Even in the twentieth century, people were ‘rational’ enough to travel to the moon and back and still believe in supernatural entities and forces that transcend, and in effect make nonsense of, all the laws of physics on which their moon journey depended. Does the human brain construct spaceships and the human mind fashion unseen forces and spirits? What is the difference between brain and mind? What is intelligence and what is consciousness? How did early people reach a stage of evolution that allowed them to make and understand pictures?
…As Chauvet himself wrote (on discovering Niaux Cave, France), ‘Time was abolished’. Despite the enormous time gap, he and his friends felt as if they could sense the ‘souls and spirits’ of the artists surrounding them; the hidden images evoked not only ‘scientific wonder’ but also awe and ‘spiritual’ proclivities. They used words like ‘artists’ and ‘masterpieces’. They were identifying with people whom they took to be their remote ancestors. They were right, though perhaps not in a way that they would have recognized.
The Mind in The Cave – David Lewis-Williams (2002) P 18 – 19
Most people still accept both the laws of physics and the existence of supernatural forces that operate beyond those laws. Others continue to challenge the very notion of evolution. The human duality between material and ‘spiritual’ has proved more stubborn than some nineteenth century scientists expected. There are thus two questions that we can ask. First, what is it that leads some people to accept a revolutionary idea like evolution? Secondly, why do so many people persist in believing in an invisible dimension populated by spirit beings?
The Mind in The Cave – David Lewis-Williams (2002) P 24 – 25
At the beginning of his popular The Story of Art, Ernst Gombrich wrote, ‘There is really no such thing as art. There are only artists’. That is the view that I take in this book. I seek a practical, down-to-earth goal: I inquire about the origin of image makers (‘artists’, if you will), not the genesis of some impossible-to-define philosophical concept. I argue that the first image-makers were acting rationally in the specific social circumstances that I describe in later chapters; they were not driven by ‘aesthetics’. That amorphous, changing concept that we, in our particular place in history, call ‘art’ came after the first image-makers.
The Mind in The Cave – David Lewis-Williams (2002) P 45
Broadly speaking, there are two schools of thought on this matter [Upper Palaeolithic art research]; they are not necessarily exclusive, though they are sometimes presented as if they are. On the one hand, there are researchers totally commited to the objectivity of science; they believe that there are established rules and procedures of verification that lead to sure knowledge. At the other extreme, there are those who see all knowledge claims as relative and the product of social forces and cultural perceptions.
The Mind in The Cave – David Lewis-Williams (2002) P 48
One cannot, for instance, explain an aberration in a planets orbit by invoking laser beams directed at it from beings living in the vicinity of Alpha Centauri, while all other orbits are adequately explained by gravitational fields within the solar system.
Secondly, a hypothesis must be internally consistent. In other words, all parts of a hypothesis must depend on the same premises and must not contradict one another.
The third criterion is one on which, as we have seen, Darwin insisted. A hypothesis that covers diverse fields of evidence is more persuasive than one that pertains to only one, narrow type of evidence. For example, if the theory of gravity applied only to inanimate objects, such as tennis balls, and not to living creatures, such as people, its explanatory value would be so limited that scientists would reject it.
Fourthly, a hypothesis must be of such a nature that verifiable, empirical facts can be deduced from it: a hypothesis must relate explicitly to observable features of data. Art for arts sake fails this test because there are no verifiable features of images that it explains and that cannot be explained by other hypotheses. Aesthetic judgement is so vague that any image can be declared to be the result of an innate aesthetic impulse, even if, by today’s standards, its draughtsmanship is not ‘very good’.
Fifthly, useful hypotheses have heuristic potential, that is, they lead on to further questions and research. Art for arts sake fails on this criterion too because, once stated, it closes off further research. It (apparently) says all that there is to say.
The Mind in The Cave – David Lewis-Williams (2002) P 49
Moreover, image-making did not merely take place in the spirit world: it also shaped and incrementally created that world. Every image made hidden presences visible. There was thus a fecund interaction between the given topography of the caves, mercurial and mental imagery, and image-fixing by individuals and groups; through time, the images built up and modified the spiritual world both materially (in the caves) and conceptually (in peoples minds). The spirit world, like the social world above, was to some degree malleable; people could engage with it and to a certain extent shape it. In most cases, this shaping took the form of adding new images to those already there, or starting a new panel altogether. But, in some rare cases, there seems to have been some attempts at removing images already there.
Structure and Meaning
‘Structuralism’ was one of the great informing notions of the second half of the twentieth century. It was a philosophical movement that had roots deep in Western thought. It has also been a diverse movement that has opened up enquiries into the relationship between the human mind and the material world. To guide us through the maze of structural approaches it is useful to distinguish between, on the one hand, ‘structural analysis’, a general method of analysis that examines the ways in which a ‘structure’, framework or mental template, of which people may not be aware, orders the ways in which they think and act, and, on the other, ‘Structuralism’ (capitol ‘S’)which refers to a specific kind of structure comprising binary oppositions and mediations of those oppositions.
…He [ Giambattista Vico (1668-1744)] argued that the human mind gives shape to the material world, and it is this shape, or coherence, that allows people to understand and relate to the world in effective ways. The world id shaped by, and in the shape of, the human mind, despite the fact that people see the world as ‘natural’ or ‘given’. This being so, there must be a universal ‘language of the mind’, common to all communities. Structuring, making something coherent out of the chaos of the natural world, is the essence of being human. The problem with his work is that ‘mind’ is taken as an intellectualizing organ that mediates between a material world and an inner, mental world. But, as we shall see, there is more to the mind than just intelligence: there is also consciousness.
The Mind in The Cave – David Lewis-Williams (2002) P 51 – 52
….related to these notions is one that became all important in Upper Palaeolithic art research. Meaning consists not so much in things themselves as in the relationship between things. For example, ‘life’ can have no meaning without ‘death’, ‘light’ without ‘darkness’, and so forth.
The Mind in The Cave – David Lewis-Williams (2002) P 52
Levi Strauss’s work is founded on the notion that binary oppositions and mediations of those oppositions constitute a unifying thread, a hidden logic, that runs trough all human thought. Binary oppositions comprise two ‘opposite’ terms, for example, up:down, life:death and male:female. ‘Structure’ is concerned with logical categories like these and the kinds of relations between them. According to Levi Strauss, every society’s language, kinship, system and mythology are variations of this binary theme.
Inevitably, in every such system of classification and relations there are anomalies: real history sometimes contradicts present conditions; and there are always people and animals that do not fit neatly into the system of categories. For Levi Strauss, ‘the purpose of myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction (an impossible achievement if, as it happens, the contradiction is real)’.
The Mind in The Cave – David Lewis-Williams (2002) P 58 - 59
The Brain / Mind Problem
Some common, frequently used words are extraordinarily difficult to define. We have noted the problem of defining ‘art’. ‘Consciousness’ is another such word. We all know what it means – until someone asks us to define it. One of the sources of this difficulty is that consciousness is a historically situated selection and evaluation of mental states form a wide range of potential states. It is not a universal, timeless ‘given’.
Two things we do know are, one, that the brain / mind evolved, and two, that consciousness (as distinct from brain) is a notion, or sensation, created by electro-chemical activity in the ‘wiring’ of the brain. These two observations guide much of the following discussion.
The Mind in The Cave – David Lewis-Williams (2002) P 104
The second observation is rather different and requires more comment. If we are speaking of evolution, we are speaking – essentially – of the human body, our physical, material, makeup of banes, blood, tissue, brain matter. By contrast, mind is a projection, an abstraction; it cannot be placed on a table and dissected as a brain. Nor, it seems, can mind be placed on a philosophical table and defined and described. Indeed, the age-old mind / body problem continues to niggle despite the ingenuity of generations of philosophers.
The Mind in The Cave – David Lewis-Williams (2002) P 104
….Descartes said that he derived his ambition of designing a new philosophical and scientific system not from rational, lucid thought but from a series of dreams. That contradiction derived from the duality of his thinking. On the one hand, he developed philosophical and scientific theories that were rooted in rigid mathematics and the material world. On the other, his system was posited on the existence of a divine, benevolent creator. Out of this contradiction grew his well-known ‘Cartesian Dualism’ that proposes the existence of two radically different kinds of substance: material substance (rocks, trees, animals, and the human body)and ‘thinking substance’ (the human mind, thoughts, desires). From this duality arises a notion that the ‘self’ (more or less what we are calling consciousness) is something non-material and that it in some way operates the brain (which is material), rather as a puppeteer manipulates a puppet. The English philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1900 – 76) summed up this notion in his famous phrase ‘The Ghost in the Machine’.
Descartes’ idea persists in what is now called ‘Attributive dualism’, the doctrine that psychological phenomena cannot be reduced to a physical foundation. Whilst there is some sense in this kind of opposition to a reductionist explanation of mind, I believe that any persuasive explanation must refer to the form and functioning of the brain, the matter of the mind. The ghost hidden in the machine is a cognitive illusion created by the electro-chemical functioning of the brain.
That said, we have to admit that, despite the current plethora of studies of human consciousness, we still do not know how the functioning of the brain produces human consciousness. We do have a much better understanding of what happens in the brain than we did 20 years ago, even though, as Ian Glynn points out in his book, An Anatomy of Thought, much remains mysterious.
The Mind in The Cave – David Lewis-Williams (2002) P 105
Minds and Metaphors
When we speak of the brain, we are on fairly solid ground. We can literally dissect a brain and find left and right hemispheres, the cortex, the hippocampus, synapses, neurotransmitters, and so forth. But, when we come to attempt the same kind of process with the mind and consciousness, we are forced to adopt a different procedure altogether. Inevitably, or so it seems, we are obliged to use metaphors and similes: we have to compare what we imagine to be the human mind to something simpler and something with which we are familiar. So the mind may be thought of as a blank slate on which, from birth, information is written by a process of learning. Or we may think of it as a sponge, soaking up knowledge, retaining it, and then squeezing it out again.
Consciousness: Neurological and social
The problem here is that the emphasis on intelligence has marginalised the importance of the full range of human consciousness in human behaviour. Art and the ability to comprehend it are more dependant on kinds of mental imagery and the ability to manipulate mental images than on intelligence. We must see consciousness as much more than the interaction of intelligence modules to create generalised intelligence. Drawing on Nicholas Humphrey’s work, he highlights ‘reflexive-consciousness’. This phrase means not only being aware of our physical selves and our own thoughts (introspection), but also an ability derived form out social intelligence module: being able to predict the behaviour of others – in a sense, to read their minds. The adaptive value of this kind of consciousness is clear. But it is also clear that what is being described is part of highly valued Western problem-solving techniques.
What we have here is a case of our knowledge of the past being entrenched in present-day values and practices. In this instance, the social constructivist position clearly has some merit. What constitutes consciousness for us at our particular position in history informs our investigation and knowledge of the past. Catherine Lutz identifies a number of features that are considered integral to our own Western, twenty-first-century consciousness. These features include an absence of emotion in problem-solving, objectivity, linear thought, and sustained attention spans: ‘Consciousness so construed is seen as fundamentally good and important’. These features of consciousness as it is conceived in the West come out clearly in Lut’z review of the historical definitions of consciousness listed in the Oxford English Dictionary. But when she moves on to consider consciousness as conceived in non-Western societies, the inadequacy of her method is exposed. She regards consciousness as something entirely constructed in social discourse and thus without neurological, ‘hard-wired’ foundations.
The Mind in The Cave – David Lewis-Williams (2002) P 112
We need to altered states of consciousness as well as normal, waking consciousness. We need to understand the ‘irrational’ thought of the poet as well as the rational thought of the [laboratory] subject solving a logical problem…we need to investigate the historical evolution of ideas in the real world as well as how concepts are formed in laboratory situations. Finally, since people are not computers, we must ask how emotional and motivational factors affect cognition.
In waking consciousness we are concerned with problem-solving, usually in response to environmental stimuli. When we become disengaged from those stimuli, different kinds of consciousness begin to take over. First, in realistic fantasy we are oriented to problem solving. We may, for instance, run through a possible social strategy that we plan to use in a forthcoming interview and assess possible outcomes. These realistic fantasies grade into more autistic ones, that is, ones that have less relevance to external reality. In what Martindale calls reverie, our thought is far less directed, and image follows image in no narrative sequence. Then reverie falls into hypnagogic states that occur as we fall asleep. Sometimes hypnagogic imagery is extraordinarily vivid, so vivid that people experience what are called hypnagogic hallucinations: they start awake and believe that their imagery of, say, someone entering the room was real. Hypnagogic hallucinations may be visual and aural. Finally, in dreaming, a succession of images appears, at least in recall, as a narrative. Actually, we add much of the narrative structure as we recall the imagery. During REM sleep (rapid eye movement sleep that precedes deep sleep) random neuronal activity produces mental imagery. As we all know, this imagery is sometimes bizarre: images transmute into different ones, and we experience sensations of flying, fleeing, and falling, together with attendant emotions.
The phrase [altered consciousness] can apply equally to dreaming and ‘inward’ states of the normal trajectory, though some people prefer to restrict its use to extreme hallucinations and trance states. By now it will be obvious that this commonly encountered phrase is posited on the essentially Western concept of ‘consciousness of rationality’. It implies that there is ‘ordinary consciousness’ that is considered genuine and good, and then perverted, or ‘altered’ states. The term ‘altered states of consciousness’ is useful enough, but we need to remember that it carries a lot of cultural baggage.
Picture by Adolf Wolfli - He suffered from psychosis, which led to intense hallucinations. - WikipediaOther components of consciousness, such as Descartes dreams, are therefore considered aberrations and suppressed in formulations of what constitutes human consciousness. As we shall shortly see, consciousness is not entirely a construct. Rather, it derives from historically specific responses to and categorizations of a shifting neurological substrate.
The Mind in The Cave – David Lewis-Williams (2002) P 112
Hildegaard of Bingen (1098 – 1179) believed that her visions revealed not just Gods personal instructions to her, but also the material structure of the universe: she did not distinguish between religious revelations and ‘science’. Indeed, the contact with the deity that dreams and visions were believed to afford was considered a defining trait of human beings, a function of the divine spark that animals lacked, even if it was something to which not everyone aspired. Today this kind of mental state is generally shunned and is not considered a valuable component of human consciousness. No one in the West is likely to be elected to high political office on a ticket of a blinding, personal, divine revelation – or, for that matter, be consecrated as Archbishop of Canterbury. Yet the paradox remains: the large ‘esoteric’ sections of bookshops show that ‘non – scientific’ thinking is alive and well, and people still pray, meditate and consult priests and psychics. It is just that, today, altered states are marginalised in the conduct of affairs of state, scientific endeavour, and even within mainstream religion. What today constitutes acceptable human consciousness is therefore an historically situated notion constructed within a specific social context but founded on the neurology to which I now turn. It is not simply a function of interacting intelligences.
The Mind in The Cave – David Lewis-Williams (2002) P 121
The Spectrum of Consciousness
As long ago as 1902, the influential American psychologist William James, who successively taught physiology, psychology and philosophy at Harvard, noted that what we think of as normal, waking consciousness is only one type of consciousness ( though, as we shall see, it too has a unitary state), ‘whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness , entirely different’. He added: ‘No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. More recently, Colin Martindale, a cognitive (rather than evolutionary) psychologist, has re-emphasized the point that studies of the mind have concentrated too much on rational states. He argues:
We need to altered states of consciousness as well as normal, waking consciousness. We need to understand the ‘irrational’ thought of the poet as well as the rational thought of the [laboratory] subject solving a logical problem…we need to investigate the historical evolution of ideas in the real world as well as how concepts are formed in laboratory situations. Finally, since people are not computers, we must ask how emotional and motivational factors affect cognition. I therefore suggest that we follow Martindale and think of consciousness not as a state but as a continuum or a spectrum.
The Mind in The Cave – David Lewis-Williams (2002) P 122
Satges of Consciousness
In waking consciousness we are concerned with problem-solving, usually in response to environmental stimuli. When we become disengaged from those stimuli, different kinds of consciousness begin to take over. First, in realistic fantasy we are oriented to problem solving. We may, for instance, run through a possible social strategy that we plan to use in a forthcoming interview and assess possible outcomes. These realistic fantasies grade into more autistic ones, that is, ones that have less relevance to external reality. In what Martindale calls reverie, our thought is far less directed, and image follows image in no narrative sequence. Then reverie falls into hypnagogic states that occur as we fall asleep. Sometimes hypnagogic imagery is extraordinarily vivid, so vivid that people experience what are called hypnagogic hallucinations: they start awake and believe that their imagery of, say, someone entering the room was real. Hypnagogic hallucinations may be visual and aural. Finally, in dreaming, a succession of images appears, at least in recall, as a narrative. Actually, we add much of the narrative structure as we recall the imagery. During REM sleep (rapid eye movement sleep that precedes deep sleep) random neuronal activity produces mental imagery. As we all know, this imagery is sometimes bizarre: images transmute into different ones, and we experience sensations of flying, fleeing, and falling, together with attendant emotions. The Mind in The Cave – David Lewis-Williams (2002) P 123
There is evidence that our normal waking day comprises of cycles of 90 – 120 minutes of moving from outward-directed attention to inward-directed states. As I have observed, some societies regard inward-directed states as pathological, while other see them as divine afflatus, while still other pay little attention to them.
Such is the spectrum of consciousness from shifting wakefulness to sleep. We must now consider another trajectory that passes through the same spectrum but with rather different effects (SCAN FIG 25). I call it the ‘Intensified Trajectory’ : it is more profoundly concerned wit inward-direction and fantasy. Dream-like, autistic states may be induced by a wide variety of means other than drifting into sleep. One of these means is sensory deprivation, during which a reduction of external stimuli leads to the ‘release’ of internal imagery. Normal subjects isolated in sound-proof, dark conditions report hallucinations after a few hours. They also experience what Martindale calls ‘stimulus hunger’: they crave and focus on even the smallest, most trivial stimulus. Comparable sensory deprivation is part of many Eastern meditative techniques. Devotees are required to shut out as much of their environment as possible and to concentrate on a single focal point that may be a repeated mantra or a visual symbol. Then too, audio-driving, such as prolonged drumming, visual stimulations, such as continually flashing lights and sustained rhythmic dancing, such as among Dervishes, have a similar effect on the nervous system. We also need to mention fatigue, pain, fasting, and of course, the ingestion of psychotropic substances as means of shifting consciousness along the intensified trajectory towards the release of inwardly generated imagery. Finally, there are pathological states, such as schizophrenia and temporal lobe epilepsy that take consciousness along the intensified trajectory. Hallucinations may thus be deliberately sought, as in the ingestion of psychotropic substances, or they may be unsought, as in many of the other modes of induction I have noted.
The phrase [altered consciousness] can apply equally to dreaming and ‘inward’ states of the normal trajectory, though some people prefer to restrict its use to extreme hallucinations and trance states. By now it will be obvious that this commonly encountered phrase is posited on the essentially Western concept of ‘consciousness of rationality’. It implies that there is ‘ordinary consciousness’ that is considered genuine and good, and then perverted, or ‘altered’ states. The term ‘altered states of consciousness’ is useful enough, but we need to remember that it carries a lot of cultural baggage.The Mind in The Cave – David Lewis-Williams (2002) P 125
In the first, ‘lightest’ stage [of hallucination] people may experience geometric visual percepts that include dots, grids, zigzags, nested catenary curves, and meandering lines. Because these percepts are ‘wired’ into the human nervous system, all people, no matter what their cultural background, have the potential to experience them. …
Writers have called these geometric percepts phosphenes, form constants, and entoptic phenomena. I use entoptic phenomena because ‘entoptic’ means ‘within vision’ (from the Greek), that is, they may originate anywhere between the eye itself and the cortex of the brain.
The exact way in which entoptic phenomena are ‘wired into’ the human nervous system has been a topic of recent research. It has been found that the patterns of connections between the retina and the striate cortex (known as V1) and of neurological circuits within the striate cortex determined their geometric form. Simply put, there is a spatial relationship between the retina and the visual cortex: points that are close together on the retina lead to the firing of comparably placed neurons in the cortex. When this process is reversed, as following the ingestion of psychotropic substances, the pattern in the cortex is perceived as a visual percept. In other words, people in this condition are seeing the structure of their own brains.
The Mind in The Cave – David Lewis-Williams (2002) P 127
In Stage 2 of the intensified trajectory, subjects try to make sense of entoptic phenomena by elaborating them into iconic forms. That is, into objects that are familiar to them in everyday life.
Stage 3 [hallucination] images derive from memory and are often associated with powerful emotional experiences. Images change into one another. This shift in iconic imagery is also accompanied by an increase in vividness. Subjects stop using similes to describe their experiences and assert that the images are indeed what they appear to be. They ‘lose insight into the differences between literal and analogical meanings’. Nevertheless, even in this essentially iconic stage, entoptic phenomena may persist: iconic imagery may be projected against a background of geometric forms or entoptic phenomena may frame iconic imagery.
Pic - Martin Ramirez
Finally, in this stage, subjects enter into and participate in their own imagery: they are part of a strange realm. They blend with both their geometric and their iconic imagery. It is in this final stage that people sometimes feel themselves to be turning into animals and undergoing other frightening or exulting transformations.
The Mind in The Cave – David Lewis-Williams (2002) P 130
Harnessing the Brain
All anatomically modern people of our own time and of the Transition [from Neanderthal to Homo sapiens] have, or had, the same 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.
…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 valued 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 Mind in The Cave – David Lewis-Williams (2002) P 130 – 131
Here, then, we have an instance in which people take hold of the possibilities of the intensified trajectories – they harness the human brain – and believe that they derive from their visions insights into an ‘alternative realty’ 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 experience the full spectrum of consciousness in some way.
The Mind in The Cave – David Lewis-Williams (2002) P 132
Cosmos and Art
We do not have any proof that only shamans painted, but it seems likely that it was the shamans themselves who painted images coming through into the world of the living and visions of the transformations they experienced in the spirit world. Nor do I imply that shamans painted while they were in trance; the images are too delicate, to fine to have been executed by the trembling hand of a trancer. Rather, San shamans were manifesting, or re-creating – perhaps re-living – their experiences of the supernatural realm while in an alert state.
In this way, the painters actualized the tiered cosmos and their journeys through it. I argue that the three levels were not merely conceptual: they were manifest in the rock shelters. The painted images of another world made sense because of their location on the ‘veil’, the interference between reality and spirituality. The rock wall on which the paintings were placed was not a tabula rasa but part of the images. Art and the cosmos united in a mutual statement about the complex nature of reality. The walls of the shelters thus became gateways that afforded access to realms that ordinary people could not visit – but they could glimpse what it was like in that realm as painted images filtered through and shamans described their journeys.
The Mind in The Cave – David Lewis-Williams (2002) P 149
Again, art, cosmos and spiritual experience coalesced. The San fused the ‘abstract’ experiences of altered states with the materiality of the world in which they lived. Perhaps most strikingly, this fusion is seen in the way in which the painted ‘threads of light’ are identical in widely separated rock shelters: the uniformity of the width of the line and the spacing of the white dots is so remarkably that some researchers have felt that all the depictions of the line must have been made by a single painter, though we know that this cannot have been so. It is as if there is only one ‘thread’ that links all the shelters: the shamans thus constituted a network of extra-corporeal travel that united distant communities and that was manifest in the people’s living places.
Now we may ask: if the rock face had significance as the tangible interface between two realms, what of the paint that was placed on it and how was paint-making and painting-making linked to painting-viewing?
Technology, potency and social relations
Today, it is easy to think of paint as merely a technical substance, something that one purchases at a hardware store. I have already hinted that, for the San, paint had special powers in that it could ‘dissolve’ the rock face and allow images of the other world to slip through. That being so, it is not surprising to find that the manufacture of paint was but one part of a complex ritual chain that included the making and viewing of images. Image making was not an isolated event.
We need to situate technology in a social matrix. Artefacts, including rock art images, are made in a social arena. That is to say, individual people drew on a known ‘chain of operations’, not in isolation, but in the flux of social relations, and, as Max Raphael would have pointed out, those relations were frequently conflictual.
The Mind in The Cave – David Lewis-Williams (2002) P 256
…the unavoidable process of coming to terms with the full spectrum of human consciousness has to be agreed on by most members of a community; without such agreement, ordinary life is impossible. Further, the ways in which only certain people are allowed to experience the far end of the intensified trajectory are socially governed.
Society comprises of those who ‘see’ and those who do not ‘see’-‘seers’ and ‘receivers’. This distinction tends to be reinforced by the way in which shamans share visions. During the course of a dance, one shaman may draw the others’ attention to what he or she can see, perhaps a number of spirit-eland standing in the semi darkness beyond the light of the fire. The others look in the direction indicated, and then they too see the same visions. There is thus a sharing of insights that makes for commonality of visions and a bond of shared experiences among shamans.
….some people seize on hallucinatory novelties and then present them to others as specially privileged insights that set them above others or, more agnostically, challenge the whole social structure. In this way, the tension between socialized and idiosyncratic mental imagery presented San shaman-artists with an opportunity to establish their social positions by manipulating, within socially accepted parameters, certain classes of mental imagery.
The third context, the viewing of rock art, probably also gave shamans insights which would become part of their own experience in altered states. People tend to hallucinate what they expect to hallucinate. There was, therefore, probably a recursivity between rack art images and visions: visions were painted on the rock walls, and then these paintings prompted people to see similar visions. As a result, rock art probably exercised a conservative, stabilizing effect on the range of mental imagery that shamans experienced.
The Mind in The Cave – David Lewis-Williams (2002) P 157-158
The Manufacture of Paint
(In early 1930s, Mapote, a Sotho man who, at the end of the nineteenth century had learned to paint with San in their rock shelters explained…) San painters greatly desired a special type of red haematite pigment known as quang quang: it glistened and sparkled and could be found only in the high basalt mountains. Painters therefore had to undertake a ‘pilgrimage’ to the towering heights of the Drakensburg if they wished to use this pigment. The Sotho people themselves believed that it would protect them from lightning. …a woman had to heat the quang quang out of doors at full moon until it was red hot. It was then ground between two stones until it was a fine powder. The production of red pigment was thus, at least at certain times, a collective enterprise. As men and women collaborated in the trance dance, so too did they co-operate in the making of paint.
Then the ground quang quang was mixed with a highly significant medium – the blood of a freshly killed eland. Quang quang was the only pigment mixed with eland blood. This suggests that certain kinds of painting only took place after a successful eland hunt. …eland blood contained potency and it was therefore mixed with the paint. …a painting made with eland blood was a kind of reservoir of potency.
The Mind in The Cave – David Lewis-Williams (2002) P 259
The Making of Rock Paintings
As I have pointed out, it does not seem likely that shamans painted while in deep trance. More probably, they painted while in a ‘normal’ state of consciousness, recalling their vivid glimpses of the spirit world and making power-filled images of those visions. Probably, too, the very act of painting assisted in the recall, recreation and reification of otherwise transient glimpses of spiritual things: painters are not automatic photocopying machines who exactly reproduce mental images. San rock should be seen as powerful emotion recollected in tranquillity.
The use of San Rock Paintings
Once made, many San images continued to perform significant functions, but there is unfortunately little ethnographic information on what precisely happened to these potent images after they had been made.
As we have seen, people were able to draw potency from some of the images. …if a ‘good’ person placed his or her hand on a depiction of an eland, the potency locked up in that painting would flow into that person, thus giving him or her special powers….if a ‘bad’ person did this, his or her hand would adhere to the rock and the person would eventually waste away and die.
The importance of touching, and not merely looking at, rock paintings is confirmed by patches of paint that were placed on the walls and ceilings of rock shelters and then rubbed smooth. San paintings were not merely looked at: they were also touched.
As time went by, certain rock shelters acquired more and more potency as the images piled up, one on top of another; the paintings in a rock shelter were never complete. The most densely painted rock shelters were probably regarded as places of exceptional personal or group power.
….the polysemy of the art was not diffuse and completely untrammelled: the images were part of, and built into, the tiered cosmos. They spoke primarily of that cosmos and the special people who had the ability to traverse it. The making and viewing of them was woven into the shifting social fabric of San communities.
Art and the physical environment, as the San understood it, were inseparable.
The Mind in The Cave – David Lewis-Williams (2002) P 161 – 162
Why are people so compliant (to the images presented to them by the shamans)? There are a number of reasons. For one, they have had some glimpse, some inkling, of the spirit world in their own dreams. In the absence of any knowledge of human neurology, dreams provide them with personal, indeed incontrovertible, evidence for the existence of a spiritual realm. This spirit world may be the preserve of the shamans, but it can unnervingly invade the minds of ordinary people. The whole of society is thus drawn into the shamanistic way of seeing things. Shamanism is not simply a component of society: on the contrary, together with it tiered cosmos, can be said to be the overall framework of society.
The Mind in The Cave – David Lewis-Williams (2002) P 177
The Origin of Image Making
Above all, we see that intelligence is no doubt important. But it is in the ways in which people understand shifting consciousness that cosmology, experiences of cosmology, concepts of supernatural realms, and art all come together.
The Mind in The Cave – David Lewis-Williams (2002) P180
….neither the three- nor the two-dimensional versions are representations: they do not show what the spirits look like; rather they are avatars of the spirits. ‘There is no sense’, Forge found, ‘in which the painting on the flat is a projection of the carving or an attempt to represent the three-dimensional object in two dimensions. The paintings are not meant to ‘look like’ something in nature, as we so easily assume.
The Mind in The Cave – David Lewis-Williams (2002) P 183
BRAIN
But what is the basic neurology of the brain? All neurobiologists accept that the fundamental cell type in the brain is the neuron. Neurons are connected to other neurons by synapses. These connections are facilitated by the generation of neurotransmitters, chemical substances that allow electrical impulses to cross over from one neuron to another.
The cerebral cortex, the ‘outer’ skin of the brain, contains as many as ten billion neurons. This complexity is daunting. Yet it is out of complex interactions between the billions of neurons that consciousness arises. Next, we need to distinguish between the limbic system and the thalamocortical system. Both are made up of neurons, but they differ in their organization. The limbic system is concerned with fundamental, non-rational behaviors: appetite, sexual behavior and defensive behavior. It is extensively connected to many different body organs and the autonomic nervous system. It thus regulates breathing, digestion, sleep cycles, and so on. The limbic system evolved early to regulate the functioning of the body. By contrast, the thalamocortical evolved to make sense of complex inputs from outside the body. It comprises the thalamus, a central brain structure that connects sensory and other brain signals to the cortex, and the cortex itself. The thalamocortical system developed after the limbic system and became intimately linked to it.
The Mind in The Cave – David Lewis-Williams (2002) P 187
….Edelman’s summary of higher-order consciousness. It is the kind of consciousness that Homo sapiens possesses:
Higher-order consciousness involves the recognition by a thinking subject of his or her own acts or reflections. It embodies a model of the personal, and of the past, future as well as the present…It is what we as humans have in addition to primary consciousness. We are conscious of being conscious…How can the tyranny of the remembered present be broken? The answer is: By the evolution of new forms of symbolic memory and new systems serving social communication and transmission. In its most developed form, this means the evolutionary capacity for language. Insamuch as human beings are the only species with language, it also means that higher-order consciousness has flowered in our species…
[Higher-order consciousness] involves the ability to construct a socially based selfhood, to model the world in terms of the past and the future, and to be directly aware. Without a symbolic memory, these abilities cannot develop…Long-term storage of symbolic relations, acquired through interactions with other individuals of the same species, is critical to self-concept. (Edelman 1994, 112-32)
Simply put, the development was enabled by the evolution of enormously complex re-entry neural circuits in the brain. The circuits created more efficient kinds of memory. Indeed, the difference between primary consciousness and higher-order consciousness is that members of the species Homo sapiens, the only species that has it, can remember better and use memory to fashion their own individual identities and mental ‘scenes’ of past, present, and future events. This is the key point.
It is also true that fully modern language is a sine qua non for higher-order consciousness. A corollary to this observation is that language makes possible auditory hallucinations: it is with language that ‘inner voices’ can tell people what to do. In this way, visual hallucinations acquire a new dimension: they speak to those who experience them. Not only do shamans ‘see’ their animal spirit helpers; the spirits also talk to them.
The Mind in The Cave – David Lewis-Williams (2002) P 188-189
Two Dimensional Images
Once human beings had developed their higher-order consciousness, they had the ability to see mental images projected onto surfaces and to experience afterimages. Here, I suggest, is the answer to the conundrum of two-dimensional images. People did not ‘invent’ two-dimensional images; nor did they discover them in natural marks and ‘macaronis’. On the contrary, their world was already invested with two-dimensional images; such images were a product of the functioning of the human nervous system in altered states of consciousness and in the context of higher order consciousness.
It is the entertaining and socialising of mental imagery that is fundamental to shamanic societies. The imagery does not have to be expressed graphically.
How then, did people come to make representational images of animals and so forth out of projected mental imagery? I argue that at a given time, and for social reasons, the projected images of altered states were insufficient and people needed to ‘fix’ their visions. They reached out to their emotionally charged visions and tried to touch them, to hold them in place, perhaps on soft surfaces and with their fingers. They were not inventing images. They were merely touching what was already there.
The first two-dimensional images were thus not two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional things in the material world, as researchers have always assumed. Rather, they were ‘fixed’ mental images. In all probability the makers did not suppose that they ‘stood for’ real animals. If we could be transported back to the very beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic so that we could compliment a painter on the ‘realism’ of his or her picture, I believe we should have been met with incredulity. ‘But’ the painter may have replied, ‘that is not a real bison: you can’t walk around it; and it is too small. That is a “vision”, a “spirit bison”. There is nothing “real” about it’. For the makers, the paintings’ and engravings were visions, not representations of visions…
The Mind in The Cave – David Lewis-Williams (2002) P 193 – 194
The images were not so much painted onto rock walls as released from, or coaxed through, the living membrane (rather than ‘veil’ if we think of the bowels of the earth) that existed between the image maker and the spirit world. In some instances, natural features of the rock stood for parts of the animals. I argue that this fundamental principal probably also applied to the making of three dimensional images: the carver of the image merely released what was already inside the material. This is, of course, a well-known principal that sculptors in various cultures, including the Western tradition, speak about. Aurignacian three-dimensional image makers, from their point of view, may therefore have not superimposed meaning (an image) on the otherwise meaningless piece of ivory that they were handling; rather, they released the animal essence from within the fragments of the animals. Many shamanic communities believe in the regeneration of animals from bones.
The portable animal statuettes were therefore far more than decorative trinkets: they were reified three-dimensional spirit animal with all their prophylactic and other powers.
The Mind in The Cave – David Lewis-Williams (2002) P 199-200
The Cave in the Mind
There is reason to believe that the brains of Upper Paleolithic Homo sapiens were fully modern. They therefore experienced dreams and had the potential to experience visions. Further, they had no option but to reach some common understanding of what the dreams and visions were and what they meant. By contrast, combined archaeological and neurological evidence suggests that Neanderthals, like other mammals, had the neurological potential to experience dreams and hallucinations, buy not to remember them in any significant way, to act upon them, or to use them as a basis for social discrimination.
The Mind in The Cave – David Lewis-Williams (2002) P 205
Contrary to these classifications, both types of images (entoptic and iconic) are representational: they both represent (by way of complex processes) mental imagery, not (at least initially) things in the material world.
The Mind in The Cave – David Lewis-Williams (2002) P 207
The subterranean passages and chambers were the ‘entrails’ of the nether world; entry into them was both physical and psychic entry into the underworld. ‘Spiritual’ experiences were this given topographic materiality. Entry into a cave was, for Upper Palaeolithic people, entry into part of the spirit world. The embellishing images blazed (possibly in a fairly literal sense) a path into the unknown.
We can go a step further. Altered states of consciousness not only create notions of a tiered cosmos; they also afford access to, and there by repeatedly validate, the various divisions of that cosmos. The tiered shamanic cosmos and ‘proof’ of its reality constitutes a closed system of experiential creation and verification. Even people who, for whatever reason, did not have access to the far end of the intensified trajectory or to the caves themselves, were still able to verify the structure of their cosmos through the more evanescent glimpses of another realm that their dreams afforded them. They could fleetingly and imperfectly glimpse the creatures and transformations of the spirit world was, for them, evidence enough that the shamans could actually visit it and return with detailed accounts of it.
Images were not so much taken underground-pictures of the world above lodged in peoples memories-and placed there; they were both obtained and fixed there. The hallucinatory, or spirit, world together with its painted and engraved imagery, was thus invested with materiality and precisely situated cosmologically; it was not something that existed merely in peoples thoughts and minds. The spiritual nether world was there, tangible and material – and some people could empirically verify it by entering the caves and seeing for themselves the ‘fixed’ visions of the spirit-animals that empowered the shamans of the community and also by experiencing visions, perhaps even in those underground spaces.
Moreover, image-making did not merely take place in the spirit world: it also shaped and incrementally created that world. Every image made hidden presences visible. There was thus a fecund interaction between the given topography of the caves, mercurial and mental imagery, and image-fixing by individuals and groups; through time, the images built up and modified the spiritual world both materially (in the caves) and conceptually (in peoples minds). The spirit world, like the social world above, was to some degree malleable; people could engage with it and to a certain extent shape it. In most cases, this shaping took the form of adding new images to those already there, or starting a new panel altogether. But, in some rare cases, there seems to have been some attempts at removing images already there. The Mind in The Cave – David Lewis-Williams (2002) P 209 - 210
Darkness and Light
This technique of using shadows to complete a depiction is more common than is usually supposed: people used the substantial interplay of moving shadows to seek power and create images of that power.
In these instances, the sought-after animal was not simply ‘discovered’ in the convolutions of the rock. It was created by human intervention and an interaction between the two elements, light and darkness.
Perhaps more than any other Upper Paleolithic images, these ‘creatures’ (creations) of light and darkness point to a complex interaction between person and spirit, artist and image, viewer and image. There was a great deal more to Upper Paleolithic than pictures simply to be looked at: some of the images sprang from a fundamental metaphor.
With small tallow lamps, only limited portions of wall could be seen at any one time, and, as de Beaune and White put it, “The illusion of animals suddenly materializing out of the darkness id a powerful one”. (De Beaune & White (1993, 78 – 79)).
The Mind in The Cave – David Lewis-Williams (2002) P 220 – 221
The effect of rhythmic sound, especially drumming and chanting, is widely recognised as a means of contacting the world of the spirits (Needham (1967)). The literature on this point is indeed vast. One has only to think of the clapping and dancing rattles fixed around the ankles that cause potency to ‘boil’ in San shamans and to carry them off to the spirit world. Elsewhere, shamans are intimately associated with drums.
The American anthropologist Michael Harner sums the effect of persistent drumming: ‘The steady, monotonous beat of the drum acts like a carrier wave, first to help the shaman enter the SSC [Shamanic State of Consciousness], and then sustain him on his journey’ (Harner 1982, 65). This is not a flight of fancy. Like so much else of what I have discussed, this is a material, neurological, not merely psychological, basis for widespread shamanistic beliefs. Research has shown that low-frequency drum-beats produce changes in the human nervous system and induce trance states, which, of course, include sensation of out-of-body travel (Neher 1961, 1962). There is thus a neurological explanation for the shamanistic use of drums.
Working on the altogether reasonable hypothesis that some sort of musical or rhythmic activity probably took place in Upper Palaeolithic caves, researchers have investigated the acoustic properties of various chambers and passages (reznikoff & Dauvois (1988); Scarre (1989); Waller 1993). Findings suggest that resonant areas are more likely to have images than non-resonant ones. The implication is that people performed rituals involving drumming and chanting in the acoustically best areas and then followed up these activities by making images.
The Mind in The Cave – David Lewis-Williams (2002) P 224 - 225
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