The Usenet newsgroup alt.religion.animism-global was established as a space for worldwide discussion of animism — the oldest and most widely distributed spiritual orientation in human history. Despite being overrun by spam and off-topic cross-posting for much of its active life, the newsgroup preserved a core of genuine animism writing: philosophical reflections on the nature of spirit, news of indigenous peoples defending animist ways of life, critiques of neoshamanism's commercial distortions, and, most unexpectedly, a cache of major public-domain texts about the fairy and spirit traditions of the Celtic world. The archive is fragmentary and noisy, but what survives is of genuine value.

The Group and Its History

alt.religion.animism-global was created within the alt.religion.* hierarchy on Usenet — a loose collection of newsgroups dedicated to religious traditions, practices, and inquiries too specific or too unconventional for the mainstream soc.religion.* space. The word "global" in its title signaled an intent to move beyond any single regional or ethnic tradition: animism understood not as the belief system of one people but as a universal substratum underlying all human religiosity.

The Internet Archive's preserved collection, mbox-dated March 2014, spans 404 posts across roughly a decade, from 2003 to 2014. Of these, only a fraction are substantive. The group was never moderated, and it attracted the full spectrum of Usenet's later decay: get-rich-quick spam, apocalyptic Christian cross-posts, and the multi-year campaign of Ivan Valarezo, who inundated the group with tens of thousands of words of Spanish-language Messianic devotionals that had nothing to do with animism. The genuine animism contributors operated against this noise.

The Community

nospamatall (Rick/Andy), posting from [email protected] and later as andy, was the group's most consistent voice for actual animism content. Irish-based and broadly read, he curated articles and academic pieces about animism and indigenous peoples: the Ogiek of Kenya's Mau Forest, the San/Bushmen of the Kalahari, Daniel Quinn's tribalist philosophy, and scholarly studies of animist epistemology. His own contributions were brief but pointed — a note on the incompatibility of English as a language of commerce with animist place-language, a forwarded discussion about the distinction between the "uni-verse" of theism and the "omni-verse" of animist practice. He was the group's custodian in the years when custodianship meant wading through spam to post something worth reading.

Noah's Dove ([email protected]), a Canadian poster, contributed the group's largest texts — ironically, from a Christian apologetics position. Posting long chapters from W. Y. Evans-Wentz's The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries (1911) and a lengthy essay on the Scottish minister Robert Kirk and his Secret Commonwealth (1692), Noah's Dove intended to warn readers about the dangers of animist and fairy belief from a Christian perspective. The effect was the opposite: in posting major public-domain texts about Celtic animism and fairy faith in full, he inadvertently preserved them for the newsgroup's archive. His texts are the group's largest body of material and among its most historically significant.

Other contributors were transient. A poster named ichidareimasu made a single call for global peace meditation on September 11, 2003. Bryan (RBNaumann), a WebTV user who posted to multiple religion newsgroups, contributed brief quotations from Prentice Mulford and Ernest Holmes. The tfadam16 account posted an extended series of "pastoral letters" — eccentric devotional missives from someone who identified as a "resurrected saint." None of these added substantially to the animism corpus.

What the Group Preserved

Animist philosophy. The clearest articulation of animism's philosophical difference from theism came in nospamatall's 2004 repost of a 2001 alt.religion.druid discussion by a practitioner named Steve: that theism posits a "uni-verse" — a single source — while animism posits an "omni-verse," a multiplicity of autonomous spirits existing together without hierarchy or singular origin. The distinction mattered to the group's participants; it is why animism cannot be comfortably absorbed into pantheism or deism.

Indigenous peoples. nospamatall tracked animism not only as philosophy but as a living reality under pressure. His posts about the Ogiek of Kenya — a forest-dependent community facing eviction from the Mau Forest — and about the Botswana government's forced removal of the Kalahari Bushmen gave the group something most religion newsgroups lacked: news of what happened to people who still practiced what was being philosophically discussed. The political and the spiritual were not separable for him.

Neoshamanism critique. A 2006 post — an essay by Jason Godesky titled "Neoshamanism is Masturbation" — argued that the Western neo-shamanic movement had fundamentally misunderstood shamanism, reducing it to an elective spiritual technique and severing it from its only meaningful context: community service under conditions of genuine calling. The distinction between authentic shamanism and commercial neo-shamanism was a recurring preoccupation of the group's genuine contributors.

Celtic fairy faith. The largest texts in the archive come from Evans-Wentz's 1911 The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries, Chapter III: "The Celtic Fairy-Faith as Part of a World-Wide Animism." At 20,896 words, this chapter — comparing Celtic fairy belief with Arunta Australian spirit beliefs, Melanesian cosmology, and African animism — represents the most ambitious early scholarly attempt to situate Celtic animism within global animist traditions. It was posted in full to the group. The Evans-Wentz chapter and the Robert Kirk material are noted here as candidates for full archival in the Celtic tradition section of the Library.

Chief Seattle's Speech. The single most significant gem preserved in the group's archive is Chief Seattle's address to Governor Isaac Stevens, January 1854, in the Henry A. Smith reconstruction of 1887 — the earliest surviving text of the speech. Posted by nospamatall in December 2007 with scholarly framing about the contested textual history of the speech, it is the voice of a Suquamish and Duwamish chief articulating an animist relationship to land, ancestors, and the dead that no subsequent romanticization or embellishment has surpassed.

The Archive in Context

alt.religion.animism-global suffered the fate of many unmoderated late-era Usenet groups: it was colonized by spam and off-topic posting long before it could develop the community density that protected groups like alt.religion.druid or alt.religion.wicca.moderated. The genuine contributors were too few, and too spread across time, to constitute a community in the way those groups did.

What the group produced instead was a curatorial act: a single dedicated poster (nospamatall) maintaining, over a decade, a record of animism as a living practice and a living politics — not safely historical, not comfortably exotic, but present, embattled, and insistently real. Against the backdrop of spam and devotional flood, that act of curation is itself a kind of spiritual practice.

Colophon

Introduction written for the Good Works Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, March 2026. Source: Internet Archive, alt.religion.animism-global.20140315.mbox.gz.

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