Lucky rituals : philosophical animism and semiosis

Holmes, Rachel (2025) Lucky rituals : philosophical animism and semiosis. (PhD thesis), Kingston University, .

Abstract

This thesis presents a theory of luck based on a philosophical animist worldview, which emphasizes beyond-human networks of sentience productive of ecological harmony. This harmony brings alternative orders of consciousness and agency into alignment, and is experienced as lucky states. The thesis thereby presents a musical view of the world which revives pre-modern cosmologies. However, it does so in collaboration with a contemporary research trend identified as posthumanism. This thesis privileges the food-chain as the site of animate semiosis woven together by its vested beyond-human agents. I argue that this animate semiosis becomes phenomenal during ritual practice and thereby instigates symbolic crises capable of undermining anthropocentric value systems. Luck and ritual practice, or indeed “Lucky Rituals”, are thus presented as cultural forms capable of limiting anthropocentric pathologies associated with our hyper-symbolic existence. The thesis therefore argues that ritual practice has an ecological purpose in terms of limiting anthropocentricity, and examines contemporary animist practices including Vision Fasting, Capoeira, Candomblé, Zār and Yuwipi, among others, to this end. Driven by an aesthetic interest in the possibility of an animate semiosis productive of lucky signs, this research engages with the possibility of modes of affect which transcend socialisation and are capable of reviving our sense of belonging in a sentient nature, privy to occult forms of knowledge and experience described as The Language of Birds, expressive of the superabundance of nature. The thesis can be read as a philosophical animist contribution to posthumanism in the genre of environmental humanities, which argues that we have developed tools to regulate anthropocentricity, identified herein as ritual practice. However these tools have been compromised by the modern transformation of epistemology. As such I posit that this function is only perceptible on a philosophical animist register, thereby problematizing modern paradigms which have underestimated the harmonic nature of luck.

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