Neo-animism

[Magical Realist]

I have always had a penchant for animism. It is perhaps the oldest spirituality of man, dating back to prehistoric times. I am convinced natural objects can possess a sort of spirit or consciousness that embodies all the things that have happened to it. Any time we posit eventhood to any place or object we posit a kind of subjectivity or proto-mind that things can happen to. Even places can have a spirit or "genius loci"--- many being a "temenos" or sacred ground. Houses too. A haunted house is often nothing more than one that remembers all the lives that have lived inside it--the good times and the bad times.

"In the oldest religion, everything was alive, not supernaturally but naturally alive. There were only deeper and deeper streams of life, vibrations of life more and more vast.

So rocks were alive, but a mountain had a deeper, vaster life than a rock, and it was much harder for a man to bring his spirit, or his energy, into contact with the life of the mountain, and so draw strength from the mountain, as from a great standing well of life, than it was to come into contact with a rock. And he had to put forth a great religious effort.

For the whole life-effort of man was to get his life into direct contact with the elemental life of the cosmos, mountain-life, cloud-life, thunder-life, air-life, sun-life. To come into immediate felt contact, and so derive energy, power, and a dark sort of joy."-- D.H. Lawrence

https://realitysandwich.com/new-age-anim...lic-twist/

"The word Animism derives from the Latin root ‘Anima’, which means breath, spirit, and life.

This universal life force known as the Great Spirit in many indigenous traditions was named the ‘Anima Mundi’ by the Greek philosopher Plato who proclaimed,

'This world is indeed a living being endowed with a soul and intelligence, a single visible living entity containing all other living entities, which by their nature are all related.'

Anima has been revered in most societal cultural cosmologies and mythologies throughout human history. It is comparable in similarity to Prana in the Vedic traditions and Chi in the Taoist.

The concept of Animism first appeared in Victorian British anthropology in the book Primitive Culture (1871) by Sir Edward Burnett Tylor. Taylor coined the word itself as a blanket term after he and other western anthropologists encountered and observed a widespread spiritual commonality amongst indigenous societies worldwide. These anthropologists observed a deeply rooted value-system cultivated amongst these societies, their land, and all life surrounding them. They witnessed the close relationship and their reverence for nature. Additionally, they observed the way these cultures infused their world with sentience.

Animism’s practice describes as cultivating a relationship with Plato’s Anima Mundi, the great universal spirit. This spirit is apparent throughout several thought systems. It’s the intrinsic connection between all living things on the planet. In essence, this spirit conceptualizes the invisible threads connecting people, nature’s elements, and its’ creatures in what we often refer to as the web of life."

[C C]

An ontological view that seems to stem from trans-Western and radical egalitarian political movements to assign personhood status to everything (for environmental and ecological protective reasons). Ironically, capitalist society facilitated such an impetus by legally assigning personhood to corporations.

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https://ericarnould.com/about-neo-animism/

EXCERPT: Neo-animism coalesces at the intersection of deep ecology, ecofeminism, and anthropological studies of ontology. Neo-animist thought adopts the animist axiom that circulation of resources (information, energy, and materials) is definitional of life. However, neo-animist thought differs in three ways from animist thought.

First, unlike animist thought, neo-animist thought does not attribute transcendent forms of being, i.e., souls, to human and non-human actors. Second, neo-animist thinking acknowledges scientific approaches to understanding non-human actors’ modes of communication, resource integration, and service exchange. Third, neo-animists accept that some animals and plants are “social beings, endowed with interiority and faculties of understanding”, but disagrees with animist thought that animal and plant selves and societies are “similar to those of humans”.

Neo-animism agrees that all living beings have selves, although radically different physical bodies produce these selves. [...] In contrast to economics generally and marketing specifically, neo-animism proposes to bring the interests of animals and other members of the biotic into consideration within relational ecosystems. The concept of selfhood in neo-snidm refers to the capacity to communicate and exchange resources.
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https://www.ideasthesia.org/neo-animism/

EXCERPT: [color=#660000]The standard modern ontology draws a bright line: humans have minds, everything else is mechanism. This works well enough for building technology. It works terribly for understanding ecosystems, relating to non-human animals, or recognizing intelligence in systems that don’t look like us.

Neo-animism proposes a different cut: Personhood attaches not to species membership but to coherence architecture. Any system that maintains organization, responds to its environment, and participates in meaning-making exhibits the properties we associate with being “someone” rather than “something.”

This isn’t mysticism. It’s the recognition that the same geometric principles governing human coherence operate in forests, mycelial networks, and even certain AI systems. Different substrates, different timescales, different concerns-but the same fundamental dynamics of prediction, adaptation, and self-maintenance.

Viveiros de Castro’s Amazonian perspectivism argues that every being occupies the center of its own world, experiencing itself as subject...
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https://neo-paganism.org/animism/

EXCERPTS: It is difficult for Westerners to understand the concept of “other-than-human” persons, especially when we are talking about (seem­ingly) inanimate “objects” like rocks. (Note how our lan­guage affects our ability to perceive the world.) But for the ani­mist, there is no such thing as inanimate matter. All matter is ani­mate, and thus alive, at least in the sense that it is part of a complex, self-regulating, living system called “Gaia.”

Neo-animism represents a challenge to Western discourse that divides the world into subjects and objects, human and animal, culture and nature. Neo-animism breaks down the conceptual barrier between the “cultural” (i.e., human) and the “natural” (i.e., other-than-human). Thus animists are those who encounter other-than-human beings as cultural persons.

Neo-animism is not about the projection of consciousness or agency onto “inanimate” objects (the concept of “projection” pre­sumes a subject-object dualism), but about respect and reciproc­ity within a community that transcends the subject-ob­ject dichotomy. Alison Leigh Lilly explains, “When we stop treat­ing the world as if it were mostly composed of dead matter and mindless meat-machines, we discover that it is not as indiffer­ent and impersonal as we’d once assumed.”
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism#Po...thropology

EXCERPT: More recently, postmodern anthropologists are increasingly engaging with the concept of animism. Modernism is characterized by a Cartesian subject-object dualism that divides the subjective from the objective, and culture from nature. [...] Human beings continue to create personal relationships with elements of the aforementioned objective world, such as pets, cars, or teddy bears, which are recognized as subjects. As such, these entities are "approached as communicative subjects rather than the inert objects perceived by modernists." These approaches aim to avoid the modernist assumption that the environment consists of a physical world distinct from the world of humans, as well as the modernist conception of the person being composed dualistically of a body and a soul.