You may have heard the word animism, and wondered what it meant, and why it might be relevant for ritual practitioners, especially those of us who work with people at the end of life.

Animism is a worldview, it’s a way of looking at and making sense of the world around us. It comes from the word “anima”, which is Latin for soul, and it has the same root as the word “animate”. If something is animated, it is living. Animism is a way of seeing the world that recognizes that it’s all alive, and that it’s all conscious.

In an animist worldview, living human beings are just one kind of people. There are also cloud people, and tree people, and ancestor people, and all varieties of different people. A healthy community is one in which all those different people are in right relationship with each other.

Animism is in contrast to the Western materialist worldview, which says that living human people (and particularly some more than other living human people) are people, and everything else is a thing. This view says that we are unique, and we are the ones whose relationships matter, and that the world exists around us. What that means for healing in a Western perspective, is that Western approaches often separate.

This view has 25 different medical specialists who work with different parts of our body. If something’s wrong with the body, this approach wants to break it down, find exactly the substance that’s missing and then add that. It’s a very separating, dispersing view. It’s not wrong, it brings us lots of useful information, but it’s not a whole picture. The other half of the picture is the way of looking at the world that says it’s about relationship, it’s holistic. This part of my body is related to this part of my body.

Rituals, by definition, are a holistic healing approach. It’s an animist healing approach. Rituals are about bringing parts of a system back into relationship with each other. Parts of a family, different members of a family, different members in a community, the living and the dead in right relationship. Putting us in right relationship with the spirit realm, with the land. Even building right relationship between the past, and the present, and the future.

The roots of the word “healing” are related to the roots of the word “holy” and “whole”, and ritual really brings a “getting larger” view, as opposed to separating and a “getting smaller” view.

Especially when you’re facing the end of your life, or the end of the life of someone you love, it’s too much to understand that from a small perspective. If we take it apart, it will never make sense. But if we can find a larger perspective and a larger way to make meaning, if we can connect with a larger spiritual whole, with community, with compassion, with nature, then there’s a way to find healing through that process. That’s an animist approach and rituals help us do that.