Written by What it is: A thorough, unflinching, practically grounded guide to animism as a lived worldview and working foundation for witchcraft
There is a distinction Althaea Sebastiani makes early in this book that is worth sitting with before you go any further: animism is not something you believe. It is something you embody through daily practice. You cannot think your way into a world that is alive with spirits. You have to actually begin relating to it as though it is – and then, through the accumulated experience of that relating, discover for yourself that it is.
This is the axis around which the entire book turns, and it is the right axis. Alive with Spirits is not a book of theory, though it contains serious and well-developed theoretical content. It is a book of practice, structured carefully to move the reader from conceptual understanding into lived experience, through exercises that build on each other, through guidance on developing real discernment in spirit relationship, and through Sebastiani’s unflinching honesty about what this work actually requires and what it actually looks like.