A vision quest is a ceremony, best known from Native North American peoples, in which a person goes alone into wild country, usually fasting, to seek a vision or guidance from the spirits. Therapeutic Shamanism respects vision quests as powerful wild practices, but does not build its path on them: for domesticated modern people their effects tend to fade within weeks or months, so the weight falls on practice woven into daily life.
What is a vision quest? #
A time alone in the wild, fasting and praying for a vision. The best-known form is that of the Oglala Lakota, who in the nineteenth century lived as bison hunters on the Great Plains. After fasting for three or four days, the seeker is taken out to a sacred hill and stays there without food or water, crying out to the spirits for a vision. Animals or the thunder beings may come, and on their return a holy person helps them understand what the vision means for their life.1
The writer and theologian Vine Deloria Jr, of the Standing Rock Sioux, describes the vision quest of many tribes as “primarily an individual responsibility”. The seeker fasts, prays and sings sacred songs, hoping to be granted a calling “to serve the people”, which might be anything from becoming a holy person to living with a hardship. Depending on the tribe, a quest may be short, may show nothing at all, or may set the person on a demanding path for the rest of their life.2 Deloria writes of tribal peoples in general, and those peoples lived in very different ways, from nomadic hunting to settled farming, so the details varied a lot from one to another.
In the wider Western world the term is now also used for wilderness fasts and solo times offered by modern teachers, such as the vision fasts Bill Plotkin uses. See Who is Bill Plotkin, and what is soul initiation?
Is a vision quest a shamanic practice? #
It is one of the powerful ways shamanic cultures had of shocking people into a deep, right-brain, shamanic state. Others included ceremonies that may have gone on for days, prolonged fasting or dancing, hallucinogenic plants and sweat lodges. These are “wild practices”. They connect us to our wild soul and to the undomesticated, more-than-human world.3
For our hunter-gatherer ancestors this caused no difficulty, because there was no conflict between the changes such practices brought and the way people already lived. They were already living wild, with an alive connection to nature and to Spirit, so a vision quest was of a piece with the rest of their lives.4
Why does Therapeutic Shamanism not build its path on vision quests? #
Because, for domesticated people, the effects do not last. Vision quests and the like can work dramatically in the short term. Paul Francis did them all, and plenty more besides, through his twenties and thirties, and they had their place in waking him up. But he noticed that although he felt great afterwards, the good effects gradually wore off, and a few weeks or months back in ordinary modern life were usually enough to leave him more or less back to square one. He noticed the same in friends and students.5
The difficulty is domesticationDomestication. The process by which, in domesticating other species, we domesticated ourselves. When dated precisely, Domestication begins with the Neolithic era, before the Fall proper, which begins with the first city-state cultures around 4000 BCE. What rewilding works to undo. More about this. If we experience an alive connection to the wild on a vision quest, how do we carry it back into a domesticated, ‘civilised’ life? One answer is to keep going back and doing them, and for many years that is what Paul did. In the end it left his spiritual life feeling semi-detached from the rest of his life, something done at weekends and on holidays to keep him going the rest of the time. He regularly hears from people who have done a vision quest in the wilderness somewhere, had a powerful experience they feel could change their life, and then found it was not changing their life, because back home they did not know how to integrate it.6
None of this decries vision quests. They can be powerful and useful, if done in the right way.7 The question Therapeutic Shamanism asks is how such experiences become part of everyday life. See What is shamanic ecstasy or soul flight?
What does Therapeutic Shamanism do instead? #
It looks for practices that bring the wild into daily life. A modern shamanism will still include practices that reconnect us to nature and the more-than-human. It also needs a whole new set of practices that keep that connection alive in largely urban, domesticated lives, so that we can “find the wild in the tamed”. Most of us cannot go back to living in the countryside, and much of the countryside is itself managed and tamed, so the practices have to reach beneath the deadening veneer of the domesticated lands we live in, whether urban or rural, and connect us back to the wild source of life that feeds our souls.8
Is a vision quest a rite of passage? #
The sources used here describe it less as a rite marking an age than as a search for a calling. A vision quest may be short, may show nothing, or may shape a whole life, and the calling it brings is meant to serve the people, not only the seeker.9 In Therapeutic Shamanism, the heart of what the old initiations did, finding our Soul, is approached through journeying to 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, and it is the start of a long process, not a single event. See What is a rite of passage, and what did we lose when initiation disappeared?
Did our Ice Age ancestors go on vision quests? #
Nobody knows. The archaeologist April Nowell, writing about childhood in the Palaeolithic, thinks it highly probable that the hunter-gatherers of that time marked the passage to adulthood in some way, since people everywhere do so today, recent foragers included. But she points out that such a passage may have been marked by changes to the body or by “some other form of intangible culture (dance, trance or vision quests), that leave behind no traces for the archaeologist to discover.”10 So the accounts of vision quests come from peoples known in recent centuries, and what happened in the deep past has to be inferred.
Is it all right to go on a vision quest? #
That is for each person to decide; Therapeutic Shamanism neither forbids nor prescribes it. Two things help in deciding. The first is integration: what will help the experience last into ordinary life afterwards. The second is respect. Particular ceremonies belong to particular peoples, and adopting the customs and practices of a culture that has been oppressed, without its permission and without acknowledgement, respect or real understanding, is cultural appropriation.11 Therapeutic Shamanism keeps its own practice as culture-lite as it can, and does not base itself on any particular indigenous culture.12 A wilderness fast in your own land is one thing; a ceremony sold as an authentic Lakota rite is another. See What is ‘plastic shamanism’? and Is Western shamanism cultural appropriation?
