The philosophers Johan De Smedt and Helen De Cruz argue that animism is not a mistake to be explained away but a philosophy in its own right, with its own view of what exists, how we come to know it and how we should live. In their chapter “Animisms: Practical Indigenous Philosophies” (2023) they show that treating the world as dead by default is itself a philosophical position, and they call on their own field, the philosophy of religion, to stop treating Christianity as the measure of all religion. Therapeutic Shamanism agrees that animism is no error, and puts the weight in a different place, since for it animism is first of all an experience, not a theory.
Who are Johan De Smedt and Helen De Cruz? #
Two philosophers at Saint Louis University in the United States, who worked together for many years and were married. Helen De Cruz was a Belgian-born philosopher who held the Danforth Chair in the Humanities there and studied why people take up pursuits such as theology, mathematics and science; her books include Wonderstruck: How Awe and Wonder Shape the Way We Think. She died in June 2025, aged forty-six. Johan De Smedt is a Research Professor at the same university.1
What do they argue? #
That animism belongs in philosophy. Their chapter appeared in a book called Animism and Philosophy of Religion, edited by Tiddy Smith (2023). They begin with their own field. In the leading journals of analytic philosophy of religion, ‘religion’ usually means a general belief in one God, or Christianity; one widely used textbook, sold as the most complete of its kind, gives only twelve per cent of its pages to any tradition other than Christianity.2 Animism hardly appears, and what is written about it turns up in journals of anthropology and ecology instead.
Against this they set out their case: “like other religious views, animism has psychological roots and it is also a philosophy, with ontological, epistemological, and ethical commitments.”3 In plainer words, it has its own account of what the world is made of and how humans fit into it, its own account of how we come to know things, and its own ethics. And it is not one thing. In their words, “it is more correct to say there are different animisms.”4
Why isn’t animism just a mistake of perception? #
Because, they argue, calling it a mistake already assumes the answer. The usual scientific account comes from the cognitive science of religion, where the anthropologist Stewart Guthrie argued that we are built to see agents everywhere, because “it is better for a hiker to mistake a boulder for a bear than to mistake a bear for a boulder”; spirits in the rustling leaves are then useful false alarms.5 See Is giving things human personalities the same as animism?
De Smedt and De Cruz reply that calling these perceptions mistakes smuggles in a view of the world. Following the anthropologist Tim Ingold and the philosopher David Abram, they point out that “the assumption that the default in our environment is lack of animacy (rather than animacy) is a philosophically substantial claim”, one that should be argued for, not simply assumed.6 They call the opposite stance inanimism, and note that it brings its own puzzles, such as how consciousness could arise out of unconscious matter, or life in a lifeless universe. “These puzzles arise because of the philosophical position we have assumed.”7
Nor are animists confused. In one of their examples, people who invite other animals into their ceremonies as persons still treat a bear with caution, not courtesy, when they meet one outside them; the category of person is widened to include other-than-human persons, not muddled.8 See Who was A. Irving Hallowell, and where does the phrase “other-than-human persons” come from?
What examples do they give? #
Two, chosen to show how different animisms can be. The Rarámuri have lived in the Sierra Madre Occidental of northern Mexico for over two thousand years. They burn oak plateaus selectively to make bean fields, which keeps the soil fertile, guards against forest fire and leaves a rich patchwork of plants and animals, and they also hunt. Their kincentric ecology counts all the creatures they “hunt, cultivate, and eat” as kin, and centres on iwígara, the total interconnectedness of all life in the mountains, physical and spiritual.9
The Inuit of the Arctic, hunting peoples by tradition, understand the land, the Nuna, as sovereign and surprising, “not something to be subdued or overcome”. A person who is depressed, stressed or unsure of their direction goes out to camp, fish, trap and hunt on the land for a while, to reconnect, and the time spent there is also moral training, since the food is shared with older people who can no longer go out.10
What do they say about how old animism is? #
That it is very old and was once very widespread. They cite a study of the religious beliefs of thirty-three hunter-gatherer societies which found animism in every one of them, and concluded that it is probably the most ancient element of religion, followed by belief in an afterlife and by shamanism. They also cite Palaeolithic carvings and paintings of part-human, part-animal figures, such as the lion-man of Hohlenstein-Stadel in south-western Germany, dated to about 40,000 years ago.11 Belief in one God, by contrast, “is almost absent among hunter-gatherer societies and only appears in the historical record once sedentary and large-scale societies emerge.”12
How does their argument connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
At many points. Therapeutic Shamanism holds that all of our hunter-gatherer ancestors were animists, all of them, all over the world, for hundreds of thousands of years.13 Gods who demand worship, obedience and sacrifice arrive later, with the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer; the gods hunter-gatherers knew were to be respected and honoured, but there was no need to worship them.14 So the finding that belief in one God appears only with settled, large-scale societies sits easily with the Therapeutic Shamanism account. See Do animists believe in God, or in gods and goddesses? What is the Great Mystery?
Their inanimism is close to what Therapeutic Shamanism calls Taker thinking: seeing the world as dead matter, learnt so deeply that most people do not notice they have learnt it at all. And their refusal to call animism a mistake matches the long-standing point that animist peoples are not confused primitives but people living by a different and, for most of human history, very successful way of being. See What is the Fall?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
Mainly in where it puts the weight. De Smedt and De Cruz treat animism as a religious philosophy with psychological roots, resting on built-in tendencies of the mind that make it an intuitive option, then worked out by each culture.15 Therapeutic Shamanism agrees that animism is no error but describes it as, first of all, an experience: animism is not a belief so much as an experience, the experience that everything is alive and conscious.16 Nor is it a religion; for hunter-gatherers it was not something done for part of the day but a way of being.17 What makes animism true, in this approach, is not that it can be defended in argument but that it is what people meet when they try the practices.
There is also a difference of strength. The definition of animism they borrow from Ingold is about being alive to the world, a heightened attention and responsiveness to an environment always in flux. Therapeutic Shamanism goes further, to a world full of persons who can be met and communicated with, Animal, Plant and Stone, on a round table with no being above another. See Who is Tim Ingold? and What is the “ontological turn” in anthropology?
Is Christianity to blame for the loss of animism? #
That is the argument of the historian Lynn White Jr., which the authors discuss. In a famous 1967 paper White wrote that “By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects.” The authors report later evidence that points the same way: one study found that Christians are less inclined than non-religious people to see agency in their surroundings, and a large review of quantitative studies found that Abrahamic religions tend to encourage human-centred and destructive attitudes to the environment, Indigenous religions more caring ones.18
Others disagree. The authors also note a body of writing that explores the opposite case, that Christianity can encourage care and stewardship of nature.18 Therapeutic Shamanism places the deeper break much earlier, with domesticationDomestication. The process by which, in domesticating other species, we domesticated ourselves. When dated precisely, Domestication begins with the Neolithic era, before the Fall proper, which begins with the first city-state cultures around 4000 BCE. What rewilding works to undo. More about this and the Fall, long before Christianity, and treats the sky-religionsSky-religion. The vertical, hierarchical reordering of the sacred that the Fall installed, governed by the spell ‘up is good, down is bad’: transcend the body, escape matter, purify upward. The conditioning Therapeutic Shamanism works to undo. More about this as a later expression of it. See What is the Fall?
