Animism

All things, whether sentient or (seemingly) insentient, possess an essence or a “spirit” within and around them. If you hold a stone tightly and close your eyes, you will sense a connection between your heartbeat and the “rhythm” of the spirit within the stone. In Rune work, this would apply to the Raido (ᚱ) rune. If you approach an ancient oak (or any other old tree) in the forest, you will feel undeniable connections and energies emulating from within it and its’ spirit can be accessed, communicated and interacted with. Once you recognize the spirit within everything, you will see how life starts to slowly connect and form one large, organic cosmos of interconnected spirit and matter.

Bodies of water, groves, and mountains are held in especially sacred light within our minds and they have undoubtedly immense power and essence within them. Each stream, river, lake and piece of land has its’ own personality and habits. We build connections and relationships with these environments and habits just as we do with the people we surround ourselves with, and the ancient man developed beautiful and passionate relationships with the landscape, its’ habits and the spirits of those landscapes. These days. people can easily relocate and move; more than likely their blood hasn’t yet built a connection to the soil because they haven’t experienced it for very long. I think this would apply to most people in America save the Native Americans.

It takes hundreds, if not thousands of years for organic relationships to be established between the soil and the blood of the people inhabiting it. The ancient man was locked into the cycle of his environment, as if his own body and mind were attached to its events and happenings. The patterns that were experienced outside of man were mimicked internally and recognized as one cycle. Time existed as an eternal and endless circle, not as a linear phenomenon with beginning and end. This recognition of patterns (and cycles) established the foundation for “religion” or Paganism/Animism.