VIII. The Spiritual Ecology of the Shepherd

My first job on a sheep dairy was in Maine when I was twenty. I pursued it out of a desire to connect with my matrilineal Greek culture near my home in rural New England Sheep have arguably been the single most important animal to the surviving and thriving of Eastern Mediterranean people for thousands of years. Their hooves have shaped the hillsides of Greece. 

In rural villages like the one in the central Peloponnese where my mom is from, the bodies of sheep and goats always seemed close by. You would hear the clang of bells as a flock foraged its way across a nearby hillside. The whooping calls of the shepherd would mingle sweetly with the antiphonal bleating of his animals. You would see their carcasses hanging, skinless and glistening, outside the butcher shops, their blood forming tiny rivulets among the cobblestones below. You would smell their meat simmering in stew pots in private homes and caramelizing on rotisseries in the public square. Through one sense or another, the proximity of these creatures to human life was constantly revealed.

As an adult, those childhood memories drew me toward that animal so important to my ancestors. I sought out small artisanal sheep and goat dairies and worked for them here as a farm hand, there as an apprentice, there as a volunteer. It was through a simple interest in the transformation of milk into cheese that shepherding opened a door to a whole other class of crafts, which I fumbled through with whatever fragment of human guidance I could find.  This is what could be called the “wood-lore” of the shepherd; how to identify plants with the acuity of the cloven-hoofed, to read the forecast in the clouds or in the dropping barometric pressure (like they do), to notice what they notice; to be their student. I saw my subsequent studies of “wilderness survival” and wildlife tracking to have their origins in that part of my heart that was the Shepherd, which is also to say the part that empathized with the other-than-humans and took my cues from them. The result of such studies is naturalist knowledge by which one is not just a wayfarer in forest and field, but is empowered to belong there. To be a good Shepherd you must be a dedicated student of the art of belonging in the outdoors. It would be difficult to protect the flock otherwise.

The sheep dairy I worked at was a grass-based operation on nearly forty acres of rocky hills. I would get up at 5 AM to gather the sheep for milking from pasture and although I only had one day off a week, I felt oddly energized. Being at the nexus of a dynamic relationship between the grasses, the sheep, their milk, and the people they fed began to heal wounds I didn’t know I had. When I remember the emotional isolation brought on by being queer and gender-variant, or about the related struggle of teenage anorexia, I remember how the sheep helped expand my identity to that of creature and earthling, and how the craft of the creamery attuned me to the sacred history of food that had been obscured through industrial processes.

That summer was a rite of passage into an altered state of consciousness that felt like a revelation but also a birthright. As I dwelled with them, the sheep seemed to answer many questions that hadn’t been asked with answers that weren’t in words. However, they were not the sole source of this intelligence. It was they and I—us together. I learned that belonging works like that. We took care of each other, and I stepped through a portal to a place where I was a creature too. A very specialized creature called a shepherd.

Consider the connection to the reindeer by several different groups of people indigenous to the circumpolar regions of the world. The comparison is germane since some of these groups are perennial objects of Western fascination. Reindeer (a term for the domesticated caribou) are known for their extensive seasonal migrations, and moving with the herds proved a brilliant strategy for the survival of Paleolithic peoples living at the harsh top end of the world. The mythology of their contemporary descendants portrays humans locked in a fated embrace with these arctic ungulates—their destinies intertwined. It was the caribou, according to one account, which first brought clothes and food—indeed culture itself—to the native people of what is now northern Canada. This sacred relationship is expressed through an animistic and shamanistic worldview and so is easily exotified by those of us from monotheistic cultures. But the Abrahamic tradition itself contains at its core a distinctive celebration of ovis aries—the domestic sheep—for very similar reasons. It is the ritual sacrifice of the lamb that upholds the world, whether literal or—in Christian tradition—metaphorical. When we delve into the lore of sheep, we are feeling the scar where an umbilical cord once was, connecting us as a people to the flesh of the earth. Under various names including ‘spiritual ecology’ and ‘eco-theology,’ modern epistemology is struggling for a way to discuss the nearly invisible seams where the human world is stitched into the non-human. The outcome—it is hoped—is a more nuanced, compassionate, and ecological picture of the relationship between humans and the rest of nature.

To further explore the sheep’s significance to us, we must turn in part to a realm beyond language, the realm of sacred images, preserved in the art of ancient Christianity. There we find confirmation that the figure of the Shepherd is central to the ancestral memory of the Near East, and thus Western culture in general. The shepherd as a symbol is not complete without the animals she tends, and together they represent a mystical ecology of the soul’s journey. In one view, the Shepherd functions in mythic consciousness as what depth psychologist Bill Plotkin calls “underworld guide” (a guide of souls), which in more common parlance could be called ‘messiah,’ ‘bodhisattva,’ or even ‘trickster.’ But the Shepherd is also an icon of ecological ‘deep’ history, speaking of a symbiotic relationship between two species that literally made our culture possible. We seem to romanticize such symbiosis in other cultures (especially pre-industrial ones) but fail to see a comparable pattern in our own. Somewhere down the line of our history and ancestry, spirituality eventually connects to what is practical—to livelihood. The shepherd archetype reveals one such point of connection.

Additionally, I felt called to connect culturally with my mom’s family. This set the stage for a complicated relationship with Eastern Orthodoxy. It has evolved today into a fascination with the archetypal and mythopoetic possibilities of this tradition, which I see through a queer, eco-feminist, and non-theistic lens. For too long the Western mind has focused on the abstract and conceptual and has lost sight of the incredible expressive capacity of ceremony and ritual, which are gestural languages, centered on relationship. In the Protestant tradition’s political rejection of high liturgy, I fear that something vital to the image-based language of the soul has been thoughtlessly cast aside.

The earliest known Christian art, preserved in the underground catacombs of Rome includes stucco paintings of the ‘Good Shepherd’—a youthful fellow with a ram lamb slung over his shoulder, surrounded by sheep and birds. The best-known example is found in the Catacomb of Priscilla—a subterranean Christian necropolis—and dates to the 3rd century C.E.  This was one of the earliest known ways of depicting Jesus, but is related to at least two well-known archetypes in the ancient Greco-Roman world. A figure scholars call the kriophoros (meaning “ram-bearer” in Greek) was present in art seven centuries before the time of Jesus. A bronze statue in the Museum of Fine Art from the 5th century BCE depicts the Greek god Hermes as the kriophoros, demonstrating the conflation of the archetype with this particular god. Ram lambs were considered the quintessential sacrificial animals throughout the ancient Mediterranean world in both Semitic and Greek religion, in an era when blood-sacrifice was one of the most important rituals in temple culture. A common role of Hermes in Greek mythology was as psychopomp—a guide for souls to the underworld or afterlife. With Hermes as ram-bearer, the ram can be seen as a metaphor for the human soul.

Though the mythos of the Shepherd functioned as an early metaphor for Jesus, the archetype of the herdsman with shamanic powers can be traced in the narrative and artistic traditions of figures such as Orpheus and Hermes, but also Moses, King David, and even to Pan, the rustic and irreverent pre-Olympian god of shepherds. In the 3rd millennium BCE, Tammuz (or Dumuzi), one of the most prominent gods of the Mesopotamian pantheon, was a Shepherd-god whose mother, Duttur, was represented as an ewe. The power of this imagery makes sense when one considers that it was in Mesopotamia where sheep—the oldest milk animal—were domesticated. Milk and cheese products quickly became the most ideal offering for the goddess Inanna (Dumuzi’s consort) and dairy products persisted throughout the ancient world as choice ‘bloodless’ sacrifices for numerous deities, appearing often as primitive versions of the modern cheesecake.

The figure of the shepherd is, throughout Jewish and Christian scriptures, associated with a unique prophetic ability. Perched at the peripheries of human settlements, far away from the hustle and bustle of urban life, it is the shepherds who are often the first humans privy to divine portents. Angels, omens, and even God himself might appear to the wandering herdsman. By the necessity of their vocation as protectors of flocks, their attention is not toward the human world, but is more often than not trained on the more-than-human world; the place of mystery from where unknown threats might come. Shepherds are then tasked with relaying the messages received from their wilderness encounters to their more civilized kin who are perennially distracted with human affairs. Moses is the best-known example in the Hebrew Bible, and in the gospel of Luke a group of shepherds are some of the first people told, by an angel, about the birth of Jesus. This office of translator—mediator between the worlds of human community, wilderness, and dreams—struck me as very similar to the role of the village medicine man or “witch-doctor”. Considering that these types of relationships can be found in the roots of Western society seems to hold promise as a healing balm for the pain brought on by colonization. Our fascination with the workings of so-called ‘aboriginal’ societies, which can bring up intense grief, projections, and longing for a felt lack of meaningful nature-connection, can be transformed into a curiosity about our own nature-bound ancestors.

In later Christian art sheep became heavily laden theological symbols in their own right, even without a shepherd. Christ was not only the ‘Good Shepherd,’ but also the ram lamb to be sacrificed. Christian mosaics from the late antique period often depict Christ as a ram lamb, and it was common in Byzantine church art to depict the twelve apostles as sheep. Sheep contrast, visually and symbolically, with deer or gazelles, which are often shown in paradisal scenes, drinking from the waters of the rivers that flow from the Garden of Eden. In the ancient Near East, deer and gazelles were associated with wildness, a contrast to the domesticated nature of sheep. The deer was also an early Christian symbol of the catechumen (a Christian initiate preparing for baptism), while the sheep was a symbol of the one who had been fully initiated. A simultaneous celebration and lamentation of the tension between the wild and the domesticated seems to lurk tacitly in this art.

In the mode of myth, meaning is woven most expertly by using stories that already exist—whether they exist invisibly as patterns within the human heart or as folk tales passed down from parents to children. Interdependence is the underground secret to what can appear independent and unique on the surface—a principle which nature reflects well. Whatever ancient Christianity pays homage to, it also pays homage to the shepherd, and to the sheep. In my view, the praise of this relationship is one of those encrypted parts of the tradition that reveals a keystone feature without which the rest of the religion does not make sense.

By virtue of her vocation, the Shepherd often finds herself on an unintentional visionary journey. A space opens where altered states of consciousness and cross-species encounters can become typical parts of perception and cognition. The shepherd’s job requires alternating periods of ‘exile’ and ‘return’ to the community Sometimes, on her return, something new is brought back to the clan: a story, a song, or a vision. In the interface between self and other, human and non-human, village and forest, there is tension, friction; sparks of energy are released. Visions come from such fissures. Ever since humans moved from a nomadic existence to a settled one, shepherds have remained somewhere in between; the sentinels posted at the edge of civilization, eyes peering toward what is dark and what is wild. Even for humans without cities, who still wandered as nomads, the herdsmen were the scouts—the eyes and ears of their collective. The animals they tend turned grass into flesh and wool, then into tools and clothing, economically ensuring the persistence of someone balanced precariously—dangerously—on the edge of worlds. For civilization, no matter how complex, will always require these edges, gradients where human order gives way to other kinds of order that can be easily mistaken for chaos to the untrained mind. It is the herdsmen, the scouts, and the trackers, who are trained to read the chaos. While their civilization sprouts religion deep inside its cities, the priests will guard the inner sanctum of the temple. But the shepherd, hundreds of miles away, guards another divine language, a green language. Somehow, the two are related, but the trails between have become overgrown, maybe even impenetrable.

Indeed, there seems to be reflected in the lore of the shepherd our own sort of creation story. Sheep were domesticated 8,000 years ago, and in an ironic exchange, the bodies of these wild ones became the very source of our own domestication. It is little surprise then that the sheep has become both a symbol of the Other and of the Self, of both God and the human. Whether domesticated or wild, they will always remain non-human, retaining the sharp senses of prey animals. As ‘apex predators’ we are their ecological opposites, yet we can project onto them our own fears and longings, our many disenfranchised and oppressed identities. We can empathize with them because despite our supposed ecological prowess, we, too, are prey in a psycho-spiritual trophic web; we too suffer silently; we too are lost or hunted at the whim of forces much larger than ourselves. In protecting them we empathize with them and in some sense we become them, and this is one view of the essence of ‘shamanism’—that is, our human capacity for shape shifting in order to heal the world. This is where the pattern can be recognized far beyond just a single culture, reflected too in the reindeer lore of the north or in the veneration of the sacred cows of India, even in the Abenaki story of humans created from an ash tree, pertaining to the land on which I now write. All these represent a culture’s understanding and mythologizing of its relationship to nature, and to creation. Among the countless material gifts these revered non-human beings provide, they impart one transcendent, immaterial gift that could be said to be the seed of spirituality: empathy across species, across entire landscapes and ecosystems, even beyond life itself.

Written on Alnôbak (also known as Abenaki) lands of Vermont.

Originally published in The Wayfarer 4 (2), 2015, 22–27. 

You can read the full essay on Apocalypticecology.com