I still can’t believe Sophie Strand saw—and responded to!—my DM. Me! With my 150 subscribers. Her! With her 37 thousand. I’m humbled.
Out of well-founded humility/fear—“Who am I to request an interview from her? Why on earth would she bother responding, let alone honoring, that request?”—I waited until the day before leaving for the conference/retreat where she was scheduled to speak. And she got back to me! Quickly! We sat beside each other at the welcome dinner; she recognized my name when we were introduced. And to be honest, after she was put in the uncomfortable position of interviewing a couple business bros the next morning, I think she was relieved to have a reason to leave.
“Are you finding this interesting?” I leaned over and asked. We were listening to a panel discussion about how to improve the world by (checks notes) being a good boss.
“No,” she said, sounding impossibly bored.
“Do you want to go talk about animism now?”
“Yes.”
For those who don’t know: read Sophie Strand! She will cut you open. She will myceliate your wounds. She will weave your tattered edges back into the exuberant earth. Read her!
My massive delay in publishing had a few causes. A baby born in June, a move across town in July. But also, if I’m being honest: I’ve been scared! This format—interview—is brand new for me. There’s the technical ignorance—how to transcribe? Manually, all myself? With an AI-assist? Hire someone? (that one, in the end)—but also: listening to it made me want to hide. I didn’t prepare or speak as well as I’d like; I thought maybe the whole thing needed to be chopped into bits, the just-Sophie bits, and reconstituted.
Thanks to the friend who listened and assured me that it works. That it is good, and worth sharing, as-is (though I did edit some).
I’m sorry I kept Sophie’s wisdom from you for so long. Here it is, in all it’s recorded-on-a-phone-in-a-dining-hall glory. (Another attendee stopped, listened, then, at Sophie’s invitation, sat at our table. You’ll hear her introduce herself.) I highly encourage listening to this one! Though I did clean the transcript and add thematic headings for easy reference/quoting, and for those who prefer to read.
And an update on her health! She mentions in this interview that she got a terminal diagnosis just weeks before. She got a second opinion, and that diagnosis evaporated. (Though she’s still not better.)
Without further ado, the (transcript of) the interview:
On a scale of 1-10, how much joy do you feel in your body right now?
Chad: Let’s start, Sophie. I’ve got interview questions for you. On a scale of one to ten, how much joy do you feel in your body right now?
Sophie: Pass.
Chad: Fair.
So, you wrote a book about bodies and health, and I also get the sense that you would rather not talk about bodies and health!
Sophie: Yeah, it’s interesting. You write a book about illness, and then you’re asked to talk about illness. Our culture wants us to cannibalize our worst experiences and make them our identity.
Simone Weil says that what we pay attention to we pray towards. And I worry that if all I do is talk about illness, I’m praying towards illness. I’m a little superstitious about that at this point.
Chad: And not just superstitious! That question, “on a scale of one to 10, how much joy do you feel in your body?” — that was the title of one of your posts. And you talked powerfully about the nocebo effect.
When you’re told that this sugar pill will benefit you: placebo effect. It benefits a bunch of people, even though it’s a sugar pill! Same thing, if you’re told that it has all these side effects, then you end up getting those side effects, even though it’s a sugar pill. And our entire medical system—
Sophie: It’s bad theater.
Chad: It’s bad theater, exactly.
Sophie: It reinforces our mistrust in experiences that could be amelioratory.
Chad: Yeah, but yeah, I also understand. I listened to another interview you did about this book, The Body is the Doorway, and you talked about sort of not wanting to become your illness.
I’ve heard this from other people too. Like you’re supposed to become whatever that thing is, but you are like that thing personified. For some people, it’s like, “I’m a canceled person on the internet,” right? “Now all I get invited to talk about is being a canceled person on the internet,” where you’re, you’re whatever condition personified or reified and you’re supposed to monetize it.
Sophie: Yeah, we live in a very, very scared culture. In a traumatized nervous system, you need to make sense of your environment so you can find safety. So you wanna be able to label people and things.
I think that our over-identification with certain identity markers and our ways of simplifying other people into how they classify themselves is… I think it’s almost symptomatic of how traumatized our culture is. We wanna be able to simplify our environment so we understand who’s safe and who’s not safe, but that’s not how anyone works.
Chad: A traumatized environment, but also the like the simplifying feels like part of the sort of reductionist, scientific, …
Sophie: Yeah, absolutely. And also, we’re evolving all the time. We should have different identities every day. To only have one identity is to have only one way of traveling and that doesn’t feel very evolutionarily viable.
Chad: I like that.
So my first questions here were about body stuff. We can skip right past them.
Sophie: We can totally talk about them.
How has your (individual or extended) body been delighting you lately?
Chad: Yeah, sure.
How has your body been delighting you lately? Your individual body, but also as you talk about beautifully in the book, your extended body. Like the ecosystem of which you are a part. I’ll let you answer for both or either.
Sophie: Yeah, it’s hard. I received almost like a very serious, perhaps terminal diagnosis in the past two weeks. So, it’s a very difficult…
Like, that’s like a fun question.
And I think there are ways in which this book represents a fossil of who I was. I think I’m in a place in my life where…
How does my body delight me?
I’m glad I’ve been here for as long as I’ve been here.
I’m glad that I have so many connections.
That I’m able to drink coffee.
That I can go on a run still.
I also know that could be obsolete really soon.
I don’t know. I mean, I’m happy to be materially present. Today.
Chad: I’m glad you’re materially present.
Sophie: Yeah, but longer than that, I have no idea.
Chad: Like you don’t know how long you will continue to be materially present.
Sophie: Yeah, or like, or what will continue to be possible. I’m super, super glad that I’ve been able to live independently and live on my own for a while and to really be self-sufficient. I don’t know how much longer that will last, either.
Sophie: I’d ask that you not put the diagnostic information in, maybe edit that out, just because I’m not sharing that super widely until I have more information.
Chad: That’s fine.
Sophie: Thank you.
Chad: Yeah, totally.
No normative bodies (Chad’s weird body shit)
Chad: I don’t know if there’s space for this, but I also think it’s, I don’t know. You’re always supposed to talk about what’s going on with you. But the able-bodied interviewer…
There’s a way that I tell myself the story, or I am told the story, of being able-bodied. And that we sort of downplay the way that everyone’s body has glitches.
The frontlines of evolution
Sophie: Yeah, there’s no such thing as a normative body. We’re all different. And in fact, that’s how evolution works. Every hand began as a glitch that was perfectly adapted to a shifting ecosystem.
I always say that people who are really sick are on the bleeding edge, the front line of evolution. Like, something’s gonna work at some point! You’re an experiment.
But everyone’s body is, you know—there’s no climactic organism. If evolution is working, it means that each person is a little bit different. And that can be a match or a mismatch with the environment.
Chad: Yeah. The biggest weird body shit for me over the past two years has been: I tore my cornea like two years ago. I woke up in incredible pain. And then it just… Never. Heals? My eyelid fuses to my cornea while I sleep. And then when I open my eyes in the morning, it re-tears.
Sophie: That’s really intense.
Chad: I mean, it’s nowhere near as intense as what you’re going through.
Sophie: There’s no trauma Olympics. Everyone is dealing with lots of stuff.
Spiralic time
Chad: It’s certainly not as all-consuming. But there are weeks of time where I can’t see clearly out of one eye.
Sophie: It sounds like it’s also a spiral. It’s not linear, “sick—fix—better.”
Chad: For sure.
Sophie: It’s more like: “sometimes okay—maybe not,” you know? And it’s that spiralic time that I think is really important to remember with illness. Like, it’s not a straight trajectory up.
Chad: Yeah. I went to a doctor about it initially, and it was like, “try these eye drops.” And I tried the eye drop for like, a year. Thinking “maybe I’ll make it long enough that the cornea will heal enough that my eyelid stops fusing to it. And then I won’t have to think about this anymore.” But after a year of that, and it just kept happening every few weeks, I was like—Okay. We’ll go back and see more doctors.
It’s a very small version of what you’ve gone through.
Sophie: Yeah, it’s the wound that refuses to close or fully heal.
Chad: Right. So anyway, I just—
Sophie: Well, I am sorry you’re dealing with that.
Chad: I’m not saying it to like—
Sophie: No, I’m glad, no.
Chad: I thought it would be fun to try to invert the like—
Dignity in the details
Sophie: I always appreciate it.
People are so uncomfortable hearing about what’s really happening. And I’m always like, give me the particularities. For me the dignity is in the details. Especially when people are sick. Like, tell me the nasty stuff. Tell me what’s really happening.
Chad: I like that.
Sophie: So, thank you.
Chad: But I also want, like I said, I want to give you a chance to not be the sick person in the interview.
Sophie: I appreciate it. Thank you.
Unintentional wellness grifters
Chad: To wrap up the health stuff conversation: there is so much in The Body is a Doorway that I just love. I love your insight into our wellness-obsessed culture right now. There’s so many wellness grifters and wellness coaches and maybe even unintentional grifters, where they really believe their own bullshit…
Sophie: Oh, I think a lot of them are unintentional.
Chad: …and the way we recreate the harms of dogmatic Christianity or dogmatic religion via new age “manifesting” kind of language. You address all of that so beautifully.
Sophie: I’m glad that it connected.
Chad: So there’s lots there that we could dig into, but…
You’re a troubadour?
…you are a troubadour animist.
Sophie: I guess I am.
Chad: That’s been your bio for a long time. Where did it come from? Tell me especially about the troubadour piece.
Sophie: Troubadour comes from the romance tradition of the Middle Ages, especially in France, kind of the Arthurian cycles of romance.
I have always been obsessed with romance culture. And when I say that, I don’t just mean romance books. I mean these storytelling cycles with fantastical elements—with dragons, with quests, with love, with relationship, with mystery. Kind of like the magical realism of the Middle Ages.
Those are the kinds of stories that I wanna tell. Fantasy stories, love stories.
Don’t pigeon-hole me
I think I put “troubadour” in my bio when I was becoming more well-known for nonfiction. It was a way of saying, “Actually, I like to write fiction, and love stories, and fantastical stories.”
Troubadours were also a last holdout of the Bardic oral tradition, which is people who would travel, collect stories, recycle certain elements. You would travel by way of storytelling. And so, it’s also kind of a way of saying I’m a traveling storyteller.
I’m collecting stories. I’m putting them together.
And the animist part, of course, is my orientation towards the prickly, weird aliveness of the world and an acknowledgement that the aliveness of a stone or a tree or a mountain is inherently different than my version of it.
A common root system in lyricism
Chad: On the troubadour piece, I had thought that troubadours were specifically musicians, but it sounds like it was a much broader category.
Sophie: Storytelling and music didn’t used to be separate. They were part of the same tradition. I mean, lyric poetry is the origin of the epic. The original storytellers had a lyre; they would always accompany themselves with some kind of music. Oral storytelling traveled by way of mnemonic devices, melodic devices. You remembered long stories by coupling with them with certain body movements, with musical motifs. There was a greater emphasis on the musicality of your speech because you were speaking it to an audience.
Chad: And that was how you made your voice carry farther, right? Before microphones?
Sophie: Exactly, and you had to, of course, also delight your audience. So, you wanted it to be entertaining. I always say that music and writing have a common root system in lyricism.
So, the troubadours were songmakers, but the songs were stories. All of the original Arthurian legends were originally like Arthurian songs.
Chad: Have you tried to resuscitate or reinvent that style of oration at all as you’ve traveled?
Who taught you story
Sophie: I come from Southern storytellers. My dad’s family are deep Arkansas, Alabaman storytellers who sit around a table at a holiday and exchange their wildest stories of their life. So, I come from a storytelling tradition. On the other side of my family are deeply boisterous Irish storytellers. And I have Middle Eastern relatives too who also have a big storytelling culture. So as part of my family, there’s this idea that you have to keep the stories of your ancestors alive, you have to make your audience laugh, what are the stories that are memorable, which stories do you pass down.
I think in my own work, it’s important for me to understand that there is a musicality to words, that they are essentially breath. They are embodied when they work well. I have been the audiobook reader for my books. This was not by choice, but I have taken it up. And I think that it means that I have to be careful about vocalization and about the melodic line of a piece of writing. It has to be speakable.
Orate your work! (to the place/being that inspired it)
Chad: I’ve heard a lot of authors recommend reading your work out loud as part of the writing process.
Sophie: I think it’s great. In classes I’ve taught, when I have people create some kind of ecological parable or story, I say: read it to the place or being that it was inspired by. See how it responds. Be open to a no. Be open to a bad reaction.
Chad: I love that. I’m curious if there have been any times when, I don’t know, the birds didn’t like it.
Sophie: Yeah, absolutely. Maybe you go to a place, and you’re reading aloud a piece, and a giant storm kicks up. I’ve had that happen. And I take that as a sign. Like, “Oh, there’s something here.”
Some things aren’t for sharing
Sophie: I also think that we live in a culture where we’re encouraged to eat up other beings and turn them into profit, turn them into product, but that there are stories that we’re not supposed to tell. That we’re supposed to experience, have inside of us, and then maybe not share. And so sometimes when people are talking about animal stories or encounters they’ve had, I say: do you have permission to tell this story?
Chad: From the animal that they interacted with.
Sophie: Or like, is this an okay story to share? It opens up the relationship.
Chad: It reminds me of Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer.
Sophie: Ah, yes. Holy Robin.
Define (your) animism
Chad: I kind of want you to define animism again as we start talking about it.
An oversimplification; species humility; a compost heap
Sophie: I mean, I think “animism” is an oversimplification of a biodiversity of different belief systems the world over. And that to create a homogenizing universalism is always a problem—to say that there is an indigenous animism or there is an animism.
I think it refers to a common thread of species humility; an understanding that we’re not the only beings that are alive. Not the only beings that have feelings and stories. And that we live in a world, a kaleidoscope, of voices and perspectives. And that belief looks different as it’s rooted in different environments and cultures.
My animism is not indigenous. It is a weird compost heap of my upbringing. I was raised on the Chautauqua Tales and a kind of Japanese Zen Buddhist animism—my dad had traveled to Japan and worked inside Zen Buddhism for many years, an ex-Buddhist monk. My mom was part of a kind of environmental, pagan goddess orientation. They were both really involved with environmentalists and ecologists. So my animism was of a strange variety growing up.
Since a child
Chad: But you’ve had it since you were growing up.
Sophie: Oh yeah. I think I learned the name for it post-college. I was like, oh, I guess people call my belief system “animism.” But that’s always what I’ve believed.
I mean, I grew up with animals being people to me. And not in any kind of superficial way. It was very real. We had lots of animals growing up, and my parents were very careful that I knew that they were just as alive, and they had tons of opinions.
Chad: It’s remarkable, in our culture, to have been so steeped in animism.
Chad’s entrypoint into animism
Sophie: I was lucky in lots of different ways. What was your entry point into animism?
Chad: For me, this is much more recent; seeing this and being like, “oh, that really resonates.” I grew up a zealous young earth Creationist; very in the Christian fold.
It took seven years from the time when someone really threw a wrench into my Creationism to get to a point where I had fully deconstructed it and could talk about it as something that happened, where it didn’t still feel like an open wound. A seven-year journey to close the chapter on Creationism.
And then in early 2022 or 2023, I listened to Richard Powers on the Ezra Klein show. Ezra Klein says to him, “You’ve described yourself as becoming something of an animist, but to me you don’t seem like an animist in the traditional sense. You seem like a bit of a scientific animist. I wonder if you could reflect on that.” And Powers had this very beautiful reflection. And then I went and listened to Power’s book, The Overstory, and it was incredible.
No supernatural truth claims needed?
And then: this longing I had heard about from people—from Ezra Klein himself, but also people that I follow online and people I know—this longing for a religion-like force in their lives, but not being able to convince themselves to believe supernatural truth claims.
Sitting with Richard Powers, I was like: I don’t know that we need the supernatural truth claim! There’s enough going on. Just with everything happening in the natural world and our place in it—we’re already part of this larger narrative. There’s already this grand mystery to be swept up in. Just look around and notice! You are already swept up in this grand narrative.
Cult-leader vibes
So, it was sort of that. And then I had friends joking that I had cult leader vibes.
Sophie: Always a good sign.
Chad: And I was like, if I want to use this power for good, what would be the thing, what would be the name for the movement? This, like, scientific animism that Richard Powers exemplified—that was it. I was like, that’s what I want to talk about and think about. That’s interesting to me.
I went to a conference, DWeb Camp, in 2023. Decentralized Web Camp, but I didn’t want to talk about the web. I wanted to talk about animism. I led a discussion called Scientific Animism: Let’s Invent a Religion. A bunch of people showed up. Someone else had read Braiding Sweetgrass; became the co-host; was like, you gotta read Braiding Sweetgrass.
So, this is within the past two or three years for me.
Sophie: It’s a huge paradigm shift, wow.
One does not digest the other
Chad: Something else I want to talk about: you talk about syncretism in The Body is a Doorway. This idea of: the new paradigm does not digest the old paradigm. They sit in uneasy conversation, or uneasy—
Occupying the same body
Sophie: Endosymbiotic Theory, yeah. They’re occupying the same body, but they’re not digesting each other.
Chad: Endos—?
Sophie: Endosymbiotic Theory. It’s how plants have chloroplasts and how we have mitochondria. Lynn Margolis came up with it, and she was mocked until it was found to be absolutely true. Multicellular life is because of this merger between two simple cells.
Chad: Gotcha, and neither-
Sophie: Fully digested the other.
Chad: Exactly. And that’s sort of the posture that I take toward Christianity at this point. I still go to a Mennonite church—there are many versions of Christianity that would be totally disgusting to me. You don’t have to look hard to find them. It’s most of it out there. But there’s also a version of it that I can still sit with and allow to be in that syncretic relationship with animism.
Sometimes people will be like, “my Christianity has a little like witchcraft mixed into it” or whatever, and I’m like: One doesn’t have to digest the other. It doesn’t have to be that your Christianity has digested your witchy impulses or your animism, and the animism doesn’t have to fully digest the Christianity. They can just be; they can both continue to exist.
To hold paradox
Sophie: F. Scott Fitzgerald says the mark of true intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing thoughts in your head at once without going insane. Paradox is always part of every wisdom tradition. Can you hold paradox? Can you hold two things at once that sometimes oppose? It must be good for us ideologically, spiritually, to hold paradox.
Chad: I like that. I think of it as almost two lenses or two sets of glasses through which to look at the world. You can move back and forth between them, but you don’t have to like—
Sophie: Fuse them into one, one eyeglass. Yeah, I think it’s really good to oscillate through different perspectives. You miss something in one and then you see it in another.
Imagining the rituals of scientific animists
Chad: Alright, more animism. Let’s go to a more imaginal, fantastical space. This is where you like to hang out.
When I first started thinking about scientific animism, I was like: if I were an author, I would write a novel where people are doing scientific animism. I was curious what it would look like if it had the society-organizing power or force or presence as something like Christianity in the United States. Like, what do scientific animists do? What are their rituals?
Do they get together every week? What do they do when they get together? Does it look sort of like Christianity, where you sit and you listen to someone talk? Or does it look like the Sangha of Buddhism, where you all sit in a circle? Or is it something totally unconsidered by me so far?
I wanna put to you that thought experiment. You are a novelist. Imagine that world for me.
Queer sci-fi re-imagining of Tristan & Isolde
Sophie: I think I have. I think it’s a book I just wrote actually.
Chad: Perfect, haha.
Sophie: I just wrote the first book in a series which I call my queer sci-fi re-imagining of Tristan & Isolde, which is an old Arthurian lay, a romance, of the Troubadour tradition. It’s based on a colonized planet that has been abandoned some 30,000 years before, because it is a place where horizontal gene transfer happens at an increased rate, where humans merge with the world very, very quickly. And not through reproductive selection, but through accidental gene transfer.
Chad: This is delightful.
Sophie: And there’s a theocratic eugenicist state that believes in genetic purity, and a much older—you could label it pagan—civilization that is more of a scientific animism, which believes in the inherent erotic life force of this world that eats everything and changes everything. I based a lot of the religious structure of the competing animist religion on Shintoism in Japan.
Shintoism
Chad: Do you wanna say more about Shintoism?
Sophie: Shintoism is really an, it’s an idea that there are like tutelary deities of every piece of land, of stones, but also of technology.
Chad: Tutelary?
Sophie: Yeah, it means they are like place-specific. That every place you go, everything you touch has a different totemic identity, a spirit.
There were also tutelary land deities in England. When Christianity came in, they syncretically merged with Christian figures and became saints. But they’re really land deities of certain places: The goddess figure who embodies a spring becomes a Saint Bridget; you know? There’s this evolution. I often call them stowaways—it’s a way of continuing their existence through oppressive regimes. They kind of like, put on a disguise.
There are the kami in Japanese Shintoism: spirits of the forest, of certain places, of shrines. There are also technology kami; there’s no purity there. I think about that a lot.
So I definitely was playing with these ideas in this book.
Too queer to sell; life-force from writing
I hope it— it’s way too queer to sell right now. It’s almost been bought a couple of times and then people are like: ooooh.
Chad: I feel like too-queer-to-sell shouldn’t be a thing.
Sophie: It’s a real thing. It’s a real thing right now.
Chad: I guess right now. Would it have sold five years ago?
Sophie: Yeah, probably. In fact, there was a publisher about to buy it, and then Trump published that list of words. And every word described my book. And they were like: actually, no! But they had been drawing up the contract.
Chad: Are you gonna try to modify the book to sell in the current market? Or just move on, sell a different book for now?
Sophie: You know: I’m a writer. Not a writer of one book. The joy I get is from creation.
So, I wrote that book. I have to trust the timing for it will be correct at some point. (And then I’ll write the second two, because it’s a series.)
But right now, what I need is life-force. Which means I need a new project. So I’m doing something else.
Chad: Yeah, no, selling a book gives no one life force.
Sophie: Yeah, and it might sell eventually. My agent has it; it’s out there. And I’ll just trust—
Chad: It sounds fantastic.
Sophie: Thank you. I do think it’s for the scientific animist. It’s not for a mass audience. And I think that is a little bit of the issue.
Chad: I think that’s sort of my—
Grow the movement with smut
Chad: How do you make the scientific animists the mass audience? How do we grow this?
Sophie: I think with smut! With dragons, and smut, and fairy sex. What are people reading? The top-selling books are romantacy. You want the dog to eat the pill? Put it in cheese. You want people to have a more expanded, animistic worldview? Put it in cheese. Put it in smutty dragon stories. What I’m writing right now is very much a dog-and-cheese kind of vehicle. I’m writing a book that is very much like: maybe you should consider _______. You know?
Would it fix anything, though?
Chad: My background deconstructing Christianity brought me to this place of feeling, like, epistemological nihilism about the effects of any religious system.
If you look at the history of the reductionary scientific approach; empiricism—
You can’t be epistemologically nihilistic about
Chad: (Tons of faults of empiricism and reductionist science! Actually, whenever I ask people if they’re a scientific animist and I sort of, “do you believe in science?” All the people I’ve asked have had way more of a problem with science than with animism. Animism? They’re like: sure. Science? They’re like: let’s put in some caveats.
So, go ahead and put in all those caveats, but also—)
Phones would not be possible without empirical science. We have these physical objects in our lives; we have medical interventions that did not exist before; I wouldn’t have children without modern science. They are science babies.
Sophie: I love that. I love that qualification.
Chad: So, like, science and this version of empiricism have given us tangible things. We can see the march of it within our own lifespans. The cameras now are way better than they were 10 years ago. There’s a way that you can’t be epistemologically nihilistic about science and empiricism.
But religion feels like much more of a mixed bag.
Buddhism & empire
Chad: In the West, we sort of fetishize Buddhism, like it seems so wise, and if we were all Buddhists, if we were a Buddhist society, surely we’d all be better. But then you look at Buddhist societies, like—where are they genociding the Rohingya right now? I forgot what country that is, but they’re a Buddhist-majority country!
It feels like any religious orientation has a way of being metabolized by the larger society and being used to whatever destructive ends the powerful people wanted in the first place. Christianity has certainly been used in that way; it’s been a tool of empire. But Buddhism gets co-opted by empire and by the powerful in the same way.
To me, animism seems obvious, in a way. It just feels like seeing the world for what it is. But if it grows as a movement, as something with a religion-like force or as a societal organizing paradigm, I’m curious if you think there’s a straight line to a better world there.
Sophie: I am always suspicious of ideas of progress and evolution and betterment, especially because I’m in a process of decay and degeneration and we all die and every species goes extinct or becomes something else.
“Religion” vs “Spirituality” is a matter of class
Sophie: In the anthropological paradigm, the difference between spirituality and religion is one of class. Religion is always: you have the luxury to create scholastic culture, liturgy, ritual. Because you have enough time and money.
Magic, or spirituality, is called the little tradition. Which is: it’s the stuff that works.
You’re sick, you’re trying to feed your family, and so you oftentimes are more interested in spells or things like miracle healing. Things that work. Less ritual, less performativity, less scholasticism and hierarchy, and more folk tradition.
And so, to the extent that there’s any difference between spirituality and religion, it’s one of class. It’s a class distinction.
I need what works
Sophie: So I’m always suspicious of religion because it’s how class ingests spirituality. For me, especially as someone who’s really sick and poor, I’m interested in magic, not creating systems or rituals, because I don’t have time for that. I need what works.
Give me the magic beans. Spit my eyes. Lay hands on me.
Those are the traditions, the anarchic traditions of the peasant class, who are trying to make meaning on a day-to-day survival basis. That’s what I’m interested in.
You really only have super hierarchical religious institutions when you have accumulation of goods and some kind of stable grain. A stable grain is one where— Potatoes aren’t, because you don’t know where potatoes are. Tax collectors can’t come and dig up your potatoes because they don’t know where they’re hidden. Grain they can see so they can tax it.
No religions without taxable surplus
And when you have taxable grain and accumulation of goods, and you can begin to use a person to produce that for you, and then take the things they grow away from them, you have, what is it called? A landed gentry. And when you have a landed gentry, they have enough time to create religious texts, to write down the folk traditions. And then you have the illiterate peasant class who are actually producing that grain and that accumulation without actually partaking of it. And they’re doing what is oftentimes considered the incorrect version of religion.
So, for me, I don’t know if I’m ever gonna be a religious person. I’m always gonna be a spiritual person. Like, I don’t know, I want what works. And yeah, in dark nights of the soul, I have tons of rituals and prayers, but usually what comes with me is just kind of a raw howl. It’s the basest stuff.
The animism I’m interested in is one that isn’t rule-based, that doesn’t become systematized, that’s patchy and heterogeneous, that shifts according to needs. One that wouldn’t have ritual, that wouldn’t be attached to class, would be always feral, anarchic, and ever-changing.
Let’s talk about rituals, vis-à-vis the little tradition
Chad: I think that there is meaning that people get from those sorts of rituals. I’ve been curious if a scientific animism that emerges from our current society, if it did have—
I feel like people want ritual. People want ceremony. People want that sort of organizing process. And also a way to embody knowledge. Like, if we believe that other beings have a consciousness that is not inferior to our own, but is just a different way to sing the song, how do we remind ourselves of that in an embodied, group/community way? I think that there’s power in those kinds of things.
Sophie: If you look at the most radical spiritual leaders, who lead underground movements—
The Aramaic illiterate storyteller
Sophie: Like, let’s go to Yeshua, the Aramaic illiterate storyteller who becomes co-opted by empire. Becomes Jesus. His only two rituals, if you actually look at the earliest versions, are:
Share food. Communally share food. And:
Heal everybody you meet. Without charging them money for it.
That’s it. Those are your rituals.
No actual liturgy. That all comes way after he dies. That’s his followers being like, “Actually we’re special and you’re not, because we know this stuff.” But he just said:
Don’t do it in my name.
Don’t pretend like I’m the leader.
Share food.
And it’s obviously a response to the Roman empire, which had created bad loans in city centers and taken away people’s lands. People couldn’t support their families. And so he was saying, “Okay, empire’s controlling food? Share food. Empire is making you sick? Heal each other.” That’s it.
I mean, I think that the most radical thing you can do is
share food
grown locally
with people
and try to offer a little ease in people’s lives, because we’re all hurting in lots of different ways right now.
Ritual machines
Sophie: I’ve been invited to so many different ritual containers, people trying to create ritual. And it feels very artificial to me.
We’re given a lot of rituals!
We are born and die. Those are rituals. They’re the most sacred thresholds that people pass over. There are tons of people dying right now. We could do dying better. We could do dying and illness better.
We could do menstruation better.
Our bodies are ritual machines! We don’t have to create fake ritual. We’re given it.
We could honor that. And work with it more.
So for me, I wanna die better. I wanna be involved in babies being born. Be they animal babies, human babies.
But I’m not super interested in getting a bunch of white ladies together wearing feathers to do a moon ceremony. Nah.
Baked into our larger body
Chad: That’s exactly who—
So I’ve been organizing locally in my area. I’ve got the scientific animism Substack, but I’ve also been curious to sort of LARP scientific animism as a community thing.
The thought experiment was: what would scientific animism look like if it were something approaching more formality? What trappings would it have? What sorts of things would people do? And rather than write it into a story, I was like, what if I invite friends, or the people near me, to sort of co-imagine and LARP scientific animism with me? Let’s do some Live Action Role-Playing of what we think this thing could look like.
Sophie: I mean, neo-paganism is very much like that. And we’ve lost track of the seasons. Just like there are rituals baked into our body, there are rituals baked into our larger body. There are seasonal shifts, there are astronomical shifts. For me personally, eclipses are really big deals. When eclipses happen, I’m like, this is a thing. This feels big to me. I’ve decided this is a big deal.
What does an eclipse mean?
Chad: What does the eclipse symbolize? If it’s a metaphor for something, what is it for?
Sophie: Well, either the sun is covering the moon or the moon is covering the sun. So for me, it’s a revealing or it’s a conscious obfuscation. And they’re also cyclical, which I like. They’re a way of punctuating time. Like tying a stitch. It stitches you into another time period. It stitches two times together. And you’re like, how does— what did this pocket of time contain? What were its themes? It’s a meaning-making device.
My favorite is comets. Because comets oftentimes will take, like, 10 million years to return to earth. And I’m like, what did they see? Last time they passed earth? Did they see mammoths? Were we even here? I think of them as cosmic sewing needles, stitching us together.
But of course, all of this, for me, is a very personal way of storytelling and doesn’t necessarily translate to someone else.
Morphic Resonance (the hundred monkeys theory)
Chad: I guess to go back, there’s part of me that wants to evangelize this worldview, animism, because it feels like how the world actually is. And it feels like it will be helpful in some way to the other creatures that we are currently in the process of murdering. And to go back, do ideas work in that sort of linear way? Where you convince more people—
Sophie: Morphic resonance, right? Where the hundred monkeys on the island learn how to break the coconut. Do you know about this idea? There’s this idea, many times shown to be true, they show these monkeys how to use a stone tool to open up a coconut. And once they reached a critical mass on one island, even though there was no communication with the monkeys on the other island, they all learned it.
Chad: Wait, say this again.
Sophie: It’s called the hundred monkeys theory.
Chad: You teach the monkeys on one island how to do the thing—
Sophie: And when they reach a critical mass, suddenly all the monkeys know. It’s also how viruses work.
Chad: On an island far away, the other monkeys figure it out?
Sophie: There are tons of theories for how this happens. It kind of complicates our idea of selfhood, consciousness. You know Rupert Sheldrake?
Chad: No.
Sophie: My homie, I love Rupert. Rupert Sheldrake is this great scientist who posits this idea of Morphic Resonance, which is like: there are these patterns and fields of behavior that are bigger than individuals, and if a field changes, all the individuals within it will change. And it’s not so much like—
My favorite is, I think in Toronto, they made these garbage cans that were supposed to be completely immune to being taken apart by raccoons. And raccoons are not social learners. They don’t learn something and teach another raccoon how to do it. They’re greedy, apparently. I love raccoons. But one raccoon learned, and then they all knew. And they all knew how to break into the trash cans.
Chad: And it’s not from watching that one raccoon. It spread too fast and too far.
Sophie: Too fast. It’s also how viruses work. And I’m not saying like this is a true theory, but it does complicate our idea of how things happen, which is like one virus mutates, learns how to disable a cell, and then all over the world, the viruses all know. It’s a quorum-sensing almost. Which is like when bacteria produce chemicals and all kind of coordinate their behavior.
But will growing the movement fix anything?
Chad: This is making me think of a couple of things, but I wanna go back to the question I posited. Does convincing more people, or getting more people on board with animism, change society’s relationship—
Sophie: Maybe! If you teach a hundred monkeys how to open up the coconut and suddenly a hundred million monkeys know how to open the coconut… I don’t know!
I have to believe that things are catching. Things are viral. They shift, they move.
And I also care— I want people to love what I love. So that they don’t hurt it.
I orient towards life not as an expert but as a lover. Like, I don’t really know. I’m not sure how to answer your question.
Chad: That’s fair. That’s fair.
How to hold (uncomfortable) difference
Chad: So, the other question that I had written down, that the morphic resonance and whatnot was making me think of is: there’s a humility to your writing and to your orientation that I really appreciate. To engage something like morphic resonance, or in your book, you tell the story of the golden rose and the nondescript, totally-not-an-elf who handed it to you in the bar. It’s a really good story!
But there’s a way of sitting with uncertainty that attracts conspiratorial types.
I’ve also noticed as I write about scientific animism online and talk about it at parties, it brings out the kooks. There’ll be people who show up in the comments who have real out-there ideas they’re excited to talk about.
Have you found that your holding of mystery, holding of uncertainty, invites these same kinds of conversations? How do you engage when people— ?
Need for certainty feeds conspiracy
Sophie: I think that the impulse for conspiracy is the impulse for certainty.
I would say I was up there on stage [earlier today] with two conspiracists. I mean, I’d say the economy, money, is a conspiracy theory.
Conspiracy is saying there is some grand unifying theory of something that explains everything. It’s a desire for a comprehensive worldview.
The difference between a politician and the conspiracist is just, like, capital and cultural legitimacy.
So, I would consider someone who comes and tells me that like the earth isn’t alive, that it’s just brute materials, as much a conspiracy theorist as someone who’s like, “Ancient archeology! The master race created everything!”
Which to shut down
I think anybody who’s talking about ideas comes up against some that feel really wacky. The ones I don’t like are ones that are eugenicist and racist and human-supremacist. And those ones I try and shut down pretty immediately.
And, you know, eco-fascism is super real. And it’s a growing force.
And there are people, an accelerationist movement in environmentalism, which is like, “break it all down so that we can rebuild everything.” And I’m like, “Well, I’m a disabled person and if we break it all down, I’m gonna die.”
So I think that I’m always trying to think about, when people come to me with their crazy ideas, that I have my own crazy ideas. But I try to make sure they’re not harmful. And if they are, I try to make sure to be clear that we’re not aligned, that I’m not part of that crew, that camp.
Epistimelogical humility
Sophie: But also, I’ve been wrong about so much in my life. Repeatedly. I’ve had the balloon punctured on a belief system, or a way of traveling, so many times that I can’t pretend like I could not have that happen again. I have to let myself be wrong repeatedly and have my mind changed. I would like to be open. If something happened tomorrow that totally ruptured my belief sphere, I wanna be open to it. Like if a reptile came to earth and it turned out all the Reptilians were right a,nd it was super obvious, I would want to not be so blinkered by the pride in my belief system that I wouldn’t be able like to change and pivot.
For me, it’s also: we’re told that bad things happen to bad people, or if you get sick it’s because you didn’t do the right thing. Or if something bad happens to you, it’s because you’re out of spiritual alignment or something. And I think that I’ve seen so many things happen in my life that feel so random and weird, to me and to other people, that I’m like: I don’t know anything.
The eternal return of the “sickness as moral failing” mind-virus
Chad: Yeah, I feel that one. The persistence of the “if you are sick, you did something bad” thinking across religious persuasions. This is going back to your book, The Body is a Doorway.
To me that’s one of the most harmful things that I saw in Christianity, the “if you’re still sick, you didn’t pray hard enough” kind of thing. It’s so harmful to people, so upsetting. And then people slough off their Christianity, and they pick up some New Age sorta things, and replace the word “God” with the word “universe”—
Scientism is the new Christianity
Sophie: Or they replace it with “science.” I mean, science is the new Christianity.
Not real science. Science is like not a monolith, it’s a way of asking questions, it’s a verb. But Scientism, as a collection of dogmas that are taken to be true without evolving and constant updating, is a kind of new Christianity.
And within it is the idea of Healthism, which is that if you’re sick, it’s because you haven’t optimized your body, or done enough. And if you drink more celery juice and pay money to the right boutique doctors and change your life, you’ll get better. And that wellness is an individual possession you have to defend and pay for, rather than, like, an entangled network of sedimented oppression.
I don’t think it’s just religion. I think that this paradigm has infected everything.
Because we’re scared. When something bad happens to someone, we wanna be able to explain it so it doesn’t happen to us. It’s so much easier to say, like, “They’re a bad person. I’m a good person; it won’t happen to me.”
Then it does.
Chad: Yeah, I mean, I feel like maybe humans have always had a bad relationship with this idea, “why do bad things happen to good people?”
Like the book of Job, the oldest book of the Bible and it’s the same conversation. Bad stuff happens to Job and his friends are like, “You obviously did something to deserve this. What did you do?” And he’s like, “I didn’t do anything.” It’s an ancient conversation.
Update the harmful, not superficial, parts
Chad: Where I was going with it before was: I feel like when people slough off their Christianity and pick up some new worldview, part of the goal should be to get rid of the most harmful pieces. But there’s a way that they just replace superficial pieces of it. And keep the harmful parts! And I’m like, why?? Why did you do that??
Sophie: Hannah Arendt says something really interesting in her book, Responsibility and Judgment, about Nazism. She says that a culture that has dominant mores, or set of beliefs—be they religious or cultural—is perfectly ripe for fascism. Because you just pick up one and exchange it with the other overnight, and everybody’s just ready. And you have to have a personal, bespoke imperative; you have to figure out what you personally believe, totally apart from any religious or spiritual— What will you not abide by?
She says the only defense against fascism, against being overtaken by these cultural, religious violences, is to not outsource your belief to a dominant structure. You can, but you also have to compare it against a subjective personal compass. What do you really believe, totally apart from any type of religious structure, any paradigm, any big unifying myth?
And it doesn’t have to be something that someone else believes. It’s not something you give to someone else. It’s what you personally cannot abide by. There are certain things in my life where I wouldn’t ask anyone else to live in that way, but I certainly believe them and they orient me. I will not exchange them out for something else that someone else gives me.
It feels ecologically contextual too, because it has to do with where you are, how you were raised, what plants you saw, what animals you ate or tended to. Highly specific.
Instagram tho, smdh
Chad: We’ll end with your relationship with technology. You make a good bit of your living on a platform that is owned by some startup, Substack. You’re also active on Instagram. And Facebook? All the things. You’re on all the places.
I’ve been mostly off of Instagram for years. I love not needing to be on Instagram. I am really privileged that I don’t need to be for the most part.
If I want to grow my audience on Substack, the fastest way to do it is to also be on the other platforms, but then: I don’t want to be consumed by it. Feeling the pull of the app. (I actually deleted the Instagram app when I realized that my main emotional trigger to open Instagram was a vague feeling of dissatisfaction with my life. Like, “Oh, that’s what makes me want to reach for Instagram? Dissatisfaction?” And it only amplifies it.)
So, what is your relationship with all of these things? You’re sort of dependent on them.
Sophie: Impure. Fraught. Impure and fraught.
You know, I do think some of these social media platforms originally worked to kind of undermine dominant gatekeeping. I was not breaking into publishing as a young queer woman writing radical shit. Not getting published or making any money off of it. And I posted it for free online. Gave it away for free. And then it went viral (because I didn’t try to make it viral).
How to make viral internet content
People are always like “how do you make something go viral?” And I’m like, “By not trying.” Like, if you try it will not work.
Chad: “Make good shit that people enjoy.”
Sophie: No, like, “Write about what you care about, give it away for free. Don’t think about it too much. You can’t game this shit.”
Old internet nostalgia
Sophie: And then I got a book deal retroactively. Like, I had the audience first and then the book deal came. (And then I was able to pay for my medical bills.)
One of those things where the gatekeepers of the academy did not want to let me in. They had to, when they saw that I had an audience.
So it’s: when it works well (which is very rarely these days—)
I did come of age at a time when—
How old are you?
Chad: 38.
Sophie: So, similar. I came of age in, like, early internet. Fan fiction boards. Early, weird, feral internet. Where it was still like you could meet really weird people and make incredible connections. I think the algorithms and simplification and aggregation of different sites is making that less and less possible these days.
But that I did really like. I met some of my closest, weirdest friends and collaborators that way. And because I shared my writing imperfectly online, people changed my mind too. People sent me references, they critiqued me. I was forced to defend my positions, change my positions. There was a way in which being online on these platforms initially kept me really spry, thinking on my feet, changing. And I just don’t think they’re operating like that anymore.
Does your online time pay you for your offline time?
My friend—who is also an amazing animist educator—David Abram was watching me do all these talks and stuff online and he was like, “You should only be spending time online if it’s feeding your real days. If it’s literally paying for you to spend most of your life outside, doing the things you love. But if you are taking that precious caloric energy/time and spending it online, the equation is off.”
And that was a really big deal for me. I was like, “I have to shift the equation.” My goal is to be—and it’s a position of privilege, and I’m not in it yet—my desire is to have the type of career where I am not dependent on being an avatar, or a brand, or online. And I hope every day I can move more towards that. But it’s really hard to make money and pay bills.
Chad: Yeah, to get to a point where you can just, like, write books and publish books and make your money off—
Sophie: Yeah, the publishing industry has completely collapsed. There are no publicists anymore. You don’t make any money off of book deals. You really have to be scrappy. I’ve been really scrappy! But it requires a lot more public-facing self-monetization than I am comfortable with.
Turning trauma into videos
But yeah, if you want to grow your Substack, Instagram’s the way. Like, I’m not gonna be purist about it. Absolutely.
I mean, I watched in realtime as some video reel I did went viral. And it sold books; it made me money. And I watched it, and I was like: I don’t like how this is rewiring my dopamine. I don’t like how I’m now like, “Well, if I make another video of me talking about a shitty part of my life, if I just keep turning my trauma into videos—”
Chad: “I’ll sell more books.”
Sophie: “I’ll sell more books,” yeah.
Be satisfiable
Sophie: But the big thing I’m also asking myself is: what is enough? I want to be satisfiable. People are always like, “You should have a team. You should hire an assistant because you obviously can’t answer all your emails.” And I’m like, No, I don’t want to make this more complicated and bigger. I want to make it as glitchy and homegrown as possible. I don’t want it to grow bigger. I want it to be just fine where it is.
Chad: Find balance with it in smallness.
Sophie: If I have enough money to pay my medical bills and my rent, I’m happy.
Chad: Yeah. Good word.
Books & authors
Chad: All right, you recommended some books to me yesterday. Can you give book recommendations, or author recommendations?
Sophie: I loved Right Story Wrong Story by Tyson Yunkaporta. He’s great. His first book, Sand Talk, is amazing. His second book, Right Story Wrong Story, is even better.
If you want the pill in cheese—if you want big questions about humanity and about evolution and our ability to relate to each other with any kind of kindness—I love the Red Rising series by Pierce Brown. It’s sci-fi. It’s fantastic.
What else? I love the work of Andreas Weber. Scientist, philosopher. He wrote Matter & Desire. He’s a good friend. He’s amazing.
There’s so much. Lynn Margolis’s writing about endosymbiotic theory. She wrote a book called Symbiotic Planet. It’s one of my favorite books.
Thomas Halliday’s book, Otherlands, is a story backwards through deep time.
Those are some favorites.
