For much of the twentieth century intelligence was treated as one thing, measured by an IQ test. In 1983 the psychologist Howard Gardner proposed instead that there are several separate intelligences, later adding a naturalist intelligence and weighing an existential one, whilst others have since made the case for emotional, spiritual and bodily intelligences. Therapeutic Shamanism welcomes the widening of the list, finds in naturalist and existential intelligence much that is close to the heart of animism, and asks why intelligence has been measured only in human terms at all.
What was the traditional view? #
That intelligence is a single general ability, which some people have more of than others, and which IQ tests measure. The psychologist Charles Spearman called it “general intelligence”, and most psychologists who measure intelligence still hold some version of the view. The first tests were designed to predict how well children would do at school, and as Gardner notes, one early psychologist put it bluntly: intelligence is what the tests test.1
Gardner also points out that not every culture has a word for intelligence at all, and that some define it in terms Westerners might find odd, such as obedience, good listening or moral fibre.2
What are Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences? #
Gardner is a psychologist who has spent much of his career studying how people think and learn. In his book Frames of Mind (1983), he proposed that instead of one general intelligence there are several, each working largely independently of the others. He named seven:
– Linguistic: a feel for language, spoken and written. – Logical-mathematical: reasoning, numbers and logic. – Musical: making, hearing and understanding music. – Bodily-kinesthetic: using the whole body, or parts of it, skilfully. – Spatial: seeing and working with space, from a pilot’s to a sculptor’s. – Interpersonal: understanding other people. – Intrapersonal: understanding yourself, “an effective working model of oneself, including one’s own desires, fears, and capacities”.3
He defined an intelligence as “a biopsychological potential to process information that can be activated in a cultural setting to solve problems or create products that are of value in a culture”, and tested each candidate against eight criteria, such as being separately affected by brain damage and having its own path of development.4 Interestingly, he gives the shaman as an example: “both the clinician in American culture and the shaman in a tribal culture are using their interpersonal intelligences but in different ways”.5
How has the list grown? #
Slowly, and with care, at least in Gardner’s own hands. For his first ten years he resisted adding to it. Then, prompted partly by the biologist Ernst Mayr’s remark that his list could never explain Charles Darwin, he added an eighth, the naturalist intelligence; in Intelligence Reframed (1999) he wrote that it “clearly merits addition to the list”.6 He weighed an existential intelligence too, and declined to add a spiritual one. Each of these three is close to the concerns of animism and shamanism, so each has its own section below. Others have gone further than Gardner, as the section after them describes.
What is naturalist intelligence, and what has it to do with animism? #
Gardner describes the naturalist as someone expert at recognising and classifying the plants and animals of their surroundings. In cultures without formal science, he says, the naturalist is the person most skilled in the traditional ways of naming and sorting the living world; in a scientific culture, it is the biologist.7 He adds that a full naturalist does much more than classify. They are at home among living things, and may have a gift for caring for them or interacting subtly with them, a gift he sees in roles ranging from hunters and fishers to farmers, gardeners and cooks.8
Therapeutic Shamanism understands naturalist intelligence more widely, as the ability to connect with, interact with and become part of nature. Seen that way, it is close to the heart of animism. One way to put the difference is that Gardner’s naturalist mostly knows about the living world, by naming and sorting it, whilst animism is also a way of knowing with it, meeting other beings as persons to be in relationship with, not as objects to be classified. See What does it mean to say the world is alive and full of persons?
It is also the intelligence in which Therapeutic Shamanism places modern humans lowest. Almost everything else in nature does this better than we do, because we have learnt to cut ourselves off from the world around us, and part of the reason for learning shamanism and animism is to put that right. In a shamanic journey, the experience of being another animal, a plant, a tree or a waterfall usually brings with it a deep sense of interconnectedness.
What is existential intelligence, and why might it matter to shamans? #
Gardner defines it as “the capacity to locate oneself with respect to the furthest reaches of the cosmos”, and to the deepest features of human life, such as the significance of life and the meaning of death. He notes that this capacity has been valued in every known human culture, and suggests that grappling with these questions was one of the major activities of early humans, much of whose art, dance, myth and drama dealt with cosmic themes. He held back from adding it to his list, for lack of evidence that particular parts of the brain deal with these questions, joking instead about “8½ intelligences”.9 He also holds that, like language, it is a distinctively human trait, one that separates us from other species.10
Therapeutic Shamanism sees this very differently. The idea that humans are “unique in having the level of consciousness necessary to discover the meaning of life” is a story of Taker culture, and, “from a shamanic point of view, complete and utter nonsense.” Instead, “we are literally surrounded by beings who know the meaning of life. The meaning of life is to be what 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 intended you to be.” When we ask what the meaning of life is, “what we are really asking is, ‘How shall I live my life?’”11
Running the intelligences across 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 goes further still. The other Peoples understand that the abstract question is a nonsensical one: “The actual question is, how shall I live my life? What will give my life meaning? And in terms of that, they all absolutely get it.” They do not fret about it because they understand it. Humans, by contrast, tend to get lost in our heads, inventing questions and then answers. From an animist perspective, we may be the least existentially intelligent beings on the planet.
There is also a link with the shaman’s role. The shaman can see past ‘consensus reality’, “the constructed reality of a society’s stories, myths, conventions, traditions, and social mores”, and, standing somewhat outside normal society, “can see why things have gone wrong in a community, and what needs to be done to put things right.”12 One way to see it is that, if existential intelligence is the capacity to step back and see where we stand in relation to the whole, then this is that capacity turned on a culture’s own stories, which is part of what the shaman has always been for. See Were traditional shamans neurodivergent?
What is spiritual intelligence, and how does it relate to shamanic journeying? #
Gardner declined to add a spiritual intelligence. He does not doubt that some people are more skilled than others at meditating or entering trance, but he finds the idea too sprawling, and worries that a claim to spiritual truth which only some can reach moves out of the realm of intelligence and into, in his words, “the sphere of dogma”. He suggests that skill at entering altered states might belong instead to the bodily-kinesthetic intelligence.13
Others have proposed one. The psychologists David King and Teresa DeCicco define spiritual intelligence as a set of abilities, not beliefs: thinking deeply about existence, finding personal meaning, awareness of the transcendent, and the ability to enter expanded states of consciousness. On the last of these, they say that merely having such experiences is not an ability; what counts is “the capacity for entering these states at one’s own discretion.”14
That is very close to the shaman in Therapeutic Shamanism: someone who can go into a trance state and travel in the shamanic realms, and then come back to this ordinary reality at will. The ability to come back at will is essential.15 Seen this way, shamanic journeying, learnt and practised over time, could be called a training of spiritual intelligence, a capacity developed and tested in experience, not a belief to be accepted. See What is shamanic journeying?
Who else has added to the list? #
Several writers, going beyond Gardner’s own.
– Emotional intelligence, set out by Peter Salovey and John Mayer and made famous by Daniel Goleman. See What is emotional intelligence? Gardner prefers to speak of emotional sensitivity. – Bodily or embodied intelligence, in a wider sense than Gardner’s. The psychologist Guy Claxton, in Intelligence in the Flesh (2015), says that “we do not have bodies; we are bodies”, and that intelligence is rooted in the whole living body, not only the brain.16 – Creative and collaborative intelligence, both in the list Therapeutic Shamanism uses. Gardner did not accept creativity as an intelligence of its own, seeing it as something a person does with their intelligences. – Intelligence beyond the human: some scientists now speak of intelligence in plants, and in the cells and tissues of living bodies. See What does Michael Levin’s work say about intelligence in cells and bodies? and Is the living world intelligent?
Is Gardner right? #
The debate goes on. Many psychologists still find a single general factor running through people’s abilities. In one study, the psychologist Beth Visser and her colleagues gave students tests for each of Gardner’s intelligences and found that most of them were linked by a large general factor, though some, such as music and bodily skill, stood more apart.17 Gardner replies that his theory questions not whether a general intelligence exists, but how much it explains. To those who say some of his intelligences are really talents, he answers that he does not mind them all being called talents, but objects to calling language an intelligence and music a mere talent.18
Are humans the most intelligent beings? #
Not in Therapeutic Shamanism’s view. Drawing on the writer Derrick Jensen’s book The Myth of Human Supremacy, it makes a point very like Gardner’s, but turned outwards to other species: “By defining what we regard as intelligence in essentially human terms, then of course when we do experiments to measure intelligence in other beings, humans will emerge with the most favourable results.” “This is ‘garbage in, garbage out’. It is blinkered and nonsensical because the tests are biased.” You could argue, as Jensen does, that what we are doing to the environment we depend on marks our species out “not as intelligent, but as uniquely stupid and irrational.”19 See Who is Derrick Jensen, and what is the myth of human supremacy?
Research on animal minds keeps pointing the same way. The science writer Jennifer Ackerman, in The Genius of Birds (2016), calls our intelligence tests “human yardsticks”, and asks that the abilities of birds be appreciated “in their own right and not because they look like some aspects of our own”.20 See Do animals think and feel?
Therapeutic Shamanism takes the point further by running a widened list of intelligences, Gardner’s together with the emotional, creative and collaborative intelligences, across all the Peoples. On that reckoning, humans are clearly ahead only on logical-mathematical and creative intelligence. Many other animals equal or outdo us in spatial and bodily intelligence, and many are highly emotionally intelligent. Whether our language is really more complex than whale song, we cannot know until we have learnt their languages, and by what measure could a songbird’s music be called less than ours? And on naturalist and existential intelligence, humans may come last of all.
The point is not to put humans at the bottom of a new ladder, but to show that the ladder itself is a product of human-centred bias. Paul Francis has noticed that this bias can linger unconsciously even in people who come to animism and accept that other beings are intelligent, as a quiet sense that animals are not quite as intelligent as us, and plants not quite as intelligent as animals. In animism there is no such hierarchy, and until that hidden ranking is noticed, the other Peoples cannot really be met as they are. See What is the myth of human supremacy? On what this means for how other beings are treated, see Does it matter whether an animal is sentient?
How does Therapeutic Shamanism see intelligence? #
As something found throughout the living world, not only in humans. A plant’s slow, rooted way of knowing the world is a kind of intelligence we simply do not notice, because “we are the aliens, moving too fast most of the time to realise the sentience of plants”. Or, “as Spock might have said, ‘It is intelligence, Jim, just not as we know it.’”21 Animists see the Peoples very differently from the myth of human supremacy: “Hunter-gatherers say that the oldest and wisest of the Peoples by far are the 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.”22 See Who are the Animal, Plant and Stone People?
Therapeutic Shamanism also sees the body as having its own intelligence. The physical body “has its own consciousness, intelligence, wisdom, needs and drives”;23 “Our bodies are a conscious part of us; a part of us that has its own wisdom and intelligence.” So Therapeutic Shamanism welcomes the widening of the list, and adds to it the intelligence of the other-than-human Peoples, and of our own bodies.
