Ernst Cassirer (1874 to 1945) was a German philosopher who taught that human beings live in a world of symbols, and that myth is one of the basic ‘symbolic forms’ through which we make that world, alongside language, art, religion and science. Myth, for him, is not failed science but a way of knowing with its own logic, rooted in feeling, in which the world is alive with powers. He also held that myth must in the end be understood and outgrown, and in The Myth of the State he showed how dangerous it becomes when modern politics takes hold of it.
Who was Ernst Cassirer? #
He was born in Breslau, then in Germany and now Wrocław in Poland, in 1874. He taught at the University of Berlin from 1906 and took a chair at the University of Hamburg in 1919, becoming its rector in 1929, the first Jewish person to hold that post in Germany. He left Germany in 1933, taught at Oxford and in Göteborg in Sweden, and moved to the United States in 1941, teaching at Yale and Columbia. He died in New York on 13 April 1945.1 In Hamburg he worked closely with the Warburg Library, with its great collections on magic, folklore and mythology.2 In 1929, at Davos in Switzerland, he met Martin Heidegger in a famous encounter between the two philosophers.1 See Who was Martin Heidegger, and what did he mean by “being”?
What are symbolic forms? #
The different ways human beings shape experience into a meaningful world: language, myth, art, religion, history and science. Cassirer set them out in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, whose three volumes appeared between 1923 and 1929: the first on language, the second, Mythical Thought (1925), on myth, the third on knowledge.3 In An Essay on Man (1944) he put the idea in a single phrase. The old definition of the human being as the ‘rational animal’ is too narrow; we are the ‘symbolic animal’, animal symbolicum, living not in a merely physical universe but in a symbolic one.3
What did he teach about myth as a way of knowing? #
That myth creates its own world of meaning, with its own logic, which cannot be judged by the standards of science. Earlier writers on myth had tried to explain myths by finding the ‘real’ objects behind them, the sun behind a sun god, for example. Cassirer held that the study of myth should look instead at the way of seeing that produces it.4
In that way of seeing, reality is made of living forces. The same power can appear in different places and in completely different shapes without ceasing to be the same, and ritual is how people summon the sacred forces and turn away the harmful ones. Myth does not hold life at a distance, as theory does; it is caught up with life and with feeling.5 Where myth speaks of a sacred power running through things, there is, in Cassirer’s words, “no clear dividing line between physical and psychic, spiritual-personal and impersonal reality”, and nature and culture are barely separable.6
He saw myth as the oldest of the symbolic forms, the one closest to life. “The further back we go,” he wrote, “the more we seem to approach the truly primordial level of myth”, and the more its closeness to life becomes clear.7 Religion and art grew out of myth, as science and mathematics grew out of language.8
Did Cassirer think myth should be outgrown? #
Yes, though not dismissed. The task he set Mythical Thought was to know myth in its own realm, and he added that “We can truly overcome it only by recognizing it for what it is”.9 In his later account of culture, the Hebrew prophets mark a turning point, bringing a sense of individual moral responsibility that broke the circle of a mythical world governed by totem and taboo.10
His last book, The Myth of the State, published after his death in 1946, turned this into a warning. Modern politicians, he warned, had learned to use the 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 of myth, through mass communication, to move people by images and emotion more than by argument, and he saw Nazi Germany as a society in which the dangerous power of myth was no longer checked by any stronger force.11 In a lecture at Princeton he said that “Myth cannot be overcome by logical and rational arguments”; what philosophy can do is help us understand the adversary.12
How does this connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
In refusing to treat myth as a primitive mistake. In Therapeutic Shamanism 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, the metaphorically true, and logosLogos. Literal, factual, analytical truth: the truth of facts you can check. One of the two modes of truth, alongside mythos. More about this, the literally true, are two different kinds of truth and two different ways of making sense of the world. We need both, and we need to know the difference between them.13 Shamanic journeys are mythos. Like great paintings, music or poems, they try to describe and convey something mysterious and ineffable, and they are always an interpretation, never an objective report.14
Cassirer’s mythic world of living powers, with no clear line between physical and psychic, sits close to the animist experience that everything is made of Spirit and that everything is conscious.15 And his warning about political myth meets the teaching that, 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, humans lost the healthy stories that taught them to live in balance and replaced them with stories of conquest and domination.16 See What are Taker and Leaver cultures? and Is shamanic journeying imagination, and how are journeys co-created?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
On whether myth is a stage to be passed through. Cassirer placed myth at the beginning of a development that leads on to language, ethical religion and science, and spoke of overcoming it. Therapeutic Shamanism does not rank them. The trouble is not mythos itself but confusing the two kinds of truth, either mistaking mythos for logos, as when sacred books are taken as literal fact, or thinking that logos makes mythos worthless.17 Over the last few thousand years an enormous amount of damage has come from the first of these.18
On the turn away from the mythic world. Cassirer saw the ethical religions that arose in the ancient civilisations as a step forward. Therapeutic Shamanism sees 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 that arose with the first city-states, with their message that “up is good, and down is bad”, as part of the Fall.19 See What is the Fall?
And on where myth is known from. Cassirer studied myth as a philosopher, from the outside, through the records of others. In shamanic practice mythos is lived from the inside, in the journey and its unpacking. See How do I unpack and interpret a shamanic journey?
What have critics said about Cassirer’s account? #
Some find the scheme of symbolic forms unclear: how many forms there are, how they relate, and whether myth is an early form of language or an equal partner beside it, are left uncertain, as is the question of whether the forms develop over time. Edward Skidelsky, in his study of Cassirer, called Cassirer’s vision “fundamentally innocent”, faulting his reluctance to engage with the politics of his day.20 On the other side, the philosopher Thora Ilin Bayer holds that Cassirer, unlike any other major philosopher of his time, was able to grasp how the Nazis used myth, because he had a complete theory of myth to work from.21
