The Presocratics were the first Greek philosophers, working from about 600 to 400 BCE, before and alongside Socrates, in the Greek cities of Ionia (on the coast of what is now western Turkey), southern Italy and Sicily. Several of them, Thales, Anaximenes, Heraclitus and Empedocles above all, described a world in which matter itself is alive, ensouled or “full of gods”, a view later given the name hylozoism. Therapeutic Shamanism hears in them an echo of the much older animist experience that everything is alive, without counting any of them as animists.
Who were the Presocratics? #
The philosophers of Greece’s first two centuries of philosophy. The name is a modern one, fixed by the standard collection of their surviving words, Hermann Diels’ The Fragments of the Presocratics, first published in 1903. None of their books survives whole. What remains are fragments quoted by later writers, such as Aristotle, Sextus Empiricus, Simplicius and Diogenes Laertius, and summaries of what they were said to have taught, so almost everything said about them is a reconstruction.
They lived in Greek city-states: settled, farming and trading societies with slavery, kings or assemblies, temples and priesthoods, some three and a half thousand years after the first city-states arose in Mesopotamia. Among the best known are:
– Thales of Miletus (active around 585 BCE), often called the first philosopher, who held water to be the source of all things; – Anaximander and Anaximenes, also of Miletus, who named the Boundless (apeiron) and air as the first principle; – Pythagoras of Samos, who taught in southern Italy that number orders the cosmos and that the soul is reborn in other bodies, human and animal; – Xenophanes, who mocked the habit of picturing the gods in human form; – Heraclitus of Ephesus, for whom the world is an ever-living fire, always changing and held in balance by an ordering principle he called the logosLogos. Literal, factual, analytical truth: the truth of facts you can check. One of the two modes of truth, alongside mythos. More about this; – Parmenides of Elea and his pupil Zeno, who asked whether change and plurality are real at all; – Empedocles of Acragas in Sicily, healer and poet, who taught four ‘roots’ of all things moved by Love and Strife (see What did Empedocles teach about the four elements, Love and Strife?); – Anaxagoras, who gave the ordering of the cosmos to Mind (nous), which he held to be unmixed with anything else; – Leucippus and Democritus, who explained everything as atoms moving in empty space.
Which of them saw the world as alive? #
Those of the early line, most clearly. Western philosophy, as one writer on the elements puts it, begins with someone contemplating a stone. Thales is said to have held that the magnet has a soul because it moves iron, and that “all things are full of gods”, both reported by Aristotle.1 Life and movement, for him, are not something added to matter from outside; they are what matter does. One historian of the idea of a living cosmos reads Thales as seeing the whole universe as a living organism, with the Presocratics feeling no need to split the world into passive matter on one side and a force acting on it from outside on the other.2
Anaximenes is reported to have compared the air that holds the world together with the breath that holds a living body together, so that the person and the cosmos are alive in the same way. Heraclitus called the world-order “everliving” fire, “kindled in measures and in measures going out”.3 Empedocles went furthest. In one of his surviving lines he tells his pupil to know “that all things have understanding and their share of intelligence”.4
In 1678 the English philosopher Ralph Cudworth coined the word hylozoism, from the Greek for matter and life, for the doctrine that matter itself is alive, and the Milesians and Heraclitus are the philosophers usually counted under it. Anaxagoras and the atomists moved the other way. Anaxagoras set Mind apart from the mixture it orders, and Democritus explained the world as atoms and void, with no life in matter beyond the movement of its parts.
Were the Presocratics the first scientists, or something older? #
Both readings have their champions. The usual history tells a story of progress, from myth to reason: instead of thunder coming from Zeus, the Presocratics looked for natural causes, and in doing so founded science and philosophy. In that story what was left behind was superstition.
Others read them as carrying something much older. The classicist E. R. Dodds, in The Greeks and the Irrational (1951), held that Pythagoras and Empedocles belonged to a line of “Greek shamans”, inspired figures who combined the roles of “magician and naturalist, poet and philosopher, preacher, healer, and public counsellor”, a line he linked to contact with the Scythians, pastoral nomads of the steppes to the north, and with the farming peoples of Thrace.5 The historian of religion Jan Bremmer has disputed this reading since 1983, holding that the Greek evidence does not support the word shaman and that the shamanic interpretation imports a foreign framework into Greek religion.6 More recently Peter Kingsley, in In the Dark Places of Wisdom (1999), read Parmenides as a healer and priest of Apollo who guided people into the healing sleep of incubation, a reading he took further in Reality (2003), whilst most histories of philosophy still treat Parmenides as the founder of logical argument about being.7
Were any of them animists? #
Not in the sense Therapeutic Shamanism gives the word. Animism is the experience that not just humans but all things have a soul, a life-force and consciousness, and that all of them are alive and conscious, even if in ways quite different from human consciousness. It is less a belief than an experience.8 It is lived in relationship with the other beings of the world as persons. Hylozoism is a theory about what matter is, set out in verse and prose by citizens of farming city-states. The two overlap, and Thales’ magnet and Empedocles’ thinking roots come closer to animism than almost anything else in Greek philosophy, but an overlap of ideas does not make someone an animist. See What does it mean to say the world is alive and full of persons?
The rebirth doctrine of Pythagoras and Empedocles is a clear point of difference. In Therapeutic Shamanism, belief in a lasting individual soul that is reborn is not part of original animism: it emerges with 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, with the idea of a separate, lasting “I”. See Do animists believe in reincarnation, and what are past lives?
What does the move from myth to reason look like from a shamanic point of view? #
Like a loss as well as a gain. Therapeutic Shamanism keeps both of the Greek words for truth. Logos is what is literally true. MythosMythos. Metaphorical, symbolic, felt truth: the truth of art, poetry and shamanic journeys. Shamanic reality is mythologically true, not literally true, which is why journeys are interpreted, never taken at face value. More about this is what is metaphorically true, and shamanic journeys belong to it: like dreams, they are full of symbolic meanings, not literal facts, and they are the realm of meanings, relationships and insights.9 Read that way, the earliest Presocratics stood at a crossing point. They kept a world full of gods and souls whilst beginning to explain it in the language of first principles, and the story of philosophy that followed kept the explanations and let the living world fall away. Western thought did not finish the move to dead matter until much later, with the mechanical philosophy of the seventeenth century; the Presocratics are a reminder that its first philosophers started from a world that was alive. See What is animism? and What did Plato teach about the living cosmos, and why did he downgrade the material world?
