Yes. The destructiveness of our culture is cultural, not innate, and so it can change. Recovery does not mean going back to hunting and gathering, but 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: reconnecting with our true nature beneath the layers of domestication, guided by the healthy templates our animist ancestors lived by, known as the Original InstructionsOriginal Instructions. The animist roadmap: the stories, principles and templates for living in right, reciprocal, non-hierarchical relationship with self, others and the more-than-human world. A template to be translated to the present, never commandments. More about this, a phrase from Indigenous North American teachings. Shamanism matters because it is the practical way back into that animist way of seeing, and because it treats the roots of our disconnection.
Can we really recover an animist way of seeing? #
Yes. “The violence and destructiveness of the modern, 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 era is cultural, not innate. And that means that it can be changed.”1 The task is plain: “we have to connect back to our true self, underneath the layers of separation and domestication. We have to re-wild our own selves.”2 For many people it does not even feel new: “learning shamanism feels like they are remembering something that they already half-knew, but had not realised that they had forgotten.”3
Does it mean going back to living as hunter-gatherers? #
No. “This process of re-wilding ourselves cannot be a mass return to a hunter-gatherer way of life.” There are far too many of us. “We simply cannot go back. Instead, we have to find a way forward.”4 Returning to an age long gone is, in any case, impossible; the work is “about finding the healthy templates on which these new solutions can be based.”5 See What are Leaver and Taker cultures, the Great Forgetting and the Great Remembering?
What are the “Original Instructions”? #
The fundamental principles by which healthy animist peoples lived. The phrase comes from Indigenous North American teachings. For Paul Francis, almost every question in his life and work comes back to this: what would the hunter-gatherer answer be? Not in terms of their specific cultural choices, which suited their time, but in the fundamental principles that guided them: the original instructions. They are “the underpinning stories that are necessary for cultures to be healthy.”
The same thing can be put another way. “Ancient shamanic knowledge contains a set of archetypal templates”, which “provide the outlines for the healthy stories we need.” When Paul asks “What would the ancestors do?”, the answer is almost always there in the form of a healthy template. It is then just a question of working out how to apply whatever it is to modern day life.6
The phrase covers “the whole body of knowledge that is original, core animism. All of its teachings, all its practices. Anything else is stuff that gets layered over this.” They are not a rulebook: “They aren’t really a list of things or an instruction manual, but a way of being.” Lists can help a little, but “we will never really get them if we just see them as lists, or external ‘rules’ to judge ourselves and others by.”
Is recovery already happening? #
Yes, and it is speeding up. Recovery from 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 has been slow, but “What is also striking is that our recovery is gaining pace.”7 Outer change is not enough on its own, though. This draws on Daniel Quinn: if these changes are to be lasting and take root, they need to be planted in a soil of deep inner change.8 That inner change is where shamanism comes in.
Why do we need shamanism back? #
Because losing it meant losing our way. “In losing shamanism, we lost our way. We need it back.”9 For hundreds of thousands of years shamanism kept us safe from wetiko, the “destructive, psychopathic energy” behind our predatory way of life, and “shamanic healing is specifically tooled and equipped to deal with what causes a wetikoWétiko. 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 infection in the first place – soul-lossSoul-loss. The sending-away of parts of the self in order to survive: through shock or trauma, or (the chief modern cause) exiling our own parts to fit in. With Power-loss, one of the two root causes of shamanic illness. Read the full answer and 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”.10 The shaman was the tribe’s wisdom keeper, “the person who could keep the tribe on the right path and in right-relationship”, and “when we killed off all our shamans, we lost our way.”11
Why shamanism rather than only nature connection? #
Because shamanism treats soul loss as well as Power-loss, and helps us keep the connection in everyday life. Time in nature helps heal Power-loss: “Anything that helps us to reconnect helps in healing power-loss.”12 But soul loss needs shamanic healing too. And Paul found that the experiences of practices such as vision quests and sweat lodges were hard to carry back into domesticated lives. A modern shamanism “will, of course, include practices that reconnect us back to nature and the more-than-human. However, it will also need to include a whole new set of practices that help us maintain that connection in our largely urban, domesticated, day-to-day lives, and practices that help us find the wild in the tamed.”13
Why shamanism rather than only spirituality? #
Because shamanism does not turn away from the world. “This is precisely why there is no tradition in shamanism of renouncing the world. Instead, shamanism is a path of spirituality through being of service in, and to, the world.” In short, “it is a path of embodied spiritual activism.”14 Spirituality that withdraws from the world “is little more than a kind of spiritual egotism and self-centredness.”15 See What is spiritual bypassing and how can psychotherapy help prevent it?
Not all shamanism will do, either. “For not all present-day animism or shamanism is free of Taker cult thinking.”16
What makes shamanism relevant to modern life? #
Its willingness to adapt, and what it gives us that nothing else does. If shamanism is to be taken up again widely, “then it needs to change. It needs to become relevant and applicable to the times that we live in now.”17 For indigenous peoples it was “literally a way of being”.18 And it is a living practice: “Shamanism has always been a dynamic and evolving thing.”19 See What is shamanism for today?
