What is another word for animistic?

Pronunciation: [ˌanɪmˈɪstɪk] (IPA)

Animistic is an adjective that describes the belief system of animism, which ascribes spiritual or supernatural properties to inanimate objects or natural phenomena. There are several synonyms that are frequently used to describe this belief system, including spiritual, mystic, shamanic, and pantheistic. The term spiritual refers to anything related to the spirit or soul and may be considered synonymous with animistic as it regards the idea of non-human entities possessing an essence or spirit. Mystic refers to the belief system that emphasizes a direct personal experience of the divine, while shamanic relates to the practice of communicating with the spiritual world through the use of ritual and meditation. Finally, pantheistic describes the belief that the universe and all its phenomena are identical with divinity.

Usage examples for Animistic

Mr. Loutfy has come into frequent and very intimate contact with these animistic beliefs in his country, and he tells me that they are common to all classes of almost all races in modern Egypt.
"The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries"
W. Y. Evans Wentz
The way in which social psychology has deeply affected all such animistic beliefs was pointed out above in chapter iii.
"The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries"
W. Y. Evans Wentz
This is somewhat opposed to Mr. Marett's point of view, which emphasizes 'pre-animistic influences', i.
"The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries"
W. Y. Evans Wentz

Famous quotes with Animistic

  • On the authority of Aristotle... motion in the planetary world was somehow directed by the more perfect motion in higher spheres, and so on, up to the outermost sphere of fixed stars, indistinguishable from the prime mover. This implied a refined animistic and pantheistic world view, incomparably more rational than the ancient world views of Babylonians and Egyptians, among others, but a world view, nonetheless, hardly compatible with the idea of "inertial motion" which is implied in Buridan's concept of "impetus"… a momentous breaking point... which was to bear fruit... in the hands, first of Copernicus and then of Newton.
    Aristotle
  • As we now know, in the evolution of the structure of human activities, profitability works as a signal that guides selection towards what makes man more fruitful; only what is more profitable will, as a rule, nourish more people, for it sacrifices less than it adds. So much was at least sensed by some Greeks prior to Aristotle. Indeed, in the fifth century - that is, before Aristotle - the first truly great historian began his history of the Peloponnesian War by reflecting how early people `without commerce, without freedom of communication either by land or sea, cultivating no more of their territory than the exigencies of life required, could never rise above nomadic life' and consequently `neither built large cities nor attained to any other form of greatness' (Thucydides, Crawly translation, 1,1,2). But Aristotle ignored this insight. Had the Athenians followed Aristotle's counsel - counsel blind both to economics and to evolution - their city would rapidly have shrunk into a village, for his view of human ordering led him to an ethics appropriate only to, if anywhere at all, a stationary state. Nonetheless his doctrines came to dominate philosophical and religious thinking for the next two thousand years - despite the fact that much of that same philosophical and religious thinking took place within a highly dynamic, rapidly extending, order.(...) The anti-commercial attitude of the mediaeval and early modern Church, condemnation of interest as usury, its teaching of the just price, and its contemptuous treatment of gain is Aristotelian through and through. (...) Notwithstanding, and indeed wholly neglecting, the existence of this great advance, a view that is still permeated by Aristotelian thought, a naive and childlike animistic view of the world (Piaget, 1929:359), has come to dominate social theory and is the foundation of socialist thought.
    Aristotle
  • Why have some people produced Confucian and Anglo-Protestant ethics—with their mutual emphasis on graft and delayed gratification—while others have midwived Islamic and animistic values, emphasizing conformity, consensus, and control? Why have certain patterns of thought and action come to typify certain people in the first place? Such an investigation political correctness prohibits.
    Ilana Mercer

Related words: animistic approach, animistic world view, animistic beliefs, animism vs animism, animism, animist, animism in nature, anima, animal rights

Related questions:

  • What is animism?
  • When did animism start?
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