Pagan Animism: A Kind Of Panpsychism

The pagan nature religions that had greater prominence before the spread of Christianity were animistic, pertaining to the worship of nature or at least to the notion that nature is indwelt by spirits tied to specific parts of the external world.  This concept of trees, streams of water, and mountains having their respective spirits, depending on the form it takes, is actually distinguishable from panpsychism only in that the former has a distinctly religious bent and the latter has a focus on the nature of consciousness and matter that does not need an automatic religious context.  In light of this, panpsychism is basically at the very least a new emphasis on a historical belief held by pagans.

Pagan animism could take forms with various extents to which it attributes minds to nature.  Hypothetically, an animist might only regard one aspect of nature like trees as associated with/animated by some class of spirit, but they also could hold that literally every type of naturally occurring environmental object has its own spirit.  At this point, animism is at least partly identical with panpsychism, the idea that all matter has some degree of consciousness.  This means that animism and pansychism share the same glaring epistemological weakness.  Both entail ideas that can have neither support nor confirmation under human epistemological limitations.

No matter how many hours one observes a tree, stone, or building (if artificial items of matter are added), short of something extremely unlikely, there will be not even the slightest evidence that there is a consciousness lurking behind the matter.  The epistemological problems facing animism go beyond this, though.  Not even fellow people can be proven to have their own minds--and they move, speak, and give other indications of conscious experience!  If this is what directly watching other people react and seemingly think fails to prove, then it is even more hopeless to look to what appears inanimate in nature and suppose that it is actually conscious.

Belief in animism of any kind is inevitably crippled by this.  The metaphysical claims of animism by nature have no logical proof (as there is no way to prove that immobile structures in nature are inhabited by their own consciousnesses by either self-evidence or longer deduction) and no empirical support.  Paganism likewise is not false by default like irrationalism or relativism due to contradiction and self-refutation, but there is nothing to even begin amassing evidence for it that falls short of logical proof.  Just like the modern conceptions of panpsychism, pagan animism is at best unverifiable and at worst completely incorrect.