Animism & Shamanism

The oldest and widest current of human belief: a felt kinship between people and a living, ensouled world.

c. 45,000 BCE → · Worldwide · Indigenous & Animist

Animism is less a single religion than the deep substrate beneath most others — the intuition that spirit pervades animals, plants, rivers, weather, and the dead. Its ritual specialist, the shaman, enters altered states to heal, divine, and mediate between worlds. Traces reach back tens of millennia in burial goods and cave art, and its logic still underlies indigenous traditions and folk practice across every continent.

Key figures

• The shaman / medicine person
• Ancestral spirits
• Guardian and totem animals

Texts

• Oral myth and song
• Cave and rock art
• Ritual memory

Beliefs

• Every being, place, and force carries spirit or personhood
• The living, the dead, and nature are one community
• Reality has seen and unseen layers a specialist can travel

Rituals

• Trance and drumming journeys
• Offerings to land and ancestors
• Rites of passage and healing

Connections in the atlas

• E. E. Evans-Pritchard
• Great Zimbabwe
• Ninki Nanka
• The word shaman
• The Bantu expansion
• Handprint
• ? Why was Göbekli Tepe built?
• Balete Drive
• Star People (Native star nations)
• Ogdy, the fire god, punishes the Evenki
• Crops from a slain body
• The Basques