, or for anyone in particular, not the way my constructed gods and mythologies exist for me, or for the fictional people they belong to. the mossy boulder in the forest has sat there for 15,000 years, and will probably sit there for thousands of years more.
by believing in animism, you necessarily also have to believe that our more-than-human relatives, the rivers, the plants, the animals, the hills, have their own rich lives separate from us, and that we may never be able to fully comprehend what the world is like to them, and yet, they exist, like us. to be a river would probably simultaneously be a very familiar experience and an intensely foreign one.
and more than that, it imbues us with an obligation. i think a crucial part of animism, one that doesn't get talked about nearly as much as the "everything is alive" aspect, is how it emphasizes the need to be in good relations with more-than-human beings, with the world broadly. its not enough to just see the river as a person if you aren't taking that seriously and following it through to its logical conclusion.
we are relatives with all these wonderful beings, in both a literal geneological sense, and a metaphorical sense. and this society is not being in good relations with it, which is why it must be destroyed and replaced with a communal, decolonial, sustainable way of living.
animism is a deeply ethical way of looking at the world, and those ethics are actually the real substance of animism to me. as the rights of rivers movement and so many decolonial indigenous thinkers wonderfully illustrate, your nonbelief in animism does not preclude you from benefiting from structuring society in an animistic way.
like even if you dont belive that a river is a person, or that animals and plants are people, or that we owe a mutualistic responsibility to these beings because of our interconnections, can you deny that the world would be so much better off if our society just used that as the baseline assumption for interacting with them? think about how much ecological damage our society tolerates because we view the world as dead and inanimate. think about the way the climate crisis is DUE to this disconnect from the more-than-human world, a beilef that humans could simply sector themselves off from their relationships with nature without consequences
to have a worldview so centered on ones relationships with a larger, ecological community of people (only some of whom are human) also means your more human community becomes of importance too. i think that a kind of anarchistic communism (not to draw any hard ideological lines or speak of how we should get there) is a natural end result of animistic thinking. the core philosophical tennant of animism to me is we all have to take care of each other, because we are all we can ever really have.
(i use the phrase "human community" as a therian who does not consider themselves "human" really but have no better word for the society humans created and us therians have to live in; you have probably noticed- animism completely breaks english in so many different ways)
historical animist societies were certainly not perfect, flawless paragons of sustainable or ethical living. no society is, every society is flawed, has done terrible things. but i truly believe that the ethics of animism can guide us to a better world
insofar as spiritual fulfillment is concerned, i have said before, a thing i appreciate about animism is that it does not actually require very much belief from you. it is in fact a very sensory way of viewing the world- you are in a kind of communication with the more-than-human world whenever you are perceiving it.
you can't see the gods of mythology. but you can put your hand against the tree, feel how the bark prickles your palm, hear the wind whispering through the leaves, and know you are cared for, that you are breathing the air this tree makes, and feeding the tree in turn. you can see the way the creek causes life to spring around her, be in awe of her creative power. you can gaze up at the morning moon in a sky full of clouds and breathe in the fact that you are living in a most remarkable moment.
i look at the ocean, at the moon, at the stars, at the creek, at the trees, at the wildflowers, at the crows, and i feel a sense of place, a sense of belonging, a sense of presence. a desire to protect these things. i want us all to have a future. they are not some distant invisible transcendant gods. they are right in front of me. these are my 'gods' first. the ones who teach me and noursish me the most. and i owe something to them.
i've been writing at this for way too long and i'm kind of mentally exhausted so i'm just going to hit post now. i don't have a nice conclusion sorry
