For now, I’m glad to offer everyone who couldn’t make it both an MP3 download of the talk (with thanks to Mark Pilkington for tech duties), and a slidecast. This is a version of the slideshow I did, synched with the audio recording—which has come out pretty well.

If anyone’s interested in me doing this presentation in their neighbourhood, or in doing an interview on the subject, do get in touch.

At first it was a part of a talk given early this year at Metageum in London. Then I thought I’d develop it into an essay. Then it seemed long enough to print as a nice pamphlet. It’s ended up being a slim book.

It’s my effort to analyze and contribute to the recent debates about the “Noble Savage”. Are pre-civilized cultures more peaceful than we are? Do they live in greater harmony with the environment? Of late, people such as Steven Pinker, Lawrence Keeley and Steven LeBlanc, who aren’t overt bigots—indeed, who generally seem to be fine, well-meaning liberal folks—have been answering these questions with a resounding “no”. In War & the Noble Savage I’ve surveyed this recent literature, and tried to dig beneath the polarized surface of the debate using some less popularized anthropological and historical scholarship.

It went to the printers just today, and should be ready to send out by the end of next week. I’m taking pre-orders now if anyone wants to dive in. (Please note that I’ve also revamped my PayPal integration, and I’ve included options to buy different Dreamflesh publications together and save money on postage.)

October Gallery talk

Coinciding with the release of the book, I’m pleased to have been invited to speak in the October Gallery‘s ‘Ecology, Cosmos & Consciousness’ lecture series on Tuesday 27th October. For more details and booking information see the October Gallery website. I’ll be presenting the book’s main ideas there, and leaving plenty of time for discussion—please bring your questions and ideas along! Copies of the book will of course be on sale, at a specially reduced price.

Review copies

If anyone’s interested in reviewing this, please get in touch.

Related material

At the bottom of the book’s page you’ll find a compilation of related material—my book reviews and blog posts covering similar area, plus a collection of links to the websites, articles, and videos I drew on in my research.

Feedback

If anyone who reads the book wants to respond to anything in it or ask questions, please use the comments here…

Coming up fast, over the last week of March, is the next Metageum conference. The last one was a fascinating event in Malta; this time, we’re in the slightly less megalith-rich, but hopefully more humanly hectic environs of London. Specifically, at the ever-conducive venue, Treadwell’s.

Speakers so far include Paul Devereux, Peter Lloyd, David Luke, Lydia Oukhaneva, Toni Perrott, Peter Knight, Donal Ruane and Deborah Marshall-Warren.

And me. I’m on March 28th at 1.30pm—sign up and I’ll see you there!

My talk has changed slightly from the blurb currently posted there. Here’s the latest version:

Darwin, Rock Art, and the Human Animal

Commemorating this year’s double anniversary (of Darwin’s birth and the publication of The Origin of Species), this talk will delve into the complex influence of evolutionary theory on both the study of prehistoric rock art in particular, and modern attitudes to “primitive” man in general. From the surprising origins of the myth of “the noble savage” in Victorian ethnology to Stephen Pinker’s contentions about prehistoric violence; from Terence McKenna’s mycological speculations to recent archaeological controversies about shamans and visions. This will be a wide-ranging trip through our varying perspectives on the prehistoric mind, what it means to be an animal with imagination, and the bearing of these stories on the ecological crisis we find ourselves in.

Photo by Caroline Forbes

An Interview with Patrick Harpur

by Gyrus

Gyrus: The threefold division of ‘body, soul & spirit’, as opposed to the dualistic mind/body model so common in our culture, seems central to your work. Could you sketch it briefly, and discuss how you feel “soul” has come to be distorted, misunderstood, or lost?

Patrick: You’ve started with the hardest possible question! I’ve just jotted down 14 ways in which the word ‘soul’ can be used, and there are many more. It’s impossible to define. But this flaw is also its strength. Like ‘God’, it’s a portmanteau word, ‘empty’ in itself, yet taking on meaning in different contexts and in relation to other things.

Soul in relation to body likes to personify itself as Jung’s anima, for instance, or as the personal daimon whom Plato describes in his myth of the geezer called Er who returns from the dead at the end of The Republic. It’s different from soul in relation to spirit, which is where I prefer to use the word as the Neoplatonists used it. For them, soul was a whole realm intermediate between the spiritual or intelligible world (nous) and our own familiar sensory, material world. It was Anima Mundi, the Soul of the World, wherein dwell the daimons who link us, as Socrates remarked, to the gods.

However, this all-pervading collective realm was paradoxical: it could also manifest individually, as individual souls—in other words, as us. Since the chief faculty of soul is not reason but imagination, it likes to imagine itself in many different ways, cutting its cloth to suit the times. Thus it re-imagines itself now as Imagination itself—a powerful autonomous realm beloved of the Romantics whence all the myths come—now as Jung’s collective unconscious. It supplies the root metaphor for such modern re-inventions as the earth-spirit Gaia and Sheldrake’s morphogenetic field.

But, in another sense, soul and spirit can be thought of as symbols of the two main perspectives through which we view the world—the two perspectives which create the world we see. We experience them as a tension within ourselves between the spiritual longing for Oneness, unity, purity, light, transcendence etc. and the imaginative need to recognise Manyness, multiplicity, labyrinthine entanglement, darkness, immanence etc. It’s because, historically—ever since the Enlightenment—Western culture has emphasised the preeminence of ‘masculine’ upward-striving Apollonian reason and science that I have tried to emphasise the neglected ‘soul’ perspective which is dark, moon-struck, downward-spiralling and Hermetic or Dionysian—the Affirmative way of the artist, as the medieval mystics might have put it, instead of their own Negative way, which disdains and seeks to overcome the images and myths which soul, willy-nilly, besieges us with and which we find so hard to free ourselves from in spiritual disciplines. The great ascents of the spirit into rareified mountain realms where the One dwells in blinding light can be read as a disastrous neglect, even repression, of the Nekiya—the underworld journey of the soul whose course is tortuous and mazy, moving towards darkness and death. That’s why, as far as any sort of gnosis goes, I prefer the soul’s way, death and resurrection, the painful initiatory dismembering of the shaman, to the rather unsexed and anodyne rebirth system of ‘spiritual’ paths.

I prefer, as Jung says, wholeness to perfection. That’s the short and incoherent answer to your question.

Gyrus: I was quite surprised when I learned that James Hillman had travelled quite widely, in Asia and Africa—his work is so consciously rooted in, and confined to, the Western tradition. You’re steeped in the same tradition, from Greek antiquity, through the Neoplatonists, to the Romantics and depth psychology; but you also freely draw inferences from anthropology, from animist traditional cultures. Have your own experiences while travelling led to this influence?

Patrick: Actually I’ve barely travelled at all—my daimon has always kept me tied to my desk, insisting that I travel metaphorically through the realm of imagination rather than literally… So, no—my influences are all from books. But I did hitch-hike round Africa with a mate in my gap year, when I was seventeen—when everyone else was travelling to India—and it did leave a deep impression on me. I constantly wondered what was going on in the minds of the Biafran refugees, or the Cameroonian villagers or the Masai or the Bushmen or the Ethiopians and so on.

I’m still trying to find the perfect work of anthropology, as it were—the book which gets inside the mind of wholly different culture from my own; which imaginatively empathises with its tribe rather than applying ‘scientific’ principles. I mean, how can you trust an anthropologist who can’t study witchcraft properly because he doesn’t believe in its possibility? I want anthropology to be like the works of Carlos Casteneda or that essay of Benjamin Whorf’s on the language of the Navajo or Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King.

Gyrus: How does the perception of deep problems in the “comparative” approach to religion and myth, exemplified by J.G. Frazer and Mircea Eliade, impact your thinking? What remaining value do you see in wide cross-cultural surveys of things like folklore and shamanism, the alleged dangers and past mistakes of this approach notwithstanding?

Patrick: That’s very pertinent and difficult to answer. I laugh at the idea of this approach being ‘dangerous’—it’s often what academics often call ideas which contradict their own. Who’s in danger? What’s more dangerous is the modern presupposition that all cultures are isolated and opaque to each other, and so studies are confined to details and minutiae, without any attempt to draw wider inferences about how different cultures can be compared, and whether or not they share a common humanity.

But if you believe that humanity is informed by a common imagination whose autonomous products, the myths, are, as Ted Hughes says, ‘as alike as the lines on the palm of the hand’, you see that no myth is truly alien to us, no matter how outlandish it appears at first sight. And if no myth is alien, no culture is. And if the contents of the myths seem strange, then Lévi-Strauss’s structural approach has been very useful in showing how the mythopoeic imagination obeys certain archetypal rules—rules of symmetry and inversion, for example—which illuminate myths by showing how one story, which looks wholly different from its neighbour, is in fact a transformed version of that neighbouring tale. This is how I hit upon the notion that the tall tales of modern science concerning black holes and dark matter and the abyss of space etc. are in fact only literalised versions of those Gnostic myths which were suppressed by orthodox Christianity 1500-odd years ago.

So, while I sometimes despair of ever understanding a single thing about another culture, I also rejoice in how much of that culture is in fact available to me through our common imaginative substrate. Incidentally, it was my elaboration of what I call ‘daimonic reality’—a version of Jung’s ‘psychic reality’—which proved the most useful tool in understanding that relationship with the world which ‘tribal’ peoples seem universally to have, and which we Westerners used to have: a reality which lies between the literal and metaphorical, which has one foot in the Otherworld, which obeys Blake’s ‘double vision’ (something shared by all artists), which is participatory rather than objective, and so on. I’d call myself an animist if that weren’t already a rather insulting term for one who has a clear vision of how everything that is, is ensouled and participates in that great World-Soul whose images constitute the flagstones of reality which underlie this poor phenomenal world of ours. And this is how ‘tribal’ people see the world: they’re natural Neoplatonists.

And of course Eliade et al. may be wrong in certain details; but the impulse is, surely, invigorating and engaging in a way that most mythography and anthropology isn’t—we suffer loss of meaning, even a loss of soul as benighted primitives say, when we lack an overarching world-view, a sense of a bigger picture from which no culture is excluded, don’t we? (Frazer was, by the way, very different from Eliade—he literalised one ‘solar hero’ myth and sought to explain most other myths by recourse to it. In this he was more like a Darwinist than a comparative mythographer).

While I appreciate the agonising of post-colonial, post-imperial, post-modern critics, I just can’t interest myself in it. It’s a fault, I know. But my deepest impulses are religious, I think. I’m a Christian, for instance; but I don’t like other Christians much. That’s why I was so happy to find my own people among the Christian Neoplatonists (who are also pagan!) such as the alchemists, the Renaissance magi, the Romantic poets. A religion or religious perspective, at once Christian and pagan, such as they held, seems just what’s needed in our times of Christian and Scientistic fundamentalism. I’d like to propagandise it more; but unfortunately it can’t of its nature be subjected to the tools of propaganda because it’s subtle, humorous, tricky etc, and has to be just seen, like a joke or a dream, to be grasped. It’s the opposite of fundamentalism because it sees the root metaphors or myths behind every belief, including itself!

Gyrus: Is there not a hint, at least, of the unifying ‘spiritual’ urge in looking for a “common humanity”—with current academia, perhaps ironically, serving ‘soul’ in its desire to retain distinctions, to emphasize particular characteristics of specific cultures, to champion multiplicity?

Patrick: Yes. And yes.

Gyrus: In your work you make very lucid, revealing comparisons between tribal initiatory structures and spontaneous modern experiences such as UFO abductions. Could you discuss these associations and what fascinates you about them?

Patrick: Yeah, the Attack of the Little Grey Men. Wasn’t that interesting folklore? With all the requisite memorates and fabulates, as those annoying folklorists with their quasi-scientific jargon call them…

Like anyone fascinated by UFOlore, I racked my brains to come up with some sort of reason why 80% of all Americans (it seemed at the time) were being snatched into circular uniformly-lit ‘spaceships’ and subjected to bestial probings by those truly frightening little greys with their now-iconic all-black eyes (the cover of Whitley Streiber’s book [Communion] still gives me the willies).

One of the theories I liked was that they were the demonic spirits of the millions of aborted foetuses getting their revenge! But it just seemed to me that what these abductions most resembled was the painful initiation of shamans by daimons, and, indeed, the imitative initiation of pubescent boys who are abducted at dead of night by masked elders posing as daimons, and subjected to scarring and circumcision etc. before being given secret knowledge. I was also struck by a remark of Jung’s—that the unconscious shows to us the face that we show to it. And I wondered if the ‘greys’ were probing us in a heartless empirical way in some parody of the way we investigate Nature.

Anyway, there is no ‘explanation’ for the widespread abduction epidemic—it is not a problem to be solved but rather a mystery to be entered—but I gave it my best shot vis-a-vis finding anthropological and Jungian parallels. While I liked the late John Mack, the Harvard Professor who researched abductions, I didn’t like the way his latest book seemed to ‘work’ with abductees, hypnotising them etc., until the ‘greys’ became sort of relatively benign harbingers of, yes, you guessed it, the imminent ecological crisis—thus effectively repressing the idea that unless we find news ways of initiating ourselves into the Otherworld, we run the risk of being forcibly initiated, against our will, by daimons who have become apparently demonic by virture of our neglect of them.

Gyrus: What is your fantasy for more conscious initiatory rituals in our society—or do you think society is now too unwieldy to manage like this, and true initiations will now continue to be emergent phenomena?

Patrick: I wouldn’t be surprised if the need for initiation has become urgent. It seems to be, after all, a universal requisite—there’s no society which doesn’t or which didn’t at one time attach the highest importance to initiation. So, now that we’ve abandoned formal rites, we must expect to pay the price: a catastrophic severance of relations with the Otherworld, for example, and a lack of certainty about identity and adulthood among youth.

Luckily youth has its own means of self-initiation—drugs, piercings, raves, Mediterranean ‘holidays’ etc.—but these can all of course be merely destructive if they are not performed in a sacred context, the ritual pain succeeded by revelations of the tribal secrets and myths. I think children probably long for initiation if reality TV is any guide: whenever they’re subjected to real hardship in a meaningful context—Brat Camp etc.!—they respond gratefully.

I can’t think what religion is doing, adopting secular liberal caring values where everything must be comfortable and all suffering is medicalised. The whole point of religion is not to provide a cure for suffering but, as Simone Weil says, a supernatural use for it. Only suffering can provide the deep energy required for self-transformation. (Luckily, once again, there’s often enough suffering to go round in the course of everyday life—illness, bereavment, unhappiness in love, whatever—but it’s usually treated when it could instead be pressed into the service of initiation.)

But I’m beginning to rant now. It’s just that i’m furious at the deprivation of meaning, enchantment and transformation that young people suffer at the hands of our culture.

Gyrus: What were your most significant initiations into your relationship to daimonic reality?

Patrick: Well, you know, I was brought up believing in Spiritualism because my grandmother was a first-class medium and my mother a believer, who, wherever she lived, always managed to dig up a local medium / healer to talk to the dead or cure us kids of our childish malaises.

Meanwhile I was very aware of my Dad’s psychic powers, which he played down, even denied, having made of himself a hard-headed business man. But he saw the fairies twice as a young man in his native Ireland—all the more surprising because he was Anglo-Irish, the son of a Church of Ireland rector, who was not supposed to see or believe in the Sidhe.

So I grew up with the supernatural and, instead of forgetting or rubbishing it all once I was exposed to education, I always tried to fit it in—ultimately this meant writing my own book. I was lucky at Cambridge to be supervised by the great Shakespeare and Yeats scholar, Tom Henn, who was another Anglo-Irishman. He, too, believed in the supernatural—he experienced Panic while fishing a stream in Galway, and heard the banshee keening on a train to Birmingham (his brother died at that moment)—and he showed me rare books from the Order of the Golden Dawn, and generally encouraged me to use my beliefs, as Yeats had, to make sense of the world.

However, my real initiation didn’t come until I immersed myself in alchemy for my book, Mercurius; or, the Marriage of Heaven and Earth. I thought I could crack alchemy in three months, but, three years later, I lifted my half-crazed, tear-stained face up off the nth Latin manuscript in the British Library and realised I’d never ‘crack’ it. For every book about alchemy perforce becomes a book of alchemy, and I had felt the hand of Mercurius move my hand and what I wrote didn’t come from me—I felt the centre of my volition shift and I was no longer myself. This, I suppose, is the central prerequisite of initiation: the awful uprooting as the Muse, or personal daimon, or self, ruthlessly seizes you and usurps the ego. From then on, I had a new topsy-turvy and Hermetic perspective on things, out of which I wrote Daimonic Reality and The Philosophers’ Secret Fire.

Gyrus: To apply Jung to his own lineage, what do you see as the Shadow side of the tradition of alchemy and Neoplatonism that you subscribe to? How do you relate to it?

Patrick: Your question is a difficult one. It may be an incoherent one. I don’t know that I can answer it.

I want to say that alchemy and Hermetico-neoplatonism (if such a thing exists) is itself the turbulent mercurial underground stream which shadows the orderly canals of religion and reason, welling up in times of transition and crisis to form the flood of culture we have called the Renaissance or Romanticism. That’s to say, in itself, the ‘perennial philosophy’ I favour includes its own shadow, like the Nigredo of the alchemists. That’s part of its great attraction: it is concerned with wholeness and with realising the totality of the psyche; it holds the great dividing forces within psychic life—forces I’ve called ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’ (tho’, pace Nietszche, Apollonian and Dionysian would do)—holds them in tension so that nothing is repressed and no shadow forms.

I think Jung said that Christ redeemed mankind but left out Nature, which groaneth and travaileth. Nature is therefore Christianity’s shadow. It was part of the alchemists’ (unconscious) purpose to complete the work of redemption by raising up Nature. But in a sense this is no more than poetry does—there’s something redemptive about all great poetry, isn’t there? Poetry, like alchemy, doesn’t merely copy Nature (as Plato feared), but (as Plotinus says) completes the work of the Creator by returning to the original archai or archetypes which the Demiurge looked into in order to make the world.

The whole point of a daimonic philosophy (to put it another way) is that it doesn’t subscribe to the brilliant Apollonic lighting effects of monotheism and, later, rationalism which are themselves intrinsically shadow-forming—soul is always neglected and forced into the darkness underground. Rather it operates in lunatic twilight, between the light and the dark, where it is half light and half shadow, and so the problem of ‘the shadow’ is not so much resolved as dissolved altogether…

Sorry, gone off the point a bit. Or have I?

Gyrus: I get the idea of this hidden tradition “containing its own shadow”. But surely there’s a shadow that’s missed by everything that can be called a “tradition”. With alchemy and Neoplatonism, I wonder if social concerns, engagement with communal politics and so on, the whole quotidian world of people and their mundane necessities—isn’t this neglected by most exponents of the tradition? Maybe Blake manages to transcend even that… But the modern occult / hermetic “scene” can be woefully insular. And I look at the arc of James Hillman’s work, and it seems his merging of the concepts of Anima Mundi with things like urban architecture and environmental concerns came quite late in his career, like the “real world” out there was the last bastion. Of course he had his Neoplatonic take on it—that we repress beauty, and our environment suffers from this…

Patrick: Yes, I take your point about there always having to be a shadow of some sort—in the case of the Neoplatonic tradition, the quotidian world etc. I don’t know, but I always thought that that was something those guys took in their stride. When you read Porphyry’s life of Plotinus, you don’t get the sense that he was in any way sealed off from the world or sitting, Hindu-like and silent, in a sacred grove, or living in an academic ivory tower etc. Rather the reverse—like most mytics worth their salt, he seems to have been embedded in life and as pragmatic as St Teresa, who achieved union with the Godhead only to burst out of the convent and found many more, her letters full of practicality and worldly advice.

I dare say periods of retreat were necessary for the Hermetic lads, during stages of their advancement—as it is for us all. But I think they attended to God’s immanence in the world, and hence to the world, just as much as to His transcendent aspect. They had both perspectives, and held that contradiction in tension by means of Blakean ‘double vision’.

On the other hand, I’m only guessing. But I’m probably, as so often, right.

All too often a “myth” (in the modern sense of a false image of something) is debunked in a way that is almost wilfully blind to the baby in the bathwater. Naturally, the encrusted mental habits that this kind of myth embodies, often bonded tightly together with the sticky glue of wishful thinking, need a jolt of force to be loosened up. But it’s often the case that people take this need for a bit of a conceptual shove as a license to instigate some kind of dramatic about-turn.

A recent case in point has been challenges made to the myth of the “noble savage”. Experimental psychologist and neo-Darwinist stalwart Steven Pinker, in ‘A History of Violence‘, sets about demolishing the idea that modernity and industrialism has led us into a mire of violence with the claim that on the larger scales of history, human violence has in fact decreased. Yet his claims, on further examination, seem to rest on quite a selective perception of human history. While the evidence that the past few millennia have seen brutality to rival the 20th century is convincing in important ways, the evidence about the bulk of the human story – the hundreds of millennia prior to the rise of agriculture – is shaky at best. When anthropological evidence from contemporary forager societies is wheeled in to back this evidence up, it is conveniently forgotten that most such evidence is looking at societies that have been very recently decimated by European diseases, conflicts and technologies. It’s like beating someone up and branding them as vicious when they fight back.

I noted in a recent post how Howard Bloom had fudged the terminology of “war” and “violence” when trying to debunk Richard Leakey’s claims about the absence of war among the !Kung in southern Africa. The evidence there involved a similar refusal to look closer at what these statistics of violence among contemporary foragers actually means in context.

I’ll not elaborate any further, because the point of this post is purely to direct people to an essential piece by Jason Godesky over at Anthropik.com. Jason details the history of the “noble savage” myth, drawing partly on a book by Ter Ellingson, but delving deep and wide into his own very capable research. He deals with five broad “sub-types” of the myth: The Ecological Saint, The Gentle People, The Honest Injun, The Super Human, and The Wise Indian. In each case, he maintains a steady grip on any and all harsh realities to be faced about primitive life, but also refuses to see-saw over to the other side. To my mind, this makes for a much more effective debunking of the myth, insofar as it is a myth.

There are crucial realities that we’ve been struggling with for 500 years now in what the European collision with non-agricultural cultures has reminded us about being human. Not all of it’s pretty, which is why the exaggerated Romantic myths about primeval innocence serve us badly. Yet much of it casts grave doubts on the modern project of technological progress – which is why the ill-conceived or disingenuous debunking favoured by otherwise dazzling thinkers such as Pinker and Bloom is to be held as suspect.

Godesky probably doesn’t “solve” all the arguments in the debate, but he’s created a precious reference point for anyone trying to rescue the kernels of truth buried in the myth.

Check it out.

Bristol’s Festival of Ideas kicked off today with a short lecture by social philosopher Steve Fuller, which I popped along to. A flaky friend didn’t show, so you, my dear readers, get what would have been my post-lecture pub ramblings.

Before we get the first round in (mine’s a pint), let me say I’ve not yet read any of Steve Fuller’s fascinating-looking books. An hour or so of listening to the guy talk and respond to questions gives a good impression, but I’ve probably missed some of his subtleties.

Fuller seems to be doing what I’ve always thought should be done, and only recently, through this lecture, realised is being done: he applies the principles of sociology and anthropology to science itself. He studies our own science in the way we might curiously observe the beliefs of a foreign tribe. Obviously this ruffles his colleague’s feathers, especially when the relativism that this stance necessitates sees him standing in defence of “Intelligent Design” (in court, no less). ID, according to almost anyone who hates fundamentalist Christianity, is a contemporary ruse with which to smuggle Creationism into classrooms. Fuller is much more generous towards ID – too generous, many would say.

Given the ludicrously limited choice of neo-Darwinism and Creationism, I side with Dawkins & co. as the lesser of two evils. ID, Creationist links notwithstanding, tries to hold out the promise of a “third option”. I’m not sure it wholly fulfills this role, but it’s the most publicly visible concept that has the potential to complexify the standard face-off between scientists whose concepts of science’s bounds have become worryingly fuzzy, and monotheists whose rationality has suffered a similar fate.

Fuller’s great contribution here seems to be to use ID as a tool for critiquing the calcified strata of belief that often underpin the dazzling commitment to objectivity in science. He contends that belief in a designer actually initiated and fertilized much, if not most, of the origins to modern science.

OK, so Newtonian tradition (if not Newton himself) has God as some great rational designer of an artifact universe; but why should the beliefs that got science off the ground not be shed, like scaffolding, when they outlive their usefulness?

Indeed, says Fuller. He took the work of Kenneth Miller, a biology professor at Brown University, who stood against ID in the court case where Fuller stood in defence of it, and who Fuller regards as the bee’s knees when it comes to the orthodox anti-ID evolutionary position. Tracing most of the arguments that Miller rallies back to the Journal of Molecular Biology, he decided to look at what is really being said about evolution by hard-nosed scientists. Not in their pop science titles where expressions implying a “designer” at work might be forgiven as convenient metaphors, but in their own technical periodicals, where their language is free to be as tediously bereft of such needless personifications as it wants to be.

Well, Fuller claims to have discovered that every step of the way, the concept of a “designer” at work is at least implied in the language of the discussions in this austere journal. This, he says, marks the Darwinists as disingenuous folk trying to have something both ways, with ID at least coming clean and trying to grapple with the issue as it can be conceptualized.

This is where he lost me. It’s an interesting take, perhaps, but it’s more than a little specious. He did, at least, come clean himself; he confessed that he personally can’t conceive of “design” without a “designer”. Suddenly I saw that he’s probably not as well qualified for the job he’s got as one might hope. How can someone so fundamentally trapped within a specific (if currently widespread) model of the world hope to offer useful meta-critiques of science itself?

Perhaps he addresses this in his books, but he made no mention this evening of Chinese thought. Alan Watts, in a lecture I was listening to a few nights ago, remarks that the Chinese ideogram for “nature” literally translates as “that which happens by itself”. Clearly, the Taoist appreciation of spontaneous order affirms that “design without a designer” is a humanly possible conception, even if it might be an effort to grasp from within a culture not used to the idea. Taoism, I feel, has a lot to offer the frustrating, explosive debate between science and religion in the arena of creation and evolution. Indeed, it’s no coincidence that John Gray‘s biting Darwinian attack on secular humanism, Straw Dogs, takes its title and opening quotation from Lao Tzu (“Heaven and earth are ruthless, and treat the myriad creatures as straw dogs”).

What is more, post-Darwinian Western science is home to another legitimate current of conceptions of spontaneous order: Chaos theory. Are Darwinians really being dishonest? If science is able to coherently formulate theories of spontaneous order arising in matter, surely the fact that writers in the Journal of Molecular Biology aren’t able to avoid language that implies an active “designer” simply begs questions about the limitations of our language? Our verbs may all need subjects, but does every action need an actor? Are we perhaps projecting limitations of our language onto the world? Fuller, at least, seems to be.

In all, an engaging and important thinker. But he may be more effective after a long meditational retreat.

I must finish here with another take on “spontaneous order”. Last night I found Adam Curtis’ most recent documentary, The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom, on Google Video (you might have to click around for the 2nd and 3rd parts). Not as wholly gripping as The Power of Nightmares and The Century of the Self (also to be found on the net for free viewing), but essential if you’re interested in the arguments he built up in those works. At heart it is a critique of post-World War II laissez-faire social and economic policies, and has some good analysis of the failures of the theory that “spontaneous order” arises when the state apparatus is dismantled (a la Reagan & Thatcher, Blair & Clinton).

My favourite part was near the end, and reminded me of that wise adage, “Economics is a form of brain damage.”

In economics, the whole idea that the free market is an efficient system is coming under serious attack. Over the past five years, many of the Nobel Prizes for Economics have been awarded for studies that show that markets do not create stability or order; that what Adam Smith called “the Invisible Hand” is invisible because it isn’t actually there; and politicians do have a powerful role to play in controlling the markets.

And a new discpline, called Behavioural Economics, has been studying whether people really do behave as the simplified model says they do. They show that only two groups in society actually behave in a rational, self-interested way in all experimental situations: one is economists themselves; the other is psychopaths.

Curtis believes that simple models of reality (here, John Nash’s game theory and classical economics) have been taken too literally, and in the process of applying them to society, people have been subtly moulded to conform to the image of people required by the model. The economic theory that people are rational, self-interested agents who behave in a roughly mechanical way is held at least partly responsible for creating a world where people are cut off from their non-rational feelings and altruistic empathies.

This all resonates strongly with David Kidner’s contention in Nature & Psyche that industrialism’s minimal conception of the natural world has led, through the forceful application of industrialism, to the literal reduction and destruction of much of the natural world. A simple model is enacted, and the world, like the taller guests of Procrustes, is violently made to conform to the model.

My vote for Curtis’ next project would be a dramatic exposition of Kidner’s thesis. So far Curtis has delineated the crucial issues at stake in politics, business and society; with ecological awareness bearing down as the weightiest contemporary issue, it would be fantastic to see his documentary series extend to our relationship with the natural world.

by Chris Knight

Every educated person since Darwin has labelled himself an ‘evolutionist’. But a real evolutionist must apply the idea of evolution to his own forms of thinking. Elementary logic, founded in the period when the idea of evolution did not yet exist, is evidently insufficient for the analysis of evolutionary processes. Hegel’s logic is the logic of evolution. Only one must not forget that the concept of ‘evolution’ itself has been completely corrupted and emasculated by university professors and liberal writers to mean peaceful ‘progress’. Whoever has come to understand that evolution proceeds through the struggle of antagonistic forces; that a slow accumulation of changes at a certain moment explodes the old shell and brings about a catastrophe, revolution; whoever has learned finally to apply the general laws of evolution to thinking itself, he is a dialectician, as distinguished from vulgar evolutionists.

Leon Trotsky, In Defence of Marxism

Until the 1980s, ideas about human origins were for the most part gradualist. It was believed that a recognisably human lifestyle began emerging some two to three million years ago, in a drawn-out evolutionary process linked with the establishment of bipedalism and tool-making. According to this way of thinking, speech co-evolved with the making of simple stone tools, becoming increasingly complex as technology evolved. Art, ritual, the organisation of kinship and other aspects of culture became more complex in the same gradualistic, piecemeal way.

Such gradualism, although still defended, has recently become a minority position. It is nowadays widely acknowledged that those archaeologists who excavated early hominid sites in Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, and saw the beginnings of "home bases", "language" and "a sexual division of labour" among these bipedal toolmakers were projecting assumptions and stereotypes derived from modern culture onto the distant past.

Over the past two decades, there has been a revolution in archaeology and palaeontology, leading to the view that the earliest tool-makers, while more intelligent than apes, were involved in essentially primate-style social and reproductive relationships. Admittedly, humans were co-operatively hunting large game animals by at least 500,000 years ago. But archaeologists have found no evidence for art, ritual or other "symbolic" behaviour at such early dates. Most archaeologists are now agreed that even large-brained humans such as the Neanderthals were not leading a recognisably human or "hunter-gatherer" lifestyle. The dominant view is that anatomically modern humans emerged in Africa around 130,000 years ago and then, some 60,000 years later, rather suddenly spread across the world in an explosive process known as the "human revolution". It was during the earliest stages of this revolutionary process that symbolic art, ritual and language emerged.

The Venus of Laussel, Dordogne, France. Note the typical emphasis on the mid-body and womb region. Originally red-painted with ochre (redrawn from a photograph by Achille Weider).

Apart from one or two isolated possible art-objects, the earliest evidence for art has been found in sub-Saharan Africa, dated to around 130,000 years ago. The evidence is indirect: we don’t have the actual patterns or pictures. What we can examine are the crayons arguably used by the artists. Shaped rather like sticks of lipstick, these are brilliant red, being made of carefully selected ochres. From their shape and in the light of ethnographic parallels, it seems that they were used not for painting on rock surfaces but for body-painting.

Along with the crayons comes evidence that the same populations were mining and grinding ochre in considerable quantities, using it for a variety of decorative purposes. It seems that people were painting one another not just haphazardly but on set ritual occasions, in accordance with a predetermined schedule. Support for this interpretation comes from fragmentary notched bones, closely resembling less damaged, more recent "calendar sticks" from the same region as well as from other parts of Africa and from Europe. Archaeologist Alexander Marshack has interpreted the arrangements of notches—often numbering 28 or 29—as calendrical notations facilitating the tracking of days, years and especially moons. In Upper Palaeolithic traditions, there is a suggestion that the days around dark moon were especially important, the corresponding notches being heavily marked.

How are we to interpret all this? I have developed a model of social and sexual revolution which would predict findings such as these. I have gone beyond generalities concerning a "human revolution" and attempted to work out the details. Some may question whether this is possible in relation to events so far back in time. My point is that the key events occurred recently enough to have left a trace. Europe was populated by Neanderthals until a mere 40,000 years ago. If geologists can piece together the history of life on earth, and if astronomers can reconstruct the creation of the universe, can we not apply comparable principles and methods to the study of our own cultural past? Prehistory is not cut off from the present—it lives on in things which are observable today. In my book I focus on recurrent structures of hunter-gatherer myth, kinship and ritual. Like red shifts, fossils or tree-rings, I believe that these patterns are in principle information-rich. The challenge is to find ways of extracting that information.

Southern San rock painting. Fulton’s Rock, Drackensberg Mountains, Natal (redrawn after Lewis-Williams, 1981). According to David Lewis-Williams, the central figure is a young enrobed woman undergoing her first menstruation ceremony in a special shelter. Circling her are clapping women, female dancers and (in the outer ring) men with their hunting equipment. Two figures hold sticks; the women bend over and display ‘tails’ as they imitate the mating behaviour of elands. Among living San, such rituals are intimately connected with success in hunting. Note that each male figure has a bar across his penis. This is probably the artist’s way of marking the marital abstinence associated with menstruation and valued as a condition of hunting luck.

We are fortunate in that the very region in which anatomically modern humans evolved includes the former range within sub-Saharan Africa of the Khoisan peoples, among whom ritual traditions have been preserved with exceptional fidelity. The Khoisan, often known as "Bushman" peoples, have continued to body-paint with red ochre up until the present. Among the greatest of their ceremonies is the "Eland Bull Dance", performed to celebrate a young woman’s first menstruation. The ritual, timed by reference to the changing phases of the moon, is staged mainly by women, perhaps with help from a few older men; they dance in circles around the girl, who is secluded in a specially made hut. Paradoxically, the girl is now constructed as "male", and said to be of an animal species—typically, she is the "Eland Bull". Around her, the dancing women act out the mating behaviour of eland cows, pretending to copulate with the "Eland Bull" inside the hut. Like riotous, orgiastic carnivals everywhere, this dance is simultaneously sacred and hilarious, the performers frequently collapsing in laughter. The dance is these peoples’ major ritual, being regarded as essential to fertility and success in the hunt. An important point is that while "animal sex" is being acted out, ordinary human sexual intercourse is temporarily suspended.

During the celebrations, the menstrual flow of the secluded young woman is conceptualised as "bull’s blood". The ochre body-paint used by the dancers is the same blood. Unity in such shared blood can be conceptualised as a form of "communion". The flowing of "animal" blood which is simultaneously "human" finds expression in religious rituals the world over, an example being the divine sacrifice central to Christianity. Like members of ritual congregations everywhere, Khoisan women periodically assert that "some things are sacred". To be precise, they declare themselves to be sacred whenever their "bull’s blood" is flowing. In my book, I have used the metaphor of "action on the picket-line" to explain how, back in the evolutionary past, rituals of this kind first arose.

Background to Revolution

A revolution does not happen unless there are forces resisting it. What could these have been? For certain academic Marxists, merely to ask such questions seems disturbing. There cannot have been a class struggle in this period, long before the emergence of classes. So how could there have been social conflicts intensifying to the point of culmination in revolutionary change?

The answer was hit upon long ago by Frederick Engels. Writing in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Engels argued that the dynamic driving the emergence of human morality and solidarity must have been sexual. Since his own words have been so comprehensively ignored, it is worth quoting Engels at length on this. Noting that in "animal societies", wider forms of solidarity are recurrently undermined by male sexual possessiveness and jealous rivalry, Engels comments:

From this it becomes apparent that animal societies have, to be sure, a certain value in drawing conclusions regarding human societies—but only in a negative sense. As far as we have ascertained, the higher vertebrates know only two forms of the family: polygamy or the single pair. In both cases only one adult male, only one husband is permissible. The jealousy of the male, representing both tie and limits of the family, brings the animal family into conflict with the horde. The horde, the higher social form, is rendered impossible here, loosened there, or dissolved altogether during the mating season; at best, its continued development is hindered by the jealousy of the male. This alone suffices to prove that the animal family and primitive human society are incompatible things; that primitive man, working his way up out of the animal stage, either knew no family whatsoever, or at the most knew a family that is nonexistent among animals. So weaponless an animal as the creature that was becoming man could survive in small numbers also in isolation, with the single pair as the highest form of gregariousness, as is ascribed by Westermarck to the gorilla and chimpanzee on the basis of hunters’ reports. For evolution out of the animal stage, for the accomplishment of the greatest advance known to nature, an additional element was needed: the replacement of the individual’s inadequate power of defence by the united strength and joint effort of the horde. The transition to the human stage out of conditions such as those under which the anthropoid apes live today would be absolutely inexplicable. These apes rather give the impression of being stray sidelines gradually approaching extinction, and, at any rate, in process of decline. This alone is sufficient reason for rejecting all conclusions that are based on parallels drawn between their family forms and those of primitive man. Mutual toleration among the adult males, freedom from jealousy, was, however, the first condition for the building of those large and enduring groups in the midst of which alone the transition from animal to man could be achieved. And indeed, what do we find as the oldest, most primitive form of the family, of which undeniable evidence can be found in history, and which even today can be studied here and there? Group marriage, the form in which whole groups of men and whole groups of women belong to one another, and which leaves but little scope for jealousy.

For Engels, then, there are no parallels or continuities linking early human life with primate sexual politics. Rather, the relationship is one of negation and contradiction. Engels, like Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, was a dialectician, not a vulgar evolutionist. This has been forgotten by academic anthropologists as well as by Marxists for most of this century.

Following Engels, my book argues that genuinely human social relations could have been established only as primate-style male dominance and sexual monopolisation of females was resisted and eventually overthrown. The privatising strategies of males had to be curbed and transcended. The reproductive forces had to be emancipated—brought under collective self-ownership and control. This was eventually achieved, in a momentous process of revolutionary change leading to what Engels termed the "primacy" of fully human, fully cultural women in the "communistic household".

In highlighting the contrast between genuinely human social life and the lifestyle of apes or of our precultural ape-like ancestors, Engels quotes the missionary Arthur Wright’s description of a communistically organised Iroquois (Native American) longhouse. Engels’ aim is to show how women, by living together and supporting one another, could exercise power in relation to their sexual partners:

Usually, the female portion ruled the house…. The stores were held in common; but woe to the luckless husband or lover who was too shiftless to do his share of the providing. No matter how many children, or whatever goods he might have in the house, he might at any time be ordered to pick up his blanket and budge; and after such orders it would not be healthful for him to attempt to disobey. The house would be too hot for him and… he must retreat to his own clan….

Women’s power, in this account, was based on their solidarity, enabling them to rupture their marital relations when this seemed necessary. This is the essence of sex-strike theory. The earliest culturally organised women were no-one’s private property. Even when married, they had sufficient autonomy to enable them to say "No", rupturing the sexual bond.

It is important to understand the difference between a scientific theory and a description. A scientific theory is not an attempt to make a plausible story out of the known "facts". Rather, a good theory, when it first hits the streets, seems bizarre and perhaps even crazy. It has little to do with "the facts" as previously understood. This is because the facts it relies on go well beyond the narrow range of familiar ones which have been selected for special attention by the older theories and debated again and again. When a scientific revolution occurs, "the facts" now brought centre-stage are those which previously seemed anomalous. Often, they come from disciplines earlier supposed to be unconnected. "The facts" as a whole are now reconstructed out of the novel theory, having been ignored previously or considered irrelevant because they didn’t fit. Regardless of whether it is correct or not, the "sex-strike" theory of human cultural origins is a model of this kind. It is not a description of facts generally known, but instead a surprising theory which, if true, would change the way we look at the whole of human history.

The theory was first outlined in my book, Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture, published in 1991. Some of it was wrong—particularly many details about dates and places, which are forever changing as new discoveries are made. In some respects, the theory itself was more fundamentally wrong, most notably in those passages where I discussed the biology of menstruation and its significance as a signal. In my book, I pictured menstrual bleeding as a biological "no"-signal; I now realise that this was a mistake, and that on Darwinian grounds we would expect menstruating females (as opposed to pregnant or breast-feeding ones) to be especially attractive to philandering males driven to maximise the number of females they can get pregnant. In view of all this, the theory has had to be substantially modified and improved; for this I am particularly grateful to my colleagues Ian Watts and Camilla Power of University College London. What follows is an abbreviated outline of our theory in its present form.

The Human Revolution

Symbolic culture was established as brain size maximised during the later stages of human evolution, from around 400,000 to 100,000 years ago. The contradictions which led to revolutionary transformation can be traced ultimately to the fact that complex learning depends on large brains; these need time to develop. Besides involving an unusual degree of infant helplessness following birth, such brains also need a prolonged childhood in which sufficient learning can take place. The evolution of large-brained Homo sapiens therefore brought with it dramatically intensified childcare burdens. If these were not to defeat the mothers who were primarily responsible, it was vital for evolving females to ensure that the opposite sex contributed more support than had ever been contributed by male primates, including hominids, before.

Unlike most other mammals including primates, the human female has evolved to resist the philandering strategies of dominant males. A successful male philanderer needs to "save time" on fertile sex with any one female, getting his timing right. In the human case, the moment of ovulation is concealed; a male cannot tell which is the correct time. However, in any group of a dozen females living in conditions of natural (that is, non-contraceptive) fertility, around three are likely to be cycling, signalling this by menstruating.

Sexual bonding with a cycling female, unlike sex with a pregnant or nursing mother, can result in a pregnancy. For this reason, a Darwinian would predict that philandering males would target cycling females, as opposed to pregnant or nursing ones. However, the same Darwinian theory would predict female coalitionary resistance to such philandering. Once a female is pregnant, she needs support, and especially provisioning support. We would expect her to resist male attempts to abandon her in favour of some cycling female in the vicinity. In fact, we would expect mothers to "gang up" to prevent the privatisation of menstruating (imminently fertilisable) females. Mothers, sisters and also male relatives should logically surround such females, bonding closely with them from the moment of menstruation onwards. Whenever one woman was menstruating, we would expect all the other women in the neighbourhood to join with her, displaying the same visible signal at the same time. This would amount to a simple form of "ritual" involving community-wide body-painting with blood or blood-substitutes on occasions when menstrual blood was flowing. Males attempting to privatise selected menstruating females would now be prevented from doing so. Using shared blood to indicate their unity and solidarity, women would resist male attempts to pick and choose between them.

Rock-engravings from Pilbara, Australia. Age uncertain but probably recent. Top: Upper Yule River. Figures dancing, with vaginal flows. Bottom: Cape Lambert. One of many Pilbara scenes of figures linked by genital streams. Here, both figures may be female and the stream conjoining them a shared menstrual flow (redrawn after Wright, 1968).

Females were now in a position to put such blood-symbolised solidarity to good economic use. To appreciate the contrast with primate behaviour, it is worth recalling that when a male chimp has hunted and caught a prey animal, a female will often approach him and—if she is in oestrus—present her swollen hindquarters. If the male is interested, the female may obtain a share of his meat, which she will begin eating on the spot, perhaps while copulation is still proceeding. Naturally, if a second female arrives at the kill-site, she will be in competition with the first for the male’s favours. This strategy, which recalls "prostitution", generates inter-female rivalry rather than solidarity; it also prompts males to compete against one another in using meat to entice females to approach for sex. Females who are pregnant or burdened with young dependents are left out in such a system: being relatively immobilised and also less attractive to males, they are not in a position to solicit meat in this way.

By contrast, once they had established their menstrual rituals, human females were in a position to begin transcending the logic of prostitution, replacing it with the beginnings of sexual morality—that is, collective determination of "right" and "wrong" in matters of sex. The strategy of bonding with menstruating females meant shielding such females, keeping males away from them. In effect, it meant forming a "picket line" around them. Whenever blood was flowing, it was as if all the females in each coalition were simultaneously menstruating and jointly signalling "no" to males. The result was that instead of chasing after meat-possessing males, females could begin making the meat come to them. The trick was in essence quite simple. Whenever blood was flowing, females signalled "No!", sustaining such "strike" action until their sexual partners had made themselves useful by collectively going hunting and bringing back the meat. Any would-be dominant male who tried to obtain sex anyway, regardless of his efforts in the hunt, met with a wall of collective hostility, generated by the logic of the situation.

It was in this way that the figure of the dominant male philanderer was decisively overthrown and an egalitarian social and sexual order was established. As against male attempts at privatisation, females had now secured social ownership of their own reproductive organs, social control over their own bodies. The economic benefits were immense. From now on, mothers had no need to travel endlessly from site to site within a restricted range. No longer did they have to disperse in order to forage in small groups, each abandoning camp within a day or two once local resources had been exhausted. Many of the heaviest burdens of travelling and foraging had now been transferred to the opposite sex. With males now motivated to hunt over a wide range, mothers could rest more and co-operate more effectively in larger domestic units. Since well-provisioned camps could now be occupied for perhaps weeks or even months on end, it was worth investing time and energy in their construction—erecting shelters or complex dwellings, perhaps with elaborate, structured hearths. In the archaeological record, one of the most characteristic signatures of the "human revolution" is in fact just this—the novel appearance of well-defined base camps occupied continuously and ringed by far-flung specialised temporary activity sites such as quarries, butchery sites or hunting blinds.

Predictions of Sex-Strike Theory

To test the sex-strike theory of cultural origins, it is first necessary to elaborate its predictions. Females signalling ‘no sex’ to males would be expected to mobilise male kin (sons and brothers) in self-defence against any threat of rape or harrassment. Faced with outgroup male resistance, females should also augment any publicly displayed menstrual blood (real or cosmetic) with bodily displays of their inappropriateness as sexual partners for human males. Since courtship ‘ritual’ in the animal world involves signalling ‘right species/ right sex/ right (fertile) time’, we would expect systematic reversal of these signals as the signature of sex-strike. Females should therefore signal ‘wrong species/ wrong sex/ wrong time’. We would expect culture’s primacy over nature to be asserted through such reality-defying ritual ‘metamorphosis’.

It need hardly be stressed that for human females within coalitions to signal that they are in fact males, of a non-human species and all simultaneously menstruating will be a fantasy not easy to convey. To overcome listener-resistance, such signalling will therefore be amplified rather than "whispered". Getting the message across will involve effort, repetition and explicit body-language or pantomime. Women will pretend to be what they are not—namely males, and animals. In our view, the construction of such "collective representations" involved asserting the potency of the first "gods".

We must now ask: How could sex-striking females prevent males from secretly eating their own kills out in the bush? Drawing on the signalling configuration already in place to prevent such cheating, women could exploit the natural fact that hunted game animals visibly bleed. This would have been difficult without a previous history of ‘symbolic’ menstruation, establishing that red colorants of one kind could substitute for colorants of another. But given such a tradition, the blood of the hunt as a public, communal construct would have signalled ‘menstrual blood’, the symbolism of this prompting the same avoidance. In hunter-gatherer cultures to this day, women’s blood is recurrently considered to be mystically linked with the blood of game animals.

Women could benefit economically from blood taboos only if, with the hunt’s success, they could now remove visible blood from raw meat. Being focused around campsites, women were the most reliable custodians of cooking fire. With such fire under domestic control, women had an important resource complementing the efficacy of blood taboos. Men who had just killed a game animal were inhibited by the blood from eating it. To remove its ‘rawness’, they had to bring the meat home to be ‘cooked’—whereupon it passed into female hands. Given such arrangements, cheating by hunters should have been minimised, reliable provisioning permitting the formation of relatively large and stable residential groups.

To prevent highly mobile males from sexual cheating (pretending to go hunting while really looking for sex), we would expect females to maintain synchrony not just locally but across the landscape. Each strike, in other words, would have had to be a general one, implying phase-locking to a universally accessible external natural clock. The only clock of appropriate periodicity is the moon. This compounds the statistical ‘improbability’ of the sex-strike model, making it easier to test. The whole system can only work if collective hunting is a periodic work/rest activity governed by a monthly on/off rhythm, with the proceeds of each large, ceremonially prepared ‘special’ hunt augmented during the rest of the month with food from less organised kinds of foraging/scavenging.

Lunar time is most simply structured through bisection, yielding a waxing and a waning half of each month. A strike is an all-or-nothing event, either ‘off’ or ‘on’, giving two possibilities: ‘on’ during waning moon while ‘off’ during waxing, or vice versa. Action during waning moon would schedule the climax of hunting, butchering and transportation within the darkest portion of each month. Since this would limit the effective day length available to complete these activities, we predict the reverse polarity—strike action during waxing moon, climaxing with the return of the hunt by or around full moon. As ‘on’ switches to ‘off’ at this point, fires are lit, meat is cooked and marital relations resumed. Ritual signals cross-culturally should reflect this binary on/off logic, ‘on’ coinciding with crescent moon, ‘off’ with the moon’s waning.

A model Ice Age hunting community’s ritually structured schedule of work and rest. In addition to daily, seasonal, and other periodicities, life normatively alternates to a fortnightly rhythm, switching between a ‘production’ phase of ritual power (initiated by menstrual onset, continued into hunting, butchery etc. and terminated as raw meat is transformed into cooked) and a corresponding ‘consumption’ phase of surrender or relaxation (beginning with feasting and celebratory love-making, terminated as meat supplies run low and the next menstrual onset approaches). The thick black line signifies the dominance of blood-relations whilst blood of any kind is flowing. The switch to white at full moon connotes cooking fire’s lifting of the taboos associated with ‘rawness’ or visible blood, allowing feasting to proceed and marital partners to conjoin.

Sex-strike theory in this way specifies mythico-ritual time as basically lunar; it also predicts periodic female inviolability as a discernible focus of early hunter-gatherer ritual traditions. Ritual potency more generally is predicted to display everywhere a characteristic signature, revealing its ancestry in menstrual inviolability. Power should be switched ‘on’ by one set of mutually interchangeable signals, ‘off’ by another:

This is a tight set of constraints. It means, for example, that a menstruant (‘on’) may amplify ‘blood’ by signalling ‘hunger’, ‘kinship intimacy’, ‘gender inversion’ and/or ‘animality’ (all ‘on’). But she cannot enhance her potency by being seen in bright light, on dry ground, with her marital partner or by a cooking fire (all ‘off’). From one culture to another, political factors will naturally alter ideological meanings, that is, the positive or negative valuation of terms. Menstruation, for example, may appear as ‘supernatural potency’ or as ‘pollution’ according to women’s political status. But through all such variation, we expect ritual traditions relentlessly to define menstrual potency as incompatible with feasting, strong light, cooking or any other signal from the ‘off’ column. We term such formal consistency—unchanging across all cultures and all historical periods—the time-resistant syntax of symbolic ritual and myth.

We now have a testable model of the origins of symbolic culture. Find a single myth, ritual or system of religion from any part of the world which violates any of the above predictions, and the model falls. A culture which said that women should cook meat while they were menstruating would confront us with a problem: it should never happen. Likewise, we don’t expect anyone to believe that meat cooks well while loud noises are being made: noise, being linked with blood, should be bad for cooking. These are very precise predictions, albeit unfamiliar and seemingly bizarre. At the time of writing, this theory is becoming widely known and debated. Criticisms have been made, but no-one has been able to come up with evidence contrary to the model’s predictions. In fact, the evidence has been accumulating that the theory is right. Should this be confirmed, it would allow socialists to reiterate in a new way what many of us have suspected all along—that the picket line is the source of all human morality and culture.

Origins of the Sacred

A strike transcends the identity of those involved in it. Insofar as a sex strike can extend indefinitely—being as omnipresent as menstrual synchrony or the moon’s light—then in embodying this power, each woman stands for something transcendental. She stands for her sisters, who may be potentially limitless in number. And if men respect this power, then although they need acknowledge no divinity, there is present here at least something of the formal structure of religious deference to "higher beings".

Let us re-examine the characteristics of these women. What powers do they really possess? And in what respects do these powers resemble or differ from those which, in more developed, complex social systems, will become thought of as those of "the gods"?

These women cannot magically strike men dead—but they can certainly exclude them from sex. To that extent, men can be rendered impotent at a stroke. No prayers are offered to these women, but men do strive to please and to be included when the time for love-making arrives. No-one offers them bloody animal sacrifices—but men do hunt and bring back game. While these women may not literally live in the sky or in the underworld, it is nonetheless true that when menstruating, they are in a world "set apart". They may not literally be half-animal, half-human. But they dance as if they were animals, identifying their menstrual blood with the blood of the hunt. These women are not immortal—they do not die and then resurrect themselves, nor undergo reincarnation, nor flit between heaven and earth. But their strike is periodically renewed, as is their life-blood which flows from generation to generation. Moreover, in menstruating they do seem to accompany the moon to its own temporary death, moving into another realm from which they later return. Admittedly, these women are ordinary human beings. They are subject to gravity and to the other ordinary laws of physics. They cannot levitate, nor fly magically through the night, nor be in two places at once, nor have eyes which probe into all corners simultaneously. Yet during each menstrual ritual these women’s potency is indeed that of their strike—which, like any strike, does make its presence felt everywhere at once, transcending space, as if possessed of a thousand ears and eyes.

Dance and trance in San rock-art. Manemba, near Mutoko, Zimbabwe (redrawn after Garlake, 1978). Dance with apparently menstrual and perhaps lunar connotations. The distended stomachs indicate ritual potency, corresponding with the !Kung San notion of n/um. The figure releasing a flow may once have held a crescent-shaped ornament like that of her companion, but this area has now exfoliated.

There is much, then, that is "goddess-like" about the menstrual sex-strike. Admittedly, to use such language is to apply a later cultural category—that of developed religious ideology—to a situation in which it is not yet applicable. It can be conceded that to begin with, there are no shamans, no priestesses, no temples. The social world is not divided into mortals and immortals, nor are humans divided into lay people and those who are "set apart". Unlike in developed religions, there are no specialists in the sacred life: all humans are involved in the solidarity of the sacred community during one phase of the lunar cycle, and then released from it in the next. All take turns in being "set apart" and reunited, in "the other world" and in this. If there are priests and priestesses, everyone is such—at least for a part of each month. If there are goddesses and gods, everyone can at the appropriate time participate in their identity and power—which is no more than the "sacred" strength and solidarity of human beings themselves. Each of these points of contrast is significant, and each underlines why it would be confusing to speak of "religion" as present already when symbolic culture first emerged. But it would be an over-simplification to state simply that sex-strike theory has no room for religion—that humans initially acknowledged no transcendental power. What we can say is that men and women initially respected no power other than the moon-linked, blood-washed, periodically-asserted sanctity and inviolability of menstruating women linked in solidarity with one another and with their offspring. This gives us a springboard from which the world’s religious and magical traditions can be derived.

Myths and Fairy Tales

In all the world’s magical myths and fairy tales, the culture-generating picket-line can be discerned as the central motif, albeit coded in a variety of ways. The stories tell of "death" followed by "rebirth". The "death" in question is of a special, magical kind, interpretable as the taking of strike action while menstrual blood is flowing.

In addition to explaining "death" and "rebirth", sex strike theory allows us to account parsimoniously for the remaining themes and motifs central to magical myths and fairy tales the world over. Among the best-known are the following:

1. Marriage to animal brides or bridegrooms;
2. Metamorphosis or "skin-change";
3. Dragon-slaying;
4. The stealing of ritual power from ancestral women;
5. The stealing of ritual power from monsters, giants or dragons.

In male initiation rites—which have often been described as rituals of "male menstruation" —men violate women’s menstrual space, take over their sex strike and "steal" from women the symbolic potencies associated with their blood. Dragon-slaying myths mirror the same theme. That is, the "dragons", "giants" or "monsters" which mythological culture-heroes slay and from whom they steal their power are code-terms for the "many-headed" menstrual sex strike which men succeed in vanquishing. The myths exactly mirror the rituals. This explains why dragon-legends are so bound up with themes of fire and blood, birth and rebirth, marriage and threats to marriage, masculine sexual potency and the origins of male ritual power.

In other words, although women’s sex-strike can be viewed positively—as a manifestation of "goddess-power" (the relevant goddesses usually being associated with snakes)—it can also be viewed negatively. Under such circumstances, it takes the form of many-headed monsters, giants, ogres, gorgons and so forth. The sex-strike’s dependence on menstrual bleeding then appears as the monster’s thirst for "blood". Its incorporation of women and children into its own sphere of blood-solidarity becomes the monster’s "swallowing" of its helpless victims. Entry into the sex-strike and subsequent emergence from it becomes coded as "death" which is followed by "rebirth". "Wrong species" pantomime, linking menstrual blood to the blood of game animals, becomes coded as "marriage" to an animal bride or groom. Emergence from the sex strike, followed by marital love-making, then becomes coded as the "animal bride’s" slaughter or loss of power—or, sometimes, as its sudden skin-change or metamorphosis. In such stories, as the spell is broken, the loathsome "frog" or "beast" or "monster" to whom a young woman has been wedded is at last revealed as a handsome prince.

In many stories, the most fearsome of all the monsters is a many-headed, blood-red, coiling, woman-loving "snake" or "dragon". Continuous, undulating, flowing like a stream, all-swallowing, death-dealing and, finally, skin-changing and death-defying, this monster is a paradoxical creature. Like the moon as it waxes and wanes, it is a unity of opposites—arguably the oldest symbol of world-changing revolutionary potency and dialectical unity to have been preserved. It lives in deep waters, yet travels through the sky. It is the lowest of creatures, yet darkens the heavens with its immense wings. It is reptilian in form, yet lusts after human brides. It is of uncertain gender—sometimes male, sometimes female, sometimes both at once. It demands periodic sacrificial tribute in the form of animals or marriageable virgins. When angered, it sends floods, spits lightning and blasts or devours whole communities. It is cyclical, coiling around its victims. It may have many heads—perhaps seven, a hundred or a thousand. It guards an immense treasure—gold, silver, the moon, a magical spring, a beautiful princess. It withholds this treasure from men until it is slain. But it is ultimately impossible to kill—it has numerous "heads" or "lives", or it keeps resurrecting itself, or it joins together its severed parts. It is linked (especially in eastern traditions) with weather-change, and particularly with storms and thunder. It represents the "dark" forces, as opposed to those of "light". It is the enemy of romantic love, carrying off virgins to the world beyond.

Cyclicity, alternation between opposite phases or states, periodic emergence from a watery abode—such are obvious characteristics of the menstrual stream. A snake’s claimed ability to escape death by changing its skins is linked in primitive cosmologies with menstrual "skin-changing" as an indicator of womankind’s fertility and child-bearing "immortality". The dragon’s many heads, its immense size and its winged, serpentine form nicely capture the essence of any flying picket. Its uncertain gender matches the fact that women are anything but "feminine" when on strike; for the duration of the action, sexual distinctions are transcended in the union of all blood-kin, whether male or female. The dragon’s association with eclipses reflects the normative dark-moon moment for menstruation to occur. The accompanying storms, thunder and floods speak of women’s bloody repudiation of marital relations at this time. The demand for tribute echoes the basic point of going on strike—which is to secure tribute from men in the form of game animals. The periodic seizure of maidens followed by their withdrawal from marriage needs no special explanation. To all this, it should be added that even when claimed to be dead, the world-dragon should still be feared. It may be merely sleeping, its coils embracing the globe, vengefully biding its time. According to one rumour, it is not extinct but awaiting the Millennium—whereupon it will stir with the force of an earthquake to reclaim its legacy.

In The Sleeping Beauty, the picket line takes a slightly different form. In place of a dragon coiled around a princess, we encounter a thorny hedge which performs the same function. The decisive action is triggered as Beauty reaches puberty, whereupon she "pricks her finger". As her magical blood flows, she "falls asleep". Thorns grow up around the whole palace and its grounds, encircling and secluding Beauty for a hundred years. All within the kingdom fall under the same spell; it is as if time itself stood still. Within the palace grounds, every gardener, footman, cook, scullery boy and stableman is, like the princess, on strike. Ardent young men attempting to penetrate through the barrier of thorns fall victim to the same witches’ "curse". Impaled on the spikes, their pallid bodies serve as a lesson to others: Never cross a picket line! Only at the turn of the century is the action called off, whereupon the thorns turn to fragrant flowers and the hedge spontaneously parts, revealing a wide path. At this moment, young men are at last allowed through. Stepping over the sleeping palace staff, the first lucky suitor makes it to the princess. He kisses her on the lips, awakening her. As she rubs her eyes, her parents and the entire population wake up at the same time. There are joyful celebrations—and, throughout the kingdom, normal duties including marital relations are at last resumed. They all lived happily ever after.

This tale, then, like its numberless counterparts, is information-rich. Properly decoded, it tells us about the origins of culture. Whenever menstrual blood was flowing, women went "on strike", obtaining backing from their male kin and remaining on strike until their demands had been met. In my book, I show how even to this day, all collective hunting among hunter-gatherers has to be preceded by a period of ritual celibacy which it is women’s duty to enforce.

Conclusion: The World’s First Picket-Line

The central message of anthropology, interpreted in this way, is that music, dance, art, religion and indeed all symbolic culture was born on the picket line. Mobilised through body-painting, dance and song, solidarity in strike action enhanced men’s and women’s consciousness, as if making them more intelligent. Action on the picket line produced new forms of intimacy, bringing the participants’ cycles into synchrony, enabling women to experience their body-clocks as a source of collective strength. "Females" became "women" when, supported by their sons and brothers, they established their own pride, their own dignity, their own power. Signalling defiance in their own shared blood, they asserted the principle, central to all the world’s religions, that some things are sacred. But this was not religion as it is known in class societies. Instead of being communicated via a priesthood, divinity was first established by ordinary women, backed by their male kin. "God" was the potency of the culture-generating strike—the inviolability and transcendental force of the world’s first picket-line.

A possible problem for Marxists is that neither Karl Marx nor Frederick Engels said that all culture was born on the picket line. This is true. Having said that, it is remarkable how much of the theory was anticipated by the founders of Marxism over a century ago. Sex-strike theory locates the origins of culture in the emergence of labour. It says that without strike action, there was no labour in the human cultural sense. Using a stick to fetch berries into one’s mouth is not labour. Eating berries is consumption—not production. Production of food means that others are doing the eating—there has to be circulation and exchange. Suppose there was a primitive "society" in which males went out hunting but ate the meat selfishly out in the bush, leaving females and their dependents to fend for themselves. No matter how complicated the hunting weapons used, this would still be "consumption", not production. An implication of sex-strike theory is that weapon-use became "labour" only at that point when collective "sex-strike" action took effect. It was this which ensured that the meat obtained through hunting was rendered "taboo" to the hunters themselves, entering into a system of circulation and exchange.

In the course of cultural origins, the rule against rape was to a genuinely human lifestyle what the inviolability of the picket-line is to revolutionary communism. It was the first cultural rule, the one to be established at all costs, and the foundation on which all other rules were to be built.

I make no apology for drawing on the findings of "selfish gene" Darwinism in order to arrive at such conclusions. Marx did the same thing in his own time: he took classical political economic theory—which was clearly being used to justify the existing system of class oppression—and instead of ignoring it, looked into its internal contradictions. He was able to make revolutionary use of it. Modern Darwinism looks at human sociality in the pre-cultural period and sees parallels everywhere with bourgeois economics. It is powerful precisely because of this—because it claims to show that the predatory and competitive realities of contemporary capitalist society are rooted in "nature".

My view is that behaviour motivated by the requirements of "selfish" genes really is what drives Darwinian evolution. There is no point in denying that. The important thing is that our species became human by transcending that logic of nature. The chief value of the study of human origins, from this perspective, is that it enables us to challenge that popular prejudice according to which revolution is futile because "you can’t change human nature". Anthropology demonstrates, firstly, that early life was communist. Secondly, it teaches us that revolution lies at the very heart of what we are. Far from it being the case that "no revolution can change human nature", everything distinctively human about our nature—above all, self-consciousness, speech-competence and our capacities for symbolically regulated co-operation—are precisely the products of that immense social, sexual and political revolution out of whose travails we were born. Culture, based on solidarity, reconstructed our "nature" completely. That is what the human revolution achieved, and why it is so important to claim it as the beginning of our revolutionary heritage. We won the revolution once. We can do it again.

by Gyrus

Rock art has recently begun to cause more than a little conflict in academic archaeology. Curiously, the controversial discovery that some rock art was inspired by what we call ‘shamanism’ and ‘altered states’ was made through the dogged pursuit of scientific method, not through ‘fringe’ research. But as these areas brush against some of the deepest levels of the human psyche, they have inevitably raised a few hackles.

While not made in reference to these aspects of rock art, Richard Bradley’s comment that rock art research "must contribute directly to archaeology if it is to achieve anything of value" (Bradley 1997: 8) is interesting. Evidently archaeologists are eager to keep their ‘sub-discipline’ firmly in their grasp. It can’t help to have bugbears such as shamanism and altered states arriving on the scene. The first is a classic example of a multi-disciplinary phenomenon, due to it being essentially ‘pre-disciplinary’. The latter, more often than not, utterly transcends such conceptual categories. Gradually, more and more respectable archaeologists, like Bradley, are paying heed to the ‘trance interpretation’ of rock art. But perhaps there is a lingering fear that the act of studying altered states and shamanism will influence those doing the studying, as it has in areas such as anthropology and psychology. Such influences may begin to dangerously loosen the boundaries of archaeology—boundaries that have been diligently erected in archaeology’s long struggle to gain the status of being a ‘science’…

A Trojan Horse?

Western science’s first attempt to grapple with subjective geometric hallucinations (after Dronfield 1996). Images on the left are identified as ‘entoptics’ arising from neurophysiology during altered states; images on the right are identified as possibly arising from such states, but not exclusively.

The ‘entoptics’1 theory of geometric rock art arose from comparisons with hard neuroscience data. But however much the theory was smothered in references to neurological studies, and decorated with reassuring graphs and tables, it carried with it the unmistakable whiff of non-ordinary consciousness. For perhaps the first time, this phenomenon could confidently raise its head in archaeology as well as anthropology, neuroscience and psychology departments. Not the romanticised magic associated with prehistory by early antiquarians; not the megalithic astronomy described by Professor Thom; not even the communal experience of formalised ritual. All these have been dismissed or absorbed by archaeology with relative ease. But the personal experience of losing contact with consensus reality and entering a wholly Other world raises too many questions and, let’s face it, fears. Can we really grapple with this sort of subjectivity when envisioning the distant past? We have so many problems tackling it now!

Altered states can not only shed light on the origin of form in some rock art; they can assist in assessing the possible significance of all rock art. Altered states radically affect our apprehension of meaning, and help considerably in expanding our capacity for modes of signification that are less linear, monolithic and immutable than the traditions Western thought has inherited. Thus, worked with sensitively, they may provide keys to unlocking symbolic possibilities in prehistoric art and architecture—even if these relics’ only connection to ‘altered states’ is the fact that they were created by cultures whose entire mindset was constantly ‘altered’, in relation to our own.

Models of trance

To begin with, we must look at the distinctions made in the ‘pure’ trance theory of rock art. ‘Entoptic’ images are generally understood to be abstract geometrical images (lines, dots, dashes, circles, spirals) that arise in the early stages of a trip to the otherworld.2 ‘Endogenous visual phenomena’ are entoptics whose forms are seen to specifically arise from neural structures, especially those of the optical nerves.

This preliminary arena of geometrical imagery should be familiar to all with even mild experience of altered states. The literature associated with dimethyltryptamine (DMT) seems particularly relevant here. Although DMT occurs in many plants with a history of shamanic usage, and can even occur naturally in the human brain (Most 1986), it is usually used in the West in its smokeable synthesised form. When smoked, one immediately feels its effects; within a minute or two one reaches the peak of the trip. And one returns to ‘normal’ consciousness after about 15-20 minutes. The astonishingly rapid action of this compound means that the various stages of trance are tightly compressed, and are thus made clearer for explanatory purposes. Building on extensive accounts of various people’s experiences, Peter Meyer (1994) breaks the DMT trip into levels, which may be used to model many similar forms of trance:

Level I: Pre-hallucinatory experience

This stage is characterized by an interior flowing of energy/consciousness.

Level II: Vivid, brilliantly coloured, geometric visual hallucinations

Here one is observing a patterned field, basically two-dimensional, although it may have a pulsating quality. One may remember having seen this before.

Transitional Phase (Level IIB?): tunnel or breakthrough experience

One may see or fly through a tunnel… A veil may part, a membrane may be rent. There is a breakthrough to another world (or perhaps even a series of breakthroughs). Alternatively, it may happen that the transition from Level II to Level III is abrupt, almost instantaneous, with no experience of transition.

Level III: Three- or higher-dimensional space, possible contact with entities

This stage is characterized by the experience of being in an "objective" space, that is, a space of at least three dimensions in which objects or entities may be encountered. Sometimes the entities appear to be intelligent and communicating beings.

Level II is the arena of entoptic imagery, and is the prime concern rock art researchers looking at abstract geometrical shapes. It is these forms that are posited as being transcultural, arising from the very structures of the human nervous system. The ‘transitional’ phase also enters this arena in rock art studies. Bradley (1997) associates the concentric circular patterns in cup-and-ring art with tunnel-like images common to entry into profound altered states; Dronfield (1996) associates these images with both the tunnel-like entrances and the spiral art found in passage graves in Ireland.

Level III is what I call ‘full visionary consciousness’, and can relate to rock art that depicts representative forms (e.g. therioanthropic images). This level is seen by most rock art researchers to be culture-bound. That is, the forms of entities (spirits, gods, ancestors) encountered here—and the transformed identity of the voyager—are clothed with culturally-defined expectations. Thus, for example, an Amazonian ayahuasquero‘s3 Level III may be replete with jaguars and anacondas, while a San medicine man’s Level III may be clothed with antelope and giraffe.

An obvious question, though, is whether a San person taken to the Amazon to partake of an ayahuasca ritual will still find the otherworld populated with African fauna. Are Level III’s ‘clothes’ contained within the acculturated portions of a person’s mind, or can they emerge from a highly transpersonal interaction with the immediate ecosystem? A friend visited the Amazon recently and, during an ayahuasca ceremony, saw, alongside angels from his Catholic upbringing, a very unusual animal he had never encountered before. Days later he saw this otherworld animal’s real counterpart in the jungle. Suffice it to say that Level III is much too vast a can of worms to really prise open in this article!

Narrow visions

I’ve only come across one archaeologist who has busied himself with dismissing the ‘trance theory’ area of research. In British Archaeology, Paul Bahn wrote an article called ‘Stumbling in the footsteps of St Thomas’ (1998). He compared the rise in attempts to interpret prehistoric rock art in terms of shamanic altered states to 16th century Christian missionaries who attributed ‘footprints’ in South American rock art to St Thomas. This analogy was in fact a thinly disguised attack on the students of the MA in rock art at Southampton University, which was devised by Thomas Dowson (the analogy also insinuates a degree of hoodwinking in Dowson’s teaching methods). The students on this course responded to the attack, and in his reply to this Bahn said that his article had brought much congratulatory feedback, and that the only negative response was from the students in question. Nevertheless, the only response to the article printed in British Archaeology (not from one of the students in question) rightly criticised Bahn for universally dismissing the ‘shamanic hypothesis’ (Chapman 1998). And in the commentaries on Dronfield’s article in Cambridge Archaeological Journal, from a variety of experts in the field, Bahn stands alone in his dismissal of altered states.

Bahn appears to be quite isolated in his opposition to this field of study, and criticism of his reactionary views may appear redundant. However, his biases are no doubt shared by many other less public voices, and a close examination of what they represent should prove useful in divining and breaking down restrictive attitudes to rock art and altered states in general.

Firstly, it must be said that his main point of criticism is actually based on important perceptions:

Interpretations in rock art studies—and indeed in archaeology as a whole—come in cycles or phases that often reflect their period and cultural background. Hence Lerio-Gourhan’s binary and sexual approach was born of the French structuralism and the sexual revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, and the astronomical approach came into its own during the Space Age. The current paradigm, trend, fad or bandwagon—as one might call it depending on where one’s own sympathies lie—seems to be the direct legacy of the drug culture of the late 1960s and 1970s, with its attendant interest in mysticism and shamanism, hallucinogens, altered states of consciousness, etc., all of which have coalesced into the massive ‘New Age’ literature of the 1980s and 1990s.

Paul Bahn (in Dronfield 1996)

Some crucial distinctions need to be made in this inaccurate morass of classification, if we are to clearly understand the cultural juncture we stand at which has made academic contemplation of theories about phenomena such as entoptics possible.

His use of the term ‘New Age’ implies an awareness of this field not very far removed from that of the average tabloid reader. The social phenomenon that calls itself ‘New Age’ is not really concerned with hallucinogens and authentic shamanism. The "drug culture of the late 1960s and 1970s" has not coalesced into the ‘New Age’. A diversification has occurred, leaving the more fad-driven factions in the public eye. However, far below the cultural horizons of Daily Express readers thrives a bunch of serious researchers concerned with psychedelic shamanism (see works by Terence McKenna, Jonathon Ott & Jim de Korne) and altered states in ritual (see works by Dave Lee, Phil Hine & Jan Fries).

But then all this solid exploration would be neither here nor there to those who see it as some backwash from the sixties. To these people, interest in altered states is merely a decadent and temporary fad, which we’ll probably all ‘grow out of’ sooner or later. Just like the Amazonian ayahuasqueros, Mexican curanderos, Indian tantrikas, African Bwiti cultists and San medicine men, Siberian and Eskimo shamans, Haitian voudon priests, Australian Aborigines, Nepalese sorcerors, Hawaiian Huna healers, Huichol Indians, and Native Americans, I suppose.

The dismissal of the "cycles" of archaeological theory as ‘fads’ amounts to a misperception of the way we are gradually recovering awareness of our environment and experience. Professor Thom’s megalithic astronomy theories may well have been made possible by the cultural milieu of the Space Age; but they uncovered a vital aspect of megalithic culture that now has a firm place in the archaeologist’s collection of lenses with which to view prehistory. The "’shamanism’ bandwagon" we are now "suffering" (Bahn 1998) is neither a bandwagon nor something to wake up screaming about—unless of course your ego structures are so rigid that they view challenges such as altered states with abject terror. No—it is a recovery of awareness.

Interpretations old & new

I have begun to take a shine to the view that all cultures have ‘interpreted’ art and monuments left by previous cultures. And yes, each interpretation says as much about the interpreting culture as the originators. Medieval peasants often ‘interpreted’ prehistoric cup-marks as places to make libations to elemental spirits (see Bennett 1998). The clergy from the same period had very different ideas about such relics, usually involving Satan and his little wizards. Interpretations in the twentieth century have chopped and changed as rapidly as Western culture in this period. But there is a vital distinction to be made between the interpretations of country folk up into living memory, and those made by academic researchers. Pre-twentieth century rustics, unlike most rock art researchers, still retained the archaic feeling that the land is alive with spirit. And, most importantly, they used and interacted with these remnants of cultures long gone.

Most academics, in looking at the "cycles" of modern interpretation, neglect the larger picture. Our current view of archaic art reflects our alienated paradigm, wherein we study the environment in an uninvolved way, never thinking (or daring?) to interact with it. In this sense, there is a much larger gulf between medieval peasants and us than there is between medieval peasants and their Neolithic ancestors. I fully recognise the difficulties in using folklore collected over the past two hundred years to gain ideas about the original purpose of prehistoric carvings and monuments; but even if the specifics are wide of the mark, the essential perception that nature is alive, and bursting with sentience, brings us much closer to understanding these relics than any quantifiable, measurement-based fieldwork.

Another interesting aspect of Bahn’s attack is that he cites our obvious inability to "be sure" what rock art motifs were intended to represent as an argument against the ‘trance vision’ interpretation. All I can say is that a human whose vision is only interested in what can be known with absolute certainty is hideously impoverished. Bahn says that "one of the joys of prehistoric art is that it does not necessarily require interpretation, and can convey huge amounts of information of other kinds—in its technology (including pigment analyses), in its location, … and in its dating." (1998) Joys?! In the end it’s each to their own—but I’d rather not limit myself to such meagre data purely because it’s a ‘safe bet’. That isn’t to dismiss the essential work in the arenas mentioned; it’s just to say that a timid self-restriction to these ‘certainties’ cannot hope to fulfil healthy human curiosity and need for meaning.

Multiple meanings

Various meanings ascribed to circular forms in aboriginal Australian art by aboriginal informants. From information collected over the past 100 years from across the continent (after Layton 1992).

We’ll never decisively nail down the significance of prehistoric rock art, obviously. But why should we not try to unfold the many possible meanings, and let them exist untethered? This may broaden our vistas of past art, and perhaps of present and future art, too. Indeed, much ethnographic evidence (e.g. Layton’s study of Aboriginal art, 1992) suggests that preliterate artists never even intend that elusive singular ‘meaning’, the certainty that scientistic researchers vainly lust for. Abstract symbols such as Aboriginal concentric circles or European cup-and-rings are obviously amenable to polysemy, the existence of many meanings. In Australia we have clear ethnographic accounts to help us in interpretation; in Europe we have scant folklore (though this may often be useful, as I have already mentioned). But even if we cannot safely ascribe Aboriginal meanings to cup-and-rings here, we can at least appreciate the importance of polysemy in preliterate signification—and realise that we can neither nail singular meanings to our prehistoric art nor shy away, in reactionary fear, from attempts to raise plausible possibilities.

Petroglyphs from Puuloa, Hawaii (after Cox & Stasack 1970).

A linguistic example of polysemy, which may show how alien singular meanings are to many non-Western cultures, occurs in relation to petroglyphs in Hawaii. At Puuloa, a large hill of solidified lava, there is testimony from the nearest inhabitants that cup-marks are used when a child is born (Cox & Stasack, 1970). They translate ‘Puuloa’ as meaning ‘Hill of Long Life’; when a baby is born, they go there to carve a new cup. They place the baby’s piko—which may mean ‘umbilical stump’ or ‘umbilical cord’—in it, cover it with a stone, and leave it overnight. "If the piko remained overnight (or disappeared—there is conflicting evidence about which would be effective) long life would be assured for the child." (ibid.) But piko is not limited to only two possible meanings:

As a noun it refers to the navel, navel string, and umbilical cord. Figuratively it can be used to refer to a blood relative and also to the genitals. It can be used to describe the summit of a hill, the crown of the head, tip of the ear, end of a rope, and the place where a leaf is attached to the stem. There are many other meanings, as is the case with very many Hawaiin words.

(ibid.)

Polysemy reveals a richness of signification that has become more and more alien to us since monotheistic literalism and the codification of language represented by dictionaries. The associations that polysemy weaves between different ideas and forms—wonderfully evident in the above example—allow for a perception of the world that owes more to the self-similar hierarchies of fractal theory than to the cut-and-dried isolation of meaning inherent in the Western rationalist paradigm.

But how in hell do you know what someone’s going on about with this many possibilities? In short: the ambiguities of communication are ironed out with context—either surrounding words and symbols, or, more interestingly, bodily presence. In using language that can refer to many things, it is vocal tonality, and the silent expression of gesture, eye contact and generalised ‘body language’ that steers verbal vehicles of expression:

In more traditional worlds … I’ve noticed that people remain much more attuned to the languages of gesture; where there’s no TV & "nothing ever happens", people watch people, people read people… I never knew this till I lived in Asia. Here in America, people react to you most often on the basis of the idea you project—thru clothes, position (job), spoken language. In the East one is more often surprised to find the interlocutor reacting to an inner state; perhaps one was not even aware of this state, or perhaps the effect seems like "telepathy". Most often, it is an effect of body language.

Hakim Bey

Here we need to appreciate the subtleties implied in the term ‘altered state’. It needn’t necessarily imply a wild trance, a voyage into the otherworld. A native of Darjeeling, in relation to our ‘normal’ consciousness, is in a constantly ‘altered state’. Culture is a drug—and each variant has its own nuances, induces differing sensitivities to environmental cues and sensory stimuli. We rarely notice that we’re loaded on culture because most people around us are too. This awareness of ‘altered states’ needs to be applied to signification in prehistoric art—to realise that these carvings were originally perceived from a totally different standpoint to ours, even by ‘passers-by’.

Transcending the borders of sense

Our understanding of polysemy may also be fruitfully enhanced by more intense altered states. Most interesting of all are experiences of synaesthesia (most common when using potent psychedelics), where signification becomes a complex trans-sensory experience that far surpasses frozen words. Polysemy is no longer: "This thing here may refer to that, that, or that"—because the extra dimensions and dynamic nuances involved in psychedelic spaces allow a transcendence of the linearity of language, and the ‘piecemeal’ signification it involves.

Clearly, some form of mutually agreed-upon system of signification is still needed to understand symbols arranged in such a space; but a right-brained task like this may well be simpler for ‘preliterate’ cultures than for our own, just as it is often simpler for someone who is stoned on tryptamines than for someone who isn’t. Terence McKenna’s fieldwork in the Amazon has convinced him that the "magical songs of the ayahuasqueros, the folk medicos of the Indians and mestizos of the jungle back rivers, are not song as we understand the term. Rather they are intended to be seen and to be judged primarily as visual works of art. To those intoxicated and adrift upon the visionary reveries unleashed by the brew, the singing voice of the shaman has become a magical airbrush of color and organized imagery that is breathtaking in its alien and cosmic grandeur." (McKenna 1991)

A mild experience of such synaesthesia once opened me up to new possibilities in rock art. Having taken some 2CB (a synthetic phenethylamine), I went to the Badger Stone on Ilkley Moor to experiment with harmonic chanting. I put my face about 5 inches from a bare, uncarved surface and began chanting. I kept my eyes open. What occurred was a meshing of entoptic phenomena (usually assumed to manifest behind closed eyelids) and exterior reality—in this case the plain rock surface.

But it isn’t ‘plain’ at all. It is alive with the tiny crystalline structures that compose the rock surface itself. There’s no ‘blank canvas’ in rock art! As I chanted, the irregular pattern of these crystals smoothly coalesced into a regular lattice-work pattern, always gently shifting. Embedded in this lattice were diaphanous symbols—the usual lines and circles, again always mutating. Their form and movement appeared to correspond to the modulation of my voice.

Carvings on the Badger Stone (after Hedges 1986).

As I hit a certain tone, the patterns seemed to reach a certain stability, and the atmosphere was charged with a pregnant and slightly ominous expectation. Nothing dramatic followed. But my feeling was that if I had taken a slightly larger dose, or perhaps if I had managed to side-step the familiar shock that impending tears in the fabric of reality induce, I would have gone into the rock.

This reminded me of an article I had read:

In many cultures, the shaman in his trance passes through the rock into the spirit world, and to communicate what had happened in the trance, the shaman depicts what had happened on the other side on the rock… In addition, several contemporary shamans have acknowledged that the rock art is a marker for where a shaman could enter the rock.

Grant S. McCall

Could vocally-induced altered states, perhaps aided by other trance induction methods, have played a part in the genesis of some rock art? There is strong evidence that acoustic effects such as echoes play a part in the Korku tribe’s decisions for locating rock paintings, and Steven Waller has found unusual echoes at over 100 rock art sites across the globe (Trubshaw 1997). Whether this idea can be extended to include the more intimate use of voice seen in my own experience is unclear; but the notion of entoptic phenomena being seen, not behind closed eyelids, but on the rock surface itself, is surely intriguing when considering rock art. Even more intriguing is the idea that the genesis of some prehistoric visual forms may have been rooted in synaesthetic experience, and owed as much to sonic performances as they did to purely ‘visual’ phenomena.

Transmedia contexts

We should realise the full extent to which our division of ‘the arts’ into respective media—writing, song, dance, visual arts, etc.—may blind us to the function of rock art. The term ‘multimedia’ has recently narrowed in meaning to refer to shoving a CD into a computer. Perhaps we should adopt the term ‘transmedia’ to refer to attempts to break down the walls between various artistic media in an active, body-centred way (see P-Orridge, 1997). ‘Transmedia’ is to separate artistic media what synaesthesia is to the five senses; and both may inform our view of preliterate cultures.

Citing Nancy Munn’s research into the teaching systems of Aboriginal mothers, where symbolic visual elements, hand gestures and language are utilised simultaneously to impart information about the mythical landscape, Robert Andreas Fischer (1997) argues:

So-called orality within indigenous societies has … never existed. Oral communication is the tag non-alphabetical literate societies have received from alphabetic literate societies. In reality, so-called oral communication is composed of an extremely sophisticated, multi-layered, polysemic codification-system of simultaneous communication systems. The "orality" of indigenous societies is actually a form of "savage multi-mediality".

We cannot let any trace of our ‘frame & gallery’ approach to visual art distort our investigations into carvings that were probably part of a culture where different artistic media flowed into each other, and merged with the environment.

In the archaic universe all things were signs and signatures of each other, inscribed in the hologram, to be divined subtly.

Giorgio de Santillana & Hertha von Dechend, Hamlet’s Mill

In unearthing rock art’s many possible meanings, we must be cautious about saying that meanings ‘belong’ to such-and-such a painting or petroglyph. Especially when dealing with abstract symbols. For if we are to take the Aboriginal mothers’ methods of teaching to be a viable contextual possibility for prehistoric rock art, we must consider the possible replication of the symbol in other media, and even in the environment.

What I mean by this can be seen if we visualise scenarios around, say, the Badger Stone. Perhaps some symbols on the stone are replicated in geoglyphs on the ground before it, or on body paintings or tattoos. It is impossible for those present to consider these symbols as wholly distinct from the bodily motions, ritual actions, vocal performances or stories woven around and among them. The symbols on the stone are not the foundation or ‘base’ of the web of significance; they are merely elements in the network. (But then the same is true of all symbols, even today—only the linearity of prose blinds us to this.)

This network extends outwards beyond human society. A cup-and-ring could relate to the form of a burial construction (see Bradley 1997), a water source, a heavenly body (e.g. the Pole Star—see Oakley 1998), a whirlpool, a tunnel to the otherworld, or the circle of the horizon. The network of meanings could also extend inwards beyond culture: to the eye, mouth, breast, nipple, navel, vagina, anus, or neural structure. Any or all of these references could coexist simultaneously in the web of meaning.

Similarities between the forms of cup-and-rings and monumental structures (after Trubshaw 1997).

This vision of signification, with meanings floating in a complex pool of cross-references, where symbols are only anchored to human life through ritual and the body, is what I have been led to through my experiences of altered states and my study of rock art. It obviously presents a difficult challenge to Western academic traditions (be they institutionalised or not). Because the only language that can grapple with this vision is one that owes as much to poetry as to prose, and more to play than to work. Finally, maintaining this vision requires something that totally breaks the present boundaries of intellectual study: active involvement.

There is a huge amount of study to be done, and fun to be had, in interpreting and revitalising archaic artforms. We should not let the inherent uncertainty and multiplicity of meaning involved in this task discourage us; but rather appreciate and enjoy the many-faceted, unfixable nature of reality that makes these things inherent. Beyond entoptics, I feel that it is in the comprehension of this more general paradigm that altered states—both subtle and intense—will benefit rock art research.

A personal testament to the archetypal nature of vortex imagery. I did the finger-painting on the left after a psilocybin-fuelled Chemical Brothers gig, 7/10/95. Six months later the 5 year-old daughter of a friend spontaneously presented me with the drawing shown on the right.

Footnotes

1. Championed by David Lewis-Williams and Thomas Dowson. ‘Entoptic’ literally means ‘inner eye’. [back to text]
2. I like the term ‘otherworld’, despite its neo-Celtic connotations. To me it simply signifies a self-consistent world that is Other than this one, only accessible via altered states. Its after-death connotations are, given shamanic testimony, entirely appropriate. [back to text]
3. An ayahuasquero is a shaman whose sacramental psychedelic is the potent brew called ayahuasca. This comprises varying hallucinogenic plants, usually DMT-containing varieties, plus the harmine-containing Banisteriopsis vine. [back to text]

References

• Bahn, Paul, 1998, ‘Stumbling in the footsteps of St Thomas‘ in British Archaeology February 1998
• Bennett, Paul, 1998, ‘Cup-and-Ring Art: Its Folklore, Myths, and the Shamanic Perspective’ in Towards 2012 part IV, Unlimited Dream Company
• Bey, Hakim, n.d., ‘Evil Eye’, http://www.spunk.org/texts/writers/bey/sp000536.html
• Bradley, Richard, 1997, Rock Art and the Prehistory of Atlantic Europe, Routledge
• Chapman, Bill, 1998, Letter in British Archaeology April 1998
• Cox, J. Halley & Stasack, Edward, 1970, Hawaiin Petroglyphs, Bishop Museum Press
• de Santillana, Giorgio & von Dechend, Hertha, 1999, Hamlet’s Mill: An Essay Investigating The Origins Of Human Knowledge And Its Transmission Through Myth, Godine
• Dronfield, Jeremy, 1996, ‘Entering Alternative Realities: Cognition, Art and Architecture in Irish Passage-Tombs’ in Cambridge Archaeological Journal vol. 6
• Fischer, Robert Andreas, 1997, ‘Protohistoric Roots of the Network Self’ in Towards 2012 part III, Unlimited Dream Company
• Layton, Robert, 1992, Australian Rock Art: A New Synthesis, Cambridge University Press
• McCall, Grant S., n.d., ‘One Medium, One Mind’, http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/3339/rockart.html
• McKenna, Terence, 1991, The Archaic Revival, HarperSanFrancisco
• Meyer, Peter, 1994, ‘Apparent Communication with Discarnate Entities Induced by Dimethyltryptamine (DMT)‘ in Lyttle, Thomas (ed), Psychedelics, Barricade Books
• Most, Albert, 1986, ‘Eros & the Pineal’, http://www.magnet.ch/serendipity/dmt/eros.html
• Oakley, G.T., 1998, Verbeia: The Goddess of Wharfedale, Norlonto
• P-Orridge, Genesis, 1997, ‘Thee Splinter Test’ in Towards 2012 part III, Unlimited Dream Company
• Trubshaw, Bob, 1997, ‘The Altering State of Rock Art Research’ in At The Edge no. 8

A !Kung dancer falling into the !kia trance

by Gyrus

When the Dutch began to settle in southern Africa in the 17th century, they called the indigenous hunter-gatherers the San.1 ‘San’ is a word used by the native cattle-herding nomads of the valleys of the Cape of Good Hope to refer to the peoples of the higher grounds and mountains. The Dutch also used the term ‘Bojesman’ to refer to these people, which turned into ‘Bushmen’; this term became widely used in the West. Because of the racist and sexist connotations of this word, current anthropologists prefer the term ‘San’.

Many different, but intimately related cultures are embraced by the term ‘San’, and they cover a large area of southern Africa. The names of individual San tribes are mostly ‘given’ titles—for instance, the !Kung2 call themselves the Zhun/twasi, ‘the real people‘. There are strong cross-connections between the different San peoples in their religious beliefs and social lives, but the information I’ve used here is from the !Kung in the north and the /Xam to the south.

The San live on a diet of gathered plants—roots, berries, fruits and nuts—and hunted game animals—antelope, giraffe, warthogs and birds. Women do most of the gathering, though sometimes they kill smaller animals. Men do most of the hunting, but like the women they possess an extensive knowledge of the local plants—the !Kung have been called "superb botanists and naturalists."3

Awareness of the special relationship between the San and one type of antelope, the eland, has been heightened by rock art research. The Drakensberg Mountains, in Lesotho, contain one of the greatest concentrations of prehistoric rock paintings in the world. The closest contemporary San people to this area are the /Xam, but information from the !Kung has also been integral to shedding light on this art, demonstrating the common cultural bonds across space and time among the San. No San continue to produce rock art, but through examining interviews with San from the 19th century onwards, rock art researchers have begun to elucidate some of the probable meanings behind paintings done by the San long ago. San culture has been forced to change over recent centuries, because of the influx of white settlers and because of their increasing interaction with pastoral cattle-herders. Nevertheless, the survival of traditional ways of life has been strong enough to carry some of the psycho-mythical patterns of ancient San rock-painters into the present.

This essay will be necessarily simplified, as my main aim is to look at the ways in which testimony from modern !Kung and /Xam, and the testimony of past San left painted on rocks, reveals the specifics of how San relate to the eland. Our core concern here is how the eland as a physical reality—its behaviour, physiology, and the process of hunting it—stimulates and meshes with the eland as a vital symbol in San social and spiritual life.

Figure 1: Rock painting from Fulton’s Cave, Giant’s Rock, Lesotho

The eland is not the only animal hunted by the San, but they prize it highly. It is central to many ceremonies, and seems so important to San rites de passages (like a girl’s first period and a boy’s first kill) that Lewis-Williams has called it the San animal de passage. The rock painting in fig. 1 should be familiar to readers of Towards 2012 from Chris Knight’s article on menstruation and the origins of human culture. It was originally thought to represent a burial rite, but evidence from San people implies that it is most probably a ritual based around a girl’s first period.

In such !Kung rituals, the girl lies beneath a kaross, an animal skin robe, secluded in a specially constructed hut. There is an association between this ritual and what is known as "eland sickness"—for the !Kung, the symbolic importance of illness and menstruation are intimately related.4

The !Kung’s Eland Bull dance is performed for this event; women clap their hands and dance around the menstrual hut, mimicking the mating behaviour of eland cows, swishing the ‘tails’ they wear. All these elements can be read into the Fulton’s Rock painting. In the dance, one or two elder men imitate eland bulls, using sticks as horns, sniffing the dancing women. This is seen as the climax of the ceremony, and the whole dance "is so beautiful that the girl in the menstrual hut weeps, overcome by the wonder of it."5 During the dance, an eland is said to appear—symbolically, but as a living reality for the participants. The faded figure of an eland can be seen in the bottom left of the Fulton’s Rock painting.

The girl herself is associated with the eland in numerous ways. Special ‘respect words’ have to be used when referring to either. When asked why it is an eland dance (as opposed to any other animal dance), !Kun/obe, an old !Kung woman, said, "The Eland Bull dance is danced because the eland is a good thing and has much fat. And the girl is also a good thing and she is all fat; therefore they are called the same thing."6 Research into steatopygia (supposed ‘excess’ of fat in the buttocks) has shown that a store of fat is necessary in women for the menstrual cycle, and during puberty a girl’s fat store is almost doubled.

For the !Kung, fat is linked with fertility and balance. A !Kung euphemism for sex is ‘to eat or drink fat’. They are greatly interested in the fat of the eland, which is used as part of ointments rubbed on girls during their menstrual rites. Eland fat, particularly fat accumulated around the heart of the male, is one of many things thought by the !Kung to possess n/um, ‘supernatural potency’, which is most effectively transferred or communicated through the sense of smell. They consider the odour of cooking fat, and of the girl during the dance, to be highly pleasant. On coming out of menstrual seclusion, !Kung girls make a mixture of eland fat and certain plants, and go around every hearth in the camp, placing some of the mixture in each fire. Thus n/um is transferred from the eland to the girl, and from the girl to the whole group. This ritual is seen as essential in the maintenance of socio-cosmic balance among the tribe, a balance that ensures enough fat for the girl, food for the people, and rain for the land. But not too much, especially not too much food; a glut of supplies is seen to cause petty bickering.

Another link to the eland is found in an expression used by the !Kung to describe a freshly menstruating girl: "She has shot an eland."7 She is thus regarded in terms of being an animal and a hunter. The bond is furthered in a custom which dictates that a girl coming out of menstrual seclusion should look down to the ground; then the eland will look down as well, making it easy for the hunters to stalk up on them.

This brings us to the complex of observances and rituals clustered around hunting, especially those associated with a boy’s first eland kill. The core aspect of hunting is the intimate link between the hunter and his prey. This link forms the central axis around which the hunting process revolves.

Figure 2: A rare instance of a San painting showing a hunter shooting an eland, from Lariston, Barkly East, Lesotho

Arrows alone are not enough to kill large game animals such as antelope; so they coat the tips, which remain embedded after the shaft has broken off, with poison. They must then return to camp, and track the animals the next day to find where it has died.

While walking away from the animal he has shot, a hunter must not hurry. He must walk slowly, because if he quickened his pace or ran, so too would the animal. Back at the camp, he is questioned about his hunt. He will never answer directly. If he has been successful, he will say that he only saw the animal’s tracks, or that a thorn had stuck in his foot; the others will know from this that he has shot an antelope. When a !Kung boy has shot his first eland, he doesn’t return to camp until late afternoon. First, he makes a fire, and uses the ashes to draw a circle on his forehead with a line running down his nose. This imitates the red tuft of hair on the eland’s forehead, deepening his link to his prey as well as signalling wordlessly to the others on his return that he has had success.

Like menstruating girls, boys returning from their first kill are isolated in a hut. The /Xam build a special hut for this, and the hunter is cared for as if he were ill. And he is ill, in a sense, because of his bond to the eland. He must be quiet, and act as if his life-energy, like the eland’s, is ebbing away. Otherwise, the poison may be ‘cooled’—made ineffective.

The supernatural being /Kaggen is a part of many San cultures, and he often intervenes during the period when a hunter is trying to be sedate. He comes in the form of a mantis or a louse, and will try to irritate the hunter in various ways to trick him into waking, lashing out, or otherwise breaking his link to the dying animal. /Kaggen works on behalf of the antelope, and prevents the hunter from becoming complacent about his task of maintaining a bond with his prey.

The next day, the animal is tracked to see if it can be found. When a !Kung boy’s first eland kill is found, he does not approach it directly, "he crouches down behind an old man and places his arms around him; they both then pretend to stalk the animal. . . . [T]he position is like one adopted by a medicine man and a novice when the young man is learning how to go into a trance and to cure".8 A fire is lit, some parts of the eland are cooked, and the eland medicine dance is danced, "in praise of the fat". Medicine men go into trance and use the n/um they raise through dancing to heal.

Returning to the camp, the boy is praised by the tribe, and the remaining parts of the eland are cooked and shared. Sitting in the centre of the spread skin of the eland, the boy is ritually initiated. He is scarified on his arms, and a mixture of eland fat and plants is rubbed into the cuts; this combination of bleeding and anointing again echoes the menstrual rites. In !Kung terminology, scarification ‘creates’ a hunter just as the Eland Bull dance ‘creates’ a woman. Both are children who have died, to be recreated as members of society ready for marriage.

Marriage itself is connected to hunted animals. If a man desires a woman for marriage, he will leave an animal he has killed outside the huts of the woman’s band, demonstrating his ability to provide food. There are numerous variations on this and what follows, but again game animals, especially antelope like the eland, form a major part of a phase of social and individual transition.

Discussing !Kung marriage customs, where the groom gives eland fat to his bride’s parents and the bride is anointed with eland fat, Lewis-Williams confronts a major question: why is the eland in particular, and especially its fat, so important? He did not reach any conclusions until he discussed it with the !Kung. Apparently, in most antelope species, the female has a greater store of fat than the male. In the eland, this is reversed. The large accumulation of fat around the heart of the bull eland means that males have more fat than females. Lewis-Williams emphasizes that this is a point "which the !Kung themselves find remarkable: it excites their interest and they consider it to be an important distinguishing feature of the eland. The animal is, in their thought, almost androgynous in that, by the male’s possession of so much fat, the usual differentiation is uniquely reversed."9 And so, menstruating girls are spoken of as hunters; and a boy who has killed his first eland is cared for as if he were menstruating.

Sexual difference is one of the most basic polarities of human life, and of most animal life. It is not, though, a fixed duality; it is a dynamic relationship, especially among humans, where it is governed by fluid cultural categories. Among the !Kung, shifts in these categories are treated as liminal zones, where androgynous symbolism (rooted in eland physiology) signifies transition and sacred ‘betweenness’.

Asked why the word tcheni, meaning ‘dance’, is used as a ‘respect word’ to refer to eland, a !Kung informant said: "Your heart is happy when you dance."10 Their healing dance rituals are often associated with the killing of game animals, celebrating the sharing of meat and the relaxation of social tensions. Moreover, such dances form the very centre of !Kung social and spiritual life.

Popular perception of ‘shamanic’ cultures often carries with it an image of the shaman as a lone figure who is consulted by the tribe for healing and other purposes—an individual mediator between the tribe and the spiritworld. In !Kung culture, there are shamanic figures, called ‘medicine men’ by anthropologists, who specialize according to the quality and associations of the n/um, spiritual energy, they possess. Thus there are those who possess springbok medicine, eland medicine, rain medicine, locust medicine, giraffe medicine, etc. But despite this specialization, shamanic activity among the !Kung is much more communal—being focused in the collective healing dance—than the situation suggested by the ‘lone shaman’ image. "In fact, everyone is encouraged to try to learn to heal, and over half the men, and ten percent of the women usually become healers."11 Even those who do not attain this status participate actively in the dance. For example, the common form of the dance is for the women to sit around a fire while the men dance around them in a circle, moving one way round then the other. The women’s clapping and singing acts as an inspiration and source of guidance for the healers entering deeply bewildering and powerful trance states. The communal aspect of the !Kung ceremonies is again reflected in the way the dancers will care for each other as individuals enter deep states of ecstasy, often supporting and attending to the bodies of those whose souls have temporarily left to journey into the spiritworld.

The trance state itself is the probable reason that more people do not become healers. It is powerful; sometimes dangerous, often feared. The !Kung hold that n/um is stored in the pit of the stomach or base of the spine. The process of prolonged rhythmic dancing and singing ‘boils’ the n/um, causing it to ascend up the body, and to be excreted in the form of sweat on the upper body. This experience may cause one to shiver and tremble, and can cause nasal bleeding (streams of blood can be seen to emanate from the noses of many dancing figures in ancient San rock paintings—see fig. 3). This blood, particularly its smell, can be used in healing or to induce trance in neophytes. The peak of the trance—full visionary consciousness, associated with ‘out-of-body’ experiences—is attained when the boiling n/um reaches the skull, inducing a state known as !kia. Entering this state is likened to dying. More mature and experienced healers can avoid the bodily collapse, rigidity, trembling and moaning that !kia often induces, but no one enters !kia without respect for the precarious balance between life and death that it signifies. The experience is braved over and over again for the simple reason that it allows access to dimensions where invaluable healing, both physical and spiritual, both individual and communal, becomes possible. The !Kung believe that everyone is latently sick, and that physical or mental illness is merely the manifestation of what is there all the time. Thus they not only treat tangible ailments, but through their healing dances work to stop sickness from manifesting, a form of ‘preventative medicine’.

Figure 3: A row of dancers entering trance, from Fetcani Glen, Barkly East, Lesotho. Note the nasal flows and the hooves instead of feet in some instances.

Once more the eland figures in this special ritual. !Kia ‘death’ is likened to the death of a shot eland. "When an eland is pursued, it sweats more than any animal; this sweat, like the sweat of a medicine man, is considered by the !Kung to contain very powerful n/um. Brought to bay and near death, the eland trembles and shivers, its nostrils are wide open, it has difficulty in breathing and its hair stands on end . . . As it dies ‘melted fat, as it were, together with blood’ gushes from its nostrils".12 In interpreting therianthropic figures in ancient San rock art—e.g. humans with antelope ears or hooves—Lewis-Williams suggests that they represent healers in trance. Approaching !kia, the healer possessing ‘eland medicine’ may feel him or herself take on the form of that antelope, and retain that form throughout their journey in the spiritworld. Taking on the form of an animal expresses the radical shift in self-image that !kia precipitates. Brain chemistry, energy structures in the body, and consciousness itself are transformed through the dance, and the !Kung encapsulate their inner understanding of these shifts by linking them to their observation of the animals that sustain them:

As the eland stands at the entrance to male and female adult status and to marriage so, for those who possess its supreme potency, it is the medium which gives access to the mystical experience of trance.13

Once more the bonds between the San and the eland are brought to life, through intricate natural symbolism.

Footnotes

1. From the !Kung San page at the Lawrence University Department of Anthropology, now defunct. [back to text]
2. The various symbols like exclamation marks used in San terms indicate their use of clicking sounds in their pronunciation. [back to text]
3. From the !Kung San page at the Lawrence University Department of Anthropology, now defunct. [back to text]
4. This association doesn’t seem to carry the incredibly negative (and taboo) connotations of our own culture’s view of menstruation, as the following discussion will show. [back to text]
5. A !Kung informant, quoted in Lewis-Williams, p. 45 [back to text]
6. ibid, p. 48 [back to text]
7. ibid, p. 51 [back to text]
8. ibid, p. 59 [back to text]
9. ibid, p. 62 [back to text]
10. ibid, p. 64 [back to text]
11. From the !Kung San page at the Lawrence University Department of Anthropology, now defunct. [back to text]
12. Lewis-Williams, p. 91 [back to text]
13. ibid, p. 100. This aspect of shamanic practice, like many primal magickal techniques, has survived (or re-emerged) into the Western occult tradition. Talking of Aleister Crowley’s use of Golden Dawn techniques to enter and explore the ‘astral plane’ by assuming a god-form, Kenneth Grant notes that Crowley "chose the form of Horus . . . He sealed the plasm of his astral body in the mentally formulated image of a golden hawk (a vehicle of Horus) and, in that form, he explored the subtle aethyrs of the universe." (Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God) [back to text]

It was a sunny autumn day, and I took about 7.5mg of 2CB1 before venturing onto Rombald’s Moor, West Yorkshire. This dose was enough to elicit minor psychedelic effects, but not enough to pass the threshold into a full-blown trip. This is commonly known as a ‘museum-level’ dose: enough to deepen appreciation of art without making it difficult to function in ‘everyday’ situations. I find this level useful for enhancing wanders across the moor and still being able to find the right change for the bus back home.

Drawing showing carvings on the Barmishaw Stone, Ilkley Moor.

My first stop was a flat rock bearing several cup-and-ring type petroglyphs, which includes a couple of ‘ladder’ designs instead of the usual singular grooves extending out from the central cups. The rock is just south of a cluster of trees on the north side of the moor, to the east of Spicey Gill, and is known as the Barmishaw Stone (OS reference SE 1123 4648). Paul Bennett tells me that Barmishaw is from the Yorkshire dialect for "spirit in the woods", as in "Barm i’ Shaw". The rock lies near the highest edge of Barmishaw Woods.

I knelt next to the stone and gazed over the glyphs. My first intuition came as a result of a modulation of my spatial perception. I believe this aspect of psychedelic experience may be very important in the investigation of rock art, and landscape archaeology in general. As I gazed at these glyphs, I began to feel that the flat surface of the rock was a full landscape in itself, and I was a large, omniscient presence flying above it, surveying its features. This reminded me of (and was possibly unconsciously prompted by) the concept of shamanic flight in the ‘middle’ world of the three-levelled shamanic cosmos. Shamans often claim to be able to leave their bodies and fly not only into alternate realities, the upper and lower worlds, but also across the surface of this world. They often use this technique to perform common tasks like finding lost objects or searching for animal herds. As this concept melded with my perceptions of the rock, I simultaneously began to sense a dissolution of the barriers between my perceptual world, which was occupied solely by the rock, and the rest of the surrounding landscape.

This particular sensation is very difficult to convey to those who aren’t sensitive to alterations in consciousness and haven’t used hallucinogens. It was the very first astounding experience that I had on my first LSD trip, by a lake at dawn. I held my head in my hands, probably as an attempt to hold it together, and was amazed at what happened when I closed my eyes. I could still perceive the entirety of my surroundings, but felt them to be spatially located between my hands. This exchange or fusion of inner bodily experience with outer sensory experience is found throughout the literature of mysticism and magick. It is explicit, in relation to physical landscapes, in certain aspects of Tantric practice, and has surely influenced Australian Aboriginal beliefs.

My experience of it at this carved rock, together with my feeling of ‘flying’ over the rock surface ‘landscape’, brought me back to the first idea I had when I saw cup-and-ring marked rocks—that they are maps. One idea that flitted through my head as I looked over the rock surface was that the stone could have been used by shamans in trance states to transpose their consciousness to a broader perspective on the landscape. The rock surface would become the local landscape, and the shaman would become the sky, or be transported into the sky. During modulations of spatial perception, the rock could become a doorway to a more omniscient perspective on the local geography.

Many people have tried to correlate cup-and-ring marks with the local landscapes in order to test this hypothesis, but none (as far as I’m aware) have been successful. Recently, my research has led me to the conclusion that if they are maps of any sort, they are more likely to be maps of ‘spiritual’ realms, symbolic delineations of the structures of inner experience. My experience over this rock led to a third hybrid hypothesis: that the glyphs are maps of the region where the local landscape overlaps with the inner human landscape. There are many possible variations on this idea, which is very close to Aboriginal perceptions. As James G. Cowan notes,

That landscape is the ‘bones’ of Aboriginal myth making suggests a new (in reality, an old) way of looking at the earth. It implies a metaphysical structure within the earth that enables it to transcend its material limitations, and so enter the minds of men as a symbolic image.

The Aborigine Tradition, Element, 1992, p. 80

One would expect, then, that if cup-and-ring marked rocks are a microgeography of the ‘mythical’ aspects of the surrounding land, depicting key sites and their inter-relationships, they would still correspond to observable features in a literal way. They would be selective in their cartography, filtered through whatever geomythical complexes the carvers had developed, but they would still have yielded results in the aforementioned ‘map hypothesis’ tests (which they so far haven’t). Perhaps we should explore the notion of structures of energy in the earth imperceptible to ‘unaltered’ consciousness.

Tests for this hypothesis will inevitably be difficult. They should be greatly aided when researchers sympathetic to these ideas get their hands on more advanced computer resources than word processors. I look forward to the day when I can get (or develop) a Wharfedale CD-ROM, incorporating detailed OS maps of the area, a full image bank of all the carved rocks, the ability to selectively superimpose advanced geological maps showing fault lines and other geological data, perhaps together with a compilation of ‘fringe’ data assembled from dowsing, measurement of electromagnetic anomalies, and the experiences of pagans and magickians in the area. [Haha! Now I can, I'm too busy... Gyrus, 2002] However, it is possible that, even if the ‘metaphysical landscape’ idea is close to the mark, no amount of rigorous assimilation of presently available data will reveal the perceptions of the glyphs’ originators. Maybe their perceptions were far too idiosyncratic to be recovered.

Then again, while I’m very interested in the impossible task of piecing together our distant ancestors’ perceptions and beliefs, I’m also into how we today can alter our perceptions and beliefs in order to relate to the environment (‘natural’ and ‘constructed’) in a closer and healthier way. My experience at this carved stone had precedents, but it may not have bonded so closely to my feelings about the landscape if it wasn’t for my interest in the stone’s carvers. Even if this particular idea is never verified as being relevant by consensus, I would still think of it as interesting and useful. Fascination with the past often acts as a good catalyst for novel perceptions. Just don’t confuse inspiration from the relics of the past with direct knowledge of the past (which happens in the ‘earth mysteries’ community as often as unexamined assumptions distort academic notions about the past).

Audiovisual Hallucinations

Drawing showing carvings on the wonderful Badger Stone, Ilkley Moor.

I moved from this rock to the nearby Badger Stone, a little to the south (SE 1108 4605). By this time, the effects of the 2CB were sufficient to lend a pale violet ‘glow’ to the edges of rocks and the hills. I knelt in front of the carved side of the stone. I began to do some chanting. I have a friend who is skilled in overtone chanting, and although I have only been able to elicit overtones sporadically, practising chanting with him has enabled me to greatly deepen and broaden the range and resonance of my voice while chanting pure vowel sounds. As with spatial perception, vocalization is a different experience for me in the open countryside. There are no inhibitions about being heard by neighbours, and the feel of a wide open landscape, fresher and more vigorous than indoors, contributes to the chanting. I seem to be able to discover a much richer voice on the moor.

I placed my face a few inches away from the rock surface, and began to intone a range of sounds. I shifted across the rock, noting various acoustic differences in chanting at different areas. I finally rested on one spot, and although cup-and-ring glyphs cover most of this side of the stone, I focused not on a carved pattern but on a patch of plain rock. A familiar perceptual shift occurred: when faced with a repetitive but irregular pattern, visual perception influenced by hallucinogens seems to smoothly rearrange the pattern into a more regular and geometrical (but constantly mutating) one. I experienced this with the minutiae of the rock surface’s texture, the irregular arrangement of tiny crystalline structures. They shifted, arranging themselves into different regular patterns, sometimes with diaphanous shapes and symbols embedded in the network. The mutation of the patterns seemed, as I had expected, to be governed by my modulation of my voice.

There is evidence to suggest that some shamanic ceremonies of Amazonian tribes using ayahuasca (a blend of plants, also called yagé, containing the synergistic hallucinogens harmine and dimethyltryptamine) are directed by the power of vocalizations to elicit visual phenomena. Shamans’ songs are not really sung here for the sounds they make, but for the visual sculptures they produce in the perceptions of those hearing the song during ayahuasca intoxication (Terence McKenna, The Archaic Revival, HarperSanFrancisco, 1991, pp. 116-141).

Amazonian Indians do not, as far as I’m aware, sing to rocks. But their art is inextricably linked to their drug visions. G. Reichel-Dolmatoff said that when he asked Tukano Indians about the paintings on the front walls of their homes, they replied: "This is what we see when we drink Yagé…" (R.E. Schultes, & A. Hofmann, Plants of the Gods, Healing Arts Press, 1992, p. 121). There is some surviving ancient rock art, similar to contemporary paintings, in the Amazon. One of the key images in most Amazonian ayahuasca art—as with many preliterate cultures, ancient and contemporary—is a dot surrounded by a circle.

There is good evidence that some cultures who produce rock art do sing to stones, though:

Over the last ten years Steven Waller has investigated over 100 rock art sites in France, Australia and USA for sound reflections, and found unusual echoes at every one of them. . . . Direct ethnographic evidence for acoustics as a motivation factor for the production of rock art has recently been found in India. Echoes have religious significance to members of an indigenous tribe called the Korku. This tribe continues to produce rock art today, using echoes as a selection criteria when choosing which caves to paint.

Bob Trubshaw, At The Edge #8, December 1997, p. 6

Cup-and-ring art is obviously a different case. Being largely carved on rocks on open land (as opposed to paintings done on larger rocks and cave walls), they were probably not sited according to echoes.

Prehistoric multimedia

I feel, though, that it’s entirely possible that the cup-and-ring producers incorporated sonic elements into the carving and/or use of these glyphs. Indeed, cultural anthropologist Robert Andreas Fischer has argued that we should begin to recognize the multi-media aspects of ‘preliterate’ cultures. (NOTE: ‘Multi-media’ here has nothing to do with CD-ROMs! The term is used to highlight the fact that much ‘primitive’ art, in the way it functions in society, cannot be categorized as purely ‘visual’, ‘acoustic’, etc.) Citing research into the teaching systems of Australian Aboriginal mothers, where symbolic visual elements, hand gestures and language are utilized simultaneously to impart information about the mythical landscape, he argues that

Western societies imprinted . . . a negative definition of communication codification on non-alphabetical societies, because they are—from their point of view!—not using the same model of language codification. They were therefore defined as oral societies. . . .

So-called orality within indigenous societies has, however, never existed. Oral communication is the tag non-alphabetical literate societies have received from alphabetic literate societies. In reality, so-called oral communication is composed of an extremely sophisticated, multi-layered, polysemic codification-system of simultaneous communication systems. The "orality" of indigenous societies is actually a form of "savage multi-mediality".

‘Protohistoric Roots of the Network Self’, in Towards 2012 part III: Culture & Language, Unlimited Dream Company, 1997, p. 33

We can’t be sure how far the cup-and-ring folk had got with language. Anyway, we need to think of ‘language’ and ‘communication’ in much broader ways in relation to this art. While Aboriginal culture may be much more complex than and quite different from stone age Yorkshire culture, I think we should use Andreas’ redefinition of indigenous societies to build more sophisticated visions of possibility for prehistoric societies. Rock carvings and flint arrow heads are just about all that’s left on Rombald’s Moor from before the Bronze Age. We can never know if they painted or anointed the carvings, what sounds they may have made at them, if they danced around them, or how they dressed or painted their bodies if they did dance. But, given the evidence from contemporary hunter-gatherer cultures, it’s unlikely that they just sat and stared at them!

Symbols and trance

Recent rock art research has begun to admit to the possibility that visionary states of consciousness have something to do with rock art. Well, not just admit to the possibility. The blatant obviousness of this idea (which is seen when altered states are experienced) has made it impossible to resist, once it was brought to light. Indeed, the hypothesis that shamanistic trance states are related to prehistoric rock art is now dangerously (and ironically) close to becoming new dogma.

Neat, unexamined ideas that ‘explain away’ prehistoric relics are not new to archaeology. It used to be common for any anthropomorphic sculptured stone to be explained away with the word ‘idol’. So many writers harp on about the ‘deities’, ‘gods’, and ‘goddesses’ of the stone ages without any real personal idea of what emotional and cognitive structures, and what direct experiences these words can imply. Our culture’s atrophied and dying relationship to the Divine has a lot to do with it. I don’t think a degraded and spiritually forgotten tradition of monotheism from the Middle East will suffice in trying to understand artefacts from more ancient polytheistic cultures in other lands.

Again, it’s a cliché/joke in archaeology that artefacts which can’t be accounted for are explained away as ‘ritual objects’. The fact that this category became such a catch-all refuge for puzzling relics reveals how hazy, unformed, or plain absent our contemporary ideas about (and experience of) sacred ritual are. There are endless codifications of ritual elements, documents of ritual practices, etc.—and a lot of this work is invaluable—but I think people with a passion for anthropology or archaeology owe it to themselves to experiment, even a bit, with whatever practices seem connected to the understanding of their area of study. As Goethe once said, "One only understands what one loves." Love doesn’t just mean a keen interest. It means involvement, connection and an openness to new experiences. This isn’t a new idea to the human sciences. The importance of direct, involved experience has long been recognized in anthropological fieldwork. Prehistoric studies are hampered by the lack of evidence as to what they should get involved in to help their research. I suggest the playfully serious use of the imagination.

Are ‘trance states’ to become the catch-all explain-away box for rock art? The vital element missing in research that will prevent this happening is the development of a much deeper understanding of trance states themselves. By seeking to understand trances more, from the inside-out, we will be able to assess their possible relevance to rock art more accurately. If such states of consciousness are just brushed against, our lack of understanding will make ‘trance states’ as hazy and unclear a term as ‘ritual’ often is. It will become a concept very easy to explain things away with, and also very hard to discuss openly without being refuted by knee-jerk cynicism.

It’s easy to resign to the belief that a pragmatic understanding of altered states can never become a part of ‘scientific’ research. Consciousness unshackled from habit is unbelievably plastic and mutable, and inevitably interwoven with subjectivity—with the perceptual and cognitive habits we return to. Individual beliefs usually overlap with a lot of other people’s, but sometimes bridges to consensus academic opinion are difficult to build. A good tactic here is to say, "Fuck it! Who cares if some people don’t get it?" Many breakthroughs in human culture would never have happened if everyone was afraid to say this. Then again, nobody, no subculture, and no academic discipline is an island. One of the most basic bridges that cries out to be built is between the intellectual study of prehistory (specifically its religious/shamanic aspects) and the experience of visionary states of consciousness. This is already happening, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this. One of the problems involved may be that some of the human sciences are being asked to move even further away from the status of being a ‘science’. If information from altered states is used not just as ‘evidence’ but as openly acknowledged inspiration—heck!, you may as well move your human so-called ‘sciences’ department over to that arts block. I’m not advocating some free-for-all in archaeology or anthropology, turning them into the academic equivalent of one of those tedious Usenet psychedelic discussion groups. Expanding the parameter of a science does not mean ditching coherent analysis. An even greater diversity of opinion about prehistory(!) will develop—so be it. At least we’ll each have a more tangible, creative and involved relationship to our ancestors.

So, trance states. The most common idea being tossed about is that some ‘abstract’ rock art patterns are connected to entoptics, geometric ‘inner eye’ visuals seen behind closed eyelids while entering a trance. Another name for these patterns is ‘endogenous visual phenomena’, meaning "imagery determined by neural structures rather than hallucinatory images derived from visual memory." (Trubshaw, ibid., p. 3) Just to give you the idea, there is an array of entoptic forms shown to the left (copied from Jeremy Dronfield’s article on Irish passage grave art, Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 1996).

This notion accords with previous research I have done into the body, specifically inner experience of the body, as a source of visionary and mythical motifs. The clearest ethnographic evidence for this idea I’ve come across is Henry Munn’s article on mushroom use among the Mazatec Indians in Central America. He says, "There is a very definite physiological quality about the mushroom experience which leads the Indians to say that by a kind of visceral introspection they teach one the workings of the organism: it as if the system were projected before one into a vision of the heart, the liver, lungs, genitals and stomach." I would expand this list by adding brain physiology, the central nervous system, DNA, and the flow of energy around the body.

I like this entoptics theory. A big cautionary note I’d like to add to the debate is: don’t fall prey to dualism! We’ve made this mistake for far too long now. Things can get pretty confusing when the boundaries between inner and outer experience melt and dissolve, but let’s not be frightened off by this initial bewilderment. I’d hate to see research into visual hallucinations and neuropsychology totally neglecting any correlations between neuropsychology and patterns in the environment, be they exoteric and observable (e.g. shapes in trees, water and the sky) or esoteric and hidden (e.g. cellular, atomic and energetic structures). Also, the visual hallucinations experienced while staring close-up at rock surfaces fall, I believe, into that important borderland between inner and outer experience. The shifting networks and symbols I saw were the result of a dynamic interaction between my inner eye and my two flesh eyes, between my neuropsychology and my perception of the rock. But isn’t that just as true when I look at a rock ‘unaltered’? All experiences (except perhaps dreams and very deep trance states) are dynamic interactions between the body-mind and the environment. What we’re looking at with the ‘endogenous visual phenomena’ theory are circumstances where external sensory input is lowered, and heightened internal perception begins to reveal the more esoteric structures of the human body.

The most powerful part of my chanting at the Badger Stone was one of those tantalising and elusive psychedelic moments where you feel like you’re on the verge of something big and then feel that the effects of the drug are on their way down—like hitting the accelerator to catch up with something and finding you’re out of fuel. Or maybe it just wasn’t the right time. It had a big effect on me, nevertheless, and it’s given me a good idea of where to head for. At one point in the chanting, as I hit a particularly piercing and resonant tone, I felt the atmosphere change noticeably. The shifting patterns in the rock surface seemed to stabilize, slightly ominously. I felt that if I hit a certain tone, the patterns would part, and I would be able to go through. An intentional ritual based around this idea, and maybe a higher than museum-level dose of sacrament, will be useful to explore this further.

This experience may sound tenuous to anyone who hasn’t had a similar ‘not quite there’ moment on psychedelics. Also, it was almost certainly affected by my having read Grant S. McCall’s article ‘One Medium, One Mind’ months before:

In many cultures, the shaman in his trance passes through the rock into the spirit world, and to communicate what had happened in the trance, the shaman depicts what had happened on the other side on the rock. . . . In addition, several contemporary shamans have acknowledged that the rock art is a marker for where a shaman could enter the rock.

He also mentions the opinion of African rock art researcher J.D. Lewis-Williams, that "the rock is merely a ‘veil’ between this world and the spirit world, and that rock art is the destruction of this veil." It could well be that my trance was influenced by my having previously considered this theory. What makes the idea more interesting to me is that afterwards I quickly remembered an experience my friend who I practice chanting with had had. Before I had really begun to study rock art, he had chanted to a stone in Avebury, and even though he wasn’t stoned on anything, he returned very shaken up. He said that while chanting he had gradually developed the feeling that something in the stone was drawing him in, and he pulled back and stopped out of fright. This experience was totally free of influence from theories about rock art.

Well this may all be on the ‘bloke in the pub’ level of credibility to some, but it has greatly enriched my ideas about rock art. Firstly, we have to consider the fact that these rocks were probably not related to in the same way that modern portrait artists relate to their blank canvases. Rocks were almost certainly alive in some way to archaic humans, already imbued with their own idiosyncratic visual and tactile textures, perhaps also containing spirits, a force of their own, or a gateway to the spirit world. Blending carvings with existing irregularities in the rock surface is typical of cup-and-ring marks, showing in a very basic way that there is no ‘blank canvas’ in rock art.

Even mild trance states can make the life of a rock plainly visible. Maybe the hypothesized ‘endogenous visual phenomena’ were not seen behind closed eyelids but in the dancing networks of crystals on the rock, visions made flesh by carving them into the very surface upon which they manifested. Maybe these surface patterns were seen to function as keys to the spirit world, or locks to be opened with vocal techniques. There have been reports from Aborigines that they use singing or didjeridu-playing to unlock the spirits in rocks. Further, visionary journeys behind the rock surface would have been a very rich and compelling source of imagery to carve into the rock gateway.

I have intentionally concentrated here on the possible significance of trance states in relation to rock art. I’m not suggesting that all cup-and-ring art emerged from visionary experiences. Or that those which could have were connected to trances induced by psychedelic plants.

Our culture has become almost entirely devoid of traditions of trance-induction, indeed it is only recently that intense ecstatic states of consciousness have begun to shed their taboo status (at least in some subcultures). It seems pretty apt that the first suggestion of evidence for an association between trance states and rock art among indigenous people was published in America in 1967! However, it’s obvious from many other cultures around the world that humans don’t necessarily need drugs to change neurochemistry. Those prepared to experiment can do the scientific thing and verify this for themselves. I’m not a chemical zealot, I’m just trying to use psychedelic insights to loosen up some blocks in my visions of the past, as well as in current debate about trance-related prehistoric art.

We need to fully admit to (and sometimes submit to) the psychedelic experience in order to deal with the matter of trance states in general more clearly. My own experiences have convinced me that psychedelics are entirely valid tools for altering consciousness, though they are not danger-free (like all such tools). I have also experienced a much broader range of non-drug altered states since beginning to use them.

I am writing here with rock art researchers and not the psychedelic underground in mind. But I’ve tried to forget all pressures to sanitize discussion of psychedelic drugs for fear of knee-jerk reactions in my gentle readers. Maybe I should have used the word ‘entheogen’. This term has been adopted by serious chemical fans to avoid the baggage loaded onto the words ‘psychedelic’ and ‘hallucinogen’. Cynicism informs me that whatever word is used, there will always be resistance to psychedelic research as least as long as possessing psychedelics is a criminal offence.

One final pre-emptive remark. Even though I’ve concentrated on the genesis and function of rock art in relation to trance states, it’s entirely possible that some originated in association with inner visions, but functioned in other ways for the tribe/community. I do not deny the possibility of non-shamanic, more mundane functions, because I don’t believe in a singular model for any rock art. Carvings were probably used by different people through time for different purposes; by different people across space for different purposes; and almost certainly by the same people for different purposes. And all these people will have had a very different ‘normal’ state of consciousness from you or I, because of their different psychic, social, economic, spiritual and (pre)historical circumstances. Even if this art was produced by shamans or some proto-priesthood, it’s still possible that it would have resonated more powerfully in non-shamans then than Holy Communion does in Catholic priests today.

There is a huge amount of exploration to be done. The bulk of this essay was written rapidly over a few days. It feels a bit foolhardy to throw such hostility-invoking thoughts into the research arena without arming them with enough references to ‘authorities’ to defend themselves. My hope is that they will help out, and be helped out by, allies in this turbulent, rapidly moving debate. I need to do a lot more research, but I hate sitting on interesting ideas—especially when the internet gives you no excuse for not publishing.

Some significant areas to explore further seem to be:

• The relationships between entoptic patterns in humans from different cultures, abstract rock art patterns, archetypal patterns in nature, and the structure of human neurophysiology. This research is already underway, I hope it grows and continues.
• The effect of sustained harmonic tones on human brain chemistry and perception, under ‘normal’ conditions and under the influence of the various hallucinogens. Some bizarre areas of research are suggested by Terence McKenna’s account of his experiment with mushrooms in the Amazon, True Hallucinations (HarperSanFrancisco, 1993). His brother Dennis proposed that psilocybin may make the spin resonance of electrons in brain DNA audible as an internal perception, that chanting could harmonize with this tone and modify it, thus modifying neural genetics. I’m not aware of any evidence backing this idea up, but the experiences that evolved from the theory seem astonishing enough to make it worth looking into. In any case, the general study of harmonic chanting, neurochemistry, and the tryptamine family of psychedelics (especially psilocybin mushrooms, the only tryptamine native to the areas in Europe where cup-and-ring art is found) could have an important bearing on rock art research. I mention tryptamines so much because they’re closely associated with unusual and powerful audiovisual experiences, as well as with the generation of bizarre linguistic structures, sometimes reported as being like a meta-linguistic ‘ursprach’. States of consciousness where the roots of language and symbolism seem to be unearthed should be of supreme relevance to ‘abstract’ rock art, even if there’s no reason for believing that the art’s creators took tryptamines.
• The re-examination of rock art sites with broader ritual possibilities in mind. Ritual has always been seen as significant in Palaeolithic cave paintings like Lascaux, which are often concealed in places that are extremely hard to reach, and could only have been viewed by one or two people at a time. This immediately suggests that they were sacred, restricted paintings, possibly involved with ritual initiation. All possibilities need to be considered for any rock art site, though. We should begin to look more at acoustic anomalies, and at the way that the human body can relate to the rock (are the carvings easy to get to, easy to touch, easy to be face-to-face with?).
• Most importantly, and this area is being explored more and more, we need to look at how our position at a site places us in the local landscape. The land may have changed—for instance, Rombald’s Moor may well have been covered in forest when the cup-and-ring marks were made—but a more holistic landscape-based approach always bears vital fruit. At the very least, it will help us to begin developing our own relationship to the land, and to our environment in general.

Footnotes

1. 2CB was invented by Alexander Shulgin in the seventies, and is a close relative of mescaline. For more information on this fascinating substance, check out The Lycaeum. [back to text]