In animist oral cultures, the continuity of worldview rests above all on living practices rather than on written doctrine. Sacred narratives—myths, legends, and folktales—articulate the spiritual nature of animals, plants, landscapes, and natural phenomena, often through creation stories and accounts of ancestral beings. These stories are not told at random; they are recited in particular seasons, at specific sites, or during ceremonies, so that cosmology, ethics, and environment remain tightly interwoven. Through repeated listening, especially in childhood and adolescence, younger generations absorb both the structure of the cosmos and the proper way to relate to the beings that inhabit it.

Rituals and ceremonies provide a second, equally vital channel of transmission. Seasonal festivals, rites of planting and harvest, hunting observances, and healing ceremonies all dramatize the reciprocal relationship between humans and the spirits of land, water, and sky. Offerings, dances, songs, and invocations are not only acts of devotion but also practical lessons in how to address and honor these presences. By participating from an early age, children learn through the body as much as through the ear, internalizing animist assumptions as they enact them. Such events also function as communal reaffirmations, renewing shared understandings of what is spiritually permissible and what is dangerous.

Structured forms of teaching deepen this foundation. Initiation rites marking the passage into adulthood, as well as long-term apprenticeships under shamans, healers, or other ritual specialists, transmit more esoteric knowledge about spirits, sacred places, and ritual protocols. This instruction is often gradual and experiential, involving observation, practice, and sometimes ordeals or tests that confirm not only knowledge but a proper relational stance toward unseen beings. Elders and spiritual leaders thus serve as living repositories of tradition, revealing certain teachings only when a person is judged ready to bear the accompanying responsibilities.

At the same time, animist understandings are woven into the fabric of daily life. Hunting, farming, gathering, and household activities are carried out with explicit attention to the presence and sensitivities of nature spirits, and children learn by observing how adults speak to animals, address landscapes, and observe taboos. Work songs, prayers, and casual conversations continually reinforce the sense that the world is populated by other-than-human persons with whom one stands in ongoing relationship. Place-based teaching is crucial here: specific rocks, groves, rivers, and mountains serve as “memoryscapes,” where stories are recited on location and the land itself becomes a mnemonic map of spiritual history.

Artistic expression further anchors and transmits these worldviews. Masks, carvings, totems, sacred objects, and craft traditions embody stories of spirit-beings, clan ancestors, and mythic events, while songs, chants, and dances encode complex teachings in memorable rhythmic and visual forms. When such objects are handled or worn in ritual contexts, their meanings are explained and re-enacted, ensuring that symbolic patterns and cosmological structures remain intelligible across generations. Through this dense interplay of narrative, ritual, apprenticeship, everyday etiquette, and art, animist traditions endure as living, relational systems rather than abstract theories, continually renewed in the shared life of the community.