Animism, Shamanism, and the Roots of Human Spirituality
Animism is a primordial religion. It is the belief that phenomena of the earth have a soul, animated by a supernatural power. The term has been used to describe modern Indigenous religions, and some even call it the earliest form of religion. E.B. Tylor theorized that animism was the most primitive religion, but that is a colonialist perspective. He claimed that animistic peoples were flawed because they supposedly could not tell dreams from waking life. In other words, they could not differentiate between subjective and objective reality.
Tylor placed animism at the base of an evolutionary tree of belief: animism, polytheism, monotheism, and finally scientific rationalism. To him, animism was just a remnant of an earlier stage. Darwin agreed, because apparently evolutionary thinking had to reach into religion too. Today, this framework is widely rejected. There is no historical evidence to support it, it is deeply ethnocentric, and it is wildly overgeneralized. Societal development does not fit neatly into this model. Why was Greek and Roman society so complex while remaining polytheistic? Why did China advance technologically without ever practicing monotheistic Christianity? Tylor called animism childlike, but that collapses under scrutiny.
Contemporary scholarship sees animism much more broadly as the attribution of personhood to non-human or non-living entities. People today self-identify as animists, and countries like Indonesia and Nigeria have sought recognition for animist belief systems. These traditions are every bit as complex as any other. Scholars now use animism not as a primitive relic, but as a way to trace early human tendencies toward association, relationality, and social meaning-making. Religious development, however, should not be mapped onto biological evolution. And there is a lot of thought to generate from that.
Animism coincided with humans developing the capacity for abstraction, dating back to the Paleolithic period, roughly 100,000 years ago. I do not buy the idea that it is premature compared to larger religions, not just because of ethical issues when framing people as underdeveloped, but because the classification does not make sense logically. That said, mapping religious formation can be useful to understand human development. Tylor’s rigid stages, though, are not holistic. They do not capture the complexity of symbolic life.
Burials with grave goods have been traced back to Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens from 70,000 to 100,000 years ago. Shamanism emerged around the same time, characterized by the belief that there are realities beyond the material world. These could be accessed through altered states of consciousness, either by rhythmic activities that shift brain states or by ingesting entheogenic plants.
It is impossible to know exactly when humans first experimented with psychedelics, but psilocybin mushrooms were naturally widespread during these periods, so it is highly likely humans encountered them. Terence McKenna’s Stoned Ape theory suggests that psychedelic consumption may have accelerated human cognition. Animism and shamanism were likely practiced alongside these early experiments in consciousness.
Then came the Cognitive Revolution, roughly 70,000 to 40,000 years ago. Humans exploded in symbolic thought. Language, social structures, and collective belief systems became sophisticated. Instead of being fleeting or unstable, animism and shamanism solidified into enduring frameworks. Homo sapiens outcompeted Neanderthals and Denisovans, becoming the sole surviving branch of our genus. With these more attuned minds, the opportunities for spiritual sophistication became essentially limitless. Animism and shamanism intertwined, and the belief that something exists beyond the material world became deeply embedded in human consciousness.
After this, religious systems that can formally be called religions began to emerge. During the Agricultural Revolution, organized polytheistic religions arose in the ancient Near East and East, practiced through temples and priesthoods, primarily in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Indus Valley, and later spreading to Greece and Rome, where mythology flourished. This occurred roughly 12,000 to 6,000 years ago.
Even though there is a temporal gap between the Cognitive Revolution and the Agricultural Revolution, this span is relatively short in evolutionary terms. Around 1900 BCE, Abrahamic religions arose, including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, introducing the idea of a single God in covenant with humans.
This timeline shows the roots of human spirituality. Animist and shamanist beliefs form the backbone of later religions. Without the notion that something exists beyond the material world, none of the later systems would exist. Shamanism and animism are the roots, and later religions are the intricate branches. Just because names like God, Allah, or Brahma are not present in animism does not make it wrong. All of these traditions point to realities beyond immediate perception. The meaning of this timeline has often been distorted by people trying to prove a single ideology correct, forgetting that those ideologies themselves depend on earlier symbolic frameworks.
Take the Aztecs, for example. Their religion has often been presented through a Western lens shaped by Spanish conquest, with human sacrifice emphasized because it is shocking. But this focus obscures their complexity. They were polytheistic, with over 200 gods according to some sources. These gods were fluid, connected to creation, rain, and the sun, and not strictly categorized. When individuals embodied a god, the Aztecs believed they became that god, not just imitated it. In some traditions, a person lived as a god for a year before being sacrificed. Sacrifice could also serve political purposes; many victims were war captives, and public displays reinforced social control.
The Aztecs used both a solar calendar and a 260-day ritual calendar. Every 52 years, the calendars aligned, symbolizing rebirth. Possessions were burned, rituals performed, and life renewed. Their worldview was cyclical. The world had been destroyed and reborn four times before, and they believed they were living in the fifth cycle. This cosmology is visible in their art and architecture, and the Templo Mayor, now largely destroyed, was once central to their religious life. Indigenous Aztec communities continue to exist in Mexico today.
I do not claim to have definitive answers. I am just sharing perspectives, and you can draw your own. Religious conflict, whether physical or ideological, is destructive because each belief system represents a lens in a multifaceted structure. Denouncing one lens can undermine the whole framework. Every tradition and every spiritual insight builds the human puzzle in its own way. Ignoring earlier pieces or dismissing later ones risks breaking the synthesis. The exploration itself is valuable, and that, I think, is part of what makes studying human spirituality endlessly fascinating.
Sources that helped content:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoYZ5xNyKbc&t=9s
