In the small maritime village of Prčanj (Montenegro), two miraculous events occurred during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Both cases shared the similar challenge of partial animism, when the ontological boundary between things and beings was blurred. This presence of peculiar hybrid entities is inspected through interdisciplinary analysis of animism and naturalism in the early modern period. The convertibility of the ontological forms of the religious objects proved to be complementary to the transformations endured by the subjects, embodied in the tripartite structure of relational exchange between things and beings. The aim of this paper is to examine notions of behavioral animation of objects and objectification of living beings as equally important aspects of the miracle-working performativity of religious entities. Animation and naturalism in the Baroque period were, as the two cases from Prčanj reveal, rather complex mechanisms, although often mutually exclusive. Artifacts that fully embodied features of a “modern style”, especially those of naturalism and illusionism, rarely had the potential for religious animation. In this paper, the possible explanations for the existence of “ontological hybrids” in the early modern period are drawn from the art historical, anthropological, and sociological views of relational epistemology, but also from the contemporary understanding of human-robot interaction and fear-response behaviors in human beings. Rethinking the ontological positions of historical agents could contribute to the larger, on-going discussions on onto-politics.