Alive with Spirits

Alive with Spirits: The Path and Practice of Animistic Witchcraft
Althaea Sebastiani
ISBN 978-1-57863-825-3
Weiser Books
$18.95

The imposing weight of a mountain, the captivating stillness of a cold lake, the whisper of magic joining in the cicada song of the nighttime woods—most Witches and Pagans find themselves deeply moved by the wild aliveness of the natural world. Nevertheless, few modern magical practices in the English-speaking world actively foster connection with it. 

In Alive with Spirits: The Path and Practice of Animistic Witchcraft, Althaea Sebastiani invites you to expand your sense of community outside the human world, and to engage spiritually and magically with the Land. By this, Sebastiani means that you should contact individual spirits in the land where you live and build relationships with them as individuals. This is an important distinction from most practices inherited from ceremonial magic and the grimoire tradition, in which you might connect with the natural world symbolically via the elements.

Sebastiani’s animism requires a reframing of magic as relational and based in a community that includes non-humans and recognizes them as people. Contacting and conversing with land spirits as individuals requires a rethinking of many common culturally-based assumptions. If this sounds a bit like decolonizing your witchcraft, that’s because it is quite similar, calling for the reader to rethink dynamics of power, community and personhood.

This is no small task, but Sebastiani is an experienced and worthy guide. Recognizing that this kind of work requires overcoming obstacles to allow the reader to see through the illusion of separation, each chapter includes exercises to help the reader develop perception of and relationships with spirits. Sebastiani also includes journal prompts for reflection to assist the reader in developing a worldview conducive to animism and working with local Land spirits.