In Sacred Nature (2022) the British historian of religion Karen Armstrong sets out the view that the ecological crisis is at root a spiritual one. Over the last five hundred years the modern West came to treat nature as a mere resource, losing the sense, shared by the great religious traditions, that the natural world is sacred. She asks us to recover it by drawing on the insights and disciplines of those traditions and putting them into daily practice, because a myth only means something when it is lived.
Who is Karen Armstrong? #
She is a British writer on religion, born in 1944. She spent seven years as a Roman Catholic nun, leaving her teaching order in 1969 to read English at St Anne’s College, Oxford, and became a full-time writer and broadcaster in 1982.1 Her books include A History of God (1993), The Great Transformation (2006), on the Axial Age, and The Case for God (2009). In 2008 she won the TED Prize and used it to launch the Charter for Compassion, presented in 2009.2 She writes as a historian of the traditions she describes, not as a practitioner of any one of them.
What is the argument of Sacred Nature? #
That the way we live now has cut us off from nature, and that this is a loss of the sacred as much as a loss of beauty. The climate crisis, as she sees it, means we have to change not only our lifestyle but our whole belief system, because “we have cultivated a worldview that is very different from that of our forebears.”3
She traces that worldview through the opening of Genesis, where God gives the first humans dominion over the earth, telling them to “fill the earth and conquer it”, part of the monotheism she sets apart as the great exception among the traditions she surveys, and then through Francis Bacon, René Descartes and Isaac Newton, whose ‘mechanical’ God designed and dominated the universe. When people say today that they do not believe in God, she suggests, it is usually Newton’s God they are rejecting.4
Against this she sets an older, ‘participatory’ way of experiencing nature, in which humans, animals, plants and even stones share one living world. She describes the shaman as an intermediary between a community and its natural environment, with no idea of a ‘supernatural’ beyond nature, and holds that, long before the first cities, this was probably how most humans experienced the natural world. In her account this sensibility “did not die with the arrival of civilisation”; it lived on, in different forms, in China, India and the Middle East until the coming of Western modernity.5 Those traditions, from Confucian and Daoist China, Hindu and Buddhist India, Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Jainism, all belonged to farming, city-based civilisations, and they make up most of the book.
What does she mean by mythos and logos? #
Two ways of knowing that every pre-modern society held together: logosLogos. Literal, factual, analytical truth: the truth of facts you can check. One of the two modes of truth, alongside mythos. More about this, practical and factual knowledge, and mythosMythos. Metaphorical, symbolic, felt truth: the truth of art, poetry and shamanic journeys. Shamanic reality is mythologically true, not literally true, which is why journeys are interpreted, never taken at face value. More about this, the stories through which people found meaning. By the eighteenth century, in her account, the West’s success in science and technology led it to dismiss myth as false and primitive. Her reply is that myth was never an early attempt at history or science. It is a guide, telling us how to live more fully, and “a myth is true because it is effective.” And a myth makes no sense unless it is translated into practical action, which is why myths were always bound up with ritual, with the body, with music and dance.6
What does she ask us to do? #
To revive “the reverence for the natural world” through the disciplines the traditions developed, practised all the time and not only when we feel like it. Recycling and protest, in her view, are not enough. Each chapter ends with a section called ‘The Way Forward’, turning a teaching into an everyday attitude: sitting in a garden or a park for ten minutes a day without headphones or a phone, simply taking in the sights and sounds; gratitude; self-emptying; the Golden Rule widened to the whole natural world; harmlessness towards all beings.7 She ends with Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, whose curse lifts only when, seeing the water-snakes he had despised, he blesses them “unaware”.8
How does this connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Most directly through the same pair of words. In Therapeutic Shamanism mythos is what is metaphorically true and logos what is literally true; they are two different kinds of truth, and modern culture tends either to mistake mythos for logos or to think logos makes mythos worthless. We need both, and need to know the difference.9 Armstrong’s test of a myth, whether it works when it is lived, sits close to the shamanic saying “Does it grow corn?”, meaning “Never mind the dogma, does it work?”, with its fuller form, “What kind of corn does it grow?”10
Her shaman, too, is recognisable. In hunter-gatherer cultures the shaman was the intermediary and advocate between the tribe, the non-humans and the spirit world, keeping things in balance.11 And her loss of a participatory sense of nature meets the teaching that modern humans, strongly left-brain dominant, have fallen into an experience of life as separateness.12 See Who is Iain McGilchrist, and what do the two halves of the brain have to do with animism?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
First, on when the loss began. Armstrong dates it to roughly the last five hundred years, with the participatory sense carried on by the great civilisations until then. Therapeutic Shamanism places the break much earlier: it began with the shift to farming and gathered pace 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 birth of the first city-states, when people began to treat animals and plants as things to be used, and when 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 arose, teaching that “up is good, and down is bad”, spirit good and matter corrupt.13 See What is the Fall?
Second, on where to look for help. Armstrong suggests that taking indigenous peoples as role models “may be too ambitious” for most of us, and turns instead to the traditions of the Axial Age.14 Therapeutic Shamanism looks further back, to our hunter-gatherer ancestors, holding them as both logos and mythos. As a matter of fact they lived in a far better relationship with the Earth than we do, and as a guiding story they remind us of a time we lived in balance, without being romanticised as flawless.15 See Isn’t the Fall just noble savage romanticism?
Third, on the route back. Armstrong’s way runs through scripture, contemplation and the ritual life of the religions. Shamanism is not a religion but a way of being, and its heart is direct, personal experience of connecting with spirit, a living world experienced, not believed in, and relationship with the beings themselves.16 See Is Therapeutic Shamanism a religion or belief system?
