“Animism is the belief that the world breathes — Latin anima meant breath, soul, the animating principle, and animism is the view that rocks, rivers, trees, and animals all share that animating quality with human beings.”
Latin anima (breath, soul, life) came from a root related to Greek anemos (wind) and Sanskrit ātman (breath, self). Anima was the breath that animated the body — the living principle without which a body was merely matter. The animus (the rational, purposeful soul) and anima (the vital, breathlike soul) were distinguished in some Roman philosophical systems, though the boundary was not always clear.
Edward Tylor, the British anthropologist, coined 'animism' in his 1871 book Primitive Culture as a technical term for what he considered the earliest form of religion — the belief that all natural things possessed a spiritual principle analogous to the human soul. He proposed animism as the origin of all religion: from the attribution of souls to natural phenomena developed polytheism, then monotheism. The theory was evolutionary and condescending, placing 'primitive' religions at the base of a developmental ladder.
Tylor's evolutionary framework is now rejected, but the phenomenon he described — the attribution of spiritual presence to natural entities — is real and diverse. Shinto, the indigenous Japanese religious tradition, holds that kami (divine spirits) inhabit natural features: specific mountains, rivers, rocks, and trees. The Lakota concept of mitákuye oyásʼiŋ (all my relations) expresses the kinship between humans and all other beings. Australian Aboriginal peoples maintain relationships of responsibility to specific landscape features.
Contemporary ecological thought has developed philosophical frameworks — new animism, object-oriented ontology, posthumanism — that take seriously the agency and interior life of non-human entities. Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass (2013) approaches plants as beings with intentions and gifts, drawing on Potawatomi language that treats plants as animate rather than inanimate. The Latin anima breathes again in these frameworks.
Related Words
Today
Animism's dismissal as 'primitive' religion was itself a cultural product — the assumption that nature is inert material available for human use required the denial of any spiritual interiority to natural things. If a river has no soul, it is a resource. If it has a soul, it is a relative.
The ecological crises of the 21st century have made this distinction matter in practical ways. Legal personhood for rivers and forests — the Whanganui River in New Zealand was granted legal personhood in 2017 — represents a formal recovery of the animist insight: that non-human entities have standing, that they are not merely passive objects of human will. The Latin anima is not mystical. It is a claim about what counts.
Explore more words