Ursula K. Le Guin (1929 to 2018) was an American writer of science fiction and fantasy, best known for the Earthsea books, The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. Her stories turn again and again to balance, to becoming whole by owning one’s own shadow, to peoples who live as part of their forest, to societies without rulers, and to stories not built around a hero who kills, all of which sit close to the way of living Therapeutic Shamanism teaches.
Who was Ursula K. Le Guin? #
One of the most admired American writers of the twentieth century. She was born in Berkeley, California, in 1929, the daughter of the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and the writer Theodora Kroeber, whose book Ishi in Two Worlds (1961) tells the story of Ishi, the last known survivor of the Yahi, a hunter-gatherer people of northern California, whom her father had studied. Anthropology runs all through her work, and many of her central characters are anthropologists or outsiders observing a culture not their own.1
Her best-known books include A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) and the Earthsea books that followed it, amongst them Tehanu (1990); The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), which made her the first woman to win both the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel; The Word for World Is Forest (1972); The Dispossessed (1974); and Always Coming Home (1985). She also made her own English version of the Tao Te Ching (1997), and Taoism shapes much of her thinking. She won eight Hugo and six Nebula awards, and in 2014 the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. She died at her home in Portland, Oregon, in 2018.1
Le Guin is amongst the people Paul Francis names as his human heroes, alongside Michael Harner, Carl Rogers, Wilhelm Reich, Derrick Jensen, Joanna Macy, Arnold Mindell, the Buddha and Saint Francis, with the reminder that no hero belongs on a pedestal. All good heroes are flawed, and that is the point of them.2
What does Earthsea teach about the shadow? #
That wholeness comes from turning to face what we have been running from. In A Wizard of Earthsea the young wizard Ged, showing off, releases a shadow creature that scars him and hunts him. For a long time he flees it; then, on his teacher Ogion’s advice, he turns and hunts it in return, across the sea. At the end he names the shadow with his own name, Ged, and the two become one, and he is whole. The book is also full of the idea of balance, or equilibrium: magic used carelessly upsets the balance of the world, and, in its own words, “To light a candle is to cast a shadow.” Knowing something’s true name gives power over it, which is why true names are given only in trust.3
Many readers have seen Jung’s shadow in Ged’s story, though Le Guin said she had not read Jung when she wrote it. Therapeutic Shamanism makes a closely related point in its own terms. What we have repressed does not go away; it comes back at us as monsters and ‘demons’, and inner demons of this kind, fragments of the psyche we have pushed away, need integrating, not removing. These days a shamanic practitioner cannot assume which kind of demon they are meeting, and knowing whether it is a genuine intrusion or a disowned part of the psyche is of vital importance.4 See What is the under-world, and how is it different from the Lower-World? and Who was Carl Jung?
What does The Word for World Is Forest say about living with the land? #
That a people’s world and their forest can be one and the same. The novel is set on Athshe, a forested planet where a logging colony from Earth enslaves the small, peaceful forest people who live there, and strips the trees for timber and farmland, until the forest people rise against them. In the Athsheans’ language the word for ‘world’ is also the word for ‘forest’, and the word for ‘dream’ is the same as the word for ‘root’; their waking lives are guided by a practice of conscious dreaming that keeps them rooted in their forest. Le Guin wrote it partly in response to the Vietnam War, and it is a story about colonialism as much as ecology.5
The Athsheans are invented, and no real people should be read into them. The story’s picture fits a point Therapeutic Shamanism makes about language and perception, though. The words we use mould the way we perceive and relate to the world around us, and a language in which world and forest are one word belongs to people who could never treat the forest as mere timber.6 See What is a metaphor, and how does it shape the way we see the world?
What does The Dispossessed show about living without rulers? #
That a society can be organised from the bottom up, and that doing so is never finished. The Dispossessed, subtitled “An Ambiguous Utopia”, is set on two worlds. On Anarres, settled generations earlier by followers of the anarchist Odo, there are no rulers, no property and no laws backed by force; people share what little a harsh planet gives, and decide things together. Le Guin drew on pacifist anarchist writers such as Peter Kropotkin. She did not make Anarres perfect. It has drought and hunger, and a creeping pressure to conform, with informal power hardening where no formal power is allowed. Its hero, the physicist Shevek, has to leave it to see it clearly.7
In Therapeutic Shamanism, anarchism means exactly what Anarres attempts: order without top-down government, with people organising themselves from the bottom up as equals. It is not chaos. For the vast majority of human history, hunter-gatherers got on fine without leaders and were better for it, and people are rediscovering non-hierarchical ways of organising today.8 Like Le Guin, Therapeutic Shamanism refuses to paint the alternative as an idyll; hunter-gatherers had their problems and flaws, and equality had to be worked at. See How does animism understand power and hierarchy? and What did Christopher Boehm find about how early humans kept power in check?
What is the carrier bag theory of fiction? #
Le Guin’s case for stories that are not built around a killer. In a short essay written in 1986, she took up the writer Elizabeth Fisher’s suggestion that the first cultural device was probably not a weapon but a container, a sling, net or bag for carrying gathered food. Most of what early people ate was gathered, yet it is the hunt, the spear and the hero who brings home the meat that the stories remember. Le Guin wanted fiction shaped more like a bag or a medicine bundle than an arrow, holding many things in relation, with conflict as one element amongst many, and with “people in them” instead of heroes.9
Therapeutic Shamanism makes a parallel point about heroes. Since 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, many hero stories are about conflict and violence, and the hero inspires through conquest and battles won. The heroes of hunter-gatherer golden-age stories are different. They are heroic for showing people how to live well, and how to serve the community, including the wider-than-human community, as an interconnected part of the web of life.10 See Who was Joseph Campbell, and what is the hero’s journey?
What can her stories teach about how to live? #
Several things that recur through her work. That balance matters more than mastery, and that power used carelessly upsets the whole. That becoming whole means turning to meet our own shadow instead of fleeing or destroying it. That a people can be so bound to their forest that their word for it is their word for the world. That a society can do without rulers, and must keep working at it. And that the stories we tell shape the lives we lead, so it matters whether they are about killers or about carriers. None of these is offered as doctrine; they come as stories. Read beside Therapeutic Shamanism, they are imaginative company for a way of living that is non-hierarchical, rooted in relationship with the more-than-human world, and honest about the shadow.
Has Le Guin’s work been criticised? #
Yes, and she answered some of it herself. Reviewers criticised The Left Hand of Darkness for calling its genderless people ‘he’ and for treating heterosexuality as the norm on their world; she defended the book in 1976, then in 1988 accepted that gender was central to it and apologised for the way it handled sexuality, and later stories set on that world used ‘she’. Some critics read Earthsea’s stress on keeping the balance as support for a conservative status quo, and the critic Alexei Panshin judged The Left Hand of Darkness a failure. The scholar Charlotte Spivack found The Word for World Is Forest weakened by its “polemic” style and one-dimensional villain, and Le Guin herself later called it a “preachment” and regretted its strident tone, in an introduction to the novel written in 1977.11
On the other side, the critic Harold Bloom, who edited a 1986 critical collection on her, praised A Wizard of Earthsea and The Left Hand of Darkness as her finest books, and many scholars treat her as a major voice in American letters. Tehanu (1990) shows her rethinking Earthsea from the inside, returning to the heroine of the second book and reversing her power and standing in a world run by male wizards. And she had made Earthsea’s heroes dark-skinned from the start, which is why she objected that a television adaptation casting a white actor as Ged “whitewashed Earthsea”.12
