Plato (about 428 to 348 BCE) taught in his dialogue the Timaeus that the cosmos is a single living creature with a soul and intelligence, containing all living creatures within it, and he called it a god. Yet he also taught that this visible world is only a copy of eternal, unchanging Forms, and that the soul is imprisoned in the body and should rise above it. Therapeutic Shamanism hears an echo of the living world in the first teaching, and in the second an influential philosophical form of the story that “up is good and down is bad”.
Who was Plato? #
The student of Socrates whose writings shaped the whole of Western philosophy. Plato was born into a wealthy family in Athens, a farming and trading city-state that depended in part on slave labour. After Socrates was executed in 399 BCE he travelled, then founded the Academy in Athens, a school that lasted for centuries. He wrote dialogues, conversations in which Socrates is usually the main speaker, so it is often hard to tell where Socrates ends and Plato begins. The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead called the European philosophical tradition “a series of footnotes to Plato”.1
What did Plato teach about the living cosmos? #
That the world is alive, ensouled and intelligent. In the Timaeus, a divine craftsman shapes the cosmos, and because it is better to have intelligence than to lack it, and intelligence needs a soul, he gives the cosmos a soul running all through its body. The result is one living creature that contains all other living creatures within it.2 The earth is “our nurse” and the “first and eldest of gods that are in the interior of heaven”, and the stars are gods too.3 The dialogue ends by praising the cosmos as “a perceptible god, image of the intelligible, greatest and best, most beautiful and most perfect”.4
This world soul became the anima mundi, the soul of the world, and the historian of ideas David Fideler traces its line through the Stoics, Plotinus and the Renaissance philosophers down to modern ideas of a self-organising universe and a living Earth.5 Through it, the idea of a living cosmos runs through the mainstream of Western thought for two thousand years. See What is the Gaia hypothesis, and who was James Lovelock?
Why did Plato downgrade the material world? #
Because he located what is most real somewhere else. For Plato the things we see and touch are always changing, coming into being and passing away, and so can never be fully known. What can be known are the Forms: eternal, unchanging realities such as Beauty itself or Justice itself, grasped by the mind and not the senses. The visible world, living cosmos included, is an image or copy of that eternal model, and for that reason any account of the visible world, the Timaeus included, can only be a “likely” one.6
The allegory of the cave, in the Republic, pictures where this leaves us. Prisoners chained in a cave take shadows on the wall for reality; the philosopher is the one who is freed, climbs up into the daylight and at last looks at the sun.7 In the Phaedo, set on the day of Socrates’ death, the body is a prison or a chain on the soul, its senses deceive and its desires distract, and philosophy is a practice of dying, freeing the soul from the body as far as possible whilst still alive.8 Plato also mentions, without fully adopting it, an older saying that the body (soma) is the tomb (sema) of the soul.9 Even the elements were demoted: Plato rebuilt earth, water, air and fire out of geometrical triangles, so that, as the environmental philosopher David Macauley puts it, they no longer prove to be “entirely elemental, first, or fundamental”.10
Behind this lay several things: Parmenides’ argument that true being cannot change, the certainty Plato found in mathematics, a Pythagorean and Orphic teaching that the soul is immortal and passes through many lives, and the death of Socrates, who died calmly believing the soul would go on.
Was Plato an enemy of the body and the earth? #
Readers divide. The Australian ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood, in Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1993), gave her chapter on him the title “Plato and the philosophy of death”, reading him as a founder of the dualism that ranks reason above the body, the emotions, women and nature, and so makes the living world something to be mastered and escaped.11 Fideler reads him the other way, as a central source of the Western tradition of a living, beautiful cosmos, whose philosopher is a lover moved by beauty, starting from the beauty of bodies.12 Plato’s own words support both readings. The Phaedo longs to escape the body, and the Timaeus praises the visible cosmos as the most beautiful of all things.
How does Therapeutic Shamanism see Plato’s living cosmos? #
As an echo, with a difference. Animism is the experience that all things are alive and conscious, each in its own way.13 Plato’s cosmos is alive too, but it is a living thing arranged in ranks, with a maker above it, eternal Forms above the copies, intellect above the body and the heavens above the earth. Animism is non-hierarchical: no being, species or realm stands above another. And animism meets the beings of the world as persons to be in relationship with, where Plato’s cosmos is mainly something to be understood by the mind. See What does it mean to say the world is alive and full of persons? and How does animism understand power and hierarchy?
How does Therapeutic Shamanism see Plato’s downgrading of the material world? #
As a philosophical form of the story that came 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. 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 tell us that “up is good, and down is bad”: that spirit is good and matter is corrupt, that earthly existence is something to be transcended, and that spirituality lies in ascension away from the physical world, seen as corrupt and not sacred.14 Plato was a philosopher, not a priest, but his climb out of the cave, his body as prison and his practice of dying passed through later Platonists into Christian thought and became one of the main ways that story entered Western thinking.
Therapeutic Shamanism does not answer by turning the ladder upside down. The 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 and Spirit are real and valued, and practices that strengthen our connection with them have their place. The problem is imbalance. No realm is better than another; an inflated Upper-World leads to a top-heavy, ungrounded spirituality, and a healthy spirituality is grounded and rooted.15 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, the realm 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 and of our Soul, is as spiritual and transcendent as the Upper-World, a place of love, healing and profound truth, though a culture trained to look up rarely finds it.16 Plato described the way up very well. Shamanism adds the way down. See What are Soul, Spirit, the middle-world self and the body? and What is spiritual bypassing, and how can psychotherapy help prevent it?
Where does Plato’s immortal soul fit in the story of the Fall? #
As one of the ideas about death that appear only after it. Plato taught that the soul is immortal and, in several of his myths, that it is reborn. Contemporary culture usually offers three views of what happens when we die: an everlasting personal life in a heaven or a hell; reincarnation, a continuous individual soul moving through many lives until it is released; or simple oblivion, the materialist view that death is just the end. Animism offers something different from all three, and neither everlasting personal life nor reincarnation, as most people now understand them, is what animist hunter-gatherer cultures believed.
Both emerge with the Fall, as people turn from the Original Instructions to the more egocentric worldview of Taker culture, resting on the idea of a lasting, individual “I”. In its wake come the Egyptian religion’s preoccupation with the individual surviving death, with its pyramids and mummies; the Zoroastrian idea that the individual is judged at death, later taken up by Christianity and Islam; and Greek philosophers such as Pythagoras and Plato arguing that we have an immortal soul, ideas that were also absorbed into Christianity and Islam. Other Greek philosophers, the Epicureans, held, like many materialists today, that death is simply the end. Elaborate stories of reincarnation develop in Hindu and Buddhist thought in the same long period. None of these is animist.
So Plato’s teaching on the soul belongs with the body as prison and the climb out of the cave: an individual soul, set apart from the body and the earth, whose true home is elsewhere. See Do animists believe in reincarnation, and what are past lives? and How does Therapeutic Shamanism understand death, and what happens when we die?
