I’ve learned that most people, even seasoned pagans, assume animism belongs in the rearview mirror. It’s something our Ancestors practiced. The old gods. An early stage of humanity that we eventually outgrew.

But when I suggest that what obscured our animistic awareness in much of the Western world was the legacy of colonization, along with patriarchy, the institutional Church, and imperialism, the conversation shifts. People begin to wonder whether animism didn’t disappear at all. Maybe it was simply buried beneath systems that taught us to relate to the world through hierarchy, ownership, and extraction instead of reciprocity.

I don’t believe we become animists. I believe we’re born that way.

We come into this world already knowing that life is relationship. Watch a toddler greet a bird outside the window. Listen to a child negotiate with a stubborn rock, apologize to a stuffed rabbit, or insist that a favorite tree is lonely because no one has visited it. Adults are quick to dismiss these moments as imagination. I see them as relationship.

Children don’t arrive believing the world is made of inert objects waiting to be used. They arrive expecting connection. The world meets them as alive. Animals have intentions. Weather has moods. Rivers are companions. The dark has a presence. Even the seemingly ordinary is encountered with curiosity instead of certainty.

This isn’t naïveté. It is a way of knowing. More than that, it is our first way of being.

As we grow, that way of knowing narrows. We learn to separate imagination from reality, subject from object, self from world. We acquire essential skills that help us think critically, navigate society, and care for ourselves and one another. Those capacities have an important place in an animistic life, too.

The difficulty begins when productivity becomes more valued than relationship. As we’re taught to become useful to the collective, our relational awareness is often obscured, discouraged, or treated as childish. Shred by shred, our participation in the living world is replaced by observation of it. The conversation we once experienced with the world becomes quieter, not because it has stopped, but because we’ve been taught to stop listening.

Animism isn’t asking us to abandon reason or return to childhood. It isn’t pretending that every coincidence carries cosmic significance. Rather, it invites us to recover a capacity children express naturally: the willingness to meet the world as a community of living relationships, each with its own agency, rather than as a collection of objects awaiting our use.

Perhaps this is why so many cultures created rites of passage around childhood. They recognized that becoming fully human required more than physical growth. It required learning how to move through the practical realities of life without forgetting our place within a larger living community.

The challenge isn’t to remain children. The challenge is to become adults who can hold discernment and wonder, logic and reverence, responsibility and relationship at the same time. Children begin there instinctively. The work of adulthood is not to reclaim innocence, but to remember relationship with the wisdom that experience brings.

If you enjoyed this post, you may also enjoy reading Animist Child – Blessings for the Tooth Faerie.

S. Kelley Harrell, M. Div.

Kelley Harrell is an animist, author, deathwalker, and death doula held by Tuscarora, Woccon, and Sissipihaw land. For the last 30 years, through Soul Intent Arts she’s helped others ethically build thriving spiritual paths. Her work is Nature-based, and centers soul tending through the Elder Futhark runes, animism, ancestral tending, and deathwork. She hosts the podcast, What in the Wyrd, and also writes The Weekly Rune as a celebration of the Elder Futhark in season. Work with her in the Runes for Change community or in her intensive soul tending training, The Spirited Path.  Full bio.

#beyourcommunity ~ #youareecosystem

elder well, die well, ancestor well

@kelleysoularts