Animism Interview

1.) Ok, so first, how should i refer to you in the paper and presentation (name and pronouns)?

I use the pen-name Autumn for my published and unpublished works, I'll use that here unless you need something different. I can use he/him/his pronouns.

2.) And what language would you use to describe your relationship to animism? Ie, when I'm talking about this interview and I introduce you, do I say you "are an animist," or that you "believe in animism," etc.?

You could call me an animist, or say that I “perceive the world in an animist way”, or that I “believe” in animism, though I see animism as more experiential than abstract. Part of my animism involves rewilding my language: I tend to use E-Prime English (excluding all forms of the verb “to be”, such as “be”, “is”, “are”, “was”, and their derivatives). Not all languages say something “is” some descriptor, animistic languages in fact rely on more active and relationship-based language (e.g. “he-hunts”, versus “he is a hunter”), and this starkly contrasts to the more Cartesian thinking that standard English uses. You can read more about it in essays such as “E-primitive: Rewilding the English Language”, “The word-hoard: Robert Macfarlane on rewilding our language of landscape”, or “Decolonising the English Language”.

An important note on my background: I did not have an animist upbringing, I grew up in a loosely Christian household in the United States. I would describe myself as a “rewilding animist” as I do not have a direct or recent cultural lineage to animistic peoples. Most of my animism comes from direct relations with the land.

3.) I'm starting this having read no background info on animism. So I'm sure this is an obnoxious question, but what would you say about it in a couple sentences, if you had to vastly oversimplify it?

The term “animism” functions as an anthropological construct to refer to the most common threads of traditional indigenous peoples' worldviews and spiritualities prior to the rise of agriculture and domestication ~12,000 years ago, typically nomadic foraging cultures. Common aspects include an intimate view of the natural world, non-dualism, belief in pervasive lifeforce and will, a relational worldview of mutual interconnection, focus on subjectivity and sensuality and subtle forces, and attributing personality to familiar bonds.

An animist does not see "nature" as abstract, alien, or outside, but as a living web of relations humans exist within intimately along with other entities and elements. Whereas pantheists perceives the world as containing a single, unitary spirit underlying all matter, animists perceive uniquely diverse spirits that interact and pervade the material world.

The so-called “Western rational thinking” that socializes most of us today relies on a type of rationale featuring the idea that things can exist without relation to one another (“Platonism”) and “Cartesian Dualism”, which proposes that one may reason through logical binaries (such as “existence v. non-existence”, “mind v. body”, “subjects v. objects”, “matter v. spirit”). This paradigm influences Westerners so much that we find it hard to understand that other ways of thinking, feeling, or relating can even exist. Animists take a non-dualistic approach to the world, rejecting separation between the material and the spiritual. Animists instead emphasize the interconnectedness of all things, as well as subjectivity, and sensory perception.

Anthropologist Tim Ingold explains, “Animacy, then, is not a property of persons imaginatively projected onto the things with which they perceive themselves to be surrounded. Rather...it is the dynamic, transformative potential of the entire field of relations within which beings of all kinds, more or less person-like or thing-like, continually and reciprocally bring one another into existence. The animacy of the lifeworld, in short, is not the result of an infusion of spirit into substance, or of agency into materiality, but is rather ontologically prior to their differentiation.”

Animists perceive vitality and will in things Cartesians classify as unliving objects, leading the latter to interpret animists as “superstitious”, though animists often reject that accusation, as to animists, we merely acknowledge connections between forces Cartesians *falsely* consider as separate, and describe persona based on our own direct bonds. If I speak of “a spirit's presence in the room, influencing those in the room”, I likely mean just a very real but unseen or *unnoticed* force, such as a ray of sunlight glimmering in through a window, shining through barely visible dust, subtly changing the ambience and microclimate of that part of the room. Animism can have just as much an experiential, empirical basis as Western rationality, it just emphasizes relationship instead of separation, subjectivity instead of objectivity, sensuality instead of instrumentality. Unnoticed and unnoticeable forces shape the world as much as noticed ones.

Animists see pervasive lifeforce and will throughout the natural world, granting persona to humans and non-human entities like flora, fauna, fungi, elements, bioregions as one relates to them. To Cartesians this seems bizarre, but one must understand animism as, in the words of anthropologist Nurit Bird-David, a "relational epistemology", a worldview of relations, which contrasts with the Enlightenment view of the self-existing, rational man. Bird-David contrasts Descartes' “I think, therefore I am” with an animist motto “I know as I relate”. The dominant culture focuses on the isolated self, often in a quantified sense, but animistic cultures tend to define things as a nexus of their particular relationships, not as mere "objects" in themselves. My “self” includes my behaviors and dynamics as they affect others, and the ways others affect me, I can only exist as a bundle of relationships.

What does it mean to see a mountain as alive? Most people in industrial civilization scoff at notions like that, but when I see the mountain I see a habitat full of vitality, a habitat that often supports a plethora of lifeforms. I see minerals that become lifeforms that become minerals again. I see majesty. I see wildness. Even a mountain without much greenery I see as essentially dormant like the seed, just waiting for the right time to burst forth with life.

Many people nowadays will speak phrases like "this book really speaks to me", but if we say this of a tree, that the tree "speaks to me", we face derision for "superstition", we face models of "rationality" and "sanity" enforced by a culture that removes life and wildness at maximum pace. But a tree holds life, and a book does not! The mulberry tree in my front yard will evoke feelings and memories of childhood belonging and playfulness as long as it stands. It will "speak to me" as long as I listen.

On a long enough timeline, the borders between living and unliving blur. Cycles of birth, growth, stasis, and decay overlap and interplay between lifeforms and landbases, entities and elements, habitats and minerals.

The book “Archetypes and Myth” by Kodurai explains that, "We, like animists, also continue to create personal relationships with elements of the so-called objective world, whether pets, cars or teddy-bears, who we recognize as subjects." Familiarity in kinship based cultures naturally leads people to impart personas on intimate bonds with enduring natural features like a grotto or a hill just as Westerners might name a pet, a teddy-bear, or a car and describe it as an active agent.

4.) I wasn't raised with any sort of explicit faith, but I've gleaned stuff secondhand about Christianity, of course, as someone living in the US, so that's really my only reference point. Is animism a religion in the sense that Christianity is a religion? Are there different sects or subgroups? If so, did they come about through schisms or is animism an umbrella term that includes many different independently-formed groups? | What culture or cultures is animism associated with? When did it come about?

Anthropologists consider animism the oldest spiritual tradition, really all cultures before the rise of agriculture and domestication ~12,000 years ago we could describe as animist. Animism contrasts with the modern notion of “organized religion” that arose with farming and urbanization. Humans have practiced animism since at least the invention of language 40,000 or more years ago, and likely much, much earlier on, since ritual burial and symbolic artifacts date back 100,000 years. People primarily associate animism with hunter-gatherer cultures, but some horticultural and herding cultures also practice it. Really, animism incorporates many extremely different and independent cultural traditions, everything from Paleolithic peoples in Europe 40,000 years ago, to the !Kung San / Ju/'hoans (“Bushmen”) of Africa, to most Native American and Native Australian cultures, and many South-East Asian cultures.

Wallace describes Four Religion Modes: individual (e.g. vision quest), shamanistic (part-time specialists, e.g. healers), communal (participatory, group-focused, e.g. gatherings), ecclesiastical (formal, durable hierarchies, e.g. priesthood). Typically animism does not contain the ecclesiastical aspect, though it can sometimes.

Some different offshoots of animism include Fetishism, Totemism, Sacred Language, and Shamanism.

Fetishism centers on sacred handmade belongings imparted with both material and spiritual significance. Even some monotheistic religions, such as Christianity, still use fetishes, such as the Holy Cross, consecrated host, communion tokens, or rosary prayer beads. Different cultures gives talismans different meanings, but, as Tim Ingold explains, for animists, talismans do not show “life in things” so much as “things in life”, they demonstrate the material aspect of spirit, the temporary physical aspect of transformation and regeneration. I keep a cloth anklet as a talisman, a sort of good luck charm that represents my relationship bonds. The Hopi Kachina doll offers an example of animist fetishism.

Totemism centers on spirit beings, sacred object, or symbols that emblemize a group, such as a family, clan, lineage, or tribe. Totems can function as tutelaries, i.e. patrons or protectors of a person, place, geographic feature, or group. Typically they focus on a source of life, e.g. a specific landbase, or one's ancestors. In most animist traditions, the animate force arises from life itself, but in totemism, it arises from a given landbase, the land itself holding the lifebearing force. Example traditions include those of many Pacific Northwest natives, and Japanese Shintoism.

Sacred Language focuses on the notion of True Names and Power Words. True Names in animistic traditions express or exist as the true nature of a thing, rather than the typically arbitrary sounds. Westerners can appreciate the power of this sacred language by imagining the feeling one gets from hearing their full name announced in a stern voice. Sacred Language symbols catalyze intense emotional responses, part of why most conceptions of spellcasting incorporate a notion of magic words. Words, names, metaphors, or mantras can all have spiritual significance for animists.

Shamanism covers a wide diversity of practices based in communion with spirits. Whereas priests lead rituals, and sages remember traditional lore, a shaman functions as a medium or messenger.

Shamanship looks very different by specific cultural contexts; shamanism in Mongolia looks very different from shamanism in the Pacific Northwest. Complicating things further, some cultures do not centralize shamanic approaches in a single person. The Ju/'hoansi (!Kung Bushmen), for example, practice nightlong "boiling energy" dances for healing, as a whole community, practices still classified as shamanism. Barasana horticulturalists have no absolute distinctions between shamans and non-shamans. In other animist cultures, shamanship takes on a more specialized role, though shamans rarely hold a monopoly on either spirit communion or healing.

Shamans reach altered states of mind, such as through the ritual use of entheogens, autohypnosis, inducing the hearing of voices, invoking visions, lucid dreaming, daydreaming, fasting and exertion, delirium, sleep deprivation, vigils, sweating, chanting and dancing. Shamans often use mimesis rhythm, affective semantics, and melody. Specific roles can include administering plant medicines, gifting, flattering, threatening, or wrestling a disease-spirit, displaying an extracted token of a disease-spirit, divination and omens, releasing spirits back to animals after hunting, fertility rites. Shamanic techniques include meditation, dramatic performance, imitation of natural sounds through onomatopoeia, conjuring talismans, sleight-of-hand, ventriloquism, out-of-body experiences, cultivating feelings of communion and transcendence through symbolism and trust.

Shamans have proven effectiveness for reconciling conflicts in the psyche and alleviating illness. A small example includes Quesalid, a member of the Kwakwaka'wakw First Nations peoples, who disbelieved in shamanism. Quesalid undertook shamanic training to discredit its efficacy, but ultimately found the techniques potent, and became a renowned healer.

Whether shamans' psychiatric and medical capabilities arise from a vast repertoire of plant knowledge, theatrics, and the placebo effect, or something beyond that, hypnotic trances can influence body temperature, heart rate, blood flow, and digestion, and, additionally, all of these in the right context, can offer profoundly transformative emotional experiences, often viewed as very beneficial within animist cultures.

5.) Are there any important or sacred texts central to animism, like the bible with Christianity? Prophets? Are there rituals associated with animism? If so, are they personalized, or are there respected authorities or leaders who teach how to conduct them? If there are rituals, what do they entail? Do you perform them? Is there a social worship aspect to it? Do people gather to talk about it, like how Christians might at a church?

Animism functions as experience, not doctrine, and existed far earlier than literacy, so it doesn't have any sacred texts in the same way that other religious traditions might. Nevertheless, the main written texts that influenced me toward animism include:

“Animism' Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology” by Nurit Bird-David

“Rethinking the Animate, Re-Animating Thought” by Tim Ingold

“The Song of the Land: Bioregional Animism” by Sarah Anne Lawless

“A Brief Summary of Animism” by Jason Godesky

“The Spell of the Sensuous” by David Abram

Local Native American scholar Jack D. Forbes wrote the most important passage I ever read as far as influencing me toward animism. He wrote in, "A World Ruled by Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Aggression, Violence, and Imperialism":

"For us, truly, there are no 'surroundings.' I can lose my hands and still live. I can lose my legs and still live. I can lose my eyes and still live...But if I lose the air I die. If I lose the sun I die. If I lose the earth I die. If I lose the water I die. If I lose the plants and animals I die. All of these things are more a part of me, more essential to my every breath, than is my so-called body. *What is my real body?* We are not autonomous, self-sufficient beings as European mythology teaches...We are rooted just like the trees. But our roots come out of our nose and mouth, like an umbilical cord, forever connected with the rest of the world... Nothing that we do, do we do by ourselves. We do not see by ourselves. We do not hear by ourselves...We do not think, dream, invent, or procreate by ourselves. We do not die by ourselves... I am a point of awareness, a circle of consciousness, in the midst of a series of circles. One circle is that which we call 'the body.' It is a universe itself, full of millions of little living creatures living their own 'separate' but dependent lives...But all of these 'circles' are not really separate—they are all mutually dependent upon each other..."

That passage deeply shaped my worldview. Animism arises directly from one's experience of  entities and elements.

Animists often have rituals for hunting, gathering, healing, rites of passage, largely personalized but in many traditions with enduring themes and styles. For me personally, it involves offering thanks to the plants and animals and fungi and minerals and bacteria that nourish me as I consume them. Other practices I do include a lot of rock balancing and nature art like arranging leaves, to me it functions sort of like a lot of animist cultures where people make little altars and shrines for local spirits. I also gather special stones that I find in a natural setting and use them for grounding myself when I feel distressed.

Socially, I do nature-themed worships with people I know, sometimes around a campfire, involving things like singing and dancing and reflection. We often do things like dissolve objects in water, or burn objects in fire, symbolizing overcoming harms. We pay particular attention to group resonance during songs. I enjoy singing and drumming with candlelight in the dark, holding hands and hugging friends as we share our deepest truths, I enjoy marveling at the beauty of rain, moss, dragonflies, campfires, the magic of lightning, sharing the heat of bodies together with affection. I interpret these as "spiritual", an emergent phenomenon of psychological and emotional fulfillment and connection greater than the sum of its parts. Something special arises in those moments, and I can call it a “spirit” of sorts.

Worship just means giving reverence, so I may “worship” the sun or moon without praying to them, appreciate lunar and solar cycles that affect my life, celebrate solstice and equinox, admire the beauty of rivers, forests, marshes, hills, ponds, lakes. I try to really get to know my local landbase. I enjoy developing my skills at practical astronomy, geography, and geology.

I pay particular attention to shadows, echoes, and reflections, as I believe these phenomena in particular demonstrate the interconnection of the matter and spirit worlds. To see one's face in a pool of water, or in another's eye, to hear a voice echo through a landscape, to see shadows flicker and dance and grow and diminish, to me all of these hold significance for displaying interconnectedness.

When the animistic Kalapalo horticulturalists of Brazil perform music as a group to commune with spirit beings, in their view, they do not so much sing *to* the beings as sing them *into being*. These sort of creation rituals appear often amongst foraging peoples, along with rituals for releasing spirits back once taken.

6.) Does animism offer a moral code of some sort? If so, could you elaborate on that? And what happens or is said to happen if one fails to adhere to it?

Every animistic culture has its own ethics. Nomadic foraging band societies, the most common animist cultures, emphasize kinship and relation, which often manifests in ethics such as environmentalism, frugality, sharing, and reciprocity. In most of these cultures, if someone breaks an important cultural boundary, often they practice “diffused sanctions” toward that individual, a decentralized expression of disapproval by community members, subjecting offenders to mockery, resulting in loss of reputation. Often animists also believe that those who transcribe against certain prohibitions (e.g. aggressive violence against one's kin, or harming endangered species) will offend the natural world or spirits, and suffer harmful accidents. Animists may claim that a stingy hunter may incur bad luck, or that someone who hurts their peoples brings about a disease that will hurt everyone. I don't have much personal experience with this aspect of animism beyond some reading about !Kung and Batek culture.

7.) Is there a mythology associated with animism? Any creation or apocalypse stories? Is there an afterlife?

Every culture has its own cosmology indicating the origins of peoples and places, and a pantheon of dominant influences. Many have their own eschatology, beliefs in afterlife. For me, I do not have an animistic cultural upbringing imparting these upon me, I have a mostly atheistic tendency toward those aspects, and toward deities. I grew up Christian and rejected that doctrine. For me the afterlife just means the unbroken flow of matter from one state to the next, e.g. flesh becomes soil becomes dust becomes soil becomes flesh. I endeavor to learn what I can of the practices of ancient Paleolithic peoples on the European continent, my distant ancestors.

One practice I know of from Paleolithic Europeans involves hanging the antlers of hunted animals like deer in trees. This offers reverence, and also indicates how much hunting of game has taken place in a region, so people do not overhunt that species.

The "Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers” textbook I've read really explores the different beliefs of various contemporary animist cultures throughout the world. Mythology often entails trickster figures, rebirth cycles, tales of how land features developed, folk stories.

8.) Does animism imply any "supernatural" beliefs or stories to be held as literal and true?

“Supernatural” really predicates itself on a division between the “natural” (material) and the “spiritual” that animists do not believe in per se, so I find it difficult to answer properly. But yes, it certainly can entail what Cartesians would interpret as “superstitious” behaviors, or “supernatural” beliefs. A lot of it however I do not see as automatically “supernatural” in the normal sense of things, as much of it does not attempt to speak objectively in the first place.

Animists, like Phenomenologists, find validity in subjective sensory perception that Cartesians often do not. We can respect someone's lived experience in a dreaming, or drugged, or feverish, or fugue state, as their authentic experience, possessing important value for that person. When someone sees a fleeting face in a shadow or a rock formation, animists would much rather listen to that individual's perception than shame them for it. We do not need to see that same face, to honor it. People who “hear voices” in many animistic cultures integrate very well and have designated roles, often becoming storytellers or healers. Neurodiversity only becomes problematic under certain patterns of subsistence and settlement and social organization; schizophrenia becomes disruptively non-productive only in an overly-rationalist, capitalist society. All children have animist tendencies, having imaginary friends, seeing figures in clouds, anthropomorphizing actions all around them. Animists respect this.

Animists can appreciate a “gut feeling”, or goosebumps, or the hair sticking up on the back of one's neck, a sense that someone's watching, or autonomic muscle use, or daydreams, or recognizing faces. These sensory but non-rational perceptions have their place.

Humans simply do not comprehend all the forces at work in the universe, nor, necessarily, should we even; we ought not grind up all the flesh of the world in the gears of inspection just to see what comes out the other end. I don't know if I believe in destiny, but I do see that hubris often has self-destructive consequences. In my view, I see the whole advent of civilization (urban society) as like that of the myth of Icarus: imagining monsters in nature to fear, aspiring to the heavens for escape and to see over the land like a god, forgetting one's place on the land, building the mechanical wings instead of returning home, coming crashing down in a ruin when he can't glide back down to that which he abandoned. The metaphor does not necessarily originate in an animist culture, but I see it as a parable for our times.

I do not find particular affinity with mysticism. I see animism as relating more to empiricism than to rationalism or mysticism, as animism emphasizes the sensual world. Animist cultures' foraging, botany, geography, and tracking skills really rely on empirical skills and storytelling and incorporate mythology into all of it. One example: a lot of animistic seafaring peoples created elaborate songs for navigating the ocean where they sang stories together that kept time and travel directions; for them they experienced it as singing the tides into being.

I know of the Ju/'hoansi (!Kung) conception of god in "//Gama", whom one informant told anthropologist Valiente-Noailles put their people there to "live a good life", "eat enough food", and "do whatever they want to". Often animist deities function as figures that merely embody, create, or explain, or that dwell in special places, not as much commanders to appease.

The indigenous animist Piraha, the most empirical culture on Earth, who only speak in the present tense and about what they directly experience, will still literally point with their fingers to spirits they actually see in the forest, that Western anthropologists cannot notice. If we actually had the upbringing of growing up wild, not dulled down and dumbed by domesticated living, maybe our keen senses would awaken us to much more than we can presently notice? That's a journey worth undertaking, in my opinion. At what point does pattern recognition become "divination", empathy become "entering supernatural realms", charisma become "possession"? We can only find these out through personal discovery.

Many animist cultures believe that humans can communicate directly with animals under special circumstances. Amahuaca Indians of the Amazon can imitate the vocal signals of wild monkeys and pigs, the Koyukon speak with birds through whistling their sounds. Often communication takes place on a more primal level, that of posture. Animists often practice posture mimicry, a very empathic experience that allows a human to really “step into the shoes” of an animal. I practice mimicing an animal's head position, matching its crossed or opened arms or legs, its nervous or controlled gestures, its facial expressions and breathing rate, its eye movements. When it vocalizes I try to match its tone and pitch and volume and pacing and pauses. I try to understand how it perceives specific cues for distance toward other creatures. All of this physical communication offers a lot of spiritual insight, and helps me to predict an animal's emotional state and migration patterns.

Often animist cultures believe each person has multiple souls, such as ones bound to one's body, one's reflection, one's breath, and one's shadow. The significance varies by culture.

9.) Does animism inform your politics? If so, how?

I identify strongly with anarcho-primitivism, a set of anarchist critiques examining the origins, development, and trajectories of hierarchies of power and the alienation of humans from nature. A-P entails phenomenological insights on culture, ecology, and technology that correspond to my animist worldview, eco-centric anarchist ethics, and wild aesthetics.

"Nature" to me entails a complex adaptive web of biotic relationships, with a substrate of geophysical structures and cycles. Nature's processes tend toward ecological succession, in cycles that approach climax communities. Processes tending toward biodiversity, as well as niche and ecoregion differentiation, interconnection. Processes that grow wild vitality over mineral or artifactual landscapes, where liveliness embeds and proliferates. Nature's dynamics tend toward reciprocity, symbiosis, and limited competition, in a dynamic equilibrium, with periodic catastrophe restarting cycles of regrowth. At the biotic scale I see the emergence of features like physiological structures, sensory organs, auto-regeneration, truly magical developments. I see the brilliance of autopoiesis, as embodied in seeds. At the ecology scale, I see progressions toward organism and habitat co-adaptation, balanced predator-prey relations, biodiversity, fertile habitat, abundant life. At the biosphere scale I see the emergence of climatic homeostasis: balanced feedback loops conducive to, and supportive of, life. For me, nature means wildness and vitality, and humans adapt best to that as most animals do: as small, nomadic forager groups. Wild Nature cannot reconcile with Civilization's ethos of domination and lifelessness, of infinite extraction and growth. Not all aspects of nature prove good or right or benign—nature can certainly yield cruelty or opportunism—but all aspects of nature nevertheless prove real and experiential, have shaped us as humans for millions of years. Nature may wash away our paltry sand castles on whim, but I still believe humans have adapted far better to wildness than to domestication.

I advocate rewilding as a central aspect of my politics. One may define "rewilding" as a process of embracing innate evolutionary biorhythms, drawing upon or returning to a wild state. In short, becoming feral. We practice this process by acting as social animals. By supporting ourselves in small groups. By reclaiming ancestral skills. By returning to evolutionary patterns for diet, sleep, and exercise. By developing animistic perspectives and living relations. By practicing attachment parenting. By taking holistic approaches to wellness at cognitive, emotional, physical, and spiritual levels. By implementing Gift Economies and Productive Play. And in many other ways. Earthen living. Rewilding means remembering the 99% of human existence in nomadic foraging band societies, with collaborative self-determination, egalitarianism, and wellness as common features, what anthropologist Peter Gray summarized in "Play as a Foundation for Hunter-Gatherer Social Existence" as “voluntary participation, autonomy, equality, sharing, and consensual decision making".

We don't need to idealize nature to reject the belief that humans can exist separate from and superior to it; we as a species still live as just one strand tied into the vast web of life, and need to re-learn some humility. Like all the others, we have evolved our own biological needs and expected rhythms to give us life and fulfillment. Ignoring and repressing our rhythms has produced miseries, maladies, and madness. Just as with all the other captive animals. Rewilding, to me, allows us to apply this understanding as a process of empowerment. An organism displaced from the natural environment in which it evolved becomes pathological. No different than the apes in the zoos, we too pace our cages, drift between boredom and frustration. We look outside longingly, but, our training makes us fear the prospect of life without masters. Rewilding means to thwart the masters, smash the cages, and revive autonomy and community, and the ferocity that defends them. I strongly advocate for “decolonization”.

10.) How and when did you become an animist? What drew you to it?

As a kid I felt an enchanting world all around me. I could spend whole days digging in dirt, playing with ants, watching dragonflies, listening to woodpeckers, or watching the autumn leaves drift down from the trees. I had imaginary friends, and I believe one could describe them as animistic helper spirits in a certain sense. I had a close connection to pets like cats and dogs and birds and lizards growing up. My mother went into labor because of an earthquake, and so during my childhood I pondered that with wonder and sought a closer connection to natural phenomena like storms and quakes.

As an adult, I began reading serious texts about “nature” and ecology, realizing my total alienation from the natural world since growing up. I began to develop an interest in anthropology, which led me to become more adventurous and explorative. I felt my first real experiences of animism again during a month-long “primitive living”, “wilderness immersion” program where we attempted to live as a small band of semi-nomadic foragers, making all of our own tools from scratch, making fire from the friction of sticks, sleeping on elk hides in wigwams, eating mostly wild foods, no modern technology except our clothing. At one point I became lost in a freezing storm and nearly died of hypothermia. I barely found my way back to came, and my campmates stoked a friction fire, and as I warmed, I saw how the flame took in oxygen and expelled carbon like I, how it ate wood like I ate deer. I felt a vital connection in my near-death state. I realized the storm had taught me a valuable lesson about my own ignorance, and the merciful fire saved me from the consequences of my own civilized upbringing. I began to see in a very real, life-or-death sense how without fire or water or air or soil I simply could not exist, my life depended absolutely upon these elements in a certain balance, my life arises from them, and too much or too little of any and my life perishes.

I thought long about the storm and the fire. The deeper I looked for connections between humans and the so-called "non-living elements", the more I moved away from classifying "subject" from "object". I noticed roots of air stretching down from the sky to my lungs, connecting us by breath to clouds, to trees, to algae, to animals, to each other. I felt new reverence for thunder, air molecules that may have at one point resided in the lungs of various creatures. I saw bodies bound to the soil, where soil becomes bodies and bodies become soil, in endless cycles, as life feeds on life and becomes life even in death, and each handful of soil contains microbial life beyond count. I realized how the blood, sweat, mucus, and tears of all creatures contain mostly water, and so arise from the vapor and the dew, and bind us still. The thunderstorm's vapor could very well mean water that once comprised the blood of our ancestors. And I realized how the sun and the moon grant life, the sun by enabling photosynthesis, mutation by radiation, and warmth suitable for life, the moon by setting the tides and germination of seeds. I can now tell direction by sun and moon, so that I do not get lost the same as before.

All of these understandings made me more and more aware of the interconnected web of life, the interplay of vitality and elements that no longer make sense to me to separate from one another. I saw the dandelions and mallow creating life in the cracks of the cities, the coyote and raccoon finding refuge in this wasteland. The crow pilfering seeds from the industrial cornfields. In weeds and vermin, I saw my kin. I relate to the wild elements far more than the sterile, ordered aesthetic of industrial civilization.

The more I learned about ecology, the less I could continue imagining this notion of “the environment” we Westerners subscribe to, this notion of an outside, alien world only loosely connected to us. I could not believe in “the wilderness”, some untouched Eden, seemingly nowhere. Instead, I saw wildness, I saw Wild Nature, and found my home again.

11.) Do you encourage "converts"? Or is it frowned upon for people who are not culturally related with it to consider themselves animists? Does animism exclude, in your eyes, adhering to a (or another?) religion?

I encourage people to learn about animism, and if they want to embrace it, all the better. I actively discourage cultural appropriation, but luckily all peoples have animistic backgrounds to draw upon if you look far enough back. Most places where monotheistic religions conquered, some remnants of traditional animist culture remain as well, for example some Canadian tribal peoples merely incorporated Jesus as just another helper spirit amongst their pantheon, many Muslim converts kept belief in djinn, many European Neolithic pagan groups kept older, animistic practices. I spend a lot of my time with Unitarian Universalists, a small religious tradition that tends toward inclusivity of those of other faiths.

12.) Is animism persecuted today? Has it been, historically?

The Western mode of rationality presents itself as the antithesis of “savage, irrational” thought supposedly embodied in animism. Animists have faced persecution and outright extermination ever since the advent of agrarian, urban cultures, since the advent of societies organized as States in particular absolutely annihilated hunter-gatherer cultures historically. Neolithic cultural formations conquered the Middle East, North Africa, Europe & the Mediterranean, the Americas, Australia, everywhere really, displacing traditional indigenous animist cultures. In Europe, very, very few intact traditional animist cultures survived the Indo-European conquest, peoples like the Sámi and Nenets. Everywhere animist cultures exist they face tremendous, existential threats from missionaries, armed colonizers, resource extraction industries. Animists have a deep connection to their wild landbases, which farming cultures see as backwards. In North America, the settler-colonial invasion starting in 1492 really has dispossessed the vast majority of Native Americans from their land and traditions, most of which had strongly animist tendencies, and this oppression continues to this day.

13.) How do you feel about the major religions of the world?

I categorically reject the hierarchy of all “organized religion”, and find most religious belief in deities as too based on dominance-and-submission paradigms. I dislike Neolithic Paganism, the Axial Age religions, the Abrahamic faiths, New Age spirituality, New Atheism. I particularly dislike the notion of divine punishment. I find a lot of value in Daoism, and like some aspects of Buddhism. I think all major religions have good people and some decent aspects or groups, but overall I view the idea of religious authority and dogmatic thinking as a disastrous development for humanity.

14.) I was gonna ask if you wanted to say anything about local history and animism.

Before European conquest, the Wintun peoples lived in my home area, an animistic people. Franciscan missionaries committed genocide and forced conversions, going so far as to burn these peoples alive if they refused to convert. The Mission system proved instrumental to dispossessing and Christianizing the natives. The Wintun suffered malaria and smallpox epidemics from the Europeans, ranchers and loggers and miners destroying their land and polluting their waters, massacres, poisoned food gifts, and mass burnings. Wintuns prayed to the sun prior to washing in the morning, smoking, or eating. Dreaming accessed the spirit-world, and vision quests could also allow one to contact spirits. Shamanistic healing ceremonies and mourning ceremonies took place as needed. Wintun mythology features a Coyote trickster figure, and a world-fire aesthetic. Dancing played a central role in spirituality.