We live in an age that suffers from loss of soul. We learn in school that the world is inanimate, that the universe is dead, that we are an island of life in a lifeless universe. We learn that the stars are not the eyes of god but nuclear furnaces that in time will become white dwarfs and eventually explode, spewing their lifeless innards into the void of space.

We have learned to explain too many things. To an Indian child high in the Andes, or in a Hopi reservation in the Southwest, life is still a mystery, the sky is inexplicably wondrous, the rocks are beings that talk to you and counsel you. They know that rivers don’t lie, that when the mountain speaks it whispers with a voice that was heard on the first day of creation.

I remember walking with a missionary friend in the high mountains of Peru. We were nearly to 14,000 feet, where the air is crisp and thin, when we spotted a boy, no older than twelve, sitting on a large rock. As we drew closer I offered him a few dried rolls of bread I carried in my pack. The boy’s face lit up, he thanked me for the bread, and ran off toward his home. My friend, who had only recently left the seminary, explained how it pained him to see such beggars.

I remember turning to him and saying that this boy was no beggar, but a warrior who slept under the stars, covered at night only by his little poncho.

To this boy, and to all the native peoples of the earth – the Aborigines in Australia, the Sub-Saharan people, the villagers of Tibet – the earth is animated. It has a soul, and the threads of our own souls are interwoven within the tapestry of Earth’s soul. The word ‘anima’ is the Latin word for soul. And one of the prices we have paid for our technology and our philosophy of materialism is to lose our touch with the soul of the earth, and with our own souls. We’ve inherited an inanimate world.

How did this happen? Some say it started in the Renaissance. In the year 1564 the elders of the Catholic Church convened a Vatican Council to determine if women, animals and American Indians had souls. After long debate it was determined that women indeed had souls. Yet the wise men of the church unequivocally declared that Indians and animals did not posses a soul. This gave the conquistadors the liberty to enslave Indians, animals and nature alike. In the first one hundred years after the Conquest, 60 million Indians died in mines and fields working like beasts of burden. They had no soul.

Two centuries later, Renee Descartes arrived at his famous, “I think, therefore I am”. He divided the world into subjective and objective phenomena, into matter and spirit. Matter was not the stuff of spirit. The earth was not spiritual, we had to plough and turn it and struggle with it to feed ourselves. Spirit was an untouchable ‘other’ to be attained once we dropped this outer form, our physical bodies.

The word matter comes from the Latin ‘matter, mother’. With Descartes we finally achieved the definitive separation from the feminine, from the Mother Earth. Science replaced all the old mythologies. Objectivity and reason became the new reality. The divine within us was reached through penance and prayer, and not through personal awakening and direct revelation. Miracles ceased happening. We forgot that reality were only those myths that we don’t quite see through yet, that they are invisible to us – like the air we breathe.

The soul is what brings us face to face with the mystery of creation. As an anthropologist I’ve always been amazed at the fact that we (Europeans and Americans) are the only peoples in the world that were kicked out of Paradise. In all other world mythologies, in the Hindu, Buddhist, Native American, humans were given the garden to tend and be caretakers of. Only in the Judeo-Christian tradition are the first children of the earth ousted from Paradise. They forgot the language of the rivers, of the mountains, and stopped speaking with God. They were told they could eat every fruit but that of the tree of knowledge – and they did, first the woman, our first mother – and we were punished for tasting the forbidden fruit.

Shamanic cultures have taboos, like the incest taboo, that ensure the survival of the tribe – but there is not a single mythology in the world that punished a person for tasting the fruit of the tree of knowledge, the mystery, and the ways of the feminine, as represented by Eve. Every culture has a way of engaging knowledge directly, the vision quest for the Native Americans, the walkabout for the Aborigines, the silent contemplation of Buddhist monks.

Our loss of soul in the West is not new. It probably began in the 2nd and 3rd centuries, when many of the books of the Bible were reviewed and re-evaluated for relevance. To be precise, it was the year 212AD. The Catholic Church had just become the Holy Roman church. Years of persecution of Christians had ended. The Church entered into a new covenant, this time not with the son of God, but with the Emperor of Rome. The Church began to define Heaven as a promised land attainable only at the end of time, in the next life. There went the personal mystical experiences and direct communion with God. There went the direct experience of the divine. There went miracles. And in came the inquisition, just as Descartes was polishing the final points of the new doctrine of scientific objectivity.

Alberto Villoldo, PhD, is a medical anthropologist and psychologist who has studied the spiritual practices of the Amazon and the Andes for more than 25 years. He is the founder of the Biological Self-Regulation Laboratory and the Four Winds Society. He is the author of numerous books, including Yoga, Power and Spirit: Patanjali the Shaman and Courageous Dreaming.