Across cultures and eras, human beings have persistently experienced the natural world as more than inert matter, and several converging lines of evidence suggest that this animistic sensibility is close to universal. Ethnographic work on traditional societies across all inhabited continents has repeatedly found beliefs in spirits of animals, plants, rivers, mountains, weather, and ancestors, and this holds in hunter-gatherer, pastoral, and agricultural settings alike. Ancient civilizations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, India, China, Japan, and elsewhere likewise portrayed sun, moon, wind, rain, and landscapes as spirited or divine, and even where more abstract monotheisms later arose, folk practices often continued to treat springs, trees, stones, and local places as inhabited by spiritual beings. Cross-cultural databases and anthropological syntheses consistently report that some form of belief in non-human persons or spiritual agencies appears in the overwhelming majority of small-scale societies, suggesting that animistic patterns arise independently rather than by simple borrowing.

Archaeological traces deepen this picture by pushing it far back into human prehistory. Paleolithic cave paintings and ritual deposits, as well as animal burials and the placement of offerings or tools with the dead, strongly imply that early humans saw animals, objects, and perhaps entire landscapes as participating in a sacred or invisible dimension. Across ancient cultures, ritual objects and offerings are frequently found at natural sites, as though certain places and beings were recognized as spiritually charged interlocutors rather than passive scenery. These material remains do not spell out doctrine, yet they point to a long-standing intuition that the boundary between human, animal, object, and spirit is porous.

Psychological and cognitive studies suggest that this orientation toward a “more-than-human” world is not only cultural but also rooted in deep tendencies of the mind. Research on children across cultures shows that they spontaneously attribute life, intention, and feeling to clouds, toys, machines, and other inanimate things, often long before formal religious teaching. This early animistic thinking reflects a broader cognitive bias toward detecting agency and purpose in the environment, a bias that makes it natural to interpret storms, illnesses, or unusual events as the actions of unseen beings. Even adults who consciously affirm scientific explanations often slip into teleological or personifying language, speaking of nature as if it acts, responds, or remembers.

Language and ritual practice reveal how thoroughly this sensibility is woven into everyday life. Many languages grammatically distinguish between animate and inanimate entities, and metaphorical patterns frequently treat elements of nature as active agents rather than neutral backdrops. Offerings to spirits of land, water, sky, and ancestors, along with taboos and respectful practices toward particular animals, groves, or mountains, presuppose that these beings are sentient or morally responsive. In both traditional and more secular settings, people continue to talk to plants or cherished objects, to feel that certain places demand respect, and to speak of “Mother Nature” or an “angry” storm, revealing that beneath changing religious forms, the intuition of a living, ensouled world quietly endures.