Empedocles, a Greek philosopher, poet and healer of the fifth century BCE from Sicily, taught that everything is made of four eternal ‘roots’, earth, water, air and fire, which he named after gods, and that two powers, Love and Strife, endlessly draw them together and pull them apart. He also taught that souls fall from the company of the gods and are reborn through many lives until purified. Therapeutic Shamanism works with five elements, in its own way, and shares with Empedocles a world in which everything, the elements included, is alive.
Who was Empedocles? #
A philosopher who was also a poet, a healer and, by his own account, a soul in exile from the gods. Empedocles lived in Acragas (now Agrigento) on the south coast of Sicily, a wealthy Greek city of farming and trade, and was born early in the fifth century BCE; his exact dates are unknown, and Aristotle says he died at sixty. Later biographers credited him with helping to break up an oligarchy in his city and with refusing an offer of kingship, though how far that tradition can be trusted is disputed.1
He wrote in verse. Two poems are known by name, On Nature and Purifications, and it is still debated whether these were two works or parts of one project. In 1994 a papyrus in Strasbourg was found to hold lines of On Nature that had been thought to belong to Purifications, which strengthened the case that his science and his religion were one teaching, not two. The famous story that he died by leaping into the crater of Mount Etna is a legend.2
What are the four roots? #
The four things everything else is made from. The philosophers before Empedocles had each looked for a single source: water for Thales, air for Anaximenes, fire for Heraclitus. Empedocles added earth and made them four, and he called them roots (rhizomata), not elements. The word that became ‘elements’ (stoicheia, the letters of an alphabet) is most likely Plato’s later coinage.3 He introduced them in a line that begins “Hear first the four roots of all things”, and gave them the names of gods: bright Zeus, life-giving Hera, Aidoneus, and Nestis, a Sicilian deity of rivers, who stands for water. Which god stands for which of the other three has been argued over ever since.4
The roots are eternal and do not change into one another; everything we see is made by their mixing in different proportions, much as, in his own comparison, painters make many images from a few pigments. And they are equals. In Empedocles’ own lines they are equal in strength and in origin, and each rules in its turn as time revolves. The environmental philosopher David Macauley reads this as an elemental version of rule by rotation in a Greek democracy, an equality the later, more hierarchical Greek thought undid.5 Aristotle credited Empedocles with being the first to set out the four clearly, and Aristotle himself later added a fifth, the aether, as the substance of the heavens.6
What are Love and Strife? #
The two powers that move the roots. Love draws unlike things together and unites them; Strife divides them and draws each root back to itself. Neither wins for good. In Empedocles’ words, things are “now being all united by Love into one, now each borne apart by the hatred engendered of Strife”.7 When Love holds complete sway, everything is gathered into a single, perfectly blended Sphere. As Strife returns, the roots separate out, and worlds and living creatures form in the time between the two extremes. Then the movement turns again, in a cycle with no beginning and no end. Readers of the fragments disagree about the details, including whether a world like ours forms once or twice in each cycle.8
Love and Strife work in the body as in the cosmos. Empedocles taught that we know the world through the same roots it is made of: “it is by earth that we see earth, by water water”, and by fondness that we know fondness and by strife that we know strife.9
Were the elements alive for Empedocles? #
In a real sense, yes. Naming the roots after gods marks them as active powers, not inert stuff, and a later Christian writer, Hippolytus, listed the four roots, with Love and Strife, among Empedocles’ gods.10 In one of his surviving lines he tells his pupil to know “that all things have understanding and their share of intelligence”.11 This is the nearest Greek philosophy comes to the animist experience that everything, the fire and the storm as much as the animal, is alive and conscious in its own way.12 It is still a philosopher’s account of the world, written in a settled farming civilisation. The overlap of ideas does not make Empedocles an animist.
What did Empedocles teach about the soul, healing and killing? #
That souls are exiled spirits working their way home. In Purifications he tells how a daimon, a divine spirit, who stains itself with bloodshed or swears falsely must wander “thrice ten thousand seasons” away from the blessed ones, reborn through every kind of body. He counts himself among them: “before this I was born once a boy, and a maiden, and a plant, and a bird, and a darting fish in the sea”. Having made the journey, he could greet his hearers as “an immortal god, no longer a mortal”.13
Because souls pass through animals, he condemned killing them and eating their flesh: “Will you not desist from evil-sounding murder?”14 And he promised his pupil cures for every ill and even the ability to lead out of the land of the dead the spirit of a man who has died.15 It was this mix of healer, poet, philosopher and wonder-worker that led the classicist E. R. Dodds to name Empedocles as the last great representative of what he called the “Greek shamans”; others, such as the historian of religion Jan Bremmer, reject the label (see Who were the Presocratic philosophers, and which of them saw the world as alive?).16
Here Therapeutic Shamanism parts company with him. Belief in a lasting individual soul that is reborn life after life is not part of original animism: it emerges with 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, with the idea of a separate, lasting “I”. And animism meets the animals and plants we eat as conscious beings, honoured and thanked, without making a rule of never eating them. See Do animists believe in reincarnation, and what are past lives? and What does animism say about killing and eating?
How do Empedocles’ four elements compare with the elements in Therapeutic Shamanism? #
They share names, not a system. Therapeutic Shamanism works with five elements: earth, water, fire and air, which appear in the published books through the transformation practicesTransformation practices. The family of journey-practices in which the self is deliberately taken apart, reduced to something formless, and reformed: burials, burnings, dismemberments, sky burials, dissolvings, cocoonings, poisonings, shapeshifting. A mini death-and-rebirth: cleansing, loosening of identity, and preparation for the greatest transformation of all. Read the full answer, each practice bringing the flavour of its element,17 and ether is named as the fifth. The fuller teaching on all five belongs to the courses and to a future book on the Wheel of Life, and it does not come from Empedocles. The Greek line from Empedocles’ four roots to Aristotle’s fifth, heavenly aether is a separate history, and the two fives should not be read as one. See What are the five elements in Therapeutic Shamanism? and What do earth, water, fire, air and ether represent?
What Empedocles’ roots share with the animist view is their standing. They are alive, they are equal, and none is above the others, each having its turn. Animism, too, is non-hierarchical: no being, species or realm stands above another. Therapeutic Shamanism has no teaching of Love and Strife as cosmic powers, and it works with the elements through practice, not only in a theory of what things are made of. See How does animism understand power and hierarchy?
