Animism
Animist artist, practitioner, and facilitator Dare Carrasquillo (formerly Sohei) returns to the podcast to discuss death practice, collectivism as the politics of wholeness, trauma and the story of the self, and the proto-human matrifocal coalition and the ritual of no.
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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.
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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).
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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?
In this episode, I speak with animist counselor and artist Dare Sohei.
In the very beginning of this discussion, I ask Dare what the animism in animist counseling is. As they state on their website and elaborate on further in this interview:
Animism, briefly, is the felt sense that all matter, all bodies are inhabited with spirit, including non-corporeal bodies such as ancestors, beliefs and ideas, that exert influence on our bodies, actions and cultures. All of our ancient ancestors were animists, even though that term is more modern.
From there, Dare tells me how recognizing of our inherent relationships — whether they are secure or insecure attachments to our bodies, the land, ancestors, more-than-human life, and cultural somas (such as "white supremacy," and this thing we call "The United States of America") — can allow us to address the fundamental disconnection that is producing the crises we find ourselves in presently. This discussion gets a bit emotional for me towards the latter half, as we really dig into the deeper elements of this work, discussing trauma, death, relationship with our bodies, and ultimately where we stand in this time of trouble.
Dare Sohei is a queer mixed-race somatic educator, ancestral healing practitioner, and neurodivergent ritual animist who specializes in helping humans heal relationships with their bodies, the earth, their ancestors, and the more-than-human world. Dare has trained for many years in somatic movement practices, as a dancer/theater maker/trainer on Ohlone land in the SF Bay area, and has a long ongoing study/praxis into the human nervous system and trauma and how that relates to indigenous wisdom and medicine practices.
- Learn more about Dare’s work on their website and at The Ritual as Justice School website: https://bodyaltar.org / https://ritualasjustice.school
- The music in this episode was produced by Eli Stonemets.
