The word animism is couched in colonial power and patriarchy. While it has become a modern buzzword, describing someone who lives in harmony and respect with the natural world, understanding its roots gives us the power to rebirth and reclaim the word from its dark past….
Read MoreIn the UK, where I live, the ancestral spiritual traditions of the indigenous people of the land have gone. What remains has been Christianised, hence the celebration of Christmas. Many people in the UK are hungry to connect with older, Earth-based traditions that marked such pivotal moments as the winter solstice. Where do they go to find ancestral wisdom to help them connect in these ways?
Read MoreWe were once indigenous. We once had ties to the land and to each other and we knew how to live sustainably on the Earth. We knew how to look after ourselves and each other, we knew how to look after the spirits of the land, the animals, the birds and the fish. We made many mistakes and we learnt, through these mistakes, how to leave an area after it had been hunted too much or over fished. We learned how to prevent forest fires and how to regenerate an area of plants. We knew which plants treated human illness and we learned the best places to forage and the places to avoid. We knew how to work with the land. We knew which areas were sacred and those to be avoided. We knew how to survive and thrive. These memories are still there, embedded in our DNA. To access these memories is possible, when you learn how to fish or forage or how to connect with spirit. These skills are old skills and therefore accessible to all; like old hands going over ancient tools, our hands know what to do. We may be rusty but with practice it comes back and, when it comes, it does so with a deep knowing and understanding and a longing to return to what was once so lived and known. It is possible to connect to our own indigeny.
Read MoreOver time I learned that the practices of the spirits I met from prehistoric Britain were part of a wider shamanic culture and the more that I was finding out about that, unearthing that and arguing that, the more that I could see that what had been lost in this land was akin to what indigenous peoples experience in their shamanic cultures. And the more that I connected with the spirits of prehistoric shamans, the more I began to create threads linking a British indigenous shamanic tradition with the modern world.
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