In Therapeutic Shamanism, an Oversoul is the Lower-World soul of a whole kind of being: Wolf is all wolves, Oak all oaks, met as one wise being. Oversouls are branches of Mother EarthMother Earth. The sacred Feminine pole: pure potential, from whom all the Peoples arise. The Lower-World is her realm, and she is all the realms: “The Earth is indeed our Mother.” More about this on the great tree of the PeoplesThe Peoples. The Animal People, Plant People, Standing People (the Trees) and Stone People: our elder kin, of whom the Human People are the youngest and least wise. A family, not a hierarchy. Read the full answer, each individual a twig growing from its branch, and smaller branches joining larger ones, species into Mammal, Mammal into Animal, all rooted in Mother Earth. In Lower-World work it is the Oversoul, not an individual, that is met.
What does ‘Oversoul’ mean in Therapeutic Shamanism? #
The soul of a whole species, or of a larger family of beings, held as one being in the Lower-World. An Oversoul is a branch of Mother Earth in the Lower-World that represents the whole of a particular species. Tiger Oversoul is all tigers, and every individual tiger in the middle-world is a projection from it, a twig on that branch.1 The difference matters in a very practical way: Tiger can be worked with safely in the Lower-World, as a loving and wise teacher, whilst to an individual tiger in the middle-world a human is still prey.
The word is written as one word with a capital O, since in this approach capitals mark beings of the Lower-World or Upper-WorldUpper-World. The realm of Father Sky and of Spirit: spacious, rarefied and clear, layered in tiers, offering not escape but perspective. Not better than the Lower-World: we ascend rooted, and bring the gifts back down. Read the full answer and lower case marks those of the middle-world: panther in a forest, Panther in the Lower-World.2
How do Oversouls fit together? #
Like the branches of one great tree growing out of Mother Earth. The Stone People are the roots, Plant is the main trunk, and Animal diverges from Plant and branches again, into Invertebrate and Vertebrate, then Reptile, Amphibian, Mammal and the rest; the Mammal branch divides into Cat, Horse, Bear, Fox and so on.3 The thinner branches are the Oversouls of single species, and the thicker ones nearer the trunk are Oversouls too, of a whole genus, order, family, class or phylum.3
Followed from the tip inwards, the picture is the same. A single twig tip is one individual soul, completely unique. Moving towards the trunk, the human twigs come together into a branch, Human with a capital H, the Human Oversoul. That branch joins those of our closest relatives, chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas, in Great Ape; beside it run the branches of the cat family and the dog family; these join in Mammal, alongside Reptile and Fish; further in lies the whole great trunk of the Plant People, and all of them merge back into the Stone PeopleStone People. All physical matter: mountains, sea, rivers, clouds, sun and stars: the oldest and widest of the Peoples. As some animist cultures put it, ‘we are just the Stone People, dancing for a while’. Read the full answer, the earliest of the Peoples. Everything grows out of Mother Earth.
Is my own soul part of an Oversoul? #
Yes. Each person’s Lower-World Soul is both unique and interdependent: a twig tip unlike any other, with its own core values, knowledge, skills and wisdom, and at the same time part of the Human Oversoul and of everything that branch grows from. The Lower-World is a place of interconnectedness. There is individuality in it, or it would be an undifferentiated mass, but far less than in the middle-world, and what look like separate individuals here turn out there to be parts of a far greater whole.4
The Lower-World is a unity of a particular kind, unity through ecology, like the organs of a single body or the members of an ecosystem, each with its own role, none able to fulfil it apart from the rest. On that picture modern humans are a branch that has declared independence, like a kidney or a spleen announcing that it does not need the rest of the body, at terrible cost. See What are Soul, Spirit, the middle-world self and the body?
What is the Human Oversoul? #
Human, the whole of humankind as one Lower-World being. It is hard to relate to directly, because humans are hard-wired to look for individual faces, so the Human GuidesHuman Lower-World Guide. A face put on the human Oversoul: the Ancestors met through an individual form, genuinely other than us, chosen from pre-Fall hunter-gatherer humanity. Related to as a teacher, never a master. Read the full answer met in the Lower-World appear as individual people with names and personalities. They are not single twigs, though, but thick branches growing from the Human Oversoul, which is what the AncestorsAncestors. The human Oversoul: the whole of humanity held as one Lower-World being. Distinct from individual dead ancestors (small a), who are not worked with in this approach. Read the full answer with a capital A are, Human in faces we can relate to.5 In healthy tribes it was the EldersElder (True Elder). The rarer stage beyond Adulthood. Adults decide; Elders advise. More about this, least caught up in the middle-world, who most embodied not only their own Soul but the larger Human Oversoul too.6 See What are Human Guides?
Why work with the Oversoul rather than an individual? #
Because individuality belongs to the middle-world and wholeness to the Lower-World. An individual animal, however beloved, is a middle-world being with the limits that brings, whilst the Oversoul is an infinitely wiser and more powerful being.7 The words used make a difference too, which is why journeys are best described as “Next, Bear appeared” rather than “Next, a bear appeared”: ‘a’, ‘the’ and ‘my’ turn Animal back into animal.8
Lower-World work usually begins with an animal Oversoul, and that is no accident. An Animal is close enough to humans to form a deep, loving bond with, which is much harder with a daffodil or a rock, and different enough to take us out of ourselves and start reconnecting us with the other-than-human. 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 is an animal Oversoul in exactly this sense, and Finding Your Deep Soul has an exercise for journeying to meet one. See What is a Power Animal? and Who are the Animal, Plant and Stone People?
Do human-made things have Oversouls? #
No. Souls and Oversouls are Stories told by Mother Earth, the patterns she gives each part of her body to be. A horse is shaped by two sets of these Stories: its own Soul with the Oversouls it belongs to, Horse, Mammal and Animal, and the Stone People its body is made of. A mobile phone is made of the Stone People too, but what makes it a phone, its make and its model, is a human story of the middle-world. There is no ‘Samsung’ Oversoul, because humans, good as they are at telling stories, cannot create Souls; only Mother Earth can. Made things are still alive, with middle-world souls of their own: “not soul-less, but they are Soul-less”.9 In the same way the actual Lower-World is wild nature, with no farms and no domesticated animals in it. See Is giving things human personalities the same as animism?
Is it the same as Emerson’s ‘Over-Soul’? #
No, the same word is used for something different. The American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his essay “The Over-Soul” (Essays: First Series, 1841), uses it for a universal unity in which all human souls share, “that Unity, that Over-soul, within which every man’s particular being is contained and made one with all other”.10 The Oversoul in Therapeutic Shamanism is the Lower-World soul of a kind of being, Wolf, Oak or Human, a branch of Mother Earth among many others. The two are given side by side here so that readers meeting either word know which is meant.
