Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 to 1900) was a German philosopher who saw all life as will to power, a drive not merely to survive but to grow, overcome and spend its strength, and who urged people to “remain faithful to the earth” instead of looking to another world. His amor fati, love of fate, is the wish that nothing in one’s life had been different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Therapeutic Shamanism meets him in his loyalty to the earth and the body, and parts company with his praise of rank and domination, since in animism power is life-force and power-from-withinPower-from-within. Starhawk’s term for the healthy mode of power, as against power-over. Egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands held power this way; practising shamanism from power-over is ‘just more Fall’. More about this, never power over others.
Who was Friedrich Nietzsche? #
He was born in 1844 in Röcken, in Prussian Saxony, and was a brilliant enough student of ancient Greek and Latin to be made a professor of classical philology at the University of Basel in 1869, at twenty-four. Illnesses caught during his service in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 ruined his health, and he resigned his chair in 1879.1 For the next ten years he lived on a pension, mostly in Switzerland and Italy, and wrote his best-known books: The Gay Science (1882), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883 to 1885), Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and On the Genealogy of Morals (1887). In January 1889 he collapsed in the street in Turin and spent his last eleven years in “total mental darkness”, cared for first by his mother and then by his sister. He died in Weimar in 1900.2
What did he mean by the will to power? #
That the basic drive in living things is not simply to stay alive but to grow, to expand, to master and to overcome. Self-preservation, on this view, is only one result of something larger.3 Morality and philosophy themselves, on this view, are expressions of different kinds of will to power.
How to read it has been argued over ever since. Some passages celebrate domination outright. Life itself, in one section of Beyond Good and Evil, is “essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker”.4 Others put the weight on self-overcoming, the mastering of one’s own impulses and the turning of raw drive into creation. The philosopher Walter Kaufmann, in Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (first published 1950), argued that the will to power was not a crude apology for ruthless self-assertion and has to be read alongside Nietzsche’s ideas about sublimation, a reading that did much to rescue him from his reputation, at the time, as part madman and part forerunner of Nazism.5
What is amor fati? #
Love of fate. The wish in The Gay Science is to learn more and more “to see as beautiful what is necessary in things”, and then: “Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth!”, with the hope of one day being only a yes-sayer. In Ecce Homo he made it his measure of a great human being: “My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity.” Not merely bearing what is necessary, still less hiding it, but loving it.6
He paired it with a thought experiment, the eternal recurrence. Suppose you had to live your life again, exactly as it was, every pain and every joy, over and over without end. Would you curse the thought, or welcome it? To welcome it is to love one’s fate. Amor fati has older roots in the Stoics, in Epictetus, who advised wishing that what happens should happen as it does, and in Marcus Aurelius.6
What did he mean by remaining faithful to the earth? #
That this world, the bodily world of the senses, is the only one there is, and that the great religions and much of philosophy had slandered it in favour of an imagined world beyond. In the prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra his prophet begs his listeners to “remain faithful to the earth”, and not to believe those who offer them hopes beyond it. Elsewhere in the same book Zarathustra speaks against “the despisers of the body”. For Nietzsche the body was not a prison for the soul but the great intelligence of which the conscious mind is only a small part.7
How does Nietzsche’s work connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Most strongly in his refusal to rank the world above against the world below. Therapeutic Shamanism teaches that the sky-religionsSky-religion. The vertical, hierarchical reordering of the sacred that the Fall installed, governed by the spell ‘up is good, down is bad’: transcend the body, escape matter, purify upward. The conditioning Therapeutic Shamanism works to undo. More about this‘ conditioning, the judgement that ‘up is good and down is bad’, has soaked into the whole culture: the 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 above 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, God above Goddess, humans above animals, animals above plants and stones. Shamanism is entirely free of that idea.8 Nietzsche’s attack on the despisers of the body and on hopes beyond the earth comes from a very different place, but it aims at some of the same targets. See What is spiritual bypassing, and how can psychotherapy help prevent it?
His love of fate has an echo too. The teaching often draws on the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl‘s words, “What gives light must endure burning”. Bereavement, illness, breakdown and other dark nights of the soul can become the forge in which a person is remade, and whether they do depends largely on how the person responds, whether they let the event make them or break them.9
Power sits at the heart of shamanism too, though the word means something different there. Power is essentially life-force, and 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 so called because it brings power in that sense, reconnecting us to the living world.10 See What is Power-loss?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
Over rank and domination. Nietzsche held that every enhancement of the human type had been the work of an aristocratic society, one that believed in a long ladder of rank between people and needed slavery in some form.11 Therapeutic Shamanism holds the reverse. For most of human history hunter-gatherers lived without permanent leaders and fiercely protected their equality, and their relationship to power was what the writer Starhawk calls power-from-within: someone who has it has no wish to have power over others, and no willingness to hand their own power to anyone else. Power-over, however good the intentions, is a Taker cult way of being.12 See How does animism understand power and hierarchy?
The comparative philosopher Katrin Froese draws out a telling contrast here. Nietzsche and the Daoist sages both saw the world as process rather than fixed substance, yet where Nietzsche built hierarchy on that vision, the Daoists, in her reading, favoured ways of living together “best described as anarchic”, and read the need for political hierarchy as a sign that natural harmony had been lost.13 See What does Daoism teach about humans and nature?
Amor fati needs care as well. Loving one’s fate can sit close to healthy acceptance, and it can also slide into skipping the grief. In Therapeutic Shamanism grief is a natural part of healing, and feelings need to be felt and allowed to move through the body, not bypassed or suppressed; accepting a loss comes through grieving it, not instead of grieving it.14 See What does animism teach about grief?
Was Nietzsche a forerunner of Nazism? #
The question has dogged him since the 1930s. After his collapse his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, took “ruthless control” of his papers, worked to refashion him in the image of her husband, Bernhard Förster, and put together The Will to Power (1901) from his unpublished notes; fascists, the Nazis among them, later invoked his name.15 Nietzsche himself was “an ardent foe of nationalism, anti-Semitism, and power politics”, and Kaufmann’s work was a sustained argument that the Nazi reading was a distortion.16 Others point out that his praise of rank, his contempt for equality and the harder passages on the will to power gave such readers something to work with, which is why Froese sets those passages out in full alongside the gentler ones.17
