Paul Shepard (1925 to 1996) was a writer on human ecology who held that human beings are still, in body and mind, the hunter-gatherers of the Pleistocene, the long Ice Age era in which our species took shape. In his last book, Coming Home to the Pleistocene (1998), he wrote that much of what ails modern life comes from living against that inheritance, especially in how we raise children and help them grow up. “Coming home” did not mean going back to the Stone Age, but recovering what still fits us from that older way of life, a view close to Therapeutic Shamanism’s own.
Who was Paul Shepard? #
A writer and thinker on the relationship between people and the natural world. He grew up in the woods and farmland of Missouri, where, as his wife Florence Shepard writes, he spent his boyhood setting traplines, hunting and fishing.1 His books include Man in the Landscape (1967), The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game (1973), Thinking Animals (1978), Nature and Madness (1982) and The Others: How Animals Made Us Human. Coming Home to the Pleistocene was his last book. He died in 1996, and Florence Shepard edited it for publication in 1998.2
What was the Pleistocene, and why did it matter to him? #
The Pleistocene is the geological era that began, in Shepard’s words, “About two million years ago”, and ended with the last Ice Age, around twelve thousand years ago. For almost all of that time our ancestors lived by hunting and gathering. Shepard’s central point is that this is the life human beings were shaped for. In his words: “We are Pleistocene hominids keyed with infinite exactitude to small-group, omnivorous life in forest/plains edges of the wilderness.” Farming and cities came only in the last moment of that long story, far too recently to have changed what we are underneath. “We have only to recognise that our genome and we ourselves are Pleistocene.”3
He drew a firm line between wildness and tameness. “Wildness is a genetic state”, he wrote, and “We ourselves are genetically wild rather than domesticated.”4 Like many animals, we can also be tamed, but the taming sits on top of a wild nature.
What did he say went wrong? #
That modern life fails us most of all in how we grow up. Shepard saw human development as a long journey through stages, each needing the right kind of care, mentoring and ceremony, from a childhood immersed in nature to an adolescence guided by elders. He called this unfolding “the most extraordinary feature of human evolution”.5 When a culture fails to meet those stages, he thought, people never fully mature: “otherwise we slide into adult infantility and its neurotic symptoms.” He called the lack of initiation for young people today “a glaring tear in the fabric of society”, in which “adolescents create their own identity” without the guidance of elders.6
He also saw the move to farming as a turning point in how people related to the rest of the living world. For foragers, he wrote, the world was “a gifting cosmos”, a place of generous plenty “not so much to be controlled by humans as to be understood”.7
What did he mean by “coming home”? #
Not going back. Shepard knew that modern people “cannot become Hopis or Kalahari Bushmen or Magdalenian bison hunters”, but he held that “elements in those cultures can be recovered or re-created” because they fit the human nature we all share. He asked readers to see time “as a spiral rather than a reversal”, and wrote that “We can go back to nature, as I wrote in 1973, because we never left it.”8
He gave the fire circle a special place: “The essence of the fire circle should be maintained in our modern world as the central metaphor for such human gathering and sharing.” The book ends with a long list of what he called themes of cultural recovery: small, face-to-face communities, the recognition of each stage of life, time in wild places, and more.9
How does this connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Closely, though Paul Francis’s books do not name Shepard. They reach very similar conclusions from their own direction.
On growing up, all hunter-gatherer cultures had initiation ceremonies around adolescence, designed “to dismantle the 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 identity that someone had constructed in their childhood, and replace it instead with a new identity. An identity rooted in their Soul”.10 Without them, “we live in a society not of Adults but of adults; a society of children in adult-sized bodies.”11 “Most people are stuck in the middle-world identities they settled on when they were little, unconsciously playing out childhood patterns in their ‘adult’ lives; effectively children in adult bodies.”12 See What is the Adult, and what does healthy inner leadership look like?
On going back, Therapeutic Shamanism is as clear as Shepard: rewildingRewilding. Recovering the wild, undomesticated Soul: the practical healing work that follows from the Fall diagnosis. We cannot go back, only forward: ancient wisdom for future solutions. Read the full answer “cannot be a mass return to a hunter-gatherer way of life”, because there are far too many of us now. “We simply cannot go back. Instead, we have to find a way forward.”13 And choosing hunter-gatherer ancestors as guides “has got absolutely nothing to do with romanticising the past”: “this is not about romanticising but about relativity.”14 See Can modern humans recover an animist way of seeing and undo domestication?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
In two ways. First, Shepard wrote as a secular ecologist, and his account rests on biology and the genes. Therapeutic Shamanism sees the same loss in terms of Soul. The initiation that turns an adult into an Adult is, in its words, the finding of “an identity rooted in their Soul”, in relationship with 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 the other-than-human Peoples.
Second, they disagree about the shaman. Shepard saw the shaman as “a latecomer”, part of what came with farming and herding.15 Therapeutic Shamanism points to cave paintings thought to show shamanic practice going back some 35,000 years, and to indigenous peoples who, if asked how old shamanism is, “would generally say that we have been practising shamanism for as long as we have been human.”16 See Where does shamanism come from?
Did people agree with him? #
Not always. Shepard expected to be called a romantic. He answered the anthropologist Robert Edgerton, who claimed that harmonious small societies never existed, by pointing out that Edgerton’s examples mixed hunter-gatherers with farmers, herders and settled fishing peoples. He also granted that “Foragers are not always pacific”, though, he added, they do not keep standing armies or make organised war.17 Some of his claims about genes reflect the science of his time, and later work on how genes and culture shape each other has moved on.
