In many traditional societies, ‘pollution’ means a dangerous, contagious state, not physical dirt, something that clings to people after contact with death, birth, blood or forbidden things, and must be removed before they can approach the sacred again, whilst ‘purity’ is the state of being fit to do so. The ideas are strongest in the religions of farming and city civilisations, where they often shore up rank between castes, between men and women, and between body and spirit. Therapeutic Shamanism treats cleansing as ordinary energetic hygiene, rejects 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’ teaching that the body, the earth and women are unclean, and keeps one firm boundary of its own, between the living and the dead.
What do purity and pollution mean? #
Not cleanliness in the everyday sense. Pollution, in the anthropological sense, is a state that people, places or things can fall into, which is felt as dangerous and can spread by touch, by sharing food or by being under the same roof. Purity is the opposite state, the condition of being fit to approach what is sacred. Between them runs a whole set of practices for moving people from one state to the other: washing, waiting, fasting, offering, keeping apart.
Why each culture draws the line where it does is what the anthropologist Mary Douglas set out to explain, with her idea of dirt as “matter out of place”, and is covered in Who was Mary Douglas, and what did Purity and Danger show? Taboos are the prohibitions that mark these lines; see What is a taboo, and why did every people have them?
What kinds of things are thought to pollute? #
The same few things come up again and again: death, birth, blood, bodily fluids, certain foods and certain people. In Hindu practice, a mother is kept apart for a period after giving birth, a bath follows a visit to a house where someone has died, and a bath is expected before entering a temple. In the Hebrew Bible, menstruation, childbirth and contact with a corpse all make a person unclean, the corpse most of all, and immersion in a ritual bath is the usual remedy. In Islam, prayer needs washing beforehand, with the greater ablution after menstruation and sex. In Shinto, the commonest purification is misogi, standing under running water, often a waterfall.
These are all religions of settled farming and city civilisations, and much of what is written about purity and pollution comes from them. Where they bear on rank, they can be harsh. The anthropologist Louis Dumont, in Homo Hierarchicus (1966; English translation 1970), argued that the opposition of pure and impure is the principle underlying the whole Hindu caste system. Other scholars have argued that he gave purity too large a place, at the expense of power, kingship and the effects of colonial rule; Dumont himself held that in caste ideology religious status ranks above, and encompasses, worldly power.
Why do these ideas exist? #
There are several explanations, and anthropologists still disagree about them. The oldest is hygiene, the idea that purity rules are early public health, protecting people from disease. Douglas called this ‘medical materialism’ and rejected it as the main explanation, arguing that the rules follow a culture’s categories, not its knowledge of germs, and that our own avoidance of dirt is as much about order as about hygiene.1 Others point out that some prohibitions do track real dangers, as the study of food taboos in Madagascar described in the taboo answer suggests.
A third explanation looks at power. Purity rules decide who may touch whom, who may eat with whom and who may enter where, so they are very effective ways of holding a hierarchy in place, and many of the most elaborate systems are found where rank matters most. Douglas, on the other hand, held that pollution beliefs are first a way of ordering experience, which can be put to the service of power but are not reducible to it.
Is menstruation always seen as polluting? #
No, though the West has long assumed so. The anthropologist Alma Gottlieb traces the Western habit of calling menstruation ‘the curse’ to biblical and later religious commentary, and shows that other peoples take quite different views. Among the Beng of Côte d’Ivoire, a farming people, menstrual blood is a sign of fertility; a Beng priest compared it to the flower a tree must bear before it bears fruit. Among the Asante of Ghana, also farmers, strict restrictions sit alongside a celebration of a girl’s first period, at which she is seated under an umbrella otherwise kept for royalty. She also points out that the Polynesian tapu, from which the word ‘taboo’ comes, named a morally neutral power, too great to be handled casually, not something dirty.2
Among the Mbendjele BaYaka, forest hunter-gatherers of the northern Republic of Congo, menstrual blood is part of ekila, a web of taboos around blood, sex, hunting and the sharing of meat that men and women alike keep. The anthropologist Jerome Lewis shows how these taboos tie the genders together in mutual dependence and deny either the chance to claim higher status, so that a system about blood works against hierarchy instead of for it.3 See Who is Jerome Lewis, and what can the BaYaka teach us about equality?
How does Therapeutic Shamanism see purity and impurity? #
Through 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 first city-state cultures came the sky religions, which justified the new hierarchy by teaching that up is good and down is bad, that spirit is good and matter corrupt, and “that men are good and that women are dirty, unclean, inferior and not to be trusted”.4 Ideas of clean and unclean were part of how that order was justified and enforced, setting spirit above the body and some people above others.
So there is no ladder of purity in Therapeutic Shamanism to climb, and nothing about the body, the earth or being a woman that needs to be purified away. Cleansing is practical. It means washing off energies and influences that have attached themselves to us, to objects or to places, and the intent matters far more than the method. That teaching is set out in What are cleansing and purification? See also What is spiritual bypassing, and how can psychotherapy help prevent it?
Is there any boundary Therapeutic Shamanism does keep? #
Yes, between the living and the dead. Many peoples treat death as the strongest pollution of all, and the teaching shares something of that instinct, for a different reason. The aim in shamanism is always to make sure the dead move on and leave the living alone, because, even where there is no ill intent, the energy of the dead is simply not good for the living to be around. Shamans do not take the dead on as guides and teachers, nor keep them around, which is a marked contrast with mediumship.5
This is not a judgement that the dead are dirty or that death is shameful. It is a matter of each being in its right place, with the dead moving on to the Land of the DeadLand of the Dead. The middle-world human place where the middle-world self belongs after death. Not the Lower-World, and not hell. More about this and the living getting on with living. See What is psychopomping? and What is the Land of the Dead?
