Paul Levy is a writer who popularised the word “wetiko” for a sickness of greed and consumption that spreads from mind to mind like a virus, a word he took from the Native American scholar Jack D. Forbes, who used it for the spirit of exploitation at the heart of colonialism. Therapeutic Shamanism uses the word too, and understands wetiko as a real middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer spirit that possesses people, drives 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, and was once kept firmly in check by hunter-gatherer peoples and their shamans.
Who is Paul Levy? #
A writer on the psychology of collective sickness. His best-known book is Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil (2013). He comes to the subject as a Tibetan Buddhist practitioner and an artist, and once managed the C. G. Jung Foundation’s book service, and his book is written in a strongly Jungian way.1 He is clear that he did not coin the word. He took it from Forbes, and credits him for it.
Levy is one of the two writers who brought the word into wider use, alongside Forbes.2
Where does the word “wetiko” come from? #
From the Algonquian-speaking peoples of North America. Forbes, a Native American scholar of Powhatan-Renape and Lenape descent, wrote that “Wétiko is a Cree term (windigo in Ojibway, wintiko in Powhatan) which refers to a cannibal or, more specifically, to an evil person or spirit”.3 In his book Columbus and Other Cannibals, he widened the idea of cannibalism to cover the whole colonial project: “Cannibalism, as I define it, is the consuming of another’s life for one’s own private purpose or profit.”4
Forbes also argued that this sickness is learnt, not part of who we are. “The ‘norm’ for humanity is love. Brutality is an aberration. We are not sinners by nature. We learn to be bad.”5 That is very close to Therapeutic Shamanism’s own view of the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer.
Why borrow a word at all? Shamanic cultures always had names for this energy, but “because we killed our shamans in the west we have lost our terminology, so we have to adopt words from other cultures (as we did with the word ‘shaman’ itself).”6 Using the word well means remembering where it comes from. See What is the Fall?
What does Levy mean by wetiko? #
A mind-virus, a psychic epidemic that infects individuals and whole cultures and drives them to consume life without giving anything back. For Levy, its great trick is to stay hidden, and it does this through projection: we see the sickness in others and not in ourselves. His answer is to turn and face it. “The part of us that thinks we don’t have a mad part is itself our mad part.”7 And once it is seen, it begins to lose its grip: “seeing a demon takes away its seeming autonomy and omnipotence.”8
Levy has a phrase for what wetiko does to the self, “‘malignant egophrenia’, the ego unchained from reason and limits”, and he observes that people wholly taken over by it can become “‘not in touch with their own humanity and therefore can’t see the humanity in others.’”9
How does Therapeutic Shamanism understand wetiko? #
As a spirit, not only a state of mind. “Wetiko is a parasitic spirit or thought-formThought-form. A human-created living being: an ideology, religion, corporation, conspiracy theory or platform that has taken on a life of its own. Genuinely alive, but soul-less in the deep sense: natural things alone are full of Soul. More about this. It is highly destructive and is motivated by greed, selfishness and excessive consumption. It infects people like a virus, literally possessing them.”10 It belongs to the middle-world: “Wetiko is a middle-world spirit. It does not exist in the Upper or Lower Worlds.”11 This is one more reason Therapeutic Shamanism is careful about middle-world work. See What is the middle-world?
It is also the engine of Taker culture. Wetiko “tells the host that they are above nature, not part of nature. It elevates the ego”, and “It is the driving force behind totalitarian agriculture, totalitarian warfare, colonialism, social inequality, our over-consumption, and the Anthropocene extinction. It is at the heart of Taker culture.”12 See What are Taker and Leaver cultures?
Nor is it only other people’s problem. “It is not so much ‘us against the psychopaths’ as ‘all of us against wetiko’. Wetiko is any time we take more than our fair share, or when we act with disregard or a lack of compassion for others.”13
How did wetiko get such a hold on us? #
Through our wounds. Therapeutic Shamanism teaches that soul-lossSoul-loss. The sending-away of parts of the self in order to survive: through shock or trauma, or (the chief modern cause) exiling our own parts to fit in. With Power-loss, one of the two root causes of shamanic illness. Read the full answer and Power-lossPower-loss. Disconnection from nature, the web of life and our place in it: like being unplugged from the national grid. One of the two root causes of shamanic illness, healed by reconnection (not by soul retrieval), beginning with the Power Animal bond. Read the full answer leave us open to things that do not belong in us. When we cut ourselves off from the natural world, and sent our wild souls away to fit in, “Suffering from massive soul-loss and power-loss, society as a whole became wide open to being infected by wetiko, and wetiko seized its chance.”14
It was not always so. Wetiko “has always been with us”, but the shamans “were our guardians”, so that “any sign of wetiko was slapped down and rooted out in hunter-gatherer societies”.15 “In a tribe, anyone who showed signs of selfishness would first be teased, to try and rein them in. If that did not work, then they would be publicly shamed.”16 See What is soul-loss? and What is Power-loss?
How is Therapeutic Shamanism’s view different from Levy’s? #
Mostly in how literally it takes the spirit. Levy reads possession through Jung, as parts of the psyche taking over the self, and his cure is mainly a matter of waking up to what is happening. Therapeutic Shamanism agrees that naming wetiko and owning our share of it matter: “To deal with it, we first have to become aware of its existence, be able to spot it and understand what it is that we are dealing with.”17 But it also treats wetiko as a being in its own right, met with shamanic understanding of possession and intrusionsIntrusion. Something lodged in us that should not be there, having entered through the holes soul-loss and Power-loss leave. Four broad types: unhelpful thought-forms, introjects, foreign-body energetic intrusions, and entity possessions. More about this, and with the old hunter-gatherer ways of keeping greed in check.
It also places wetiko in history. Possession, in this view, belongs to the world that farming and hierarchy made: “Possession is a symptom of the Taker cult. It describes a relationship between things that is based on inequality, power-over and ownership.”18 See What is an intrusion, and what is extraction?
Can we recover from wetiko? #
Yes, though it takes inner and outer work. We have to “wake up to it, and become aware of it within ourselves; name it, and then choose to act differently in our own personal lives”, and equally “wake up to it in society, name it and shame it, resist it, and spread awareness of it”.19 For most of us “the cure starts with ‘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’, with understanding that the way we are now is not ‘human nature’ but a recent infection.”20
There are signs it is already happening. The slow return of empathy over the last few centuries, which the psychologist Steve Taylor calls our “post-fallen recovery”, is what shamans would call “dispelling wetiko”.21 See Who is Steve Taylor, and what is his idea of “the Fall”? and Can modern humans recover an animist way of seeing and undo domestication?
