A metaphor is a way of understanding one thing in terms of another: an argument as a battle, time as money, an illness as a war. Many linguists and philosophers now hold that metaphor is not decoration on top of plain speech but part of how we think, so the metaphors a culture lives by quietly shape what its people notice, value and do. Therapeutic Shamanism agrees that the words we use shape what we experience, and adds that the language of shamanic journeys is itself the language of metaphor, image and symbol.
What is a metaphor? #
In the everyday sense, it is the use of a word or phrase for something other than what it literally means, to suggest a likeness or a connection between the two. The linguists Murray Knowles and Rosamund Moon give the example of Lindisfarne Priory described as “the jewel in Northumbria’s ecclesiastical crown”. A priory is not a jewel and Northumbria wears no crown, yet the phrase says at once that the priory is the most precious thing in the region.1
The definition that changed the field is shorter. “The essence of metaphor,” wrote the linguist George Lakoff and the philosopher Mark Johnson in 1980, “is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.”2 The family therapists Gene Combs and Jill Freedman put it more simply still: “A metaphor is something that stands for something else”, and it “always communicates on at least two levels”, the level of the thing itself and the level of what it stands for.3
Is a metaphor just a figure of speech? #
For a long time that was the usual view. Plain, literal language describes the world as it is, and metaphor is ornament, best left to poets. The psychologist Andrew Ortony, introducing the standard collection Metaphor and Thought, sets this against the opposite position, in which all knowledge is built by the knower, so that “metaphors afford different ways of viewing the world” and literal language loses its privileged claim on reality.4
Lakoff and Johnson’s work, from 1980 onwards, did much to move linguists towards the second view, and Knowles and Moon trace today’s great interest in figurative language directly to it.5 Knowles and Moon describe metaphor as not “artistic embellishment” but “a basic phenomenon” running through the whole range of language.6 Lakoff and Johnson went further: “Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.”7 Their evidence is ordinary speech. English speakers win and lose arguments, attack weak points, defend positions and shoot down claims, because, in their account, we think of argument as war.
How does a metaphor shape what we see? #
By lighting up some things and hiding others. Thinking of argument as war fixes attention on winning, and so “can keep us from focusing on other aspects” of arguing, such as two people giving their time in an effort to understand each other.8 Knowles and Moon trace the same thing in medicine, where cells fight off invading organisms and patients are bombarded with antibiotics. Other metaphors were possible, but war is the familiar one, and the way we now think about the body’s response to infection “is determined by it”.9
Most of these metaphors go unnoticed, which is why they have so much power. Lakoff and Johnson go further and say that they also change things: “New metaphors have the power to create a new reality”, a change that begins when people start to understand their experience through a new metaphor and deepens when they start to act on it.10 The psychoanalyst Donnel Stern makes the general point from the consulting room: “Reality is not directly received, that is, but interpreted”, and a culture’s habits of interpreting are usually so taken for granted that they are not, or even cannot be, the object of our attention.11
What does Therapeutic Shamanism say about words shaping experience? #
Something very close, reached by its own road. Shamans are very clear that words have power, in that they shape how we experience reality, and can to some extent shape reality itself.12 The language we use moulds the way we perceive and relate to the world around us, and so does the system of assumptions, beliefs and values we are steeped in from childhood.13
The clearest case is the notion that up is good and down is bad. It has seeped into everyday language: humans are ‘above’ the rest of life, ‘animal nature’ is ‘lower’, and ‘acting like an animal’ is an insult. It shapes religions and other institutions, and it is a spell, one that begins to break once we see that it is simply not true. The idea of human supremacy that goes with it is, in the same way, a myth we live by, and one that needs to change.13 The word ‘civilisation’ works the same way. Its literal meaning is ‘city culture’, yet it brings with it the idea of an advanced stage of development, so that ‘uncivilised’ comes to mean crude and savage. Through language, the dominant culture teaches its members that it is better than the hunter-gatherer cultures that came before it.14 See What is the myth of human supremacy? and What is deprogramming?
The same holds inside a journey. Because journeys are co-created, how we think and the words we use shape what we meet, which is why Therapeutic Shamanism writes “Next, Bear appeared” and not “Next, a bear appeared”. Putting ‘a’, ‘the’ or ‘my’ in front reduces Animal to animal, a small change in language with a large effect on what happens.15 See What part do silence, words and names play?
Why is the language of journeys metaphor and symbol? #
Because shamanic reality is very different from ordinary reality and hard to describe. To make sense of it, what is there has to be clothed in imagery and metaphor. So when a practitioner describes a healing to the person it was done for, in one worked example a Power AnimalPower Animal. The Oversoul of a wild species, met as a single Lower-World being and bonded with in a deep, committed, usually lifelong soul-bond of unconditional love. The practitioner’s first and foremost Guide: Panther, not “my panther”. Read the full answer pecking grey stones out of their solar plexus, the account is not literally true but a symbol of the healing, in much the way that dreams carry symbolic meaning.16 Language is largely a 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 thing, and largely left-brained, a way of labelling and dividing up the world. 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 is largely beyond it, “the realm of metaphor and imagery”, closer to poetry, painting or music, evoking things rather than spelling them out.17
So journeys are 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, not logosLogos. Literal, factual, analytical truth: the truth of facts you can check. One of the two modes of truth, alongside mythos. More about this. Mythos is something that is metaphorically true but not literally so; logos is literally true.18 An enormous amount of damage has come from people taking mythos, such as sacred books, as literal truth, and problems arise in the same way when people treat a journey as a literal report. A journey is closer to a dream, the realm of meanings, relationships and insights, and not a source of facts.19 See Why are there no words or symbols in the Lower-World? and How do I unpack and interpret a shamanic journey?
Are the beings met in journeys just metaphors? #
No, and here Therapeutic Shamanism differs from approaches that read every image as a symbol of something in the self. Something met in a journey may carry symbolic meaning on one level. Reducing everything to symbols, though, humanises everything, treating every being we meet as a projection or a metaphor for our personal growth, which is a limited and deeply anthropocentric way of seeing. The beings met in shamanic reality are real, with their own lives, wisdom and agency. Shamans are very clear that the spirits are real and the shamanic realms real places, though not real in the same way as physical things, and what we experience there is co-created, a mixture of what is there independently of us and what we bring to make sense of it.20 See Is shamanic journeying imagination, and how are journeys co-created?
How do therapists work with metaphor? #
Several schools of therapy work with it directly. Combs and Freedman, drawing on the psychiatrist Milton Erickson and the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, built a way of working from symbol, story and ceremony. One of its tools is reframing, which offers a client not new facts but “a new way of perceiving facts” they already know.21 The New Zealand psychotherapist David Grove noticed that many clients described their symptoms in metaphor, and created Clean Language, a way of asking about a person’s metaphors in their own exact words without distorting them. James Lawley and Penny Tompkins, who set out the method in Metaphors in Mind, point out that a metaphor limits what makes sense within its own logic, so that it can be “a tool for creativity or a self-imposed prison”.22 See Who was Gregory Bateson, and what is an “ecology of mind”?
Shamanic work meets them on common ground. Wounds from before we had language, such as a damaged first bond with our mother, are embodied and largely unconscious, and not easily reached through words, so they usually call for therapies that use imagery or work through the body. Shamanic journeying, being largely non-verbal and often very embodied, can be highly effective with this kind of wound too.23 See What can art therapy offer shamanic work?
How is grokking different from metaphor? #
A metaphor understands one thing in terms of another, usually something already familiar. GrokkingGrokking. Understanding a being from the inside out (the word is Robert Heinlein’s): deep, embodied, experiential knowing rather than intellectual knowledge. Its two shamanic routes are shapeshifting and dieting. Read the full answer does not work by comparison. The word comes from Robert Heinlein’s 1961 science-fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land, and means understanding something so thoroughly “that you merge with it and it merges with you”.24 In shamanic work it means knowing a being from the inside out, often by shapeshifting into it in a journey, which takes us beyond human consciousness and into being Bird, or Plant, or Stone. Knowing about a being beforehand helps, so research and grokking go together. See What are grokking, dieting and research in working with the Peoples?
Does everyone agree that thought is metaphorical? #
No. Conceptual metaphor theory, as Lakoff and Johnson’s approach is called, has been hugely influential, and it has been criticised too. Knowles and Moon list the main objections: that it is not rigorous enough, that its analyses often seem made up to fit, that it pays too little attention to real examples of language in use, and that its claims about thought are often unverified or cannot be verified.25
Lakoff and Johnson, for their part, never claimed that all thinking is metaphor. They hold that there is “a vast system of literal concepts”, such as cup, grasp and the spatial sense of ‘in’, alongside the metaphorical ones, and that metaphor builds on these.26 See What do Lakoff and Johnson say about metaphor and the body?
