Epictetus (about 50 to about 135 CE) was a Greek Stoic philosopher, born a slave, who taught that living in accordance with nature means living by reason as one part of a larger, living whole: telling apart what is up to us (our judgements, choices and desires) from what is not, and meeting everything else as the working of the whole. His sense of each person as part of a living whole sits close to Therapeutic Shamanism; it parts company with him over his placing of humans above the other animals, and over how feelings are handled.
Who was Epictetus? #
He was born in the 50s CE in Hierapolis, a Greek city in Asia Minor, and grew up a slave in Rome, owned by Epaphroditus, an administrator at the court of the emperor Nero. At some point he studied for a time with the Stoic teacher Musonius Rufus. Once freed he left Rome, presumably when the emperor Domitian banished philosophers from Italy in 89 CE, and then set up a school at Nicopolis in north-western Greece, where he taught until his death around 135.1
He wrote nothing himself, as far as is known. His student Arrian wrote down his talks as the Discourses, four books of which survive, and made a short digest of the teaching, the Handbook or Enchiridion. The emperor Marcus Aurelius was never his pupil but read him closely and counted himself a follower, and the Handbook has been read ever since as one of the clearest short guides to Stoic living.1
What did the Stoics mean by living in accordance with nature? #
Stoicism began with Zeno of Citium, who taught in Athens around 300 BCE at a painted porch, the stoa poikilê, which gave the school its name. Zeno put the goal of life as ‘living in agreement’, and his successor Cleanthes as ‘living in agreement with nature’.2
For the Stoics ‘nature’ meant two things at once, and they belong together. It meant the nature of the whole, for the cosmos itself was a living being, with god, identified with Zeus and with reason, present throughout it as the life is present throughout an animal’s body, carried by pneuma, literally ‘breath’. And it meant our own nature, which, for the Stoics, was above all a rational nature. Living in accordance with nature is therefore living by reason, in tune with the way the whole works.2
How did Epictetus put this into practice? #
He began from one division. The Handbook opens: “There are things which are within our power, and there are things which are beyond our power.” Within our power are our opinions, aims, desires and aversions; beyond it are the body, property, reputation and office.3 Most suffering, on his account, comes from treating what is not ours as if it were. So “Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of things.” Death is not terrible in itself, or Socrates would have found it so, and the terror lies in our notion of death.4
The will of nature can be learned, he said, from what everyone already agrees about other people’s losses. When a neighbour’s boy breaks a cup, we say such things happen; when our own cup breaks, we should take it the same way, and so on up to the greatest losses.5 And he asked his students to keep death “daily before your eyes”, so as never to cling or crave too much.6 The practice is not detachment for its own sake. It is a way of seeing each event as part of a whole larger than ourselves, and putting our effort only where it can actually go.
What did he mean by being part of a whole? #
His favourite image is the foot. Taken on its own, it is natural for a foot to stay clean; but as part of a body it must sometimes step into the mud, tread on thorns, even be cut off for the good of the whole, “otherwise it is no longer a foot.” In the same way, “if you consider yourself as a man and a part of a certain whole”, it is for the sake of that whole that we are sometimes ill, sometimes in danger, sometimes in want. A person cut off from others is no longer fully a person, as a foot cut off from the body is no longer a foot.7
So each of us is “a citizen of the world, and a part of it”, and the good citizen deliberates about nothing as if detached from the community, acting as a hand or foot would if it had reason and understood how nature is put together.8
How does Epictetus’s teaching connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Most closely in that sense of being one part of a living whole. Hunter-gatherers, as Therapeutic Shamanism understands them, experienced themselves as individuals and, at the same time, as part of something larger, as a cell or an organ is part of a body. They were part of a tribe, then of Human, of Animal, of all living things, and ultimately 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. This was not a belief they held but how life actually felt to them, and that felt interconnectedness is at the heart of what shamanism is.9 Epictetus’s foot, which is only a foot as part of a body, is a close cousin of that cell.
The Stoic cosmos is also a living one, breathed through by a single active principle. In shamanism everything is made of Spirit, and Spirit is conscious, so everything is conscious, though in ways very different from ours.10 See What does it mean to say the world is alive and full of persons?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
First, over who the whole is for. The Stoics counted animals such as dogs and cows as non-rational,11 and Epictetus tells his students that reason has ‘separated’ them from the wild beasts and the domestic animals, making each person one of the ruling parts of the world, not one of the serving parts.12 His whole is a city of gods and humans, with everything else below. Shamanism is entirely non-hierarchical. Humans are not superior to animals, and animals are not superior to plants and stones.13 In terms of the PeoplesThe Peoples. The Animal People, Plant People, Standing People (the Trees) and Stone People: our elder kin, of whom the Human People are the youngest and least wise. A family, not a hierarchy. Read the full answer humans are the youngest, the children, and the Stone People, then the Plant People, the oldest; this is not about hierarchy, but about family.14 See What is the myth of human supremacy?
Second, over feelings. Epictetus traced grief, fear and envy to false judgements, and asked that a death in one’s own family be met as calmly as a death in someone else’s.15 In Therapeutic Shamanism feelings need to be felt and allowed to move through the body, not bypassed or suppressed, and grief is a process that takes time and cannot be rushed or got round without cost.16 It also watches for what the psychologist John Welwood called spiritual bypassing, using spiritual ideas to avoid painful feelings, with signs such as emotional repression and an unhealthy degree of detachment.17 See What does animism teach about grief? and What is spiritual bypassing and how can psychotherapy help prevent it?
Did Epictetus teach people not to feel? #
That is how he is often read, and the everyday English word ‘stoical’, for bearing things without showing feeling, carries that reading. His own words go further than that, and not only one way. He said he ought not to be “unfeeling like a statue”, and he counted some responses as right and fitting, such as joy at what is truly good, and gratitude to god.18 He also loved his children and friends, whilst remembering, like someone holding a fine crystal goblet, that they could break.18
A different objection came from the seventeenth-century French thinker Blaise Pascal, who admired Epictetus as a moralist but thought it arrogant to hold that the human soul is divine and can perfect itself by its own efforts.18
