Eoten

Animist poet

Wild poetry, untamed stories and animist teachings from Eóten

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Animism: Definitions & Terms

Animism & Witchcraft

Witchcraft is a part of my personal spiritual identity as a practitioner of Northern European animism. But is witchcraft animism?

The word witch traces back to the Old English wicce/wicca meaning wise person, magician or sorceress, and possibly futher back into Proto-Germanic and Proto-Indo_European with a relation to words meaning sacred, to divide, to divine or to wake.

In the modern world, witchcraft encompasses a vast array of practices, beliefs and  traditions. Many of these have roots in ancient Northern European paths, while others are rooted in other lands and cultures. It’s relationship with animist is fluid and complex; these are areas of living experience that aren’t easily defined into tidy boxes, and they vary between people, place and time.

But for me, witchcraft is a part of animism and also a religion that grew out of animism. It’s a part of animism because much of non-religious witchcraft in the UK and other European countries is a continuation of deeply animistic folk magic, mysticism and reverance for the land and ancestors. These are practices that our ancestors have held and worked with for millenia, and while in witchcraft they take on a particular aesthetic, structure or intent, they are still deeply concerned with the relationships between people, their land and their community.

In this way witchcraft is a branch of the tree of animism, a particularly Northern European branch with rich modern resources.

But witchcraft can also be a religion, when it becomes hierarchical and organised around specific rules, such as which deities to honour and which ceremonies to practice at certain times. As we’ve talk about, animism is not a religion; and while our animistic ancestors would certainly have recognised the deities and ceremonies used in modern religious witchcraft, the highly ordered practice between separate communities would be alien to them.

And neither is all animism witchcraft; many people who practice animism use no folk magic at all. They work with angels or ancestors but no pantheistic deities or land spirits, and their ceremonies draw from completely different animistic roots and lands.

When we’re talking about deeply personal spiritual experiences and concepts like this, it’s important to remember that we can’t – and dont need to – define the experiences of others for them. While I call my spiritual practices animism, others who have the same viewpoints and methods use different words, like witchcraft. While shared language is helpful, so that we can share and learn from each other, we have to remember that these words are simply viewfinders that help us work within a vast and ambiguous field of experience.

What matters more is our own personal understanding of the terms we use and the methods we apply, and our ability to work with them is a way that’s helpful for ourselves and for others.

The Principles of Animism

Animism is as diverse as it is potent.

There are no laws, rules or dogma that apply across animism, and there are no universal texts, beliefs, teachers or teachings in animism. All animist practitioners are different, and see their practice differently.

Saying this, it can be difficult for beginners and newcomers to get a grip on how to begin an animist practice. To be able to understand animism,we have to do it rather than read about it, but this is hard when we don’t really understand how it works or why.

The following principles are the foundations of animist practice, found in animism throughout the world, no matter the languages and or form. When we approach animism for the first time, these principles give us a solid base from which to have our own experiences and come to our own understanding.

Workability
Workability means that the universe is workable; we aren’t merely passive objects in our lives, but active participants. We can change things, direct ourselves, make decisions, break and destroy, create and maintain.

It doesn’t mean that we can force our lives into the exact shape that we wish, or change the people around us, or change the way nature works. But it does mean that we can work in partnership with our relationships to people, objects and that fabric of reality.

Relationship
Relationship means recognising that we are always in relationship with everything in our lives, and that these relationships are crucially important. We are not islands; we exist in an infinite web of connection, movement, pattern, energy, emotion, causality.

In animism, these relationships are the means through which we work with the world. Almost all animist practices work through these relationships; enhancing, deepening, pruning, rooting, nourishing, taking space from or cutting them off.

Warriorship
Warriorship is the word I use for the blend of courage, discipline and integrity that animism requires from us in order to be useful. Without these qualities, animism can’t work in our lives; we will always be sabotaging ourselves.

But animism recognises that these are not static qualities. We can grow them and learn how to access them better through specific practices. And we can express them in varied ways; not just through physical courage, but through a huge spectrum of internal and external behaviour.

Nature
Nature is vastly important in animism throughout the world. This isn’t because nature is ‘better’ or ‘safer’, as is often misunderstood in Western distortions of animism, but rather because it is the heart of who and what we are as a species.

Animists remember that we are animals, and that this animal nature must be honoured for us to be healthy. Nature reminds us of the importance of our own individual natures; it provides deep teachings about freedom, mortality, power, health and relationships.

Imagination
Imagination is the language of animism. It lets us understand the areas of life that are non-linear, non-rational, inaudible, invisible, unpredictable, uncertain and yet vital.

Imagination is used every time we use animist tools, from divination to spirit communication; it is the sense we use to interpret the world. It is, like warriorship, a skill that we can develop through practice, and it will grow as your animist practice does.

Having your own relationship with these principles will mean that the foundation of your animism is strong and reliable.

A Personal Animism

Animism goes far beyond what our language can tell. We can catch glimpses of it in art, poetry, music and dance. We can share echoes of it in story and in teachings. We can feel the call of it on the moor and in the forest, in the waves, on the mountain peak.

But animism is so ancient, so deeply rooted in our spirits and bodies, that it has no language other than direct experience. We cannot fully communicate the nature of animism except through doing, and through the sharing of that doing.

This is why animism is described in so many ways and takes so many forms throughout the world. The echoes of animism that I can talk about, won’t be the ones you can, or that our ancestors would have described.

The practice is consistent and recognisable, but the words change.

At SongBoneStar, I am sharing my experience of animism as best I can, because I believe it can help so many people. The principles I describe, the methods and their meaning are all rooted in my own experiences of a lifetime of animist practice.

I cannot speak for all animists, or even any other animist at all. But I can help you experience animism for yourself, so that one day you can tell us what it means for you and how it changes your life.

Atheism or Non-theism?

I consider myself a non-theist. I was raised by atheists, in a secular society, and for a long time I was confused by my spiritual experiences – I thought that if I experienced these things, I must be ‘religious’. (Of course, my parents’ weren’t keen on that!)

But over time, I’ve come to see that spiritual experience does not equal experience of ‘God’. My experiences with spirits and non-ordinary realities doesn’t mean that I have to believe in the whole package; a creator God who controls the universe makes no sense to me, in light of my experiences. And so I’m a non-theist.

Why not an atheist? It was the ‘family religion’, after all. And that’s exactly why I don’t identify in that way; my experiences of atheism are that it comes with a lot of unrelated baggage, just like a religion, which complicate spiritual practice. Atheists, in my experience, worship science and rationality; I don’t think that science and rationality provide all the answers, or even practical answers a lot of the time.

Atheists also seem to hold a lot of beliefs about the world that can’t be based in their experience or be proven; for example, science doesn’t prove the non-existence of spirits, or non-ordinary realities, and yet many atheists are violently opposed to considering these topics as anything other than ‘irrationality’ or ‘mental illness’. And I understand; in a world that’s only just recovering from religious oppression of free thinking peoples, it’s tempting to throw the baby out with the bathwater. “Let in any belief, other than science,” atheists seem to say, “and we’ll lose all our secular rights again.”

But for people like me, for whom these other, spiritual, experiences are valuable and real, atheism can be as dangerous as religious zealotry. Where’s the line between a mental health ward and a prison, a lifetime on anti-psychotics or burning at the stake? The religion of rationality is as damaging as the religions of the book; dogma is dogma, and so – I’m a non-theist.