Original participation is the philosopher Owen Barfield’s name for the way earlier peoples experienced the world, not as a set of dead objects outside them, but as appearances they were part of, with something alive and of the same nature as themselves standing behind them. In his book Saving the Appearances (1957) Barfield argued that this awareness faded over centuries, until modern people came to treat the world they perceive as wholly separate from them, and he hoped for a future ‘final participation’ in which people would take part in the world consciously again. His account of a real loss that cannot be undone simply by going back runs close to the Therapeutic Shamanism account 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, though Barfield was a Christian and a follower of Rudolf Steiner, not an animist, and he placed the loss far later.
Who was Owen Barfield? #
An English writer and philosopher, born in London in 1898. He met C. S. Lewis as a student at Oxford in 1919, remained his close friend for over forty years, and was a member of the Inklings, the Oxford circle that included Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. His first major book, Poetic Diction (1928), was a study of how the meanings of words change over time. He worked as a solicitor in London from 1934 until 1959, and wrote his philosophy alongside. From 1924 he was an anthroposophist, a follower of the teacher Rudolf Steiner. Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry appeared in 1957. He died in East Sussex in 1997, aged ninety-nine.1
What are ‘the appearances’? #
The world as we actually perceive it: trees, rivers, stars and rainbows. Barfield opens with a rainbow. Everyone agrees that a rainbow is not a thing hanging in the sky; it appears only where sunlight, raindrops and an eye come together. Then he asks the same question of a tree and comes to a similar answer, that “a tree which is ‘really there’ is a collective representation.”2 What physics describes is not the tree as we see it but particles we never see. The green, solid, rustling tree comes about partly through us, through the mind’s unnoticed work in turning sensations into things.
So, for Barfield, people always take part in making the world they perceive. The question is whether they know it. He calls this taking part participation, “the extra-sensory relation between man and the phenomena.”3
What is original participation? #
Participation that people are directly aware of. Earlier peoples, in Barfield’s account, experienced that behind every appearance stood something alive, with an inner life like their own. In his words, “The essence of original participation is that there stands behind the phenomena, and on the other side of them from me, a represented which is of the same nature as me.” Whether that something was called mana, or the names of many gods, or the spirit world, it was not mechanical or accidental, “but psychic and voluntary.”4
He believed this awareness lasted, in fading form, a very long time. The ordinary medieval European, he wrote, “did not feel himself isolated by his skin from the world outside him to quite the same extent as we do”; he was “rather less like an island, rather more like an embryo, than we are.”5
What happened to original participation? #
It faded, and then it was forgotten that it had ever been there. Over the centuries, and decisively with the scientific revolution, people stopped experiencing their part in the world and came to take what they perceive as things existing wholly on their own, outside and independent of anyone. Barfield called a representation treated like this an idol, one “collectively mistaken for an ultimate… It is an idol.”6 A world of idols is a world of dead objects, which can be measured and worked but not met.
He was sharp about the theory of animism that grew up in the nineteenth century, that early peoples had imagined spirits into a lifeless nature. “Now, in order that nature may be peopled with spirits, nature must first be devoid of spirit; but this caused the scholars no difficulty, because they never supposed the possibility of any other kind of nature.”7 In other words, the scholars read their own dead world back into peoples who had never lived in one. See Is giving things human personalities the same as animism?
What is final participation? #
Taking part in the world again, but awake to it this time. Barfield did not think the way back to original participation was open, and he called the poet Wordsworth’s longing for it a “nostalgic hankering after original participation, which is called pantheism”.8 Final participation has to be won by conscious effort, through what he called a disciplined use of imagination, “not of theorizing, but of imagination in the genial or creative sense”, with the poet and scientist Goethe’s way of studying plants as his example.9
He also turned this on psychology. Freud and Jung, he argued, took the life that had once been met in the world outside, sealed it inside the skull, and then called any trace of it out in the world “projection”. In one of his best-known lines, “Pan, it seems, has not only not retired from business; he has not only gone indoors; he has hardly shut the door, before we begin to hear him moving about inside.”10 See Are Power Animals and Guides just archetypes?
The book has a destination. Barfield wrote it to clear the way for the teaching of Rudolf Steiner, and its last chapters are Christian, presenting the Incarnation of Christ as the turning point towards final participation.11
How does this connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Most closely through the shape of the story. Barfield describes a way of experiencing the world that was real, was lost, and cannot be had back simply by going back, so it has to be found again in a new way. Therapeutic Shamanism tells the history differently but has the same shape. Our animist ancestors experienced the world around them as alive and conscious, and that experience, not a belief, is what animism is.12 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 and the Fall changed not only the world but us, rewiring how our brains work, so most of us probably cannot fully experience the world as they did. Nevertheless, we can train ourselves to perceive the world in a more animist way.13
And, like Barfield, Therapeutic Shamanism does not try to go back. “We simply cannot go back. Instead, we have to find a way forward”,14 taking the healthy templates of pre-Fallen shamanism and applying them to modern life, which is what post-Fallen shamanism means. See What are pre-Fallen, Fallen and post-Fallen shamanism?
His answer to the projection theory of animism points the same way too. If the world is dead to begin with, the spirits must have been put there by people; if it is not, there is nothing to explain away. Animism starts from the experience that everything is made of energy, and that this energy is alive and conscious.15
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
Over when the loss happened, who suffered it, and where the way forward leads. Barfield’s original participation runs from the earliest peoples right through medieval Europe, a Christian, farming civilisation, and he places the decisive break at the scientific revolution. He does not separate hunter-gatherers from farming peoples at all. In Therapeutic Shamanism the deep break comes much earlier, with domestication and then the Fall, the rise of the first city-states from around 4000 BC, so that a medieval farmer was already living long after it. See What is the Fall?
His way forward is also different: he finds the completion of final participation in Christ and in Steiner’s teaching. Animism is non-hierarchical. Humans are one 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, not the centre, and there is no divine figure at the top. What is found again, in Therapeutic Shamanism, is relationship with a living world full of persons, the Animal, Plant and Stone People, met through practices such as the shamanic journey, not a new stage in the history of human consciousness.
And Barfield uses the word ‘primitive’ throughout, as the scholars of his day did. In Therapeutic Shamanism that picture of earlier peoples is itself part of the story the Taker culture tells about itself. See Aren’t you romanticising hunter-gatherers?
What do critics say about Barfield’s account? #
The main challenge is to the anthropology he leaned on. Barfield took his picture of how ‘primitive’ peoples think largely from the French philosopher Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and the sociologist Émile Durkheim, and wrote that he assumed what they said was “substantially correct”.16 Lévy-Bruhl was accused of overstressing how much ‘prelogical’ thinking there is in the cultures he described, and in his own late notebooks, published after his death in 1949, he noted that non-logical thought is common in modern societies too.17
Barfield’s reply was already in the book. Whether or not those scholars were right about peoples living in his own day, he argued, the evidence of language shows that the further back we go, the more mythical people’s experience of the world becomes, and that the picture of early humans first seeing a world like ours and then inventing spirits to explain it has no evidence behind it.16
