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I happened on a scientific paper saying that believing in or sensing the spirit in an "object" was abnormal. How sad it must be to live in a world full of dead things, where everything is inanimate. Worse to evangelize it and say animist religion and fairy tales are pathological.
Animist religion is not something from the dusty past. Many modern religions have animist components, not only modern revivals of pagan and heathen religions, but continuous religions too.
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In retrospect, it was one of the formative moments in my early pagan career.
1973. A gangly tow-head is sitting on the floor of his grandparents' living room in Pittsburgh, reading a National Geographic article about that year's Winter Olympics in Sapporo, Japan.
One photo was all it took.
The organizers had commissioned a local artist to make three massive—25 foot—snow sculptures of three pertaining kami for the occasion: the kami, if memory serves, of Winter, Snow, and Ice.
But now the Olympics were over, and it was time to tear down the snow-statues before they became a hazard. ("Look Out for Falling Gods.") In the photo, a workman is making a final offering to the kami before they're broken up: he's leaning out of the basket of a cherry-picker, pouring a bottle of sake into the fanged mouth of one of them.
In that moment, a door opened in my head. Lacking contextual experience of kami, Shinto, or pagan religious practice, I somehow recognized and understood what I saw in that photo. I didn't need any explanation of what they were doing to know that it made sense, and that it was right.
Lo and behold: nearly half a century later, that gawky teen, now grown up, has become chronicler, and éminence grise, to one of the US's largest and most vibrant pagan communities.
Talk to any pagan, and you will hear about similar formative experiences; we all have them.
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