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Animism

The worldview of a living world, and our place in it

Questions about animism, the worldview this work rests on: the living world and its Peoples, how our culture lost touch with it, and how we find our way back.

Animism: the worldview

What is animism?

Also answers eleven more questions

What does it mean to say the world is alive and full of persons?

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What is the relationship between animism and shamanism?

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What is animism in shamanism?

What is right relationship and reciprocity?

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What is right relationship?

How does animism understand power and hierarchy?

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What is liminality?

Do animists believe in God, or in gods and goddesses? What is the Great Mystery?

What are moments of awakening?

What are the betwixt-and-between places, and why do they matter?

What are the sacred Masculine and sacred Feminine (Father Sky and Mother Earth)?

What does animism say about killing and eating?

Is giving things human personalities the same as animism?

Is animism the same as ‘all is one’?

What is kinship, and why do animists extend it beyond humans?

What is totemism?

What are the sacred and the profane?

What is the “ontological turn” in anthropology?

What is panpsychism, and how is it different from animism?

What does Daoism teach about humans and nature?

The living world: the Peoples

Who are the Animal, Plant and Stone People?

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How do humans communicate and build relationships with the other-than-human Peoples?

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What are Plant People and what gifts do they bring?

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What are Stone People and what gifts do they bring?

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Who are Fungi People, Small People and other kinds of People?

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What is the medicine bundle?

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What are grokking, dieting and research in working with the Peoples?

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How does working with the Peoples change how we live?

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What are nature spirits and spirits of place?

What is an Oversoul?

The Fall and Taker culture

What are Leaver and Taker cultures, the Great Forgetting and the Great Remembering?

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What is the myth of human supremacy?

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Why have shamans been persecuted, and what happened to shamanism under states and world religions?

What was hunter-gatherer life really like?

What did the Fall do to us?

What are pre-Fallen, Fallen and post-Fallen shamanism?

Isn’t the Fall just “noble savage” romanticism?

Is spirituality separate from politics?

How has spirituality been used to justify domination?

How did hunter-gatherers keep their societies equal?

What is the difference between a hunter-gatherer and an agricultural society?

What is the Fall?

What does ‘fiercely egalitarian’ mean?

Aren’t you romanticising hunter-gatherers?

Are today’s indigenous cultures the same as original animist cultures?

What is a reverse dominance hierarchy?

Were hunter-gatherers peaceful?

Was farming a mistake?

Why did some peoples avoid the state?

What is a gift economy?

The recovery: rewilding and the Original Instructions

Can modern humans recover an animist way of seeing and undo domestication?

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How do we reconnect with the other-than-human world and heal cultural Power-loss?

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What does rewilding Soul mean and how do we discover our gifts and life direction?

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What is the Work That Reconnects?

What is a calling?

What are joy, contentment and bliss, and how do they differ?

How does animism respond to eco-despair, and why is activism part of the path?

What are refugia, and how can we become one?

Living rightly: ethics and relationship

What are shamanic ethics and how are they different from rules or morality?

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What do right relationship and reciprocity mean in practice?

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What does consent mean in shamanic work?

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How do values help us live an ethical animist life?

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What were sacrifice and offering in traditional shamanism?

What is sorcery, and are there ‘dark’ shamans?

What is smudging?

What is shamanic goal-setting?

What are the seven generations?

What are shamanic masks?

What are power objects, fetishes, amulets and talismans?

What are cleansing and purification?

Can we “manifest” whatever we want?

Do I need spiritual protection? What is energy hygiene?

What are altars, fetishes and offerings for?

What part do ritual and ceremony play in Therapeutic Shamanism?

How can breathing practice support shamanic work?

What does it mean to live as if it is all sacred?

What is metta (loving kindness), and how is it a shamanic practice?

Why is gratitude an animist practice?

What does animism say about the meaning of life?

What are the Original Instructions?

Tribe: community, belonging and the shaman's role

Questions for this topic are still being gathered.

Why are we so lonely, and what is the difference between loneliness and Solitude?

What makes a healthy group or tribe?

What is the Lower-World Tribe?

What do purity and pollution mean in traditional societies?

What is a taboo, and why did every people have them?

What is communitas?

What do tribe and belonging mean, and what is the shaman’s role in a community?