Shamanism can offer Jungian work a world beyond the human psyche. Where Jung’s psychology mostly treats the figures of the inner world as contents of the psyche, shamanism meets the 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, Power AnimalsPower 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 and the other-than-human Peoples as real beings; it tells 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 of the unconscious apart from the 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; it roots the Soul in nature; and it can find parts of us that have not just been repressed, but have left.
Are the figures we meet in the inner world only archetypes? #
Not in the shamanic view. Jung’s psychology reads such figures as expressions of the psyche. The psychotherapist C. Michael Smith notes that “Unfortunately Jung did not address the possibility of independently existing spirits”, whereas “In the shamanic view, spirits are a sui generis reality; they simply are what they are”. Smith himself writes that “there is plenty of room in his psychological theory to account for the factuality and importance of the spirit guides as sui generis”.1
Psychotherapy usually sees spirits as parts of the human psyche, rather than as real, independent, living beings. Yet there is “absolutely nothing about being a psychotherapist that is incompatible with also accepting that spirits are real.”2 The two views can fit together. A journey is “an experience of something that exists independent of us (as the shamans say, ‘the spirits are real’)”, and the imagery through which we meet it is often personal to us. So our Guides “are representations of the archetypal pattern of Human”, clothed in forms we can relate to.3 See Are Power Animals and Guides just archetypes?
Is the unconscious the same as the Lower-World? #
No, and this may be the most useful thing shamanism has to offer a Jungian. The unconscious, the under-world, is not the same thing as the shamanic Upper and Lower Worlds, and Paul Francis works “with and in them all, as appropriate.”4 The under-world is made of what humans have repressed, personal and collective. The Lower-World is the realm of the Animal, Plant and Stone People and of our Soul, and it was there long before us. Jungian work is well equipped for the under-world, and shamanism offers a way into the Lower-World as well. See What is the under-world, and how is it different from the Lower-World?
What does shamanism add about the Soul? #
That it belongs to nature. The Lower-World Soul is “part of 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, but it is also the unique individual that Mother Earth intended (and still intends) us to be.” In an image drawn from the Jungian psychologist James Hillman, “whilst our Spirit loves the peaks and dazzling heights, our Soul wants to lead us to the valleys and the depths.” And the Soul “must be connected to nature. Without connection to nature, it withers and weakens.”5
Jung felt this loss keenly. He wrote of modern people that “No river contains a spirit, no tree means a man’s life”, and that “Nature is not matter only, she is also spirit.”6 Shamanism offers more than the diagnosis: a living practice of going to the Lower-World, meeting the other-than-human Peoples there, and finding the Soul in relationship with them. Psychotherapy mostly misses this: “most psychotherapy is done indoors, with no connection or awareness of nature.”7 See What are Soul, Spirit, the middle-world self and the body?
Is a lost part the same as a repressed one? #
Not always. Jungian work knows a great deal about what we repress. Shamanism adds that a part can also leave altogether. Psychotherapists would say that we repressed the part, but sometimes something more startling happens: the part is not just repressed, but actually leaves altogether. Such a part cannot be reached by analysis, because it is no longer there; it needs to be found and brought back through soul retrievalSoul retrieval. Finding an exiled soul-part and inviting it home. In the modern psyche the fort-holder who sent it away must consent first, and the retrieval itself is a beginning: the real work is integration. Read the full answer.
Jung knew of this idea from traditional peoples, writing that “To the primitives it is death to lose the soul.”8 Smith reads Jung’s own breakdown in this light: “From a shamanic perspective, Jung was now suffering a form of 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”.9 See What is soul loss? and What is soul retrieval?
What does Smith see shamanism and Jung offering each other? #
A shared remedy for a shared loss. Smith concludes that “The loss of the sacred in western society is also a loss of soul, a loss of the soul of the earth, of the cosmos, of human society.”10 Therapeutic Shamanism would place the cause in 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 Taker culture, and the remedy in reconnecting with the Lower-World and the other-than-human Peoples as well as in inner work. See What is the Fall?
