They are Therapeutic Shamanism’s names for three kinds of shamanism, sorted by how far 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 thinking has got into them. Pre-Fallen shamanism is the shamanism of hunter-gatherer peoples before agriculture, practised for tens or hundreds of thousands of years; Fallen shamanism is shamanism as it survived in farming and herding societies, changed by hierarchy, ownership and the myth of human supremacy; and post-Fallen shamanism is the ethical, adaptable shamanism now emerging, which helps us see Taker thinking and heal from its damage.
What are the three kinds of shamanism? #
Three kinds “belonging to three different eras, with three different ways of thinking and relating to the world around us.” The first is pre-Fallen shamanism, “the kind of shamanism that we practised for tens of thousands, probably even hundreds of thousands, of years. It is shamanism that is entirely free of Taker cult thinking. It is Leaver cultureLeaver culture. Daniel Quinn’s term for the animist tribal peoples, hunter-gatherers above all, who took only as much as they needed and left the rest, living in reciprocal right-relationship for the vast majority of human history. Read the full answer shamanism.”1
When Taker thinking enters a society, shamanism often dies out altogether 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 replace it. Where it survives, it changes, and that is Fallen shamanism, “the shamanism practised in agricultural, hierarchical societies, and characterised by the myth of human supremacy.” The third kind “is only just emerging”. This is post-Fallen shamanism, part of what the psychologist Steve Taylor calls the post-Fallen recovery.1 See What is the Fall?
What makes shamanism Fallen? #
Its relationship with the other-than-human. Fallen shamanism shows “an emphasis on depossessionDe-possession. The healing for a full entity takeover: persuading or compelling the possessing entity out, then disposing of it, and always addressing the underlying soul-loss and Power-loss that let it in. More about this work, working by inviting in spirit possession, animal sacrifices, hierarchical thinking, and so on.”2 Animal sacrifice is common in the herding societies of large parts of Mongolia, Siberia and Africa, yet if hunter-gatherers ever practised it at all, it was extremely rare; they had no surplus animals and did not treat animals as property to be used.3 Possession follows the same line. Cross-cultural studies by the anthropologists Michael Winkelman and Erika Bourguignon and Thomas Evascu found it mainly in agricultural societies with rank and hierarchy, and in hunter-gatherer times shamans worked with their guides but were “rarely, if ever, possessed by them.”3
The figure of the shaman changes too. As farming spread and stories of human supremacy took hold, the shaman became some sort of magical figure: the magical fantasy shaman some people still want to be today. Possession and sacrifice are hierarchical in the same way. Inviting a spirit to take over means handing one’s power to another being, and sacrificing an animal treats the Animal People as lesser. See What is possession, and what is de-possession? and What were sacrifice and offering in traditional shamanism?
The root is hierarchy. If a culture is agricultural, then “shamanic or not, they are still damaged by the hierarchical thinking 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 and 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.”4 One sign of it is a shamanism that treats the Lower-World and the Earth as lesser than 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 that is “contamination from the Fall”.4 See Is mediumship healthy, from a shamanic point of view?
Does that mean indigenous shamanism today is Fallen? #
To some degree, much of it is, and this is said without any criticism of the peoples themselves. “Genuine hunter-gatherer shamanic cultures have all but gone”, and even the few animist nomadic societies left are usually herders, so, animist or not, they are “to some degree still Fallen societies”.5 How far depends on how long ago a people took up farming or herding. In North America and Australia, colonisation came comparatively recently and older ways of thinking can still be relatively intact, whereas some herding peoples, in Mongolia for example, took up herding thousands of years ago.6 Empires such as the Inca, Aztec and Toltec may be called shamanic, but they “were, though, undeniably Fallen societies”, city-based, unequal, hierarchical and violent.6
The guard goes with the point, every time. Present-day animist societies “still have a much healthier relationship with the Earth and with the more-than-human than the societies that abandoned animism and shamanism altogether”, and “we owe a truly incalculable debt to them for keeping shamanic and animist knowledge and practices alive.” “My criticism is not of existing shamanic societies. It is of Taker cult thinking, in all its various forms and guises, and wherever it is found.”5 See Where does shamanism come from?
What about Western shamanism? #
Much of it is Fallen in a different way. “For most Westerners, shamanism is usually something that they ‘bolt on’ to Taker cult thinking.” People learn to journey, meet their Power Animal and do healings for others without ever questioning the Taker thinking they hold unconsciously, adding shamanism to New Age beliefs, theistic thinking, Celtic or Norse mythology, Druidry, yoga and so on. These all have their own good points, but they are still products of Fallen societies and show the hallmarks of that way of seeing the world.7 See What is ‘plastic shamanism’?
What is post-Fallen shamanism? #
Shamanism that helps us recover from the Fall. Over the last few hundred years, Steve Taylor points out, we seem to have been slowly regaining our empathy: the abolition of slavery, votes and equal rights for women, child protection, free education, healthcare, more humane treatment of prisoners and animals, environmental laws, growing acceptance of different sexualities and genders.8 In the last few decades shamanism and animism have also been returning to places where they had been wiped out.
Post-Fallen shamanism belongs to that recovery, so “it is ethical shamanism.” It is “not solely based on traditional practices, but adaptable, flexible, and relevant practices”, so in developing it we do what our pragmatic hunter-gatherer ancestors always did. What makes it post-Fallen “is not just whether we can use it in our modern-day lives, but whether it specifically helps with our post-Fallen recovery”, so it has “practices and knowledge that help us identify Taker thinking, and which show us how to heal from its damage.”9
Therapeutic Shamanism is proudly post-Fallen. It is not trying simply to go back to the old ways of doing things, but to look back to the Original Instructions and find ways of applying them to the very changed times we now live in, and that means a new kind of shamanism. See What is neo-shamanism, and how does it differ from traditional shamanism?
Why not simply go back to pre-Fallen shamanism? #
Because we are not the people we were, and the world is not the world it was. There are far too many of us to live by hunting and gathering. “We simply cannot go back. Instead, we have to find a way forward”, adapting shamanism to the times we live in, as our ancestors always did.10 And the modern psyche carries wounds that pre-Fallen shamans never had to treat, above all the vast under-world of repressed material that domestication and the Fall created. That is why post-Fallen shamanism draws on psychotherapy too. Shamanism is equipped for soul-loss and Power-loss, deep psychotherapy for the under-worldUnder-world. The realm of our repressed and disowned psychic energies, personal and collective: Jung’s Shadow and the unconscious, mapped shamanically. A part of the middle-world, created by the Fall, not the Lower-World, and psychotherapy’s proper territory rather than shamanism’s. Read the full answer, and “Used together (together with real-world activism and action), we have a cure not just for the symptoms of the Fall, but for its underlying causes too.”11
What it takes from pre-Fallen shamanism is its healthy templates. In practice that means asking, of almost any problem, “What would the ancestors do?” or “How would this have worked in a hunter-gatherer tribe?”, then working out how to apply the answer to modern life.12 See How is Therapeutic Shamanism different from traditional and core shamanism?
Is the line between the eras a sharp one? #
No, and the model does not need it to be. The Fall was gradual, “a long, slow fall” that “started off slowly, way back in time, then gathered pace”,13 and the first seven thousand years of agriculture still seem to have gone “reasonably well”, “maybe not a golden age, but a silver one”, before things went catastrophically wrong around 4,000 BC.14 There were also rare settled hunter-gatherers, such as those of the Pacific Northwest coast of North America, who developed hierarchy and chiefs without farming at all.15
Some go further and doubt that there was a single Fall at all. The anthropologist David Graeber and the archaeologist David Wengrow, in The Dawn of Everything (2021), argue that early humans moved between equal and unequal ways of living, and that farming did not lead straight to kings and states. Therapeutic Shamanism shares much of their picture, and sees the loss as reaching deeper, into our relationship with the living world. See Who was David Graeber, and what does The Dawn of Everything say about the Fall?
