I really don't think animism is that easy of a worldview to adopt, actually, either that or I'm just bad at it
Shortly after embracing the animism worldview, and this is a true story, I had a meltdown over whether or not my soup spoon was mad at me for not asking it for permission to eat my lunch.
Witchcraft and spirituality are supposed to make you empowered, you say? Nonsense, I say. Try being paralyzed over your increasingly soggy bowl of cereal because you're too exhausted to perform spirit work to request permission from cutlery. That's real witchcraft.
And if I asked the spoon for permission, what did that say about my treatment of the bowl? Of the milk?
I think people treat animism sort of as paganism lite, like you get all the mysticism and wonder of everything being alive, without actually having to like pick a pantheon and research specific gods and spirits. Sort of like easy magic - all you gotta do is believe.
I'd actually like to propose that adopting a worldview that everything might be alive is in fact terrifying and requires a lot of forethought, integration, and personal development in order to internalize in a way that makes your life better instead of worse.
And after several years of soul-searching, experience, and a heaping dose of UPG, I've come to the following conclusions that has helped animism move away from a destructive force in my life and into a stable platform that inspires harmony and communication.
Here are my thoughts on it. Take what you will and leave the rest behind.
No, not everything is alive.
The reasons why I believe this is a whole metaphysical discussion, but no. Not everything is alive. Plastic sporks mass-produced in a factory are inert hunks of matter. There is no point in that process where the spork gains a soul.
(Mass-produced tarot decks, runes, wands, pendulums, spirit boards, etc., roll off the factory line with about as much soul as a spork does, by the way)
In fact, not even lovingly hand-crafted things are automatically "alive," not even lovingly hand-crafted magical tools.
It actually takes a lot of work to imbue life into an object, so much work that it's not easy to have happen on accident.
This ain't a post on how to alive an object, but suffice to say if you've really set your heart on it, it's not that complicated.
It's just also not really that easy to do on accident.
You can use your magical bell, wand, tarot deck, etc., for years, and they will simply never become alive.
Spiritual life doesn't "just happen" just because you interact with something a lot and involve it in a lot of energy working or magic or whatever.
You are not in a perpetual mating dance with your magical tools. They are not in a state of permanent ovulation. You are not the spirit of divine fertility. You're not going to accidentally put a soul into your tools.
Objects can appear to gain personalities and aliveness, but that doesn't mean they're actually alive or sentient.
I'm not sure if this is necessarily discussed enough, but an energy reader's (/spirit talker, same thing really) personal beliefs play a huge role in how they personally perceive the energies and spirits they're interacting with.
If I tell you, "spirits are not real, even things which appear to be spirits are just complex layers of energy that, like a computer program, can mimic life," (and you believe me)
There is a really heckin good chance that even if a fully-formed spirit being approaches you and says, "hey, I'm the spirit of that tree over there," you'll just say, wow, this pattern of nonliving energy has a call-and-response inquiry style; I can ask it questions and due to its friendship-oriented programming, it will give me responses back. Neat!
If I tell you, "spirits are incredibly real, in fact literally all energy is just a spirit in one form or another, and every object and living thing and area and concept you can imagine has a spirit within it," (and you believe me)
There is a really good chance that even if you encounter a very typical, mundane, and nonliving energy pattern , you will say, wow, this is a very precious and smol spirit, its favorite color is red and it likes being taken care of. It's alive in every meaningful sense of the word!
When, in reality, you are anthropomorphizing a nonliving object and reframing this has warm, cozy vibrations into "this object has preferences and needs," which is exactly how we get to having a panic attack over forgetting to ask your spoon for permission to eat cereal.
Which is all to say, just because objects you regularly use may gain unique energy signatures and repeatedly respond the same way under the same circumstances does not mean they are alive, any more than a baseball bat making a loud sound when it hits a baseball means that the baseball bat is alive and yelling.
Even if things are alive, it doesn't make them complex or self-aware
I just don't know how to step this out because it seems incredibly self-evident, but people really are out here acting like just because something is imbued with spiritual life it gives them the depth and mental complexity of a very advanced brain, like a pig or a dolphin or a 45yo human from Fresno, California.
You can, through willful magical action, imbue life into a tool. But that doesn't spontaneously create a self-aware, fully-formed being with a human-like mind.
Spiritual life can be as simple as a single-celled spiritual organism that eats one kind of energy and poops out another kind. Just because it's alive doesn't mean it's psychologically complex and emotionally advanced.
Even if it's complex and self-aware, that doesn't mean it has human concerns or needs
So the problem comes when people decide that all life must in some form or another reflect their own personal understanding of the human condition, so if something gains sufficient complexity it must mean it's essentially human.
Which is how we get to, "now that I've ensouled my tarot deck it will feel taken advantage of unless I take it out on a friends date and watch a movie with it, because it's a complete human trapped in a deck of cards. My tarot deck prefers Film Noir and fruit-palate desserts, and needs me to be a good listener."
(Protip: spirits can take many forms. Just because a spirit appears to you as a human doesn't necessarily mean it is human)
And because people really do believe stuff like that, they then get to, "oh my god, I wasn't performing mindfulness enough while I took my tarot deck out to the park, it's offended at my inattention and that's why my readings aren't working,"
Because there's nothing better than your spirituality making you feel like you're the problem friend desperately seeking approval from a group of cool kids who could take you or leave you.
If your animism makes you feel like you have to prove yourself to inanimate objects, it might be helpful to reconsider your worldviews.
The idea that anything could be alive is not the same as everything is alive, and even if everything is alive, the spectrum of aliveness shifts greatly from a single nonsentient repeating pattern, to bona-fide biological organisms.
Animism can be a wonderful worldview that encourages us to consider that the world around us is imbued with life. But that doesn't mean that your socks have opinions about your feet.
(inb4 "but this isn't what historical animism is, real animism was agreed to by our ancestors in a prehistoric Zoom call and there's only one right way to do it!")
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