The world view I approach magick (and life) from
(everything stated in this blog is based upon my own research, personal practice, and opinion)
Holistic panpsychism, when you strip it down to something you can actually say out loud without sounding like you’re about to hand someone a pamphlet, becomes pretty simple. At its core, it’s the idea that consciousness is built into everything. Not thoughts. Not personalities. Not conversations with your blender. More in the vein that every part of reality has an interior. A way it experiences being itself. It might be tiny. It might be simple. It might be nothing like you. But it’s not zero.
When you connect enough of those interior experiences together, you get something more. The same way you aren’t just one cell, or a hundred cells, or even a trillion cells, but a whole person whose consciousness emerges from all that interaction. Holistic panpsychism says the world works like that at every level. Little bits of experience forming bigger experiences, forming bigger ones still. Like layers of awareness you can zoom in and out of.
This is the part where someone always says, “So what, the rock is alive now?” in a tone that suggests they think they’ve debunked the whole thing. No, a rock doesn’t have opinions. A rock isn’t watching Netflix when you’re not looking. But… the rock isn’t empty. There’s something it’s like to be that rock. Something incredibly simple and unimaginably different, but still something. Sacking millions of those somethings together makes the world feel the way it feels.
When you take this idea and set it next to animism, the way many cultures have always understood the world, something shifts. Suddenly it stops looking like a brand-new theory. Instead, it feels like philosophy finally catching up to the lived experience of basically all of humanity prior to industrialized skepticism.
Animism says the world is full of beings, only some of whom are human. When you talk to a river or treat a mountain with respect or make an offering to a plant before you harvest it, you’re not performing a symbolic act. You’re engaging with something that has presence. Not necessarily a “spirit” with a name and hobbies and a favorite color, but a being. A something… a someone in the broadest sense.
Holistic panpsychism and animism are looking at the same world. One is using philosophy to describe the structure of consciousness. The other is using relationship. Let’s say you’re in a forest. You’re not just surrounded by organisms. You’re inside a presence. It’s in the way the air feels. The way the light hits the ground. The way the silence shifts when you move. The forest isn’t conscious the way a human is. It’s conscious the way a forest is. Your job isn’t to translate it into something familiar. It’s to recognize that a different form of consciousness doesn’t make it less real.
This is where most people struggle. We’ve been trained to think consciousness comes out of brains and only brains. Historically speaking, that’s a weird idea. That’s like assuming only guitars can make music, so if you hear drums or flutes or someone humming, you tell them they’re imagining it. Animism is a drum. Panpsychism is a hum. Occultism is the improvisation you do once you realize the world is full of instruments.
Magick makes a lot more sense in a world where everything has an interior life. You’re not pushing physical objects around with invisible forces. You’re engaging with presences. Aligning yourself with them. Communicating through symbols, gestures, and ritual acts. If you accept that the universe is conscious in some form, magick stops being supernatural and starts being social.
Think about intention. In a dead universe, your intention is just a private thought. It doesn’t go anywhere. It doesn’t matter unless you act on it physically. In a conscious universe, intention is like a ripple in a field. It interacts with everything else in the field. It’s not a command. It’s a signal. A request. A shift. What responds is whatever form of consciousness your signal touches.
That includes the spirits people work with. Not all spirits are the same kind of being. Some might be the presence of a place, the collective awareness of a forest, or river, or storm. Some might be ancestral, the layered memory of lives lived before. Some might be archetypal, built from human experience woven into forms larger than any individual. Some might be independent, beings that exist because consciousness exists in more ways than we have names for. Panpsychism doesn’t rule these out; it actually makes them easier to understand. If consciousness is fundamental, then beings that aren’t tied to bodies aren’t breaking any rules. They’re just different kinds of participants.
Because animism focuses on relationship instead of category, it doesn’t particularly care what kind of being a spirit is. It cares how you engage with it. Respect, reciprocity, and responsibility aren’t moral decorations. They’re the etiquette of interacting with a world full of subjects instead of objects. If you treat everything like an object, you eventually end up feeling alone because you’ve defined yourself as the only someone in a world of not-someones. If you treat the world like a gathering, you stop feeling isolated because you’re not an island anymore. You don’t need philosophy to feel that, but philosophy can give you language for why those intuitions feel right.
When you sit with this worldview for long enough it stops being quiet. Not in the auditory sense. You’re not suddenly hearing whispers from tree branches. It’s more that the world starts to feel like something you’re inside, rather than something you’re observing from a distance. You walk differently. You listen differently. You start noticing how places have moods the same way people do. Not metaphors. Moods.
Some places are welcoming. Some are wary. Some feel ancient, others feel young. Some feel like they’re waking up, others feel like they’re exhausted. Once you accept that these sensations might be real perceptions instead of imagination, you start forming relationships with places the same way you would with people. Not because you’re romanticizing nature, but because you’re finally treating your perception as a form of interaction rather than a glitch.
Magick is a way of deepening those relationships. It is an extension of listening. You’re not commanding anything. You’re participating. You’re speaking in a language made of gesture, intention, and presence.
Holistic panpsychism helps you understand why that language works. Animism teaches you how to speak it. The occult gives you tools to speak it fluently.
I think one of the most important parts of all this is the way it shifts ethics. If everything has interiority, then everything is part of a shared moral field. I don’t mean morality in the right and wrong, or heaven and hell sense. I mean morality in the relational sense. When you take something, you’re affecting someone. When you leave something, you’re affecting someone. When you enter a place, you’re entering someone’s presence. When you act, you’re creating ripples in a field of other beings.
It doesn’t mean you can’t live your life or make decisions that favor yourself. It just means you’re not doing it in a vacuum. It’s the difference between thinking you’re walking through an empty house and realizing you’re walking through a house where people are sleeping in the other rooms. You move differently. Not out of fear. Out of awareness.
People didn’t develop animism because they were naïve. They developed it because they were paying attention. The land behaved like a presence. Weather behaved like a presence. Objects behaved like presences. Animals behaved like people. Spirits behaved like neighbors. Reality behaved like a community. Panpsychism is what you get when you reverse engineer that experience using philosophy instead of relationship.
The irony is hard to miss. Philosophy spent centuries insisting the world was dead matter and only humans had consciousness. Now the cutting edge of consciousness studies is quietly backing away from that claim like someone who just realized they’ve been confidently giving the wrong directions for twenty minutes. There’s something deeply grounding about seeing animism and panpsychism meet in the middle. One comes from lived experience. The other comes from conceptual analysis. Yet, they still end up describing the same thing, a world that isn’t silent. A world that isn’t indifferent. A world that isn’t purely mechanical. A world that has a sort of layered selfhood.
Occult practice is a bridge between them. It’s the art of living as though the world is conscious, not just in a poetic sense, but in a literal, practical one. It’s choosing to communicate, to listen, to build relationships, and to collaborate with the presence that moves through everything.
Once you start living like that, even a little, it becomes very difficult to go back to pretending the world is just a collection of objects. The presence seeps in. The awareness shows up in the corners. The land feels different. Your tools feel different. Your magick feels different. Even your sense of self feels less like a sealed container and more like something porous, connected, influenced, and influencing. You stop being a lonely point in space and become a participant in something vast.
Panpsychism doesn’t just make the universe interesting; it makes it intimate. Animism doesn’t just make the world magical; it makes it personal. The occult doesn’t just give you techniques; it gives you a way to navigate life in a universe that’s not empty.
Once you start seeing the world as conscious, not metaphorically but actually, genuinely conscious, the whole structure of magick shifts. It stops being this thing you do to the world and starts being something you do with the world. Kind of like the difference between pushing a chair across the floor and dancing with another person. When you’re pushing a chair, the chair isn’t participating. When you’re dancing, everything depends on how the other being responds. Even if your partner doesn’t speak your language, the rhythm itself becomes the conversation.
Magick in a panpsychist, animistic worldview becomes a kind of choreography. You’re not the puppet master, you’re the partner. The world isn’t raw material. It’s a participant in your intention. You set the movement in motion, but the universe is the one who decides which direction the current will pull. You learn to feel for that current. You learn to cooperate with it instead of trying to bulldoze your will through it.
That alone changes spellwork massively. If you were taught magick in the “command reality with your iron will” style, the kind that treats the universe like a customer service desk for your desires, this worldview shifts things. It doesn’t do it with force. It just quietly and gently rearranges everything you thought you were doing. You stop seeing spellwork as an act of forcing something to happen and start treating it like a request, or even better, a relationship negotiation.
Imagine approaching a spell the way you’d approach asking a friend for help. Not demanding. Not manipulating. Just showing up honestly with your intention, offering something of your own energy, listening for what they’re willing to do in return. That “listening” is the part most people skip without realizing it. They cast the spell and never stop to feel whether the presence they’re engaging with is saying yes, or no, or “not like that,” or “you’re missing the point entirely.”
When spellwork becomes relational, you start noticing who and what you’re actually working with. The candle isn’t just wax and wick anymore. The flame has a presence. The air that holds the smoke participates. The herbs aren’t “ingredients”; they’re little packets of concentrated personality. A plant that grew under harsh sunlight has a different tone than one that grew in shade. A dried herb taken too early has a sharpness. One taken after blooming has a kind of melancholy sweetness. They respond differently when you call on them. You notice because you pay attention differently.
Sigils, too, stop being “symbols that represent my intention” and become more like vessels you’re giving a job to. You’re not forcing your will into the sigil. You’re waking up an expression of will that already exists in the field and channeling it through that form. You can feel the difference immediately. One feels like shouting into a void. The other feels like dialing a number and having someone pick up on the second ring.
Even the timing of spellwork changes. In an animistic, panpsychist world, a full moon isn’t just a chunk of rock reflecting sunlight. It’s a shift in the consciousness of the entire field. The tide inside you and the tide inside the world move in sync. When you throw your intention into that, you’re not harnessing “energy” in some vague, abstract way. You’re aligning yourself with a presence that’s already moving. You’re swimming with the current instead of against it.
Divination changes even more dramatically. Most people think of divination as decoding symbols through pulling tarot cards, interpreting runes, watching how wax spills or smoke curls. In this worldview, you’re not decoding anything. You’re conversing. The cards aren’t random. The runes aren’t random. The pattern of tea leaves isn’t random. Randomness only exists in a universe without consciousness. Once consciousness is everywhere, what looks like randomness is more like a language the universe uses to talk indirectly.
It’s a lot like when someone’s face gives away what they’re thinking even though they’re not saying anything. Divination is that. You’re reading the expressions of a world that has moods, intentions, warnings, and invitations. You ask a question, and the universe answers in whatever symbolic channel you’ve opened.
Because the universe isn’t an object to be interrogated but a presence to be approached, the tone of your divination changes. You start each reading with verification of consent rather than demands. The world responds better when you’re actually listening, not demanding certainty. Sometimes the answer is blunt. Sometimes it’s cryptic. Sometimes it dodges the question entirely because you’re asking the wrong thing. You learn to hear that silence. You learn to interpret a refusal. You learn to feel when the cards are answering and when they’re just reflecting your own anxiety back at you.
Relationship with land gets even more interesting. Once you accept that land has interiority, not just ecological complexity, but genuine presence, stepping into a place becomes stepping into someone’s home. You can feel the difference between a place that’s indifferent to you and one that’s curious, or welcoming, or irritated, or tired, or closed off. You stop assuming you have automatic rights to every piece of ground you walk on. You start asking permission silently without even thinking about it. You start offering gratitude more casually, not because you’re trying to “raise your frequency” or whatever, but because it feels rude not to.
Over time, you build actual relationships with places. The grove you walk through regularly starts to feel familiar, like a friend whose silence you know as well as their speech. The stretch of river you visit stops feeling like scenery and starts feeling like a presence you’re checking in on. You start learning the moods of the storm season, not scientifically or astrologically, but relationally. Understanding when the storm wants to be witnessed and when it wants to be left alone.
Your tools change too. Once you stop seeing them as objects, they start behaving differently. A knife you use only for ritual work starts to hold the tone of that work because it has a history of intentionality with you. It becomes a partner in whatever you’re doing. Light a candle enough times in intentional contexts and that candleholder begins to feel alert the moment you pick it up. A deck of tarot cards gets a personality over time, not a mystical spirit but an emergent tone from its countless moments of being used in relationship with you. Objects develop familiarity, quirks, and preferences.
Spirits become far less mysterious in a universe like this. Not because they stop being strange, but because they stop feeling like intruders. In a world where consciousness is everywhere, spirits are just another form of consciousness wearing a shape you didn’t grow up expecting. Some are the presence of places. Some are the accumulated memory of ancestors. Some are beings that coalesce from human intention, or emotion, or collective stories. Some existed long before humans did. Some don’t care about humans at all.
The point is, it stops being a binary question of “are spirits real or imaginary?” and becomes “what kind of presence am I dealing with here, and how do I build a relationship with it?” You’re not summoning something unnatural; you’re communicating with someone who was already there. That “someone” can be anything from a tiny, flickering personality that lives in the corner of your house to a vast, weather system sized consciousness that only brushes against your awareness when conditions line up just right.
Magick becomes less about control and more about diplomacy. Divination becomes less about fortune-telling and more about conversation. Land becomes less about scenery and more about relationship. Tools become less about function and more about partnership. Spirits become less about superstition and more about presence. The world stops sounding like static, and starts sounding like someone humming in another room. Not loudly. Not in words. Just enough that you know you’re not alone.
Once you start living in a universe where consciousness is everywhere, things change. Not metaphorically or poetically, but literally threaded through the fabric of everything. In that kind of world, spirits stop behaving like mysterious, unpredictable forces and start behaving more like… people. Not human people. Just beings with their own internal logic.
You notice pretty quickly that spirits respond differently based on how you approach them. In a materialist mindset, people try to summon spirits like they’re ordering food. “I want this. Bring this. Do this.” The result, unsurprisingly, is usually nothing or chaos. In an animistic mindset, you approach a spirit the way you approach anyone who exists; as a center of awareness, not a tool. With respect. With listening. With curiosity. With a willingness to be told no.
When you approach a spirit like that, they actually respond. They become consistent. They become steady. They show up. They show interest. Not necessarily in the dramatic Hollywood way, but in the sense that their presence becomes recognizable. Familiar. Relational.
A spirit that once felt distant becomes warmer. A spirit that once felt confusing becomes clearer. Even the ones that are enormous or ancient or fundamentally alien start to feel like you’re navigating a real relationship instead of a guessing game. You start knowing what a “yes” feels like. What a “no” feels like. What a “not right now” feels like. You stop second-guessing every sensation because you’ve learned how each presence communicates.
Some spirits communicate like a breeze shifting. Some communicate like a weight settling behind you. Some feel like the quiet alertness of a wild animal watching you from the edges. Some feel like a pressure in the air. Some feel like emotion rising from nowhere. Some feel like a thought that doesn’t come from your own inner voice/movie but still flows through the same channel. Because you’re no longer expecting communication to sound like a human conversation, you notice the subtler forms you were missing.
It’s like learning the social cues of someone whose culture you weren’t raised in. At first you misunderstand everything. After enough time together, you know when they’re teasing, when they’re serious, when they want to help, when they want to be left alone, and when they’re testing you to see who you really are.
Tools change in a similar way. A ritual blade, a chalice, a wand, a rosary, a bag of stones, a deck of cards, they start out as objects. Once you’ve worked with them long enough, especially in a world soaked in consciousness, they stop being neutral. They accumulate tone. They accumulate presence. They accumulate the memory of every intentional moment you’ve shared with them.
At first, that presence is tiny, just a little flicker of familiarity. Then one day you go to pick up your ritual knife and you feel that the knife is very aware of what you’re about to do. Not like it has a human mind. More like it has a direction. A readiness. A role. It’s as if the object has its own posture. Its own stance in the work.
Some tools become sharp-tempered. Some become calm and grounding. Some are eager, almost impatient. Some are solemn. And some… some are picky. They want to be used in certain ways and not others, and you learn that the hard way if you ignore their preference. Not because the tool will curse you or anything dramatic. More like the work will fall flat, or the atmosphere around you will feel wrong, or the tool will simply resist being used until you understand the boundary.
Divination gets even stranger, and more accurate. Once you stop thinking of divination as you vs. random chance, and start thinking of it as conversation with a conscious reality, everything sharpens. Your readings stop being vague. The symbols stop wobbling. You stop pulling “confusing” spreads, because you’re not interpreting the cards alone anymore; you’re interpreting them while the world is actively helping you speak its language.
The cards become alive with nuance. They lean into meanings you can feel rather than decipher. Sometimes a card practically throws itself out of the deck because the universe is done being subtle. Sometimes the whole reading comes in with a tone. It might be stern, gentle, amused, warning, or even sad. It feels as if the presence you’re speaking with is expressing emotion through your tools.
Sometimes you ask a question and a silence falls. The heavy silence that only shows up when you’ve asked something you’re not meant to know yet. That silence becomes just as informative as any card you could pull.
You stop doubting your intuition because the universe stops treating you like you’re interrogating it; instead, you’re part of a dialogue. Like any good dialogue, the clarity improves when the relationship deepens.
Then there’s land. Land doesn’t feel like dirt and rock. It feels like someone. Not a humanoid someone. Not a “spirit of the land” in a fantasy-novel sense. Just… a presence with layers.
A hill feels different from a valley in a way that goes beyond temperature or wind. A forest feels different from a field in a way that goes beyond ecology. A river can feel curious, or protective, or tired, or agitated. You can stand in one spot and feel welcomed, then take three steps to the left and feel like you’ve crossed an invisible boundary where the atmosphere changes.
When you visit the same land repeatedly, something even more interesting happens. The land starts recognizing you. The land begins responding when you arrive. There’s a subtle shift, the breeze changes, or the pressure in the air softens, or animals behave just slightly differently. Not big fairytale princess effects, just an awareness. Like someone turning their head when a familiar person walks into the room.
Over months or years, that recognition deepens into something like affection. The land starts taking care of you, not through miracles, but through nudges. You notice you always find the right herbs at the right time. You always feel grounded when you’re overwhelmed. You always get warned when something is off. You start having an internal map of the place that isn’t just topography… it’s emotional, relational, and conversational.
Offerings change tone too. In a world without animism can feel like bribery. “I give you this so you give me that.” Once you accept that you’re interacting with a conscious universe, offerings become more like hospitality. Like bringing a small gift when visiting someone you care for. There’s no payment. No trade. It’s gratitude. It’s respect. It’s saying, “I recognize you. I value you. I acknowledge the relationship we already have.”
The offerings themselves shift. You start feeling what the land likes. Sometimes a spirit responds more to sound than objects. Sometimes pouring clean water into thirsty soil says more than lighting a candle ever could. Sometimes the land wants a moment of silence more than any physical item. Sometimes an ancestor wants the smell of food but not the food itself. Sometimes a spirit wants you to leave something living instead of leaving something dead. Sometimes all they want is a few minutes of your attention with no agenda at all.
Offerings stop being transactions and start being conversations. “Here’s something that feels right for you”, and the universe responds with, “I noticed.”
It all comes down to relationship. When the world is conscious, magick is relationship. Divination is relationship. Spirits are relationship. Tools are relationship. Land is relationship. Offerings are relationship.
Relationship builds depth. Depth builds clarity. Clarity builds trust. Trust builds an entire spiritual life where nothing is inert, nothing is isolated, nothing is meaningless, and nothing is ever truly silent.
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