DAVID LEWIS-WILLIAMS THE MIND IN THE CAVE Consciousness and the Origins of Art Thames&Hudson 2004

pg 130 Shamanism Harnessing the brain The implications of what I have so far said for an understanding of the Transition are clear and different from those implied by studies that concentrate on intelligence. All anatomically modern peeple of our own time and of the Transition have, or had, the same human nervous system. They therefore cannot, or could not - avoid experiencing the full spectrum of human consciousness, - refrain from dreaming, or - escape the potential to hallucinate. Because the Homo sapiens populations of that period were fully human, we can confidently expect that their consciousness was as shifting and fragmented as ours, though the ways in which they regarded and valued the various states would have been largely culturally determined. Moreover, they were capable of passing along both the trajectories that I have described, though the content of their dream and autistic imagery would have been different. As we shall see, we cannot say exactly the same of the Neanderthals. We therefore have a neuro­logical bridge to the Upper Palaeolithic, but probably not to the Middle Palaeolithic. Furthermore, all societies are obliged to divide up the spectrum of consciousness into (probably) named sections, even as they divide up the colour spectrum in one way or another. Human communities are not viable without some (possibly contested) consensus on which states will be valued and which will be ignored or denigrated. Bluntly put, madness is culturally defined: what counts as insanity in one society may be valned in another. States that occasion embarrassment and are ignored in one society may be cultivated in another. But, despite such cultural specifics, the nervous system cannot be eliminated: all people experience dreaming on the first trajectory, and all have the potential to experience the states characteristic of the autistic trajectory. And they experience them in terms of their own culture and value system; this is what has been called the'domestication of trance'. The ubiquity of institutionalized altered states of consciousness is borne out by a survey of 488 societies included in Murdock's Ethnographic Atlas. Erika Bourguignon, who carried out this survey, found that an overwhelming 437, or 90 per cent, of these societies were reported to have 'culturally patterned forms of altered states of consciousness'. She concluded that 'the capacity to experience altered states of consciousness is a psychobiological capacity of the species, and thus universal, its utilization, institutionalization, and patterning are, indeed, features of cultures, and thus variable.'The materials from which the Ethnographic Atlas was compiled were, however, not always reliable, and the definition of altered states employed was too narrow. For example, sub‑Saharan Africa is shown to have a comparatively high percentage of societies from which altered states are said to be absent. Yet we know that this is not the case. All sub‑Saharan societies do recognize the importance of altered states, though they may not be as overtly institutionalized as in other parts of the world. Dreams, for instance, play a prominent role in these soci­eties. It seems, then, that Bourguignon's 'capacity' should be changed to 'necessity, if the full range of altered states is recognized and the ways in which they may be institutionalized are seen as highly variable. Because there is no option but to come to terms with the full spectrum of consciousness, people of the Upper Palaeolithic must not ouly have experienced the full spectrum; they must also have divided it up in their own way and so created their own version of human consciousness. This italicized paragraph encapsulates two vital steps in my argument. Although manyWesterners today recognize the intensified trajectory for what it is and do not attach profound significance to its imagery, this 'sceptical' atti­tude is not, nor has been, universal. For an instance of a non-Western attitude, I turn to the Tukano people of the Colombian northwest Amazon Basin and glance briefly at the stages of their yaje-induced visual experiences. Yaje is a psychotropic vine that occurs in numerous varieties. The Tukano speak of an initial stage in which 'grid patterns, zigzag lines and undulating lines alternate with eye‑shaped motifs, many-coloured concentric circles or endless chains of brilliant dots' (Fig. 26). During this stage they watch 'passively these innumerable scintillating patterns which seem to approach or retreat, or to change and recombine into a multitude of colourful panels'. The Tukano depict these forms on their houses and on bark and explicitly identify them as elements of their yaje visions. Geraldo Reichel-Dolmatoff, who worked for many years with the Tukano and other peoples of the Amazon Basin, demonstrated the parallels between what the Tukano see and draw and the entoptic forms established independently by laboratory research. Comparable but greatly elaborated and formalized designs come from'eye spirits'to the Shipibo-Conibo shamans of eastern Peru during ayahuasca-induced hallucinations. These designs are believed to have therapeutic properties and to be closely associated with songs that are 'engraved in the shaman's consciousness': song and design become one. In a second stage recognized by the Tukano there is a diminution of these patterns and the slow formation of larger images. They now perceive recogniz­able shapes of people, animals, and strange monsters. They see 'yaje snakes', the Master of the Animals who withholds animals or releases them to hunters, the Sun-Father, the Daughter of the Anaconda, and other mythical beings. The intense activity of this stage gives way to more placid visions in the final stage. It seems clear that the Tukano first and second stages correspond to our Stages 1 and 3 respectively. Here, then, we have an instance in which people take hold of the possibilities of the intensified trajectory - they harness the human brain - and believe that they derive from their visions insights into an 'alternative reality' that, for them, may be more real than the world of daily life. This is a worldwide experience. Indeed, ecstatic experience is a part of all religions - as I have pointed out, people have to accommodate the full spectrum of consciousness in some way. Shamanism Amongst hunter-gatherer (and some other) communities the sort of experience that the Tukano describe is called 'shamanism'. The word derives from the Tungus language of central Asia. Today this is a disputed word. Some researchers feel that the term has been used too generally to be of any use and that it should be restricted to the central Asian communities of its origin. Although I appreciate the point that these writers make, I and many others disagree. We believe that 'shamanism' usefully points to a human universal - the need to make sense of shifting consciousness - and the way in which this is accomplished, especially, but not always, among hunter-gatherers. The word need not obscure the diversity of worldwide shamanism any more than 'Christianity' obscures theological, ritual and social differences between the Russian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic and the many Protestant Churches. Nor does 'Christianity' mask the changes that have taken place in those traditions over the last two millennia. Too intense a focus on differences is in danger of losing sight of the wood. Because I use 'shamanism' frequently in subsequent chapters, I give a brief outline of what I take the word to mean when I use it to refer to ritual specialists in hunter-gatherer societies. Our ultimate goal is the Upper Palaeolithic when all people were hunter-gatherers, so we need not consider broader manifestations of shamanism, sometimes alongside and integrated with other religions. - Hunter-gatherer shamanism is fundamentally posited on a range of institutionalized altered states of consciousness. - The visual, aural and somatic experiences of those states give rise to per­ceptions of an alternative reality that is frequently tiered (hunter-gatherers believe in spiritual realms above and below the world of daily life). - People with special powers and skills, the shamans, are believed to have access to this alternative reality. - The behaviour of the human nervous system in certain altered states creates the illusion of dissociation from one's body (less commonly understood in hunting and gathering shamanistic societies as possession by spirits). Shamans use dissociation and other experiences of altered states of consciousness to achieve at least four ends. Shamans are believed to - contact spirits and supernatural entities, - heal the sick, - control the movements and lives of animals, and - change the weather. These four functions of shamans, as well as their entrance into an altered state of consciousness, are believed to be facilitated by supernatural entities that include: - variously conceived supernatural potency, or power, and - animal-helpers and other categories of spirits that assist shamans and are associated with potency. In listing these ten characteristics of hunter-gatherer shamanism I have excluded features that some writers consider important, if not essential, for the classification of a religion as shamanistic. I do not, for instance, link shamanism to mental illness of any sort, though some shamans may well suffer from epilepsy, schizophrenia, migraine and a range of other pathologies. Nor do I stipulate the number of religious practitioners that a shamanistic society may have; some societies have many, others very few. Some shamans wield political power, others do not. Nor do I stipulate any particular method or methods for the induction of altered states of consciousness. Still less do I attend to diverse concepts of the soul, spirit and subdivisions of the tiered cosmos. In addition, I wish to emphasize the diversity of altered states of consciousness. If we focus, as some writers have done, too much on the word 'trance' and imagine 'altered states' to be restricted to deep, apparently unconscious conditions, we shall miss the fluidity of shamanistic experiences, and even fail altogether to notice the presence of altered states of consciousness in religious practices. The Saami shamans of Lapland and northern Scandinavia, for instance, receive visions and experience out‑of‑body travel in a variety of states. These range from a 'light trance' in which shamans are still aware of their surroundings but in which spirit helpers none the less appear and in which they can heal the sick and perform divinations. The spirits also appear to Saami shamans in'ordinary'dreams. Then in'deep trance', the shamans lie as if dead; in this condition, their souls are believed to have left their bodies and to have travelled to the spirit realm. In all three states, shamans are believed to have direct contact with the spirit realm. The anthropologist Anna­Leena Siikala took Arnold Ludwig's study of altered states of consciousness as a starting point for her study of Siberian shamanism. She found that the so­called'ecstatic experience' of shamans is far broader than is commonly imagined. These instances may be readily multiplied around the world. It is therefore essential to keep the full spectrum (or, as I have presented it, spectra) of consciousness in mind when we consider religious expressions that fall under the rubric of shamanism. Just which stages of altered consciousness are emphasized and highly valued depends on the social context of an expression of shamanism. Some societies, such as the Tukano, place considerable value on Stage 1 entoptic phenomena; others virtually ignore Stage 1 and seck out Stage 3 hallucinations. In whichever stage, and also in hypnagogic hallucinations, shamans learn to increase the vividness of their mental imagery and to control its content. Novices learn to do this by'actively engaging and manipulating the visionary phenomena'. Allied to this engagement is 'guided imagination', a form of imagination that goes beyond what we normally understand by the word: in Siikala's phrase, it consists in 'setting aside the critical faculty and allowing emotions, fantasies and images to surface into awareness'. Amongst those 'fan­tasies and images' are beings and episodes from myths that the novice has been taught and that concern the 'making' of a shaman and the structure of the universe that he or she will traverse in spiritual travel; such images'are frequently used...as a means of achieving sensations and experiences of the other world' The shamanistic mind is a complex interweaving of mental states, visions and emotions. We must beware of stipulating some naively simple altered state of consciousness as the shamanistic state of mind. I am not alone in emphasizing the importance of making sense of altered states of consciousness in the genesis of religion. Peter Furst, then a research associate of the Harvard Botanical Museum, wrote, 'It is at least possible, though certainly not provable, that the practice of shamanism...may have involved from the first - that is, the very beginnings of religion itself - the psychedelic potential of the natural environment.' Without stressing the use of psychotropic plants to alter consciousness, James McClenon sums up the matter:'[S]hamanism, the result of cultural adaptation to biologically based [altered states of consciousness], is the origin of all later religious forms.' And Weston La Barre came to the same conclusion:'[A]ll the dissociative "altered states of consciousness" - hallucination, trance, possession, vision, sensory deprivation, and especially the REM-state dream - apart from their cultural contexts and symbolic content, are essentially the same psychic states found everywhere among mankind; ...shamanism or direct contact with the super­natural in these states. . . is the de facto source of all revelation, and ultimately of all religions.' Before we proceed to examine the evidence from Upper Palaeolithic western Europe in the light of what this chapter has set forth about the human brain/mind and the genesis of religion, I describe two shamanistic societies that made rock art - the San of southern Africa and the Native American groups of California. In both cases we have a considerable amount of information on their beliefs. We do not have to indulge in the blind (and often wild) guessing that is frequently associated with the study of rock art. These two case studies widen our understanding of how the working of the brain can be harnessed in hunting and gathering societies. They also present further key features of shamanism that are relevant to Upper Palaeolithic art.

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