ANIMISM

Animism is the doctrine that tends to view life as taking the form of discrete spirits that were the inhabitants of the spiritual world and were the vital force of the universe itself. All natural objects and the universe  are believed to have souls and they preexisted the physical realm and weren't generated from our existence and experience in the physical world.
According to animism there was once a "mythic reality," a spiritual age when heavens and earth had not yet separated. Each entity in this world took part in the mythic reality of his divine ancestor, their lives were fulfilled and their powers maximized.
This belief is shared by all ancient societies around the world, who did not worship their gods just in its simple manifestation of the physical realm, instead, they graded them according to its powerful dominance in the physical realm that preexisted before in their mythic reality. Rocks and trees, among physical things, were the most closely approach to represent models of spirits that previously dwelt in the world of shadows, because they did not change or decay easily in their physical image, instead, they were more inclined to preserve the integrity of their identity, either in the physical or the spiritual realms. Another examples are: mountains, turtles; preservatives like salt and spices; preserved foods; the sun, moon and stars, etc.
Plato, an ancient Greek philosopher, was also a believer that anything we perceive in the physical world, in order for us to recognize it as anything at all, must correspond to some spiritual origin, or eternal, preexistent in our minds. In this sense any physical thing had a soul -a mental original that endowed it with its being and its identity.
Platonism and Jungian psychology are indebted to animism. Plato's concept is portrayed as a time when the soul lived among the Forms and learned to know of them by experiencing them directly. Plato's concept of Forms had its roots in old notions of the spiritual and animistic world of the ancestral gods.
The Forms were autonomous. In a sense they were living entities of their own conscious.
Jung's animistic concept of his philosophy is thought as the modern-day heir of animistic thinking, based in the mythological world view that still is present and alive in our unconscious world. We are still thinking, at least unconsciously, along animistic lines.