What does domestication do to us?

Did domestication change our bodies? #

At first, yes, in many places. “A modern domesticated carrot is scarcely recognisable as being related to its wild ancestor. Corgis and bulldogs are profoundly different to their wild ancestors too, and we are a very different creature compared to our wild, hunter-gatherer ancestors.” Early farmers suffered for it: “early agricultural diets provided a drastically reduced variety of foodstuffs, resulting in nutritional deficiencies”, and crowding, animals and poor sanitation brought more infectious disease.¹

Outside research gives a similar picture in many places. Writing about skeletons from Greece and Turkey, the geographer Jared Diamond reports that “With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed”.² A study of early farmers in Central and Southeast Europe found “significant reductions in mean stature and body mass” compared with the hunter-gatherer-fishers who came before them.³

The evidence is more mixed than a single story, though. A large study of more than three thousand skeletons found that in some regions “decreases in stature preceded the origins of agriculture”, and that in the Levant and China, where farming grew slowly from local plants and animals, people “had stable stature and body mass over time”.⁴ So the harm seems to have depended very much on how, and how fast, farming arrived. See What is the Fall?

What did it do to our freedom? #

It asked us to give much of it up. As settlements grew into towns and cities, they needed “much more complex social structures, rules and regulations, laws and contracts”, and “The result was we turned ourselves from wild and free hunter-gatherers, into domesticated and tamed beings.”⁵ “To fit in to our current civilisation we suppress our individuality and curtail our freedom to a degree that is unprecedented in the previous hundreds of thousands of years of human history.”⁶

Every culture has its rules. Hunter-gatherer children also had to learn the rules of belonging. “However, the more complex a group’s culture is, the more rules there are, and the more introjectsIntroject. A foreign belief, message or story swallowed whole (often in childhood) and lodged inside as if it were our own; a type of intrusion. More about this are needed, in order to keep people in line.”⁷ An introject is a “must” or a “should” we swallow whole from the people around us. A domesticated culture needs a great many of them.

What did it do to our sense of who we are? #

It buried our real self under a persona. The lives most people live today “are a long way from being an expression of their real-self, their 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 soul”, because the real self “is buried deep underneath introjects, wonky stories, wonky beliefs, and middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer thought-formsThought-form. A human-created living being: an ideology, religion, corporation, conspiracy theory or platform that has taken on a life of its own. Genuinely alive, but soul-less in the deep sense: natural things alone are full of Soul. More about this”. “The desperately sad truth is that most people in our ‘civilised’ world will live and die never knowing who they really are, or what they could have blossomed into.”⁸ Modern societies are designed to turn us into “a diminished and domesticated thing, cut off from both nature at large and from our own true and personal nature.”⁹ See What are the Wild Mind and the Domesticated Mind?

What happens to the parts of us that do not fit? #

They are pushed down, and they do not go away. “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 and domestication, we create vast amounts of unconscious material, both personal and collective.” That material forms what Therapeutic Shamanism calls 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, “the realm of our repressed and unconscious middle-world psychic energies.” Its scale is “an enormously significant difference between us and hunter-gatherers.”¹⁰

It also changes the commonest cause of soul-loss. In hunter-gatherer cultures, soul-loss usually came from bereavement, illness or shock. Today, “the principal cause of soul loss in modern times is usually that we send part of our own soul away, to ‘fit in’.”¹¹ See What is the under-world, and how is it different from the Lower-World? and What is soul-loss?

What did it do to our relationship with the land? #

It broke it. With totalitarian agriculture “we moved from being a part of the land to seeing ourselves as owning the land.”¹² “Far from seeing all things as alive and sacred, we now began to see all things as just commodities to be used.”¹³ At the root lies the idea that up is good and down is bad, that Heaven is good and the Earth is bad. “It is a foundation stone of Taker society. It is what both allowed and created our domestication and the Fall.”¹⁴

Cut off from nature in this way, we suffer Power-loss. “From a shamanic point of view, we are suffering from severe and chronic power-loss, at a scale unprecedented in human history.” Together with soul-loss, this leaves us “full of holes that other things can get into”, in a culture that sells us things to fill them.¹⁵ See What is Power-loss? and What is the myth of human supremacy?

Does domestication make us ill? #

In several ways. “Compared to most hunter-gatherer cultures, the mental health of modern-day human societies is truly, truly awful”, with causes such as “lack of exercise, poor diets, the absence of greenery and connection to nature”, inequality, oppression and a sense of powerlessness.¹⁶

It also affects the brain. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived with the two hemispheres in balance, and the right hemisphere, the part linked with “empathy and the sense of interconnectedness”, is “heavily suppressed in modern humans.”¹⁷ And Rewilding Yourself draws on anthropology to argue that possession is rare among hunter-gatherers and widespread in agricultural and hierarchical societies: “In other words, possession is a product of our domestication.”¹⁸ See What does healing mean in Therapeutic Shamanism?

Was any of it good? #

Yes, plainly. “Our domestication has brought us great benefits of course”: health care, food, homes and much else. The cost has been “our freedom and wildness”, and whether the benefits are worth it “is for you to decide of course.”¹⁹ Therapeutic Shamanism does not ask anyone to give up modern life. It asks us to see clearly what domestication has done, so that we can begin to heal it. See Can modern humans recover an animist way of seeing and undo domestication?