What are the three shamanic realms?

Is there a reality behind physical reality? #

The realms map rests on a prior claim: behind day-to-day physical reality is a deeper one, from whose patterns the physical world is organised and held together. The physicist David Bohm‘s “implicate order” describes something strikingly similar. Where shamanism goes further than physics is in saying, and experiencing, that this underlying energy is alive and conscious.

A shaman walks with one foot in each reality and, crucially, can move between them at will. Being permanently stuck in either is a kind of madness: the person who only talks to trees is out of balance, and so is the person who cannot perceive the aliveness of the world at all. GroundingGrounding. Returning fully into the body and physical reality; the bedrock of safe practice, and how every journey ends. More about this, and clarity about which realm you are in at any moment, is the bedrock of safe practice.

How does this map differ from other shamanic traditions’ three worlds? #

The three-world map, joined by a central axis (the axis mundiAxis mundi. A real, physical place in nature where the veils between the worlds are thin; the world-axis (World Tree) from which a shamanic journey is entered. Read the full answer, the World Tree), appears in shamanic cultures worldwide; the naming was popularised in the West by Michael Harner‘s “core shamanism”. Different traditions and teachers draw the map differently, however, and much of what circulates under these names merges realms that Therapeutic Shamanism keeps firmly apart. The commonest merge: a shadowy “underworld” of testing, tricksters and the dead, treated as the shamanic Lower-World. This approach is stricter about the map than most, and that distinction is dealt with below.

What is the Lower-World? #

The Lower-World is the realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt nature, nature as it was before humans messed with it. There is no technology there whatsoever, not even agriculture. It holds every kind of natural environment (deserts, swamps, grasslands, oceans, mountains, forests of all kinds) but no actual middle-world places: no Rockies, no Tahiti, only landscapes that are mountainous or tropical. Its inhabitants are the Animal, Plant and Stone People and their Oversouls, kin to the human people. It is also home to the Lower-World Soul: a person’s truest, wildest, undomesticated self.

Its defining quality is complete safety. It is a place of love, wisdom and healing, as far removed from hell as it is possible to be. Nothing there attacks; attack is a middle-world thing. In the Lower-World you can swim in molten lava, jump off cliffs, breathe underwater, be eaten by Bear, and come to no harm. This yields a practical test: a journey that feels anxious, threatening or even slightly “off” has not reached the Lower-World. Keep going deeper until it feels completely right. Simply being there heals the deep sense of loneliness, isolation and separation that nearly all modern humans carry.

What is the Upper-World? #

The Upper-World is the realm of Father Sky: the realm of Spirit, wisdom and the great teachers, and historically the realm on which 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 built their heaven. Experienced on its own animist terms, it is nothing like the crowded, ornate heaven of religious imagination. It is spacious, rarefied and clear, often layered like veils of sky within sky. Light there has substance; colours tend towards silvers, golds and translucent pastels; sound feels less like noise and more like resonance. Where the Lower-World teems with life, the Upper-World holds few forms, and its animals are often mythological or archetypal.

What the Upper-World offers is not escape but clarity: spaciousness and perspective, a realm that helps us see through illusion rather than flee the world. We rise not to leave the world behind, but to return to it with clearer eyes. And the Upper-World is not better than the Lower-World: saying one is better than the other is as nonsensical as saying yang is better than yin. “Up is good, down is bad” is the sky-religions’ conditioning, not animism. A healthy practice ascends rooted, like a tree: roots into Mother Earth first, then branches to Father Sky.

What is the middle-world? #

The middle-world is ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers. It is the realm of individuality and separation and, uniquely among the three, a realm of mixed intentions, where things can and do go wrong. In the teaching’s most quoted line: “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world. Or, at least parts of the middle-world are indeed hell.”

The modern middle-world is harder to work in than our ancestors’ was. It is crowded with the energetic residue of centuries of human activity and of the human dead: in cities, layers upon layers of them, like a sludge to wade through. Therapeutic Shamanism also places the Land of the Dead, and what other traditions call the astral, in the middle-world; many cosmologies put the dead “below”, and this is a point where the TS map deliberately differs. The middle-world’s required skills are boundaries, discernment and protection, which is why it is not where anyone should begin.

Is the under-world the same as the Lower-World? #

This is the map’s most important clarification, and the one most often got wrong. In most mythologies, and much modern shamanic teaching, “going down” leads to an underworld: Egyptian, Norse and Celtic underworlds, realms of shades and testing. Because the journey to the Lower-World also begins by descending, the two get merged, and people arrive at the genuinely safe Lower-World braced for demons. In Therapeutic Shamanism they are two entirely different territories.

The under-world, as this approach uses the term, is the realm of our repressed and unconscious middle-world psychic energies, personal and collective: Jung‘s Shadow, mapped shamanically. It has not always existed. It is a creation of the Fall: when humans became domesticated and hierarchical, vast tracts of human nature had to be repressed and sent away, and that banished material had to go somewhere. Its “demons”, dark entities and trickster spirits are projections of disowned material, not real beings. Hunter-gatherer cultures, carrying far less repression, had no great 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 to contend with, which is why traditional shamanism has little to say about it, and why this territory belongs to psychotherapy. Shamanism is designed for soul-loss and Power-loss; the under-world is what psychotherapy was invented for.

The practical rule: the tunnelTunnel. The descent at the start of a journey. Still middle-world territory, all the way down: the Lower-World begins only where you emerge. More about this descended at the start of a journey is still middle-world, and so are its deeper, murkier layers. Anywhere that feels creepy, tricky or threatening is not the Lower-World. Keep going, all the way through, to the place of sanity, rightness and healing. The genuine Lower-World is only ever safe.

Why do beginners start in the Lower-World? #

The training order is fixed, and follows the way a plant grows: a seed reaches down into Mother Earth with roots before it reaches up to the sun. Root in the Lower-World first; once deeply embedded there, take the practice up into the Upper-World; and only once anchored in both, begin middle-world work, the one kind that requires protection. Practice that leaps straight for the Upper-World while neglecting the Lower-World becomes top-heavy and ungrounded, all light and no roots, and correcting that imbalance is one of the things this approach was developed to do.