Animism emerges in the deep prehistory of humanity, arising among early hunter-gatherer societies long before written records or organized religions. Archaeological traces from the Paleolithic period—such as burials with grave goods, the use of red ochre, and ceremonial treatment of animal remains—suggest a conviction that life continues beyond physical death and that humans and animals possess some enduring, non-material essence. Cave paintings and hybrid human–animal figures point toward a world understood as populated by spiritually potent beings rather than inert objects. These early practices indicate that the environment was experienced as a community of persons, some human and some other-than-human, bound together in networks of relationship and obligation.

The roots of this worldview lie not only in material remains but also in the basic patterns of human cognition and experience. Dreams, trances, and altered states of consciousness offered vivid encounters with what seemed to be separable “spirits” that could travel, transform, or appear in animal and natural forms. The stark contrast between a living body and a corpse invited reflection on an animating principle that could depart yet somehow persist. At the same time, a tendency to perceive agency and intention in wind, storms, animals, and landscapes encouraged the sense that these were not mere things but beings with whom one could communicate, negotiate, or offend.

In small, pre-agricultural communities that depended directly on animals, plants, and weather for survival, such perceptions naturally crystallized into animistic practices and narratives. Rituals, taboos, and offerings helped structure reciprocal relationships with the spirits of animals hunted, the land cultivated, and the elements endured. As settled agriculture and more complex societies developed, these early patterns did not vanish; rather, they often unfolded into nature cults, ancestor veneration, and localized deities of rivers, mountains, and fertility. Across continents—among Indigenous traditions in the Americas, Africa, Australia, Asia, and in shamanistic currents of regions such as Siberia—this sense of a world alive with spirits took on diverse cultural forms while retaining a common intuition of spiritual presence in nature.

Over time, elements of this ancient orientation were woven into later religious systems instead of being entirely replaced. Many organized traditions carry within them layers of practice and belief that treat natural forces, places, and beings as spiritually charged, echoing the older animistic matrix from which they arose. In this way, animism can be understood as a foundational religious posture: an early, pervasive way of seeing that the visible world is suffused with invisible life, and that human existence unfolds within a larger, spiritually inhabited cosmos.