Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 to 1882) and Henry David Thoreau (1817 to 1862) were the best-known writers of New England Transcendentalism, a movement that looked for truth in direct experience, in the individual conscience and in nature, not in churches and doctrine. Emerson taught that nature is the outward sign of spirit, and that in nature a person can lose their small self and find their place in a universal soul; Thoreau went to live in the woods to learn what nature had to teach, and wrote that wildness is what keeps the world alive. Their sense of a world that answers back overlaps with animism at several points, though both men were writers in the Christian and Romantic tradition, not animists, and Emerson in particular kept a ladder with spirit at the top that Therapeutic Shamanism does not.
Who were Emerson and Thoreau? #
Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston in 1803 and trained as a Unitarian minister, leaving the ministry in 1832. In 1836 he published Nature, at first anonymously, and the same year helped found the Transcendental Club, the circle of writers and reformers who gave the movement its name. His Essays: First Series (1841) includes “Self-Reliance” and “The Over-Soul”. He lived most of his life in Concord, Massachusetts, and died there in 1882.1
Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord in 1817 and became Emerson’s friend and younger companion. On 4 July 1845 he moved into a small cabin he had built on land Emerson owned beside Walden Pond, and lived there for two years, two months and two days. The book he made of it, Walden, came out in 1854. His essay on refusing to pay taxes to a government that allowed slavery, published in 1849, is now known as “Civil Disobedience”. He died in 1862, and his essay “Walking” appeared the same year.2
What did Emerson teach about nature? #
That nature is alive with spirit, and that being in it can change a person. In Nature he describes standing on bare ground in the open air and feeling every mean, small concern drop away, so that, in his words, “I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me”. Out in the fields and woods he felt “an occult relation between man and the vegetable”, and wrote, “I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them.”3
For Emerson, though, nature mattered above all as a sign of something beyond it. “Nature is the symbol of spirit”, he wrote, and natural things are there to teach the human mind about spiritual things. He was just as clear that nature is there for human use. “Nature is thoroughly mediate. It is made to serve. It receives the dominion of man as meekly as the ass on which the Saviour rode.” Even his own body, he said, belongs with nature on the far side of the line from the soul, part of the “NOT ME”.3
His essay “The Over-Soul” describes a single universal soul in which every human being shares. The word is the same as the OversoulOversoul. A branch of Mother Earth representing the whole of a species: the single being all the individuals arise from. Lower-World work is always with the Oversoul, never an individual; environments are composite Oversouls, wheels within wheels. More about this of Therapeutic Shamanism, but the meaning is different. See What is an Oversoul?
What did Emerson teach about the self? #
That each person should trust what they find within, not what society, custom or the churches tell them. “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string”, he wrote in “Self-Reliance”.4 Conformity was the enemy, and the inner voice, met in solitudeSolitude. Chosen aloneness from other humans: a healthy, essential Adult capacity, the opposite of loneliness (which is about the quality of relationship, not the quantity). Relational solitude is time away from the humans in the company of everything else. More about this and in nature, was the guide. His self-reliance was never meant as selfishness. The same self that trusts itself is, in his picture, rooted in the one universal soul, so that going deep into the self is also going out into the whole.
What did Thoreau learn at Walden? #
Thoreau went to the woods to find out what life is when it is stripped back to essentials. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”5 He built his own cabin, grew beans, walked, watched the pond through the seasons and wrote about the animals, birds and plants around him in close detail.
He also found that being alone in the woods was not lonely. A few weeks after he arrived, after an hour of doubting whether people need human neighbours to live a serene and healthy life, he felt, in the middle of a gentle rain, “an infinite and unaccountable friendliness” in everything around him. “Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me.” He was “distinctly made aware of the presence of something kindred” to him, even in places most people would call wild and dreary.5
And he would not set the spiritual above the wild. He found in himself “an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life”, and another “toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both. I love the wild not less than the good.”5
What did Thoreau mean by wildness? #
The living source that the tame world depends on. In his late essay “Walking” he wrote that “in Wildness is the preservation of the World”, and that “Every tree sends its fibers forth in search of the Wild.” Cities, he said, import wildness at any price, and the strength people need comes from the forest and the wilderness.6 He meant it of people as well as land, since something in us goes dull and tame without contact with wild places and our own wild nature.
Where do their ideas meet Therapeutic Shamanism? #
At several points, though they reached them as writers and walkers, from inside a Christian and Romantic culture. Emerson’s trees that nod back and Thoreau’s befriending pine needles describe a world that responds, which is close to the shamanic experience of a world that is profoundly alive and vibrant, and which can be communicated with.7 In animism that is not a feeling about nature but the plain experience that everything is made of energy, and that energy is alive and conscious.
Thoreau’s refusal to rank the spiritual above the wild has a counterpart in the balanced spiritual practice of Therapeutic Shamanism, which works with the Upper-WorldUpper-World. The realm of Father Sky and of Spirit: spacious, rarefied and clear, layered in tiers, offering not escape but perspective. Not better than the Lower-World: we ascend rooted, and bring the gifts back down. Read the full answer and the Lower-World equally. Upper-World practices help us move beyond the separate self towards oneness; Lower-World practices help us find our Soul and take our unique place in the web of life. Neither is higher.8 His “Wildness” sits naturally beside the idea of rewildingRewilding. Recovering the wild, undomesticated Soul: the practical healing work that follows from the Fall diagnosis. We cannot go back, only forward: ancient wisdom for future solutions. Read the full answer ourselves, and his discovery that solitude in nature is not loneliness matches the teaching that loneliness and being alone are not the same thing at all.9 See Why are we so lonely, and what is the difference between loneliness and solitude?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
Mostly with Emerson, and over hierarchy. A nature that is “made to serve” and “receives the dominion of man” is the old ladder, with spirit at the top, humans next and the rest of the living world below. Therapeutic Shamanism names that ladder as the value judgement that ‘up is good and down is bad’, which came in with 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 and the 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 soaked into the language, so that stones are said to have no consciousness at all and animals to be less conscious than we are.10 In animism there is no ladder. Humans are the youngest of 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, kin to Animal, Plant and Stone, “not about hierarchy, but about family.”11 See What is the myth of human supremacy?
Emerson’s transparent eye-ball, where the self vanishes into the Universal Being, is close to the Upper-World experience of oneness. On its own that is only half a practice, since a spirituality that seeks oneness and never turns to the Lower-World and to Soul is top-heavy and ungrounded.12 And where Emerson put his own body amongst the “NOT ME”, he drew the line modern culture still draws, treating the body as not us but something we inhabit, a vehicle for the soul. In Therapeutic Shamanism the body is one of the four parts of the selfParts of the self. There are four parts of the self, the realm-corresponding members of the Inner Tribe: the Body and the middle-world self (both of the middle-world), the Soul (of the Lower-World) and the Spirit (of the Upper-World). The Aware Self, also called the Witness, is not a fifth part but a capacity: the awareness that can watch all four, with compassion and equanimity. Read the full answer, alive, conscious, and with its own wisdom and intelligence.13 See What are the four parts of the self?
Thoreau is nearer. He gave the wild and the spiritual equal reverence, and found kinship in the woods. But he still spoke of the wild in himself as “savage”, the word of a culture that pictured hunter-gatherers as lower than itself, and for him nature remained above all a teacher of the human soul, not a community of persons to be in relationship with. Animism adds that step, that everything is not only alive but a person, kin to be greeted and given back to. See What does it mean to say the world is alive and full of persons?
Were Emerson and Thoreau animists? #
No. Their writing overlaps with animism in places, and Thoreau’s in particular describes experiences an animist would recognise, but they wrote from within their own culture, its Christianity and its Romantic poetry, and neither described the living world as a round table of persons. The overlap is in the ideas, not in membership of a tradition. What the two of them show is how strongly the sense of a living, answering world kept breaking through, even in a culture that had taught itself to see nature as raw material. See What is ‘dark green religion’?
