Therapeutic Shamanism teaches that the Fall, the rise of city-states, kings and organised religion from around 4,000 BC, damaged us in many ways at once. It hardened our hearts and handed power to the least empathic, let loose an old destructive spirit the shamans had kept in check, replaced healthy stories with stories of violence, taught us that we are sinful and the Earth is lesser, and broke our relationship with the dead. Its best-known wounds, 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, soul-loss and the vast under-worldUnder-world. The realm of our repressed and disowned psychic energies, personal and collective: Jung’s Shadow and the unconscious, mapped shamanically. A part of the middle-world, created by the Fall, not the Lower-World, and psychotherapy’s proper territory rather than shamanism’s. Read the full answer of repressed material, are set out in the answers on the Fall and on 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; this answer gathers the rest, and none of it is beyond healing.
Where is the rest of the damage described? #
In two neighbouring answers. The Fall itself, and the patriarchy, armies, 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 and ‘ego explosion’ it brought, are in What is the Fall? What domestication did to our bodies, our freedom, our sense of who we are, our relationship with the land and our health, including Power-loss, soul-loss and the under-world, is in What does domestication do to us? The two are stages of one break, domestication, from around 11,000 BC, began it, and the Fall, from around 4,000 BC, sped it up. What follows is the damage those answers leave out.
What did the Fall do to our empathy? #
It hardened it, and it put the least empathic in charge. For hundreds of thousands of years hunter-gatherer bands, which depended on cooperation to survive, nipped psychopathic behaviour in the bud. With the Fall, “for the first time in human history, we not only hand power to the psychopaths, but give them free rein”, and they became warlords, kings and emperors, and later the robber barons and ruthless businessmen we still hand our power to.1
Most people are not psychopaths, but most people, given enough trauma, can show some psychopathic traits, and war demands it. “You have to have killed empathy and compassion within you.”1 Even then, there have always been “countless acts of kindness and compassion through these dark times. They are candles in that darkness.”2
Why did the damage keep going, generation after generation? #
Because brutality raises brutalised children. The cultures of the Fall “are brutal cultures, and the children born into them grow up brutalised, and accordingly, raise their children in the same manner. And so, once the brutality started, it rapidly became self-perpetuating”.3 Thinking it is fine to hit children is the norm in most parts of the world today, yet for around 95 per cent of our species’ history “we mostly raised children without hitting them”.4 Neglect passes down the same way. Abuse and neglect are endemic in 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 most people, not knowing any better, pass on what was done to them, so “the cycle of violence, abuse and neglect that characterises the cult gets passed down the generations and rolls on and on.”5 See What was hunter-gatherer life really like?
Why did no one stop it? #
Because we had turned our back on the people whose job it was. Shamans say wétikoWétiko. The parasitic, cannibalistic thought-form of Taker culture (the term is from the Algonquian peoples of North America, via Jack Forbes and Paul Levy): it drives its host to consume, dominate and set itself above nature, and it infects all of us to some degree. Read the full answer, the spirit of taking more than our share, is a very ancient spirit, and “it was the knowledge that the shamans had about wetiko that kept it in check in the past, and that kept hunter-gatherer cultures safe from it.” Any sign of it was rooted out. “It was only when we turned our back on shamanism that wetiko was free to really take hold and infect human culture, and become the epidemic that we now see and live in.”6 Taker culture, in turn, wiped out shamans wherever it found them. See What is wétiko, and what is co-wétiko?
What did it do to the stories we live by? #
It replaced healthy stories with stories that justify violence. To justify its behaviour, Taker culture has to deny that anything else ever existed, so the long ages before it are forgotten or dismissed as savagery; this is what the writer Daniel Quinn called 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.7 And “To justify their aggression, the psychopaths tell us that violence and selfishness are innate and normal behaviour for humans.”7
Native cultures all over the world kept stories of a golden age, to remind people how to live and to hold them to account. In the West the nearest thing, the Garden of Eden, “is the twisted burnt-out remains of a healthy golden-age story”, centred on humans and ‘god’ rather than on living in right relationship with Mother Earth.8 See What are Leaver and Taker cultures, the Great Forgetting and the Great Remembering?
What did it do to spirituality? #
It turned it upwards and away from the Earth. The sky religions taught that up is good and down is bad, and they brought with them the idea of sin; yet “Pre-Fallen cultures had no notion of us being in a state of sin and having to submit to the will of some external God.”9 Cut off from the Lower-World and from Soul, spirituality became a matter of rising above the body and the world. Monasteries and hermitages appear for the first time with the Fall, because becoming disembodied and dissociated in this unbalanced way “is something that pre-Fallen people had never done.”10 See What is spiritual bypassing and how can psychotherapy help prevent it?
It also cost us our Souls. Domestication “was not just about cutting off from Mother Earth and the more-than-human, it was about losing our own Souls”, so that our everyday self came to express family roles, wonky beliefs and the myth of human supremacy, rather than the person we were meant to be.11
What did it do to our relationship with the dead? #
It reversed it. Hunter-gatherer peoples took great care to make sure their dead moved on and left the living alone, but as shamanic cultures began to Fall they lost that understanding and the knowledge of how to do it, “we begin to actively try and hold onto the dead, and keep them close to us.”12 “In turning our back on shamanism, we lost our psychopomps.” The sky religions added fear of hell and damnation, so the dying grew afraid to move on, and our world began to fill up with the unquiet deadUnquiet dead. The middle-world self become ghost: the ego that, having no body left to anchor it, lingers among the living instead of moving on to the Land of the Dead. Unhealthy for the living, and moved on by psychopomping. More about this.12 See Is mediumship healthy, from a shamanic point of view?
Did it change how we perceive the world? #
It seems to have dulled us. Hunter-gatherer cultures “were also clearly cultures of highly sensitive people”, and Therapeutic Shamanism sees domestication as having dulled the senses that went with that sensitivity. The political scientist James C. Scott, in his book Against the Grain, sets the hunter-gatherer, attentive to a great diversity of natural rhythms, beside the cereal farmer, whose year is organised around one dominant crop, and finds the farming life “comparatively far narrower experientially”. He also asks whether settled people, like domestic animals, became less alert to their surroundings, though he says he knows of no evidence that settles it.13 See What did James C. Scott show about early states and grain? and What is a highly sensitive person, and why are so many drawn to shamanic work?
Can this damage be healed? #
Yes, because it is cultural, not innate. “Obviously, the Fall has resulted in enormous damage. Thankfully though, in the process of our post-Fallen recovery, we have also learnt a lot.”14 Psychotherapy is one of the things learnt. Shamanism is equipped for soul-loss and Power-loss, psychotherapy for the under-world, and used together, with real-world action, they reach the causes of the Fall as well as its symptoms. See What are pre-Fallen, Fallen and post-Fallen shamanism? and Can modern humans recover an animist way of seeing and undo domestication?
