Animism was commonplace in the ancient world, and resonates today as a means of reconnecting with our living world. The world of Kolkha (the setting of my fantasy novels-in-progress), is informed by animism as well as the more familiar historical mythology of polytheism (multiple gods).
 | “The color of the sky, the rush of waves--every aspect of the earthly sensuous [can] draw us into a relationship fed with curiosity and spiced with danger.” So says David Abram in The Spell of the Sensuous, his exploration of animism, oral traditions, and the philosophy of phenomenology. He urges us “to wander and bask in the scents drifting up from the nightriver...it’s the unfathomable otherness of things--the strange perspective of an orb-weaving spider spinning the cosmos out of her abdomen; the outrageously different sentience of a humpback whale or an albatross; the complex intelligence of an old-growth forest dank with mushrooms…that makes any attentive relation with such beings a genuine form of magic” |
Animism (from Latin anima, "breath, spirit, life") is a religion that recognizes places and creatures as having distinct spiritual essences. The sacred oak groves of Celtic druids, the dryads and naiads of ancient Greece, Skythian gods of sky, rain, and fire--these all harken to a time when the world was experienced as a living place full of spirits.
This mystic unity with the natural world resonated in all areas of society:
Self-identity among animists is based on relationships with others. Instead of focusing on the "individual," persons are viewed through social relationships (one among many), some of which are with non-humans.
This mystic unity with the natural world resonated in all areas of society:
Self-identity among animists is based on relationships with others. Instead of focusing on the "individual," persons are viewed through social relationships (one among many), some of which are with non-humans.
 | Anyone who has formed a deep friendship with a cat, dog, horse or other companion animal has experienced a non-human social relationship. Our animist ancestors would have had similar bonds with the forests and fields, the sky and rivers, with ravens and bears, and the earth. |
| Rupert Sheldrake asks “If nature is alive, if the universe is more like an organism than a machine, then there must be self-organizing systems with minds at all levels, including the earth, the solar system, and the galaxy--and ultimately the entire cosmos.” “Our direct experience of nonhuman nature can lead us beyond our limited selves to a direct connection with the more-than-human world and the more-than-human consciousness that underlies it.” |  |
 | Neil Price gives a visceral description of animism in Children of Ash & Elm: A History of the Vikings: “The Vikings…shared their world with…a whole host of beings, spirits, and creatures….The Vikings didn’t believe in these things…they knew them.” The same is true of many oral cultures embedded in the natural world. I strive to recreate this sacred animism in my stories, to give my readers a chance to know the magical, living world surrounding us. |
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