The Original Instructions are the healthy template for being human: how to live in right, respectful and non-hierarchical relationship with ourselves, with each other and with the other-than-human world, as animist hunter-gatherers lived for hundreds of thousands of years. They are not commandments or a sacred text but a way of being, learned above all from the Animal, Plant and Stone PeopleStone People. All physical matter: mountains, sea, rivers, clouds, sun and stars: the oldest and widest of the Peoples. As some animist cultures put it, ‘we are just the Stone People, dancing for a while’. Read the full answer and translated afresh for the times we live in. The phrase comes from indigenous North American peoples, and Therapeutic Shamanism uses it with that debt acknowledged.
Where does the phrase come from? #
From indigenous North America. The ecologist and indigenous scholar-activist Melissa K. Nelson edited the collection Original Instructions: Indigenous Teachings for a Sustainable Future (2008), and the botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer describes what Nelson calls our ‘Original Instructions’ as “ethical systems that govern relations with the human and the more-than-human world”.1 The phrase is not a Therapeutic Shamanism coinage. In this approach it names the core of animism itself, and the Original Instructions are among the near-universal animist teachings that make up Core AnimismCore Animism. The culture-neutral core of animism: the aspects of animist teaching that are (near-)universal rather than specific to any one culture: the Original Instructions, fierce egalitarianism, respectful right relationship with the other-than-human people, equal respect for the masculine and the feminine, treating all as sacred, living as a Leaver rather than a Taker. The parallel of Michael Harner’s ‘core shamanism’, and its necessary root: shamanism is a branch of animism, so a culture-neutral shamanism has to be grounded in a culture-neutral animism, with no borrowed regalia required. More about this. See Who is Robin Wall Kimmerer, and what is Braiding Sweetgrass about?
Are they a set of rules? #
No. The Original Instructions are a template for living, not commandments, the kind of thing every other being already follows without being told. Bears just get on with being bears, turtles hatch knowing how to be turtles, oak trees get on with being oak trees. Humans are the exception, with a unique ability not to know who we are or how we are meant to be, a unique ability to become lost.2 The Instructions are what we have lost track of.
They are also a template, not a museum. The question to bring to any modern problem, from a personal dilemma to the climate crisis, is what the healthy hunter-gatherer answer would be: not in the specific cultural choices that suited their time, but in the principles that guided them, translated into a form that fits today. Copying their way of life would miss the point; applying the principles to new conditions is itself what they did.
What do they include? #
Above all, they are the template of a healthy Adult, and of the healthy stories that every culture needs underneath it if it is to stay healthy. They are bound up with living in right relationship and reciprocity with the other-than-human Peoples, taking what is needed and giving back; with equality, held fiercely, with nobody set above anybody else; and with humility, because among the PeoplesThe Peoples. The Animal People, Plant People, Standing People (the Trees) and Stone People: our elder kin, of whom the Human People are the youngest and least wise. A family, not a hierarchy. Read the full answer humans are the children, “the youngest and least wise”, which is a matter of family, not of rank.3 None of these is a rule to be obeyed; each is part of the pattern every other being already lives by. See What is right relationship and reciprocity?, What does ‘fiercely egalitarian’ mean? and What does it mean to become a true Adult?
What is the story of the Original Instructions? #
A story told in different versions in many shamanic cultures. The Animal People grew furious with the humans for the way they were harming 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, and planned to wipe them out. The Plant People and the Stone People, far older and wiser, heard of the plan and called a great council of all the Peoples. There they told the Animal People that they understood their anger, but that killing the humans was forbidden, not in accordance with Spirit, since the humans were children who had lost their way, and needed teaching and help. So every kind of animal, plant and stone took on a healing gift and a teaching, its part of the healthy way to live, and agreed to give it freely to any human who asked.4
Where the story first came from matters less than its message, which is ancient. Like all good stories of its kind it is mythosMythos. Metaphorical, symbolic, felt truth: the truth of art, poetry and shamanic journeys. Shamanic reality is mythologically true, not literally true, which is why journeys are interpreted, never taken at face value. More about this, not logosLogos. Literal, factual, analytical truth: the truth of facts you can check. One of the two modes of truth, alongside mythos. More about this. It is not literally true, but it carries something important.5 The same story, read for the healing gifts every being offers, is in Who are the Animal, Plant and Stone People?
What does the story mean? #
It works on two levels. Many people hear it as an explanation of why Lion, Eagle or Oak Tree has the healing and teaching qualities it has, and that is not its main point. Its point is that modern culture thinks of humans as the wisest and cleverest, “the top of the pyramid, and actually we’re the stupidest”. There is nothing clever about a species that knows perfectly well it is destroying the environment its survival depends on, and carries on.
And it says where to turn. Knowing we have lost our way, humans have turned for six thousand years to other humans, spiritual teachers, gurus and religions, and look where that has led. The teachers the story turns us towards are the Animal, Plant and Stone People, and that is the heart of animism. See What is the myth of human supremacy?
Who kept the Original Instructions? #
In animist cultures, the shaman held a central part of the work, measuring the human community against the Original Instructions and right relationship, and keeping the tribe in respectful relationship with the Animal, Plant and Stone People where they lived. Since the Fall, animist knowledge has been persecuted and very nearly wiped out, and it has survived because some people kept it alive through dark times and passed it on. Present-day animist peoples, though most now farm or herd and are touched by Taker thinking, have been the wisdom-keepers through those times, and the gratitude owed to them is immense.6 See What are refugia, and how can we become one?
How are they recovered today? #
By remembering, and by asking. The author Daniel Quinn named the long erasure of the time before civilisation the Great ForgettingGreat Forgetting. Daniel Quinn’s term for the mass amnesia by which Taker culture erased the knowledge that humanity ever lived any other way, dismissing almost all of our story as ‘pre-history’. Read the full answer, and its cure the Great RememberingGreat Remembering. The counter-movement to the Great Forgetting: the recovery of the buried animist knowledge, already underway. Therapeutic Shamanism understands itself as part of it. Read the full answer, which means remembering that it does not have to be like this, because once it was not. Returning to the Original Instructions, the healthy template for living respectfully with the other-than-human, and starting to apply them again is “not rocket science”. See What are Taker and Leaver cultures?
In practice that means learning to reach the actual Lower-World, wild nature free of human middle-world things, and asking the Animal, Plant and Stone People for their teaching, as the story says.7 It also means using the Original Instructions as a measure, for a way of life, a spiritual practice or a story, by asking whether it is in line with them or not. The Shamanic Journey and the First-Steps course are where to learn to journey.
Are they the same as Sherri Mitchell’s Sacred Instructions? #
No. The Penobscot author Sherri Mitchell’s Sacred Instructions (2018) is her own teaching, from within her own Wabanaki tradition. Therapeutic Shamanism does not speak for her people, and the two are not presented as the same thing, though they share some concerns. See Who is Sherri Mitchell, and what are her Sacred Instructions?
