For animists, everything is alive, conscious and sacred, not only special places or holy objects. Living as if it is all sacred means relating to the whole world, the ordinary and the human-made included, with honour and respect, instead of treating spirituality as something that lifts us away from the physical world. For most people raised in our culture this starts as a possibility we allow, and bit by bit can become something we experience.
What does “sacred” usually mean? #
In everyday use, “sacred” usually means something set apart and treated with special reverence: a holy place, a holy book, a sacred object. That leaves most of the world outside it, as ordinary or merely physical. In animism the word reaches much further.
What does it mean in animism? #
The experience that everything is connected and part of Mother EarthMother Earth. The sacred Feminine pole: pure potential, from whom all the Peoples arise. The Lower-World is her realm, and she is all the realms: “The Earth is indeed our Mother.” More about this is “the natural state of being” for people who live, or lived, shamanically. “It is why indigenous people the world over describe everything as being alive, and everything as being sacred.”1
Hunter-gatherers lived as just one species in a community of species, part of an interconnected web of life, belonging to the land instead of owning it. All other species were honoured, whether animal or plant, and even the stones, the hills, the rivers and the land itself were honoured as the body of Mother Earth. “Everything was alive. Everything was sacred. Everything was Spirit.”2
The same is true of animism today: animists experience the world, and everything in it, as being alive, conscious and sacred. It is not a belief so much as an experience.
Why did we stop experiencing the world as sacred? #
Therapeutic Shamanism links the loss to 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, and to the idea that up is good and down is bad, that Heaven is good and the Earth is bad: “It is the idea that the physical world is not sacred but corrupt, and that ‘spirituality’ lies in ‘ascension’ and in ‘transcending’ the world.” It is a foundation stone of Taker society, and lies at the heart of 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.3
As our dominant culture arose, the idea emerged alongside it that withdrawing from the world is ‘spiritual’, a more ‘highly evolved’ thing to do. “Literally nobody in shamanic cultures did this, however.” From a shamanic point of view, telling ourselves the world does not matter and withdrawing to concentrate on our own development is “a psychologically unhealthy avoidance strategy, and a narcissistic avoidance of responsibility”. In shamanism, the world itself is spiritual and sacred.4
What did living this way mean for shamans? #
Shamans did not hold themselves apart from ordinary life as though the day-to-day concerns of everyday life were somehow beneath them. “Because they knew that Spirit and matter are not separate, and that everything is sacred, shamans did not withdraw from the physical world. Nor did they renounce human society.” Their role was, and still is, to be of service.5
So living as if it is all sacred is not a retreat into a special spiritual state. It points the other way: towards the physical world, other people and the other-than-human, and towards honouring them. It was the role of the shaman to honour the sacredness of the world, “and to help the rest of the tribe to do so, too”.6
Which things count as alive and sacred? #
The Stone People are all the things made from chemical elements, including the things that Taker society mistakenly thinks of as non-living: rocks and stones, water, air, sand and soil, and also things like your mobile phone. Plants, Animals and Humans are Stone PeopleStone People. All physical matter: mountains, sea, rivers, clouds, sun and stars: the oldest and widest of the Peoples. As some animist cultures put it, ‘we are just the Stone People, dancing for a while’. Read the full answer too, at a physical level.
The Stone People are conscious and alive, though in a way very different from us, so different that most modern humans do not perceive them as alive at all. Our animist ancestors knew the mountain was alive and had to be treated with honour and respect, and so too the rivers, rocks and waterfalls. And when they encountered western “civilisation”, “they knew the machete had a soul, too, as did the outboard motor, because everything is alive and conscious.”7
See Who are the Animal, Plant and Stone People?
How do we begin, if we do not yet experience the world this way? #
The practice “Everything Is Conscious and Sacred”, in Finding Your Deep Soul, involves looking around at the things in a place and allowing the possibility that each is conscious, noticing where we find that easy and where we find it harder. It is worth trying it in natural environments and in human-made ones, and noticing the difference. Usually people find it easy with animals, often with plants too, but harder with other things.
The “as if” is built into it. Even if we cannot genuinely feel it yet, the practice asks us to allow the possibility that everything around us is alive and conscious, that spirituality is not separate from matter, and that everything is sacred. Done regularly, it is “a great animist practice for gradually overcoming our modern-day separation and alienation from the living world around us”. Alongside journeying and other shamanic work, the more we do it, the more we begin to experience that the world around us is alive, “rather than just thinking that it could be”.8
How does gratitude fit in? #
Gratitude is one of the everyday ways of living in this kind of relationship. We can express gratitude towards “other people, animals, plants, the weather, mountains, your car, medicines, your home, your sofa, water, a ball-point pen – anything at all”. Doing this is a powerful way of overcoming the sense of disconnection and isolation that characterises the Fall, and helps us to feel connected to the web of life and bounty around us.
It does not need to be done often to matter: “It is not how often you do it that matters, so much as how sincerely and heartfelt it is.”9
