Socrates (about 470 to 399 BCE), the Athenian philosopher, spoke of a daimonion, a ‘divine sign’ or voice he had heard since childhood, which warned him off things he was about to do but never urged him on; his talk of it fed the charge of impiety on which he was put to death. His ‘intellectual midwifery’ was his way of teaching: claiming no wisdom of his own, he asked the questions that helped other people bring their own ideas to birth, then tested whether those ideas were sound. Therapeutic Shamanism meets the same two questions in its own work, whether a guiding voice is a real being or a part of ourselves, and how to teach in a way that leaves people trusting their own experience.
Who was Socrates? #
The philosopher who wrote nothing. Socrates lived in Athens, a farming and trading city-state built in part on slave labour, and served there as a citizen-soldier. Everything known of him comes from others: the dialogues of his student Plato, the memoirs of the soldier and writer Xenophon, and the comic playwright Aristophanes, who mocked him in The Clouds. These portraits do not always agree, and how much of ‘Plato’s Socrates’ is the man himself has never been settled.
In 399 BCE, at about seventy, he was tried and condemned for not recognising the gods of the city, bringing in new divine powers (daimonia), and corrupting the young. He drank hemlock in prison. Plato tied the second charge directly to his divine sign.1
What was the daimonion? #
A sign or voice, something divine and daimonic, that came to him from childhood. In Plato’s account it only ever held him back. It turned him away from what he was about to do and never urged him forward. It kept him out of politics, which he believed would have cost him his life far sooner.2 Once, about to leave a riverside walk, he felt it stop him until he had made amends for having spoken disrespectfully of the god Eros.3 At other times it told him not to take back a former pupil who wanted to return.4 On the day of his trial it stayed silent, and he took its silence as a sign that what was happening to him, death included, was not an evil.5
Xenophon tells it differently. In his memoirs the sign also gave positive advice, and spoke about his friends’ affairs as well as his own, which made it sound much like the ordinary divination any pious Athenian practised and so answered the charge of bringing in new gods.6
Was it a spirit, or his own mind? #
Both readings have had defenders for two thousand years. In the ancient world the sign was taken as a real divine presence. The Platonist writer Apuleius held that everyone has a daimon, a guardian spirit working within the soul much like conscience, and that Socrates was simply unusually attuned to his. Plutarch gave the voice to a mind calm enough to hear it.7 Many modern readers move it inside the person. The classicist Gregory Vlastos took it as an extra-rational prompting which Socrates still weighed with reason; the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche dismissed it as an auditory hallucination.8
It is the same debate that runs between shamanism and psychotherapy. Psychotherapy usually sees spirits as parts of the human psyche, “sub-personalities”, and journeys as imagination; in Therapeutic Shamanism, GuidesGuides. The Lower-World and Upper-World beings a practitioner works with and learns from, of whom the Power Animal is the first and foremost. True Guides are ethical to their core; the shaman’s power comes from the depth of these bonds, not from the shaman. More about this are real, independent, living beings.9 They are not parts of us, though we clothe them in imagery we can relate to. Telling a real presence from our own wishes or fears takes discernment, which shamanism calls stalking ourselves: being aware of the thoughts, preconceptions and beliefs we bring to what we meet.10 The question is never settled by deciding in advance that such voices must be one thing or the other. See Are Power Animals and Guides just archetypes? and What are helping spirits?
The daimon did not end with Socrates. Later Greek thought made it a guardian spirit given to each soul at birth, and in the twentieth century the psychologist James Hillman revived it as the image each person carries of who they are to become. See Who was James Hillman?
What was intellectual midwifery? #
Socrates’ own picture of how he taught. In Plato’s Theaetetus he tells a young man that his mother, Phaenarete, was a midwife, and that he practises the same art. Greek midwives, he explains, were women past the age of bearing children themselves; in the same way he is barren of wisdom and has nothing of his own to teach. What he can do is help others give birth to the ideas they are already carrying, and then examine each newborn idea to see whether it is real and sound or only a false phantom. Those who spend time with him make remarkable progress, he says, but not because they learn anything from him; they find many fine things in themselves.11
In practice this was the method of question and answer that still carries his name. He asked what courage, or justice, or knowledge is; tested each answer against examples until it broke down; and left the other person, often, at a loss, knowing at least that they did not know. Not everyone found it gentle. In Plato’s Republic the sophist Thrasymachus accuses him of putting on a show of ignorance so that he never has to give an answer of his own, only find fault with everyone else’s.12
How does Socratic midwifery compare with the Therapeutic Shamanism way of teaching? #
Closely, on one point above all: the answer is not handed down from the teacher. Shamanism asks no one to believe anything or take anything on faith; it is a path of direct, personal experience, and for the psychotherapist Carl Rogers experience was “the highest authority”.13 Rogers’ person-centred therapy, in which therapist and client meet as equals and the client is helped to uncover their own solutions, is the therapeutic form of that same trust.14 It is also why handing our power to a guru is a danger on any spiritual path. See Who was Carl Rogers, and why does he matter to Therapeutic Shamanism? and How can I tell whether a spiritual teacher, group or practice is healthy?
The difference is in what is being drawn out. Socrates delivered arguments and definitions, and tested them by reason. In shamanic work much of what comes to birth comes from beyond the person, from journeys and the Guides met in them, and is tested by living with it as much as by argument. And there is no pretence of having nothing to teach: there are teachings, and practices to learn, alongside the questions.
