All tagged Animism

Death Keeps You Honest: Decentering The Individual, A Story Of Loss / Rachael Rice

Artist, writer, and death worker Rachael Rice joins me to discuss death practice, entitlement, and honesty in our time of collapse and extinction.

This is an honest conversation, between friends. Both Rachael and I have very different lived experiences, but we align in several significant ways, especially when it comes to interpreting and navigating an extraordinarily messy time. The felt sense and scope of loss in the midst of the ongoing pandemic is shared between us. We bear witness to the wide-spread denial and full-faced First World entitlement — the “return to normal” and “I’ve-got-mine-ism” of it all, from top to bottom. It is a lot to bear. And yet, we acknowledge the time we are living through may be remembered as the good ol’ days in the years and decades to come.

The Pagan Anarchist: Animist Worldview & Dreaming As Ritual / Christopher Scott Thompson

Pagan author and poet Christopher Scott Thompson joins me to discuss the intersections between animism and anarchism as defined in his essays, and books, published through Gods & Radicals Press, including Pagan Anarchism, and most recently, The Book of Onei (an antinomian dream grimoire), and If In Ruins We Must Live (a collection of mystic poetry).

Raven Age: Animism, Conspiracism, & Songs Of Power / Rune Rasmussen

Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen, historian of religion and founder of the Nordic Animism project, returns to the podcast to discuss animism and the Raven totem flag project he, and others, have created to define and symbolize humanity's role in the climate disrupted present we find ourselves in.

Through years of in-depth research into the history and contemporary practice of animist religious/spiritual traditions the world over, Rune has unique insight into the nature of the numerous crises the world finds itself in presently. In our first discussion on this podcast, he framed the global climate crisis through the myth of Ragnarök, famously depicted in the Old Norse poem Völuspá. In this interview, I ask him to help us understand, though a mythic lens, the roots of the widespread proliferation of conspiracist thinking (endemic within the United States) in our “post-truth” era. How has modernity produced this crisis of meaning in the Western world today? What value can animism provide, not only in identifying the source of this crisis, but also in rooting ourselves in a world that is undergoing climate cataclysm and civilizational rupture?