“The Fall” is Paul Francis’s name, borrowed from the psychologist Steve Taylor, for the birth of what we call civilisation: from around 4,000 BC, the rise of cities, kingdoms, patriarchy, armies, hierarchy and organised religion. It sped up a break from animism that had begun with domesticationDomestication. The process by which, in domesticating other species, we domesticated ourselves. When dated precisely, Domestication begins with the Neolithic era, before the Fall proper, which begins with the first city-state cultures around 4000 BCE. What rewilding works to undo. More about this, from around 11,000 BC. It is not a fall from grace through sin but a fall out of right relationship, and because it is cultural rather than part of human nature, we can recover from it.
What is the Fall? #
The birth of ‘civilisation’, and all that came with it. “The birth of ‘civilisation’ is in reality ‘The Fall’.”1 It is the period from around 4,000 BC that sees the emergence of city-based societies, kingdoms, nations, empires, patriarchy, hierarchy, mass inequality and organised religions.2 The culture that grew from domestication and the Fall is what Therapeutic Shamanism calls Taker cultureTaker culture. Daniel Quinn’s term for the totalitarian agricultural, owning, surplus-driven way of life that takes everything and leaves nothing, and calls itself ‘civilisation’. Cultural, not innate, which is why it can be changed. Used interchangeably with ‘Fallen culture’. Read the full answer, or Fallen culture. See What are Taker and Leaver cultures?
Where does the name come from? #
From Steve Taylor’s book The Fall. Paul found that its overall arguments “rang true at a very deep level.” Some have questioned the book “for romanticising hunter-gatherer lifestyles”, and to a certain extent that criticism is fair.3 See Who is Steve Taylor, and what is his idea of “the Fall”?
When did it happen? #
In two stages. “The Neolithic era, which started around 11,000 BC, when we began to abandon hunter-gathering and take up agriculture instead, saw the beginning of our domestication. This accelerates with The Fall, which began around 4,000 BC”.4 Agriculture reached different places at different times: “Exactly when a particular hunter-gatherer culture was destroyed depends on where in the world you are talking about.”5
What changed? #
Power, and how we see ourselves. “For the first time in human history we see one group in society seize power and oppress another. Men seize power and oppress women, and patriarchy is born.”6 “For the first time ever in human history, we see the emergence of large armies”, and, cut off from Mother EarthMother Earth. The sacred Feminine pole: pure potential, from whom all the Peoples arise. The Lower-World is her realm, and she is all the realms: “The Earth is indeed our Mother.” More about this, “the religions that begin to emerge around this time are ‘sky religionsSky-religion. The vertical, hierarchical reordering of the sacred that the Fall installed, governed by the spell ‘up is good, down is bad’: transcend the body, escape matter, purify upward. The conditioning Therapeutic Shamanism works to undo. More about this’.”7 Within us, too, something shifted. Using ‘left’ and ‘right’ brain as shorthand for two ways of perceiving the world, “In order for the Fall to happen, the left hemisphere of our brains had to dominate and suppress the right hemisphere”, which Steve Taylor calls “the ego explosion”.8 See What is the myth of human supremacy?
Was it sudden or slow? #
Both. Its roots go a long way back, but its pace has quickened. We are “the culmination of a long, slow fall. It started off slowly, way back in time, then gathered pace, almost imperceptibly at first, but gradually accelerating.”9 But once the civilisational stage began, it moved fast: “Once it starts, the Fall is very swift indeed.”10
Does the Fall still affect us? #
Yes, deeply. Power-loss and soul loss “are diseases of ‘civilisation’, of the Fall.”11 The Fall is “a long and dark night of the soul for humanity as a whole”.12 And the deepest layers of wounding in us “carry wounds which still affect us to this day, the wounds of domestication and the Fall.”13 See What did the Fall do to us? and How do we reconnect with the other-than-human world and heal cultural Power-loss?
Is it a story of sin, or of a lost golden age? #
Not in the usual sense. “If there is any “sin”, it is in having turned our backs on living in right-relationship.”14 And “the answer to the problems we face is not more shaming, more messages about sin”.15 Nor is the time before painted as perfect: our hunter-gatherer ancestors were certainly not living in paradise, and this is no romantic dream of one.16 See Isn’t the Fall just “noble savage” romanticism? and What was hunter-gatherer life really like?
Can we recover from it? #
Yes, because it is not our nature. “The violence and destructiveness of the modern, Taker culture era is cultural, not innate. And that means that it can be changed. Knowing this is ‘the great remembering’.”17 Recovery does not mean going back: “We simply cannot go back. Instead, we have to find a way forward.”18 See Can modern humans recover an animist way of seeing and undo domestication?
