# Animism · The Canon · The Atlas · The Congregation of Tomorrow

Source: https://congregationoftomorrow.org/atlas/library/canon/animism/ · The Congregation of Tomorrow · the Atlas · language: en
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The Canon · No. 001
Animism
Spirit-in-all-things; the substrate religion
c.100,000 years ago – present · Indigenous / Folk · Living · Universal; every inhabited continent
I. BEFORE HISTORY — c.100,000 – 3000 BCE
### How many
### Who began it
### What it is for
### What it worships
### What it holds
### What it does
### After death
### Its texts
### Its branches
### Of note
### Its timeline
- c.100,000–120,000 years ago Deliberate burial with grave goods at Qafzeh and Skhul, Israel — a boar's jaw on one man's chest, deer antlers placed with a child — the earliest widely accepted material evidence of belief in a continuing self.
- c.35,000–41,000 years ago The Lion-Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel, a carved human body with a lion's head, the oldest confirmed statue. The Chauvet cave paintings follow, c.37,000–33,500 years ago, and Lascaux much later.
- c.9600 BCE Gobekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey — monumental ritual architecture built by people who had not yet adopted farming, which reversed the old assumption that agriculture came first and temples second.
- 1871 CE Tylor coins animism and frames it as religion's earliest stage — a developmental scheme later anthropologists rejected while keeping the term.
- 1960s–present The new animism of Irving Hallowell, Nurit Bird-David and Graham Harvey recasts it not as a failed theory of matter but as a relational way of being, in which persons simply are not all human.
### Sources
Verified 2026-09-13, against these.
- Pew Research Center, global religious landscape 2010–2020 (2025)
- Skhul and Qafzeh hominins
- Lion-man of Hohlenstein-Stadel
- Smithsonian, new timeline for the Chauvet paintings
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