The Healing Power of Animism

As the Dagara have shown, spirits exist everywhere and in an array of forms. By acknowledging and engaging with these spirits, we can align with these energies to uncover an array of healing capacities, and deepen our spiritual understanding of ourselves and our world. This is the potent premise of animism, humanity's most shared and ancient system of spirituality.

In this guide to Dagara animism, Mark Bockley outlines the animistic practices and beliefs he learned firsthand by working for decades with members of the Somé lineage of Burkina Faso. He explains how, for the Dagara, everything is alive and worthy of respect and engagement.

He describes how he was chosen by the spirits and underwent a rigorous apprenticeship and initiation with Martine Somé, sister of bestselling author Malidoma Patrice Somé.

Revealing how to integrate animism into one's spiritual practice, the author explores the rituals and initiations that shape Dagara life, including divination, healing practices, birth rituals, and transformative death rites. The result is a reawakening of our unique connection to our own lineages, allowing us to attune our relationships with all beings, which is the basis and essential power of animism. The author looks at the importance of essential ancestors and elemental spirits in depth, through the lens of divination methods and ritual practice.

The antidote to the spiritual amnesia of the West is reawakening to animistic consciousness. This guide offers a reconnection to the vibrant living spiritual traditions that inherently reside within us and restore our kinship with our own ancestral medicine.