David Abram, born in 1957, is an American philosopher and ecologist and the author of The Spell of the Sensuous (1996) and Becoming Animal (2010). He coined the phrase “the more-than-human world” in the subtitle of The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World, as a name for the living earth, and it has since been taken up widely by other writers and activists. Therapeutic Shamanism uses ‘more-than-human’ for the beings and the living world beyond the human, whose loss of connection lies at the root of much of our modern sickness.
Who is David Abram? #
He was born in New York in 1957. From his teens he worked as a sleight-of-hand magician, and after graduating from Wesleyan University in 1980 he travelled in Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Nepal, living and studying with traditional healers. He went on to become a philosopher, drawing above all on the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the careful description of experience as it is actually lived.1 See Who was Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and what has the body to do with knowing?
The Spell of the Sensuous won the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction, and Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology was a runner-up for the first PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. In 2006 he co-founded the Alliance for Wild Ethics with the ecologist Stephan Harding and others, and he is its creative director.1
Where does the phrase “more-than-human world” come from? #
From Abram. He coined it in 1996, in the subtitle of The Spell of the Sensuous, to refer to earthly nature; he sometimes also calls it “the commonwealth of breath”. Other scholars and activists soon adopted it, and it is now widely used in ecology, philosophy, anthropology and environmental writing.2
In Therapeutic Shamanism the more-than-human is simply the not-human, the Animals, Plants, Mountains and the rest of the living world. Modern humans carry a deep wound of loneliness, isolation and separation, a sickness in the soul that people try, and fail, to fill with food, drugs, shopping, work, television and the internet. It comes from losing the experience of interconnection, and reconnecting with the more-than-human is how people rediscover what it is to be fully alive and truly human.3 See What does it mean to say the world is alive and full of persons?
What does Abram say about animism? #
That animism is not a mistake but the normal way human beings perceive. In his essay “Magic and the Machine” (2018), which condenses a chapter of The Spell of the Sensuous, he calls animistic perception “utterly normal for the human organism, a kind of default setting” for our species, and defines animism as “the instinctive experience of reciprocity or exchange between the perceiver and the perceived”, which, he says, lies at the heart of all human perception.4
What redirected that perception, in his account, was technology, and above all the alphabet. Reading is itself a kind of animism, he says, because we look at marks on a page and they speak to us. So the old sense of a speaking, sentient world moved onto our own written signs, and “it is only when a traditionally oral culture becomes literate that the land seems to fall silent.” Talking gadgets and voice assistants, he goes on, offer “only a sham facsimile of wonder”, because they speak only in human words and have no real otherness, whilst satellite navigation replaces the ancient bodily skill of finding the way. He sets against it the tracking skill of a band of San in the Kalahari, hunter-gatherers whom he describes as struggling to keep their traditional hunting and foraging ways in the face of ‘development’.4
How does this connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Closely, though the books name Abram only in their reading lists. Both see the experience of a living, responsive world as the human norm, and its loss as the wound. Shamans say that the root cause of most illness is Power-lossPower-loss. Disconnection from nature, the web of life and our place in it: like being unplugged from the national grid. One of the two root causes of shamanic illness, healed by reconnection (not by soul retrieval), beginning with the Power Animal bond. Read the full answer, soul loss or both, and Power-loss happens when we separate ourselves from nature and the more-than-human world; anything that helps us reconnect, above all bonding with 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, helps to heal it.5 See What is Power-loss?
Both also value knowing through the senses and the body over knowing about. In shapeshifting, transforming into something more-than-human, an Animal, a Plant or a Mountain, gives not an intellectual understanding of it but a deep felt senseFelt sense. Eugene Gendlin’s term for the whole bodily ‘feel’ of an issue: deeper than emotion, deeper than words, reached through Focusing. Read the full answer, a knowing from the inside out.6 Therapeutic Shamanism turns a similar concern on modern psychology, where much psychotherapy tends to reduce everything to the human level, working indoors on human relationships and inner human processes, with no connection to nature.7 See What can ecotherapy and ecopsychology offer shamanic work?
Where do Abram and Therapeutic Shamanism differ? #
Mainly in what kind of claim they make. Abram writes as a phenomenologist, describing how the world is perceived, as a field of sensitive and sentient powers that we feel addressed by. Therapeutic Shamanism goes further. Everything is made of energy, and that energy is alive and conscious, so the beings met in the living world and in shamanic journeys are persons in their own right, who can be related to and communicated with.8
They also tell the story of the loss differently. Abram names the alphabet and literacy as the great turning point, the moment the land fell silent. Therapeutic Shamanism places 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 earlier and more broadly, with the 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 of the world and the rise of the first city-state cultures, in which our separating, left-brain way of attending took control.9 The two accounts can stand together, one naming a powerful technology and the other the shift in how we live and attend that came before it. See What is the Fall?
