Shamanism offers art therapy the oldest setting for image-making, in which pictures were part of a living relationship with the other-than-human world. It offers the possibility that a being who appears in a picture may be real in its own right, a map that tells the unconscious apart from the shamanic realms, journeys that can give a person the nurturing they missed as well as express the wound, and a reminder that much of our pain comes from our disconnection from nature.
How old is the link between images and healing? #
Very old. There are cave paintings in Europe from around 33,000 BCE that are generally thought to depict shamanic practices. A piece of ochre carved around 77,000 years ago, found in the Blombos caves in South Africa, may have been a shamanic ritual object, and an ochre-processing area found in the same cave has been dated to around 100,000 years ago. Ochre is widely used in shamanic societies for body painting, which is rarely just decoration and usually part of sacred practice.1
Art therapy was named only in the 1940s. Shamanism places it in a far longer story, in which images were made as part of sacred practice and relationship with the spirits for tens of thousands of years. See What is shamanism?
Is a being in a picture only part of the psyche? #
Not necessarily. Psychotherapy tends to reduce everything to the human level, and so to see spirits as parts of the human psyche and journeys as simply imagination.2 Art therapy often reads images in the same way. The British art therapist Rita Simon, for example, read a child’s drawings and stories through Freud’s id, ego and superego,3 and Jungian art therapy reads images as symbols of the psyche and its archetypes.4
An image can certainly carry personal meaning. But in shamanism the spirits are real, independent, living beings, and there is nothing about being a therapist that is incompatible with accepting this. So an Animal that appears in a picture may carry personal meaning, and it may also be Animal, a being in its own right. See Are Power Animals and Guides just archetypes?
Is the unconscious the same as the Lower-World? #
No, and the difference matters. The unconscious, which Therapeutic Shamanism calls 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, holds what has been pushed out of awareness, personal and collective. The shamanic Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer and 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 are not the human unconscious, and should not be mistaken for it.5 Much of the image-making in art therapy works with the under-world: the feelings and memories a person has buried.
The Lower-World is something else. It is largely beyond language: the realm of metaphor and imagery, evocative and symbolic, closer to poetry, painting or music than to words.6 It is also the realm of nature, of the Animal, Plant and Stone People and Mother EarthMother Earth. The sacred Feminine pole: pure potential, from whom all the Peoples arise. The Lower-World is her realm, and she is all the realms: “The Earth is indeed our Mother.” More about this. Knowing the difference matters, because the two call for different kinds of work. See What is the under-world, and how is it different from the Lower-World?
Can a journey give what was missing, as well as express it? #
Yes. Art therapy is especially good at giving a wound form, so that something held without words can be seen, shared and worked with. Shamanic journeying can do something alongside that. For the earliest, pre-verbal wounds, a person can journey to the Lower-World to experience being nurtured as a baby by a loving Mother, and so feel, perhaps for the first time, what secure attachment is like. If a Human Mother is too hard to imagine, a mammal mother such as She-Bear or Lioness usually comes more easily. Because the experience is non-traumatic, somatic and sensory, it can begin to release the old wounding patterns and let healthier ones form.7 See What can art therapy offer shamanic work?
Why look beyond the human? #
Because much of our pain comes from our disconnection from the more-than-human and from nature. Most psychotherapy happens indoors, with little connection with or awareness of nature, and its focus is almost entirely on human relationships and inner human processes. Whilst it stays that way, it cannot fully address the cause of the pain, only relieve the symptoms.8 In shamanic terms, this disconnection is 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. Anything that helps us reconnect with nature and the more-than-human helps to heal it, first and foremost a relationship with a Power AnimalPower Animal. The Oversoul of a wild species, met as a single Lower-World being and bonded with in a deep, committed, usually lifelong soul-bond of unconditional love. The practitioner’s first and foremost Guide: Panther, not “my panther”. Read the full answer, the most important connection to the more-than-human.9 See What is power-loss?
