Elf Arrows, Land Spirits, and Spiritual Illness

Folk Medicine from an Animist Perspective

Autumn Moonrise on the Author’s farm

There is a nearly insurmountable gulf between our modern way of understanding the world and that of our more animist ancestors. To ancient people and modern indigenous people, the world was and is understood to be a web of souls, alive and in relationships of interdependence. Souls might not be the best word, freighted by theological baggage as it is. Indwelling consciousness may be better, although I do want to imply a metaphysical dimension here. Spirits. Everything is a person, plants, animals, rivers, clouds, mountains, even whole ecosystems are persons such as forest spirits or mountains spirits. Personhood is even extended to the no longer living, such as ancestors and the dead in general, as well as entities that never were alive, such as the gods and angels, fairies and the myriad of other non-physical entities that populate the folklore and mythologies of people around the world. Humans are considered to be just one part of a web of relatio…