Jacques Ellul (1912 to 1994) was a French sociologist, historian of law and Protestant thinker who held that modern life is ruled by ‘technique’, the drive to find the single most efficient method for everything, which grows by its own momentum and that no one really controls. He held that technique strips the world of mystery and then becomes sacred itself, an idol, and that even modern leisure has been filled up by it, though his subject was leisure, not rest as such. Therapeutic Shamanism shares his sense of a made world that has slipped out of our control, but where he called for idols to be broken, it treats the things we make as alive, beings to be brought into right relationship.
Who was Jacques Ellul? #
He was born in Bordeaux in 1912 and spent almost his whole life there. He taught law at Montpellier and Strasbourg, was dismissed by the Vichy government in 1940, and was active in the French Resistance during the war. Afterwards he was briefly deputy mayor of Bordeaux, and from 1946 to 1980 he was professor of the history of law at the University of Bordeaux, also teaching social history at its Institute of Political Studies.2 A committed member of the Reformed Church, his books range across sociology and theology, and with his friend Bernard Charbonneau he developed a critique of modern society that was anarchist in spirit. He died near Bordeaux in 1994.1 His best-known books are The Technological Society (1954), Propaganda (1962) and The Humiliation of the Word (1981).
What did Ellul mean by technique? #
Not machines, but a way of doing everything. In his own definition, technique is “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency” in every field of human activity.3 Machines are only its most visible form; there is technique in economics, in government, in education, in advertising, in the management of people. Whatever the field, the one question technique asks is which method works best, and once it has been found, every other way is pushed aside.
His central claim was that technique has become autonomous. It no longer serves ends that people choose; it follows its own logic, so that whatever can be done comes to be done, and people adapt to it instead of the other way round.4 In Propaganda he applied this to the shaping of opinion, arguing that propaganda can only take hold in a society that has first broken up the small groups, family, village and parish, that once held people and protected them from such influence.5
Why did he call it idolatry? #
Because, in his view, technique first empties the world of the sacred and then takes its place. For technique nothing is sacred and there is no mystery; it turns everything into means. Yet people cannot live without a sense of the sacred, so they transfer it to the very thing that destroyed its former object, and technique becomes “the essential mystery”.6 In The New Demons he went further: what enslaves us is not technique itself but the sacred that we have transferred onto it.7 In The Humiliation of the Word he named money, the State and technique as the modern world’s new spiritual trinity.8 Read theologically, as one recent reader puts it, this is idolatry: made means taking the place of God as the object of ultimate trust.9 As a Christian he answered with iconoclasm, a continual refusal to let images, statistics or computer output stand as final truth.8
What did he say about rest? #
His subject was leisure, not rest as such. In The Technological Society leisure, far from being an empty space apart from society, is “literally stuffed with technical mechanisms of compensation and integration”. It is not a human kind of emptiness in which decisions might ripen. “Leisure time is a mechanized time”, exploited by techniques as demanding as those of work, and it leaves people no freer than their work does.10 Separately, in his theology, he spoke of non-power, being able to do something and freely choosing not to do it, as a stance against the drive of technique.11
How does Ellul’s work connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Closely, on the made world slipping out of our hands. Religions, ideologies, advertising, corporations, the economy and social media are complex thought-formsThought-form. A human-created living being: an ideology, religion, corporation, conspiracy theory or platform that has taken on a life of its own. Genuinely alive, but soul-less in the deep sense: natural things alone are full of Soul. More about this that we gave birth to, which have grown into powerful beings with lives of their own, and which are now largely out of our control. Our phones, cars and the internet are already alive and conscious beings, shaping our lives in ways we did not foresee, and we are only partly in control of them.12 Ellul described the same autonomy from the side of sociology. And many of the unhelpful thought-forms that lodge in people come from advertising and consumer culture.13 See What is wétiko, and what is co-wétiko?
On the sacred, Ellul’s desacralised world is the world of Taker thinking, which divides everything into living and non-living things and treats the Earth materialistically, as ours to use.14 Animism holds the opposite, that everything is alive and sacred. See What does it mean to live as if it is all sacred?
Where Ellul wrote about modern leisure, the teaching looks at how hunter-gatherers spent their time. They spent on average between two and four hours a day on everything needed to survive, and the rest of their time socialising, playing with their children, sleeping, laughing, dancing, singing and practising shamanism. Modern people work long days and then have only the energy to collapse in front of the television, at a great cost to mental health.15 Plants teach the other way: free of the restless need to be doing things, they slow down, and to understand them a person has to slow right down too.16 See What is “being not doing”, and what is wide-focus journeying? and Who was Marshall Sahlins, and what is “the original affluent society”?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
On what to do with made things. For Ellul, the honest answer to an idol is to break it, and the sacred belongs to a God who speaks and is not to be pictured. Therapeutic Shamanism does not set the made world against the sacred. Because everything is alive and conscious, a phone or a machine is not a dead object to be worshipped or smashed but a being, sentient in its own way, and the task is to realise what these beings are and to work with them in a shamanic way, so as to live in right relationship with them.17 Where Ellul looked for freedom to faith in a transcendent God, Therapeutic Shamanism looks to relationship with the living world, the other-than-human Peoples and 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 as well as the Upper. Visions are a point of real difference too. In The Humiliation of the Word the sight Ellul analyses is ordinary seeing of the outer world; dreams and visions, in his account, owe nothing to sight, and he treats visions as belonging to the order of reality, not of truth or spiritual revelation.18 Therapeutic Shamanism holds that what is experienced in a journey is real, and that the journey, the form given to that experience, is 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, not logosLogos. Literal, factual, analytical truth: the truth of facts you can check. One of the two modes of truth, alongside mythos. More about this.19 See What are altars, fetishes and offerings for?
