The Spiritual Ecology of the Shepherd
by Sophia Sinopoulos-Lloyd
From the Wayfarer Archive, 2015
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 culture—Greek—near my home in rural New England during a time when it was not feasible for me to spend a lot of time overseas. Sheep have arguably been the single most important animal to the surviving and thriving of Eastern Mediterranean people for thousands of years. The hillsides of Greece have been shaped by their hooves, and the pungent aroma of their fat wafts from stew pots atop old wood ranges and from sizzling plates of fried cheese in tavernas. Despite modernization, people still have to eat, and so the pastoral roots of Greece’s shepherding past remain, a spirit animating the iconic foods of that place. The meat and milk of sheep have come to virtually symbolize Greek cuisine and culture in the form of gyros, souvlaki, feta cheese, and the legendary yogurt, thick from the richness of ewe’s milk as well as traditional manufacturing processes.
For me, it was the cheese that had made a lasting sensory impression on me as a child. One type was hard, salty, and so subtly yellow that it glowed. The straw-like color and slight translucence is characteristic of aged cheeses made from sheep’s milk. The flavor was almost musky—if you weren’t hungry, you might pass up a piece because of the intimacy that its taste obliged. But if you had an empty stomach (with the open senses that hunger brings) a whole story would unfold on your tongue through that taste. This flavor was the kind of experience that, for a little kid, was slightly repulsive and at the same time conjured a strange attraction. That same feeling was there when I was about seven and watched my uncle Lambis skin a huge hare he’d just shot. At first, I was shocked, curious, and a little grossed out. But the image stayed in my memory. Something other than my conscious mind held it, kept in a special container, recognizing some unforeseen value. This is the wisdom of the body. Particularly for me, the wisdom of a body without any living tradition that encouraged me to really get to know my non-human environment—who inhabited it and how to get food from it. Those things are considered hobbies in my culture, or, in the case of food production, commercial industries. I didn’t know anything in between, and neither did most people around me. In Greece on the other hand, especially in the 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 baa-ing of his animals. You would see their carcasses hanging, skinless and glistening, outside the butcher shops, their blood in little rivulets between the cobblestones below. You would smell them simmering in stews 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. And 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. 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, bushcraft, and wildlife tracking to all have their origins in that part of my heart that was the Shepherd, which is also to say the part that empathized with the animals 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.
To say that summer in Maine changed my life would not do it justice. Those months were potent medicine. 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 with the help of a bright-eyed young Border Collie named Geordie. I worked six days plus a seventh morning each week and didn’t tire. Being at the nexus of a dynamic relationship between the grass, the sheep, their milk, and the people they fed healed a wound I didn’t know I had. When I think about the puzzlement brought on by being queer and gender-variant, or about the related struggle of teenage anorexia, I remember how the sheep helped me see myself through the universal identity of creature and earthling, or how their milk helped me see into the sacred dimensions of food. They seemed to answer so many questions that hadn’t been asked with answers that weren’t in words. But it wasn’t just them who had such intelligence. It was them and me; us together. I learned that belonging works like that. I took care of them, and they took care of me, and in doing so I stepped through a portal into nature, where I was a creature too. A very specialized type of 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, who 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 the 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 has been 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 environmentally aware picture of the relationship between humans and the rest of nature.
To further explore this theme, we must turn in part to a realm beyond language, the realm of sacred images, uniquely 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 human 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. But somewhere down the line of history and ancestry, spirituality always connects to something practical, to livelihood. The lore of the shepherd reveals one such point of connection.
I was not raised Orthodox but was inevitably immersed in Orthodox culture during many childhood visits to Greece. Growing up in Vermont, I attended a Unitarian-Universalist church with my parents. Unitarians don’t pledge allegiance to a creed and embrace an interfaith approach to spirituality, and though the liberal ethics of the U.U. Church made an indelible mark on me, I sought a spirituality that was physically strenuous, multi-modal, sensorial, even wild. Most importantly too, one to which I had a palpable ancestral connection. This set the stage for my appreciation of Orthodoxy, which has evolved today into a fascination with the archetypal and mythopoetic possibilities of this tradition which I naturally approach from a queer, ecological, and non-theistic (but not anti-theist) perspective. One might call this eclecticism, and to that I’d say that the religions of the ancient Mediterranean are unequivocally my cultural heritage, regardless of my theological beliefs. Why let the political and social complexities of theology—which are so bound up in imperialism and colonialism—get in the way of the important work of tracking one’s own ancestral life-ways? For me, connecting with the material culture of my ancestors is a powerful ceremony its own right. 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 draw of Orthodoxy is not for the minutiae of its theology per se, but for its ritual, its rich ascetic and contemplative traditions, and not least, its aesthetic presence. One of my earliest memories of Greece starts with a smell native to any Greek Orthodox church. The honeyed scent of burning beeswax candles, then the feeling of being in the womb-like nave of an ancient basilica. The heavy stone floor and domed ceiling create a kind of silence that feels at once artificial and preternatural. Shadow dominates, with shafts of light and flashes of gold punctuating the space as if inside a mountain cave at dawn. What was impressed upon my young senses was an ancient language: the transpersonal language of ceremony. Whether or not this language speaks to specific Gods, I do know that it speaks to the human soul.
The sheep is a prominent early Christian symbol. So prominent, perhaps, that it is often overlooked for its ecological significance. 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. In the Christian tradition, the Good Shepherd 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 seven centuries before Christ in statuary and many kinds of everyday objects. 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, whose provenance was generally the realm of communication, was as psychpomp—a guide for souls to the underworld or afterlife. With Hermes as ram-bearer, the ram is a metaphor for the human soul.
Another motif in ancient Greco-Roman art that is similar to primitive Christianity’s “Good Shepherd” features Orpheus, the prophet and poet of Classical Greek legend. Orpheus was both a quasi-historical figure and object of cult veneration—a category not unfamiliar in Greek cultural narratives—and one of his most well-known attributes was his ability to tame wild animals, indeed the whole of nature, through his enchanting music. Greco-Roman renderings of Orpheus depict him seated among trees playing his lyre as a menagerie of wild animals attend. It is important to note that Orpheus was also associated with the underworld, or Hades, in Greek mythology, because he was said to have journeyed there to attempt to bring his lover Eurydice back from the dead. Other figures in Greek mythology also made underworld journeys, but usually they were gods, whereas Orpheus was commonly considered mortal. This was indeed part of his allure, and could also explain why one would be inclined to depict Jesus in a mode familiar to Orpheus.
One well-known image of the Good Shepherd is found in the Roman Catacomb of Priscilla—a subterranean Christian necropolis—and dates to the 3rd century of the Common Era. I had the pleasure of seeing it in person on a class trip to Rome during graduate school. The shepherd carries a ram lamb in the ceremonial role of the ancient kriophoros, but the sheep gathering at his feet and the birds turned toward him, perched on flowering trees is reminiscent of scenes of bucolic harmony and communion typical in images of Orpheus. Both Hermes and Orpheus could, for various reasons, travel between the worlds of the living and the dead and so would be appropriate figures to reference in funerary art. Many Christian theologians as well as secular scholars take this Good Shepherd to be referring to Jesus. The catacombs were underground burial chambers for early Christian communities before Christianity was legalized, and much of the art in the catacombs depicts biblical scenes. The Good Shepherd is not a biblical scene per se, but rather gains its symbolic potency through multiple cultural associations. In the Hebrew Bible King David—an icon of Israelite identity—was portrayed as a sensitive shepherd who devoted himself to the protection of the family flocks (and also played the lyre) as a youth. Psalm 23, which tradition attributes to King David, professes God as the shepherd of humankind. Indeed, it would be advantageous to associate a new prophet, Jesus, with the important attributes implied by the Good Shepherd, such as the stewardship of life (and consequently of souls), communication with animals, and communion with the dead. These are all qualities common to the figure that anthropologists might call a shaman in other contexts. Depicting Jesus as a ‘shamanic’ figure is not as far-fetched as it may sound, and occurs elsewhere in the world of early Christian art. Several scholars have documented the prevalence of images of Jesus performing miracles with a wand or staff. These scenes are common in the catacombs as well as on ancient Christian sarcophagi, and connect Jesus to the archetype of magician that had also at that time become a popular way of thinking of Moses in early Jewish and Christian mysticism.
The figure of the shepherd is, throughout the Hebrew Bible (and also in the New Testament) 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 whence unknown threats might come. They then become 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” that magician and naturalist David Abram encountered during his field studies with traditional societies in Indonesia, which he describes in The Spell of the Sensuous. 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 the aboriginal people that inevitably are part of our own history.
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 a common feature in Byzantine church art to depict the twelve apostles as sheep. Sheep contrast, visually and symbolically, with deer or gazelles, which are often depicted in church art 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.
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, Hermes, Moses, and King David, even to Pan, the rustic and irreverent Arcadian god of shepherds pre-dating the worship of the Olympian gods. 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. To think such a rich web of meaning discredits the story of Jesus is to miss the point entirely. On the contrary—the web upholds the power of the story of Jesus, just as vast ecosystems uphold keystone features that humans value so greatly. 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 to children. Interdependence is the underground secret to what can appear independent and unique on the surface.
By virtue of his vocation, the Shepherd often finds himself on an unintentional vision quest. 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—thus he shares in the mystique of the sailor, but his is a sylvan sea. Sometimes, on his 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, 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, with 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. 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 being created from an ash tree, which pertains 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.
Sophia (“So”) Sinopoulos-Lloyd is a queer Greek-American who grew up in Vermont. So has an MA in Religious Studies from Claremont Graduate University and has done immersive studies in wilderness survival, nature-based mentorship, and animal husbandry. So currently works as an outdoor guide and nature educator and plans to pursue a Ph.D in Religious Studies.