Naturally I’ll post updates here as publication approaches (early 2012 a good estimate), but I’ve also kicked off a website for the project with a sign-up for a special mailing list dedicated to the book. The book’s title isn’t confirmed, but the site is named with rough aptness ‘Polar Cosmology‘.

This article explores the relationships between language and magick, and uses concepts derived from neuro-linguistic programming to bring into focus the core elements of magickal training.

Introduction: What is Language, and What isn’t?

Some dualisms are actually useful, and considering them leads us deep into magick. One such complementary dyad is that of biogram and logogram. The biogram is seen as the operation of the entire genetic potential, the whole genome, of the individual or, on a wider scale, the gene-pool of the whole human race. This includes flesh, desires, atavistic levels; in short, everything that Austin Osman Spare might have implied by the definition of Zos as ‘the body considered as a whole’. It appears that the biogram contains the needs for food, shelter, sex, companionship and some form of ecstasis.

On the other hand, the logogram contains the whole gamut of symbolic systems that humans use—language in all its forms, from the abstractions of mathematics through spoken and written word, semaphore, the structured visual and audial imagery of painting, TV, music, to symbolic postures and hand gestures and everything in between. A magician can be viewed as someone who seeks to strengthen, liberate, feed, indulge and enjoy the biogrammatic forces through transforming his or her portion of the logogram, although it might be pointed out that this definition is broad enough to take in anyone who succeeds in generating sane (functional) behaviour out of the logogrammatic mess of mass culture.

The distinction between biogram and logogram gets blurred when we consider our appetite for ecstasis, or what is usually called the ‘drive to transcendence’. This whole issue is dominated and confused by religious/political exploitations of our fears of death and social ostracism. This exploitation takes the form of repressive dogmas built deep into the logogram in the course of the socialization process, along with their related reward/punishment patterns. The function of these elements is the achievement of social conformity via co-option of the ‘transcendence drives’. This pollution of the weirdest aspect of the biogram has the effect that many magicians deny the existence of any ‘drive to transcendence’. This is not surprising, considering that ‘transcendence’ usually (and wrongly) implies escape from the world of the senses—indeed, escape from biogrammatic realities into the cloud-cuckoo lands of religion or historical determinism.

This is basically the position of Freudians, who identify transcendence with mere escapism, regression to the oceanic consciousness of the womb. While this is valid as a critique of religion and body-denying mysticism, it has to be borne in mind that the outcome for the Freudian process is the return of the individual to the ‘ordinary misery of life’. The more sophisticated views of the postmodern psychonaut assert that there is a whole spectrum of eigenstates available to us. In this view, the socially-sanctioned formula of ‘ordinary misery’ is merely one rather sad example of institutionalized disappointment and hedonic dysfunction. Let’s face it: either we are here to experience ecstasy in as many manifestations as we can handle, or we’re wasting our time.

To look at civilization so far, it’s easy to get the impression that the logogram has won a decisive victory over the biogram. The contents of the logogram, under the influence of the slave-religions, have been severely anti-hedonistic and anti-bioaesthetic, crippling the ecstatic capacities of all but a few strong individuals.

There is no easy solution to this mix-up, and I believe there is a good reason for that: human consciousness is, by its nature, incomplete, provisional. Our atavistic prehistory in the stream of organic evolution provides us with the biogrammatic constants of hunger, sex, the search for shelter, and the more primitive forms of reproductive bonding. As soon as we start to construct more complex social forms, we need language. It may even be true to say that the evolution of language and the evolution of society go hand in hand. In any case, as soon as we start consciously defining and negotiating our relationships with each other and the world, we transform ourselves. Therefore, language is the prime medium of transformation; the logogram is the history of our past transformations, and a set of levers which we must use to achieve the next ones. Awareness of the inevitable link between language and magick is recapitulated in numerous myth cycles—Hermes was the Messenger as well as god of magick; Odhinn gained the runes, bringing the core of the mysteries into focus through a sophisticated system of semiotics.

Structures of Magick

Certain themes are common to all effective systems of magick. These core elements have also been recognized in one of magick’s postmodern descendants—Neuro-Linguistic Programming or NLP. NLP has been described as ‘an attitude and methodology which leaves behind it a trail of techniques’. It is the techniques that NLP is best known for; the ’10 Minute Phobia Cure’, and the Pacing and Leading techniques that are taught to salespeople are (in)famous, and tend to give the impression that all NLP is is a set of techniques for doing a few tricks with the mind. This is not the case: NLP is essentially about finding out how people who are exceptionally good at something actually do it, including the parts that they may not have conscious access too. In other words, the practitioner finds a precise role-model for the skill he or she wants.

To illustrate this, imagine you want to become better at, say, archery. The most obvious route would be to find a truly excellent archer, the best you can find, and get him to teach you. Now, your master archer will only be able to transmit to you what he knows he does when he shoots an arrow. Unless he is also an exceptionally sophisticated teacher, this will consist only of the conscious part of his skill. Under his tuition, you will no doubt progress to a much higher level of skill, but it is unlikely that you will achieve his own level unless you also absorb the unconscious strategies that hone his technique to a level of brilliance. The elicitation of these strategies comprises the core NLP technique of modelling.

Some of these strategies may appear initially to have nothing to do with the skill of archery; for instance, you may find that you have imitated his stance, his breathing, his sighting… and still you miss something. By talking to him, however, you may find that he performs a particular visualization, or hears a particular voice in his head just before he releases the arrow. At an even more internal level, you may discover that he has a particular belief or set of beliefs about his archery skill. You may even find that he has beliefs about life in general, powerful generalizations that mark the difference between you and him, and which facilitate his excellence. In any case, the model is complete when you are able not only to achieve his level of excellence, but able to communicate to others the internal processes that can take a third party to a new level of proficiency.

What is it that is being studied here? In the most general sense, it is the internal language of the person being modelled. The phrase ‘Neuro-Linguistic Programming’ reflects discoveries of how the brain actually represents information—in other words, the internal language of consciousness. Magicians have been ‘programming’ in this sense throughout the history of magick, and many of the concepts and structures of magick have been rediscovered by NLP modellers. Some of these are:-

Using Willed Imagination

Magick is often seen as a linking of imagination, will and desire towards a single aim. Much of basic magick consists of the controlled daydreams of visualization and audialization (and to a lesser extent the use of imagined kinaesthesia and smell). Anybody who has tried this a few times will realise that it works, if the focus is strong enough. Much NLP work also relies heavily on imagined situations, although usually for effects on the self. (NLP practitioners will seldom admit (at least in public) that they are trying to affect consensus reality!) The point is, your brain cannot tell the difference between the ‘real’ situation and the visualized/audialized one, and responds accordingly.

Try this exercise: remember an emotionally-loaded situation that is past and done, and check you reactions to it. Better still, evoke one of your obsessions, a concept you can get really emotional about—for instance: scroungers, poverty, Country and Western music, or whatever really rattles your cage. Get really worked up about it. Now relax and look at what you have done: you have taken some key images, sounds and words, and created a set of feelings which are indistinguishable from the feelings you would have got if you were standing in front of a real sample of your obsession. In fact, even when you are in a ‘real’ situation, you are often dealing with it through the lens of previous remembered experience. In other words, you aren’t there at all. Experiment with evoking the whole range of emotions—start off with a basic 6 or 8—lust, tenderness, anger… proceed to more complex ones, like gratitude or jealousy… experiment with different modes of each one. Remember to banish! This is—or should be—absolutely central to basic magickal training. If you cannot achieve a resourceful/useful emotional state at will, you are always vulnerable to enemies and manipulators. That is one of the differences between a magician and a non-magician.

The ability to change your state of consciousness via imagination takes us on to the next point:-

Correspondences and Anchoring

Correspondences are often used by magicians to attain repeatable states of consciousness. Correspondences work by conditioned reflex linking the desired state to a symbol at a pre-conscious level. For instance, a magician may associate personal dynamism and assertiveness to Mars, via repeated work with the colour red, iron, blood, and the smell of leather. Every time these symbols are used deliberately, the Martial state is evoked. In NLP this type of process is known as Anchoring, and it appears virtually everywhere—consider the power of a perfume or other unusual aroma to bring back a precise memory from years before. Consider also the ways in which we associate a particular task with a particular emotion; how do you feel when it’s time to get out of bed in the morning on a work day? Or again, on a day when you’re about to go on holiday? At some stage in the past, you had anchored a particular state to an imagined situation; whatever went through your mind, whatever picture or voice was in your head, had had that emotion anchored to it. Knowing that, you know that you can change any state, if you want to enough.

Will and Congruence

One of the central themes in magick is Will. This is probably best defined as ‘unity of desire and purpose’. This is the unity of purpose that brings about the reification of your most inspiring dream. Most people, most of the time, hardly ever achieve this condition, and simply wander from one passing impulse to another. Failed attempts to break out of the cyclical world of desire-gratification-frustration and achieve one’s dream of life often feed back to the person an increased sense of impotence, resulting in further entrenchment in hopeless cyclicity.

The condition of one-pointedness is known in NLP as ‘congruence’. A person in a congruent state knows what he or she wants, and is already in the process of achieving it, by that very fact. She can walk into a room and command attention by the slightest of gestures. The kind of congruence required to influence others can, to some extent, be developed by rigorous attention to one’s own body language and voice tonality whilst in the process of speaking one’s desire. This will lead to some inner congruence. However, the royal road to congruence at every level is to pay attention to signals from the ‘unconscious’ that manifest as body sensations, inner voices and images.

Try the following: get into a relaxed posture, and ask your ‘unconscious’ if it’s listening: you will probably get a sensation of some kind; this is a congruence signal. Now repeat to yourself a desire-sentence about which you have some doubt or fear. You will probably experience a different sensation, which is an incongruence signal. Experiment with different formulations of the desire-sentence, until you feel quite a different sensation. When you are confident that this is a congruence signal, you will have formulated a congruent desire. If you persist with such techniques, it becomes rather like dowsing. Some form of congruence testing is a powerful tool for magick, because you have at your disposal the entire committee of selves whenever you want to clarify your will.

Multiple selves, Goddesses & Gods

Chaos magicians have been working with the notion of multiple selves for some time. So have NLP practitioners, as the following quote from Frogs into Princes by Bandler and Grinder shows:-

We’re all schizophrenic… Evolutionarily, the next step, which we’re all engaged in, is multiple personality. You’re all multiple personalities. There are only 2 differences between you and an officially diagnosed multiple personality: 1) the fact that you don’t have amnesia for how you are behaving in one context; you can remember it in another context, 2) you can choose how to respond contextually. Whenever you don’t have a choice about how you respond in context, you are a robot. So you have two choices. You can be a multiple personality or a robot. Choose well.

We can view a personality as a pattern of social responses. It consists of language, of external and internal signals—body language, voice tonality and language patterns that project it to other people, and internal dialogue and internal imagery that supports it and keeps it in place internally. It has an agenda, concerning social power transactions via the repetition of learned roles (or, in the case of more advanced personas, adaptation). One feature of personalities is that they attempt to achieve (or believe they have achieved) some consistency of behaviour. They are in a sense functional clusters of wordviruses or memes which have acquired self-consciousness, and in this respect they are like deities.

Chaos magicians invoke god/dess-like entities from various sources, including the archetypal/stereotypical humanoid deities of pagan pantheons, characters out of films and comics. The god/dess form Baphomet as used by chaos magicians is a kind of reinvented gnostic entity, culled from various sources, which has come to represent magick, and the universal life-field, the planetary biogram. When we invoke any of these entities, we are seeking to bring into our nervous systems a perfect (or at least improved) role-model for one of our personas. Or indeed to assemble a ‘new’ personality for some new function. These selves are then available so that we can access and act from whatever self is the most effective in every situation we find ourselves in. The use of samples is a kind of parallel in music to this modelling of personality traits we desire. Flexibility is one of the cornerstones of power.

Systems, Levels & Hierarchies

Magickal systems almost invariably involve some sort of symbolic psychocosm. These maps can be useful for doing practical magick—generally in proportion to how much the magician immerses herself in the set of beliefs that the system implies and depends upon. The usual meta-belief in Chaos Magick is that belief is a tool, rather than an end in itself , and a particular psychocosm is viewed in the light of its usefulness. Psychocosms originate from mystery schools (‘Qabalah’ means something like ‘oral tradition’) or from commentaries on older texts (the I Ching, reconstructed Runic systems), or from scientific considerations, like the 8 Circuit model of Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson.

Some such maps can be viewed as purely magical or ‘spiritual’ in purpose. Such psychocosms have teachings associated with them which are only comprehensible if the map itself has been internalized. Further, some, like the Qabalistic Tree of Life, have an inbuilt up/down quality, a hierarchy, explicit or otherwise. This kind of hierarchy is seldom helpful in practical magick. For disentangling levels in the selves, the neurolinguist Robert Dilts has created a ‘Unified Field of Neurological Levels’. This is purely functional, stripped of any ‘spiritual’ message. Each level contains all the most general features of the level below it. In other words, the patterns in one level imply the patterns in the next level down. This means that change at any level will affect the levels below it, but not necessarily the levels above it (although this can happen). It is not the case that higher levels are more important than lower; rather, the model reflects the way in which willed change works: it is more effective to make a change at a higher level, and that is precisely what makes it a higher level. Dilts’ Neurological Levels are:-

• SPIRITUAL: Purpose. This is anything which is at a higher level of power or priority than:-
• IDENTITY: all the things we tell ourselves about who we are; we are often not conscious of the self-referential loops that inhabit this level;
• BELIEFS: whatever ideas we think are true. This includes our criteria, which are implicit in the way we make decisions, whether we are conscious of them or not.
• CAPABILITIES: these are our skills—not just manual or recognized intellectual ones, but the abilities that enable us to get through our everyday lives, socialize, make decisions, engineer our emotions and so on.
• BEHAVIOUR: what we actually do in the world. Our usage of time.
• ENVIRONMENT: the final level which we change through action (including magick).

Conclusions

Magick is inextricably intertwined with language, and language is just about everything. We are immersed in it for better or for worse, and so we need to understand it, take a grasp of our inner linguistic processes, so that we can become just what we want, rather than another robot whose blueprint was drawn up by someone else. Change is resisted by the nervous system, which prefers to repeat comfortable and familiar actions which have become ineffective rather than adopt new and more powerful strategies.

Magicians are generally aware that, in order to get results and fulfil your potential, you have to do things you don’t initially like—you have to break out of your ‘comfort zone’, in order to change. Through its modelling of successful change, NLP has accumulated (and is still accumulating) some of the smoothest techniques for changing beliefs and identities. This in itself makes it worth the magician’s while to investigate.

Recommended reading

NLP

• Richard Bandler & John Grinder—Frogs into Princes. Fast-moving seminar transcripts from the original masters.
• Joseph O’Connor & John Seymour—Introducing NLP (Thorsons). Good general introduction to NLP, including Robert Dilts’s Unified Field.

Magick

• David Lee—Chaotopia! (Attractor)
• Peter J. Carroll—Liber Null (Samuel Weiser)
• Phil Hine—Prime Chaos (Chaos International, BM Sorcery, London WC1N 3XX)

The 8-Circuit Model

• Robert Anton Wilson—Prometheus Rising

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

An Interview with ManWoman

by Gyrus

Gyrus: How did the swastika come into your life?

ManWoman: I had no idea that the swastika was sacred. Some of my Polish relatives were in Auschwitz so I had the usual conditioning against it. In 1965 I had a series of spontaneous trance visions in which my soul flew up into the inner source of everything—a radiant light that was extremely ecstatic. It blessed me, it healed me in a profound way. In some of the visions it was a vortex of power. After this the swastika appeared in my dreams and in one very powerful moment a wise old man told me, "Take this symbol as your own and redeem it so that it will strike love in all hearts that behold it." I choked and he marked my throat with a white swastika (which I later had tattooed) using his finger.

Gyrus: I suppose you’re aware of American Indian myths connecting creation with the swastika and the throat. One myth tells of a god who took a bird and whirled it around until it got dizzy and hallucinated everything into existence! And gorgets (worn on the throat) showing four birds emanating from the Centre have been found at Spiro Mound in Oklahoma.

Swastika gorgets found in Oklahoma

Do you connect the swastika with the throat, in terms of the voice, poetry and creation?

ManWoman: The thing that I love is that I wasn’t aware of any of these myths at the time. This stuff all poured out from my depths unlooked for. That story of the bird hallucinating everything into existence makes more sense to me than the Adam and Eve bit. In the Kundalini yogic system the throat is the centre of creativity and self-expression. In my dream the swastika on my throat was to help me speak out for the swastika and to give me courage. The prime quality of the swastika seems to be creativity. In a recent dream I saw the nature of existence as a burning white octopus with a lightbulb of creative idea over his head. On the end of each of his many arms was a being like a dog, a cat, a woman, a man, a gorilla, a bird, a snake, etc. The notion of separation is an illusion as there is only one consciousness creating all the play of this world. And when we see this clearly we can co-create and influence the direction this world takes. If you can get past the prison of your own face, life is swimming molecules waiting to dance with you. My throat was marked with the swastika in about 1968. Now thirty years later I see kids walking around with swastika tattoos. Did I help to create this by my focussed intentions or was I just picking up on an inevitable occurrence with my artist’s visionary antennae?

Gyrus: What are some of the more extreme reactions you’ve got from people in the street? Has there been anyone who just hasn’t been able to see what you’re trying to do in redeeming the swastika symbol?

ManWoman: Sometimes I feel eyes burning into my arms and I look up to see looks of great fear, anger and revulsion on faces. It’s hard to explain yourself to passing strangers in ten words or less so I have to live with this. Although my life is much easier now because the word is spreading—so many of the Swastika Friends are out there now helping me. One time an old man approached me on the street threatening to whack me with his cane and calling me a fascist. I began telling him about the history of the swastika and soon he was using his cane to keep me away as if I was truly crazy. Another time I stopped to pick up a hitchhiker coming back from LA. She looked desperate for a ride but she leapt out of my van screaming, "Nazi, Nazi!" as if she had sat on an electric wire.

One time I was in Fort Worth, Texas and there was a convention of B-52 bomber pilots in the hotel. My wife wanted us to sneak in the back door but I walked boldly into the lobby and by the end of the weekend they were all having their pictures taken with me to prove it to the folks back at home.

The worst episode was on Muscle Beach in Venice, California, when three angry Jewish body builders surrounded me and started screaming. One shoved his gold Hebrew good luck charm in my face and said, "What about my symbol?" I had to do some fast talking. They were surprised when I said I wasn’t anti-semitic. I knew that they wouldn’t believe that the swastika was an ancient Jewish symbol found in synagogues (this is true) so I told them it was a Buddhist symbol and they slowly cooled down. My other Swastika Friends who were with me were amazed when I actually parted friends with the Jews because I was totally candid with them and they believed me. They were only reacting to their conditioning (my charm and my third eye tattoo helped). Soon I will be able to put my book Gentle Swastika into peoples’ hands when these situations come up. At the New York City Tattoo Convention last spring a woman approached me on the street. She said, "You’re awfully brave to be showing your arms in this town. It’s owned by Jews." But what can I do? I’m following the directions of my dreams which have given me quite the adventure in this lifetime. If I don’t speak out, who will?

But there is another side to this. Sometimes people get really ecstatic when we meet and do handstands in the street because they thought they were alone, the only one in the world to be fascinated by the "evil" swastika, and then suddenly they see this defiant guy tattooed with 200 swastikas and a third eye and the light goes on. That’s why Friends of the Swastika is growing so fast—it’s like discovering your lost tribe, like discovering that you aren’t the ugly duckling, a misfit, but a swan, a different more spiritual creature altogether!

Gyrus: Have you tried starting dialogue with representatives of the Jewish community about your work?

ManWoman: Not officially. I met a rabbi in San Francisco who was very intrigued. Quite a few Jews have signed the declaration of independence of the swastika that I started a couple of years ago. One said, "Don’t tell my mother," because he was breaking the chain of conditioning that has perpetuated the hatred of an innocent symbol wrongfully defamed. This was a brave act. And of course I have a lot of Jewish friends who have been challenged during our friendship and now see beyond their tragic past. I haven’t emailed the Jewish Defense League. No point in provoking people. I’m out to re-educate not to be intentionally a shit-disturber. However last fall in Calgary Alberta I had a show and one of the paintings contained a swastika representing the mystical source. Outraged citizens phoned the local JDL president who came over to meet me. He walked into the gallery, looked at the painting and said, "Now that looks more like the old Hindu swastika to me," and I knew right then I could have a dialogue with this man. He told me to call him if anyone gave me static about it. All I ask of Jews is to look at the thousands of years of sacred history of the swastika and to say okay the swastika has another life independent of the second world war. Not everyone using a swastika is anti-semitic. Over half the world’s population still honors it as a sacred sign.

Gyrus: Give us a thumbnail sketch of swastika history.

ManWoman: Okay. It was used for centuries as a symbol of good luck by Greeks, Romans, Celts, Vikings, Christians, Jews, Africans, Mayans, Aztecs, Chinese, Hindus, Jains, Buddhists, Tibetans, Hopi, Cree, and wandering neolithic tribes. To Hell with Hitler!

Gyrus: You held a convention in the town of Swastika in Ontario. How did this town get its name, and what attitude do the citizens have now to the symbol, and what you’re doing?

ManWoman: Two brothers, the Dusty brothers, found gold on that location—tons and tons of gold! One of their girlfriends wore a swastika good luck charm on a pendant around her neck. They named the mine Swastika Mine because of their good fortune. Two years later another gold mine was found and they called it Lucky Cross Mine. Lucky Cross is what the Indians called the swastika. When the town grew up around these mines it was called Swastika, Ontario in 1911. They fought a hard battle during the Second World War because the Canadian government wanted to rename the town Winston to honor Churchill. The towns folk sneaked out at night and changed the signs back to Swastika. They have fought criticism from many people over the years but have kept the name. They made one concession—they did not display the symbol on their store fronts as they did in the past. The citizens like what I’m doing because it takes the heat off them. Many people in Canada have heard my message now and the word is spreading. The town of Swastika has recently started using the swastika symbol on the buttons they wear during their winter games festival.

Gyrus: Some of your artwork is outrageously sexual! Also, you described your initial visionary experiences as being ‘gang-banged by holiness’. A lot of people must have a whole series of cultural barriers to leap before they appreciate your work!

Elvis the Pelvis by ManWoman

ManWoman: Yes, that was a series where I was trying to exorcise the Catholic nineteen fifties sexual hang-ups I inherited and had dragged behind me for years. You can leave church but does it leave you? I called it Smut Therapy where the paintings were the therapy. I was raised on a bully god who was pleased if you were dead from the neck down. He created you imperfect and then was pissed off when you acted imperfect—go figure!

My visionary experiences were of a sweet bride soul ascending up into the ecstatic light—burning up, freed of ego and melting into oneness. But the other aspect, unspoken at the time, was that this plunge of my soul into the void of pure pleasure was just like the plunge of my penis into a juicy vagina and the explosion of my sperm up into the womb of the sacred. Free at last! Whole at last! I knew nothing of the Tantric and was slightly disturbed by the parallel because of all the "god hates sex" I had been taught. Now I could say I’m having sex with god. The whole universe is nothing but fucking, endless cycles of birth, becoming, bliss—billions of vaginas popping out new life. People have sex, animals have sex, plants have sex—and love is at the centre of all. I had to dream up an new incarnation for god. God needs a facelift! Perhaps the audience for my work is still unborn but every generation loves it more than the last.

Gyrus: What are your immediate plans for the Friends of the Swastika network—where do you see it going?

ManWoman: I don’t know. It is growing so fast, I’ll just see where it takes me. I started by myself thirty years ago. Twenty years ago I met Carolyn O’Neil from Swastika, Ontario. Ten years ago there were four of us. Then, after the interview in Modern Primitives by Re/Search of San Francisco in 1989, it built into about fifty friends around the world by snail mail, pen-pal style. Now only six months after putting Friends of the Swastika online I’ve got hundreds of friends all over the world. Some have suggested a membership fee and newsletter. I like it as a grass-roots movement without a lot of organization or control. I’m getting photos and info from all parts of the world such as I did from you when you sent me the photos of the famous Swastika Stone on Ilkley Moor in Yorkshire. It’s a friendship of kindred souls and now that we have a guest book we can all interconnect. I’m not quite sure where it’s going but plenty of enthusiasts are asking to get involved even if that means getting a swastika tattoo or just spreading the word to others. It’s a place where major ignorance needs to be overcome and there’s a certain safety in numbers. I’m not asking anyone to be a martyr. The swastika has a tremendous stigma attached to it. You, yourself, are aiding this cause by interviewing me and I thank you for that.

I just did another interview for the July issue of International Tattoo Art magazine. The Swastika is re-emerging in the alternative pop culture much to the shock of those who are still thinking in the old idiom: in the punk rock world, in the flying saucer cults, in the street gangs, in the renaissance of tattooing that is happening—tribal tattoos like Celtic knots, Maori spirals, the Buddhist seal of perfection. The Declaration of Independence of the Swastika has been signed by many famous artists, poets, tattooers; cool people including Lyle Tuttle, Leo Zulueta, Hanky Panky of Amsterdam, Billy Shire, Charles Gatewood, Spider Webb, Robert Delford Brown, Clayton Patterson, Joe Coleman, Bob Roberts, Steve Bonge, Chris Pfouts, Jonathan Shaw, Jack Rudy and Paul Jeffries. I’m very excited about it! Especially looking back on the dream I had about redeeming the swastika thirty years ago. The time is ripe!

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]

Romano-Celtic carving now to be found in All Saints Parish Church, Ilkley, West Yorkshire.

by Gyrus

Firewoman, river of life
Firewoman, mother and eye
Firewoman, seeding below
Firewoman, help my earth glow

Psychic TV, ‘Firewoman’

At first it was just the stones.

The north side of Rombald’s Moor, steep crags and patches of forest, towers over the town of Ilkley in West Yorkshire. Scattered over its hills are literally hundreds of prehistoric rock carvings that are still baffling archaeologists and students of the history of art. They are all seemingly abstract, dominated mainly by ‘cup-and-ring’ designs. Cup-like depressions carved into the rock, alone or clustered in groups, often surrounded by one or more rings. These rings may overlap with those radiating out from nearby cups; there may also be a straight groove running from the central cup, out across the rings.

Some cup-and-ring carvings from Westhorton, Northumberland

After checking these out for a while, I was amazed to learn that nearly identical carvings exist in Northumberland, across Scotland and Ireland, Portugal, Italy and Scandinavia. Closely related ‘primitive art’ can also be found in the Canary Islands, Africa, India, Australia, the Americas, and many others places I’m sure. Across the globe, these enigmatic designs can date to anywhere from the Stone Ages to the present day (in the case of tribal cultures still making them). The ones in Ilkley are hard to date, because of their exposure to the elements, and guesses range from Neolithic times (5000-2000 BCE) to the late Iron Age (about 500 BCE).

I was initially attracted to these markings because of their enigma. The possible significance of megalithic sites like Stonehenge seemed to me to be all mapped out, exhaustively elaborated. Yet stabs at the meaning of cup-and-ring marked rocks are generally half-hearted, quelled by a lack of reference points. Ronald Morris lists 104 possible interpretations, all extremely brief, in his book on the rock art of Galloway—from the stupidly prosaic ("stone age doodles") to the wildly improbable ("carved by lasers from outer space").

Several people have grappled with interpreting the carvings in an open-minded and intelligent way, but they are few. For good reason. We will never know what these carvings were used for. This is the bottom line of most prehistoric investigations. We’ll never know, not exactly. How you proceed from this baseline of ignorance is a mark of your own psyche. Do you not even start to delve further, dismayed by the prospect of never being able to attain certainty? Do you meticulously catalogue that which you can be certain of, sites and sizes, recurrent features? Or do you, in wilful ignorance of the evidence that exists, treat prehistoric art as some sort of Rorschach for your own mind, projecting your desires onto them to suit your own needs?

Given that you’re interested in rock art, the first option is an admission of despair, because ultimately nothing in life is certain. The second path is that of the academic, and such work is essential to any attempt at interpretation; but as an end in itself it is a petty cover-up for despair, and in omitting the realm of significance it removes genuinely human interests. The third tactic is a caricature of the independent ‘mystical’ researcher, and is how most academics would probably view my own work. But I think it has to be seen that an element of this subjective projection is unavoidable. As we have little concrete evidence about the meaning of prehistoric art, what else fills the gaps but our own minds? In the interests of ‘objectivity’, the psychology of the prehistorian is left out of academic texts. Yet they are still people, and no amount of rigorous methodology can, I believe, erase the person from the writing. The fantasy of objective science is a contradictory enterprise of reality-denial: "I want to see the world as it would be if I were not here." The reality of the situation is that you’re always there. In denying their own personal presence, many writers leave themselves (and their readers) open to an unseen subjectivity, which can either be uncovered and made part of the picture, or left to grow more powerful and malignant, eventually rigidifying into dogma.

My own personal approach is… personal. I have to experience the place I’m involved in. I spend time there and immerse myself in it, meditate and do rituals, note dreams and synchronicities. I bathe in the mystery until intuitions that make contact with intellect bubble up. I study a lot, and greatly value the work of historians and archaeologists. But I am not overly concerned with ‘methodology’. My method is: go from the concrete part of reality that interests me, that draws me to it, and branch out into whatever different directions I feel are relevant. The ‘disciplines’ I delve into—archaeology, history, religion, etymology, ethnography—are subservient to the reality I’m investigating.

A general problem for me, one left out by most academics because it prods at their own basic assumptions, is deciding where I stand in relation to history. I feel I’m moving slowly (and non-linearly) towards a radical non-linear approach. I’ve tried to trace many different things through history, mainly shifting archetypal myth-figures; and I find too many cross-cultural connections, too many links across space and time to really believe, deep down, that ‘history’ (when it embraces human experience) can be accurately represented by a straight line. Historical context is important, but a wider context exists, that of the nature of time.

‘Time’ is a single word, but what it refers to is profoundly diverse and chaotic.

Linear historical time

One day, year, century after another, ad infinitum.

Linear eschatological time

One day, year, century after another… BANG!!!

Cyclical time

Each day is created anew at daybreak; each year is, in a way, the first. The growing-older-and-dying world co-exists with the Dreamtime, where all the ancestors are still active and all myths and realities recur.

Cyclical eschatological time

"Anyone who can read history with both hemispheres of the brain knows that a world comes to an end every instant . . . And every instant also gives birth to a world—despite the cavillings of philosophers & scientists whose bodies have grown numb—a present in which all impossibilities are renewed, where regret & premonition fade to nothing in one presential hologrammatical psychomantric gesture." (Hakim Bey)

Real time

No such thing!

All forms of time are potentially accessible. Many different gradations of these simplified categories are usually experienced in the course of a day by most people, but the subtle differences usually go unnoticed.

So history is not absolute. History as we know it is our own culture’s construct of time, our largely linear map of temporality, projected back onto the material artifacts left in the fabric of the world by our ancestors. Not to mention the psychological prejudices and models we leave unquestioned, and our lack of culturally sanctioned landmarks in the realm usually called the ‘spiritual’—a realm that was arguably a prime concern for ‘map-makers’ in prehistory. ‘Objective history’ is an illusion born of a lack of true context, our ontological context.

One of the stickiest problems in tracing mythology and religious practices through history is that of tracing influence and co-mapping meaning. Should we compare similar motifs and artifacts across time and space in our search for meaning? For example, could the rock art of the !Kung San bushmen in Africa today have any bearing upon the carvings left on Rombald’s Moor by people who lived thousands of years ago?

Things become stickier (for the linear historian) when times and places are closer together, but no direct evidence of cross-cultural interchange appears to exist. The Swastika Stone near Ilkley is pretty much identical to the ‘Camunian Roses’ in Val Camonica, Italy, and they were possibly carved within 500 years of each other. Did the two cultures that produced these designs interact? Was there a parallel, but separate evolution of the same basic pan-European design, the crossed circle? Was it coincidence? If so, is the meaning of each necessarily as separate as the carvings themselves? And do we need to insult the critical judgement of readers by meticulously pointing out the subtle differences between similar symbols, and only tentatively making comparisons? It is ironic that, because of their pedantic methodologies, texts aimed at the academic community (a most discerning and critical bunch), demand the least amount of critical intervention on the part of the reader.

I do not unquestioningly believe in Jung’s theory of ‘universal archetypes’, but I do believe in the uniformity of basic human physiology, and I think the body is one of the main aspects of the world from which maps of the spirit—shamanism, alchemy, yoga, tantra, whatever—unfold. So we may expect some recurring global motifs in art and myth, notwithstanding the infinite variations that similar body-minds interacting with different environments produce.

I also believe that we each need to ask ourselves why we are interested in these things. What do I get out of this? I have no illusions (OK, a few) that I’m trying to contribute to some ever-progressing body of human knowledge. The feeling that we’re building up an increasingly accurate and ‘truthful’ picture of the world as time goes by is part of the linear history package. Look at the ridiculous ideas held by quite intelligent people in the past, and assume that your own ideas may be equally stupid in the end.

In the end? What end? The straight line is hard to shake off…

There’s one thing I’m definitely not in this for. I don’t claim to be right. I get enough out of it already, and don’t need gaps in my enjoyment to be filled with the consensus of agreement. I have to write this, and hope some people get stimulated by it. But… "I am not interested in the academic status of what I am doing because my problem is my own transformation." (Michel Foucault) I involve myself in the conscious recognition of what I project onto the past. My theories will have a different emphasis from others’ because my transformation is different. Why shouldn’t people print for themselves a license to steal from the past, as Hakim Bey phrases it, as long as they’re conscious that they may have no ‘real’ connection to the culture they plunder, or to academic history? This is the Chaotic approach to history, the utilization of any and all human cultural artifacts for the purpose of making life now more interesting, stimulating and challenging. It can be abused by those who trivialize or entirely misappropriate other cultures, possibly affecting the general view of that culture; or by those who fail to keep a check on their ego and their connection with the here-and-now of their lives. It can also be used as the most adaptable and dogma-free map-making tool around. Flexible enough to cope with inevitable change, ontologically rigorous enough to realize it’s never right, never authoritative, always capable of laughing at itself. As a friend once said, some people would rather be right than happy.

The Badger Stone, Rombald’s Moor, looking northwest up Wharfedale

The first time I visited the Badger Stone on Rombald’s Moor, I walked alone across the moors with a map. As I crossed a small valley, clouds gathered and light rain fell. I put the map away and stumbled across the heather shrouded in mist. As I blindly approached the stone, the rain fell harder, and all I could see around me was thick white moving mist. By the time I reached it, and rounded it to see the carvings, I was too wet to care about the rain, a state which alters consciousness into a more receptive mode. Throughout my explorations of the moors, I’ve found that there has been a subtle interactivity between the land, my consciousness and the weather, as if all conspire to make me receptive to a new discovery. Standing in front of the ancient carvings on this stone, I was struck by the realization that something I considered exotic and alien, something only found in caves in remotest Australia, was actually here as well, just down the road. The rock carvings are always more impressive when they’re wet, and this, one of the most impressive set of carvings on the moor, made quite an impression on me. I did some spontaneous chanting and whirling, then walked away. As I left the stone, the mists began to clear, and the rain stopped abruptly.

Later in the year, I was writing about my idea that the Christian Satan is a demonized remnant of prehistoric chthonic snake-goddesses. Flicking through a book on folklore, I found a picture of an altar stone showing the goddess Verbeia. She holds two snakes, and now stands in the All Saints Parish Church in Ilkley. The mythic irony was too much, I had to check it out. I had only the faintest idea that she would lead me back up on to the moors, and deeper into the stones.

Verbeia

Known only through a dedication to her, carved by the Prefect of the Second Cohort of Roman troops stationed in Ilkley during 3rd century CE, and her depiction on a separate altar stone (shown at top of page). The All Saints Church stands on the remains of the Roman fort. The dedication (which can now be seen in the Manor House Museum behind the church) reads: "To Verbeia. Sacred. Clodius Fronto. Ded. Prefect of the Cohort, Second Lingones." Goddess of the River Wharfe, which flows down from the Pennines in the northwest, through Ilkley at the bottom of the valley which the moor overlooks, and east to the Humber estuary. Snakes and flowing water have intimate archaic connections. The two snakes held by Verbeia probably represent the two streams that flowed from the moor in Roman times, past either side of the fort enclosure, and into the Wharfe.

The Mavilly goddess

The Roman troops stationed here were only Roman in political allegiance. Racially, the Lingones were Celtic Gauls recruited from the upper Marne in eastern France. A goddess image similar to Verbeia—she holds two snakes and has a pleated skirt—was found in Mavilly, which is in the region where the Lingones cohort were recruited from. In this area, Gaulish Celts are known to have been greatly concerned with water cults. Mavilly is only 35 miles south of the famous healing spring at the source of the Seine. Did the troops bring a goddess-related water cult with them to blend into the matrix of the Wharfedale environment?

Scholars argue against a Celtic origin for the word ‘Verbeia’. But a female water divinity holding snakes would, in nature if not in name, happily dovetail with the way in which the native Celts of northern England (the Brigantes) probably made their environment sacred. Water cults were very frequent among the Celts: they cast offerings into wells and lakes, including human heads (Celts, like the Greeks, believed the head to be the seat of life-force, as the ‘head’ of a river is its source). Romans likewise would sanctify natural features; for them, "every grove, spring, cluster of rocks or other significant natural feature had its attendant spirit. Generally the locals gave such entities personal names, but a stranger ignorant of these would refer to each simply as genius loci, ‘the spirit of the place’. Especially awe-inspiring or beautiful spots possessed proportionately powerful genii." (Ronald Hutton) Verbeia seems likely to be a fusion of existing Brigantian and imported Gaulish and Roman influences.

Sifting through languages to find the origins of ‘Verbeia’ proved to be a dizzying task. Even a firm knowledge of linguistic influences in the area at that time wouldn’t stop your head from spinning. Two possibilities: Either language, like the universe, plays tricks, and leads you around in baffling cycles which appear connected to every other cycle; or the name ‘Verbeia’, for whatever reasons, happens to be an inexplicably polysemic (many-meaninged) cross-linguistic condensation of some of our most primal intuitions about nature. Follow me…

Spring

Verbeia is often equated with Brighid, the Irish goddess, aka Bridget, Bride, Bríd or Bríg—possibly the origin of Brigantia, the goddess of the Brigantes. Bride’s Day is Imbolc, 1st February, or when the ewes start to lactate. A goddess who heralds the coming warmth of spring. The Mavilly goddess is shown surrounded by rising vegetation. The Latin for spring is ver, from which our ‘vernal’, ‘verdigiris’ (green rust on copper) and ‘verdant’ (fresh, green) come. A botanical term, ‘vernation’, refers to the arrangement of leaves in a bud. This derives from the Latin vernatio: the flourishing renewal of plants in spring, and the snake’s sloughing of skin in spring. All these spring-associated Latin words stem from the Indogermanic root √WES, meaning "to shine".

Fire

Brighid presides over fire. Goddess of blacksmiths. Brighid, from brigh, ‘strength’. Welsh bri means ‘power’, and brig means ‘hill-top’ (‘Brighid’ and ‘Brigantia’ are often translated as ‘The High One’). Ancient belief in the sacred power of hills and mountains… the lighting of fires on hill-tops at seasonal festivals… St Bridget (the Christian edition) was honoured by nuns at a monastery in County Kildare, who kept her sacred flame burning until the Reformation. The public shrine to Vesta, Roman goddess of fire, both domestic and ritual, was a sacred fire tended by the Vestal Virgins. Brighid, too, ruled over the domestic hearth, and in Gaelic Scotland her bird was the white swan. ‘Swan Vestas’ anyone?

‘Vesta’ and close-to-home words like ‘vernacular’ both derive from the same Indogermanic root as all the shining spring-like words—√WES can also mean ‘dwell, live, be’. Home and fire, dwelling and light. From the temporary base-camp hearths of the first proto-human hunter-gatherers through to the Celts and the Roman Empire, these two are intertwined.

The most famous stones on the moor are the Cow and Calf—the ‘Cow’ is a vast part of a rocky outcrop overlooking Ilkley, the ‘Calf’ is a smaller, though still large boulder that has apparently separated from the crags. The larger rock was once known as the ‘Inglestone Cow’. When Queen Victoria was crowned in 1838, "a great fire blazed on these famous stones, and Ilkley I am told, was ‘illuminated.’" (Harry Speight)

The Cow and Calf rocks, Ilkley Moor

There is a history of beacon hills in Wharfedale. During the early 19th century, when a French invasion was feared, beacon fires were tended all along Wharfedale. The beacon signal was sent from Ingleborough, over in the northernmost reaches of Ribblesdale (close to the Wharfe’s source), down via various hills, including Beamsley Beacon just north of Ilkley, on to the Otley Chevin. Perhaps the prominent ‘Inglestone Cow’ was part of this network? The Scottish dialect word, ingle, ‘fire burning on a hearth’, may come from the Gaelic aingeal, meaning ‘fire’ or ‘light’. The Mavilly goddess holds a torch as well as snakes.

Milk

Brighid is also a cow goddess; she was reared on the milk of a white, red-eared cow. In Ireland, churn-staffs were fashioned into the likeness of a woman called Brìdeog, ‘Little Bride’. ‘Verbeia’ may derive from the Old Irish root ferb, ‘cattle’, making her ‘She of the Cattle’. Like the Irish Boand, ‘She who has White Cows’, goddess of the river Boyne. Like Marsa of Latvian mythological songs, "Mother of Milk, the Mother of Cows" (Marija Gimbutas), who may appear in animal stalls as a black snake. The night before I read Gimbutas’ book, where she relates Verbeia to Marsa, and suggests the ferb derivation, I was staying with friends who have two daughters. I dreamt I had breasts and was breast-feeding their two-year old.

There is strong evidence of an old calendar custom in the British Isles, around Beltaine or springtime in general, where the old fires are extinguished and new ones are lit. Cattle are then driven between two fires to divinely protect them from disease. ‘Imbolc’ means ‘purification’. Inglestone Cow… Fire-stone Cow.

Ronald Morris found three separate people in Scotland who remembered from their youth a ritual connected to cup-marks in rocks. They would be filled with milk each spring, lest the "wee folk" prevent the cattle from giving milk that summer.

Water

"Springs, wells and rivers are of first and enduring importance as a focal point of Celtic cult practice and ritual." (Anne Ross) Not far from the Badger Stone, at the top of Heber’s Gill, is a spring called Silver Well, "which it is not unlikely was an old Celtic tutelary spring, and bits of metal or other articles may have been thrown into it as offerings for protection from the saint or presiding genius of the well." (Speight)

The source of all life. We come from the ocean, we need water to live, we are two-thirds water. Verbeia, goddess of the river, bearing the two serpentine streams flowing down from the moor. They flow from the area where one finds the White Wells, a Victorian spa building. The healing powers of the spring waters on the moor here were reputed in the last century, and probably long, long before as well. Certainly the Romans were obsessed with spa baths, and there was one in Ilkley. "Verbeia may be a Latinised form of the Goidelic guerif, to heal." (Speight) Geurir is used in France with the same meaning.

(At the bottom of the bath in the White Wells today there is the familiar site of hundreds of coppers and ten pence pieces. You even find this in fountains in shopping malls. It is a remnant of the widespread Celtic practice, mentioned by Speight above, of casting offerings to water spirits into wells, lakes and rivers.)

In Niederbronn, Alsace, where in Celtic times Diana was worshipped as the Goddess of sacred wells, to this day women carry water from the mineral spring to nearby mountains. There, they pour it over stones with circular depressions to ensure pregnancy. . . . Holy wells are recorded by the hundreds in 19th century literature. In Ireland, they mostly became St. Brigit’s wells, all visited on the first day of spring. Devotees perform the rounds at such wells, washing their hands and feet and tearing off a small rag from their clothes, which they tie on a bush or tree overhanging the well. According to a 1918 written account from Dungiven parish, after performing the usual rounds at the well, devotees proceed to a large river stone which has footprints; they perform an oblation and walk around the stone, bowing to it and repeating prayers as at the well. If there are hollows or cupmarks in stones, the country people stoop to drink.

Marija Gimbutas

Ronald Morris’ survey of cup-and-ring marked stones in Argyll, Scotland, revealed that they "are nearly always carved where there is a fine open view. . . . more often than not it includes a view of sea or estuary." They are "nearly always made on parts of rock which are nearly horizontal. Thus, in southern Scotland seven out of eight sites have carved areas which are within 20 degrees of horizontal, and nearly half the carved areas are absolutely horizontal. . . . Where there is a ‘tail’ or radial groove from near the middle of the cup-and-ring (very often from the cup), in about seven out of eight cases, where there is any slope on the rock surface, the tail runs downhill." This all accords well with the Ilkley carvings, which are dominant on the north side of the moor overlooking the river, and are often clustered close to springs or streams. Before I had theorized about these glyphs, my intuitive ‘offerings’ to the Badger Stone consisted of pouring some of my drink (water or whiskey) into the cups and watching it stream down the grooves. There are some cups on near-vertical surfaces, but most were clearly meant to hold water, rain, or other fluids. Like wells, the water in cup-marks could be healing water. In regions where there are cup-marked rocks and peasant lore about them still survives, there are recurrent beliefs that water out of the cups is good for all manner of ailments, especially eye diseases.

The Greek Muses were water-nymphs, and poets drank from their springs on Mounts Helicon, Parnassus and Castalia for inspiration. To them, a poem was the water, honey or nectar of the Muses. Pythagoras gained prophetic insights from drinking spring water. Richard Onians, in his investigation of ancient Greek concepts about the body and soul, found that they believed ‘life-essence’ to be contained in a ‘seed liquid’ concentrated mostly in the cerebro-spinal marrow—"on tap in the genital and stored in the head", as Norman O. Brown puts it. They thought it came out of the body in the form of tears, sweat, and sexual fluids. Crying and sexual love are "repeatedly described as a process of ‘liquefying, melting’ . . . Aristotle tells us that the region around the eyes was the region of the head most fruitful of seed, pointing to . . . practices which imply that seed comes from liquid in the region of the eyes." Tears, sex, melting… I think of Wilhelm Reich’s ideas about bodily armour, rigid musculature softened by crying and sex. Experiences of weeping at orgasm. Tears, eyes, seed… the repressive myth of masturbation and blindness. There is an Egyptian myth of people coming out of a creator-god’s eyes. Cup-marks, rain, creation, life-force, healing…

The Slavic goddess Mokosh-Paraskeva Pyatnitsa "is the dispenser of the water of life. . . . The name Mokosh is connected with moisture, mok- or mokr- meaning ‘wet, moist,’ and her ritual was called mokrida. On the other hand, the root mok- appears as a name for stones. In Lithuanian, mokas is a ‘standing stone,’ always appearing in legends associated with lakes or rivers." (Gimbutas)

The significance of water and stones extends down into the rites of divine kingship. Pagan British kings usually had to symbolically wed the goddess of the land. Even as late as the 17th century, England’s King James said, "I am the husband, and all the whole island is my lawful wife." Gerald of Wales (12th century) said that in County Donegal, for his feis (inauguration), the king would bathe in water then stand barefoot in a footprint carved in rock, or sit on a stone to be handed his rod of office. The feis site of the Irish king O’Donnell in western Ulster was used until the end of the 16th century. It is a rock with the holy well Tobar an Duin at its foot, where the king probably bathed. In early Scottish history the fort of Dunadd, in the Kilmartin valley of Argyll, was one seat of the kingdom of Dalriada, "and upon the summit of the fortress the modern traveller can still find the carved footprint. Next to it in the rock surface is a bowl-shaped hollow and a splendid figure of a wild boar . . . A ruler placing his foot in the print would be gazing north straight at the ancient row of megalithic monuments." (Hutton) "In Scandinavia engravings of human footprints are common—especially near the cupped stones. On the Bunsoh stones, indeed, footprints and cups are found together." (Herbert Kühn)

The king gains his power from his union with the goddess of the land, symbolized by his immersion in her waters and his body’s shallow, but significant, penetration of her stones. Paul Devereux, in a persuasive book that links divine kingship back to shamanism, quotes a !Kung man talking of his trance experiences: "When people sing. . . I dance. I enter the earth. I go in at a place like a place where people drink water. I travel a long way, very far. . . . You enter, enter the earth, and you return to enter the skin of your body. . .". For the San people, snakes are significant because they enter the earth, go underground, like themselves when they go on ecstatic journeys.

J.D. Lewis-Williams suggests that rocks are ‘veils’ between this world and the spirit world, and that rock art is the destruction of this veil. "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. . . . The Hupa of America have a concept of spirits responsible for precipitation that live in the rock, and are known as ‘Mi.’ 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)

Procreation

The belief systems of the Australian aborigines, whose rock and totem-shield art is often compared to cup-and-ring markings, may be one of the most useful tools we have to approach the meaning of European petroglyphs (rock carvings). The Australian continent is their Bible; the earth, the physical landscape, embodies their spiritual understanding of the world, contains their history and knowledge. "Preliterate peoples are at pains to identify with their land as if it were a physiological or psychological ‘echo’ of themselves." (James G. Cowan) Body and earth, psyche and landscape.

Some hunter-gatherer tribes, like archaic humans, do not see sex and birth as cause and effect. To explain birth, beliefs about the origin of children from the earth evolved. The spirits of unborn children dwell in the land, in rocks and pools, waiting to enter a receptive womb. Even after the connection between sex and birth is made, many, like the aborigines, favour the idea of earth-conception as ultimately essential to the creation of a child. Rocks or pools "bore the spirit that would vitalise the baby. It therefore seems likely that the purpose of cutting a circular cup in the surface of a rocky outcrop was to liberate a spirit and so ensure a complete and successful child-birth. . . . At some later date a ring would be circumscribed about the cup to guarantee a second child, and in this way, as the years passed, the ring systems built up." (George Terence Meaden) This idea holds that the interlinking groups of cups and rings depict inter-family bonds. The ‘spirits’ released by carving the cup may have been those of ancestors as well as unborn children, for ancestors are frequently the source of divinatory and magical knowledge in shamanic cultures. For aborigines, the two types of spirit are interchangeable, as each person is a reincarnation of an ancestor.

Two apparent survivals of these notions in modern times. The Christian doctrine of baptism: a baby’s soul is not ‘saved’ (and may as well not have one as far as hardcore Christians are concerned) until it is baptized, with holy water from a cup-shaped font. And the folklore of the stork, which carries babies from marshes to drop them down the chimneys of expectant parents.

The ‘caged spirit’ theory of cup-marked rocks does not ‘explain’ all the carvings, but no one ‘explanation’ will. The 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. Our culture and our psyches, outside the frames and boundaries of ‘art’, are conditioned to assign singular meanings to symbols. Before dictionaries, words were a lot more elastic. Proto-linguistic symbol systems such as hieroglyphs were even more amenable to polysemy, the existence of many meanings. Further back in the development of symbols, petroglyphs take us into a realm of signification almost alien to the industrialized west. Their meanings seem abstract and vague until they are bound to the concrete feelings and bodily, non-verbal perceptions they refer to. And many meanings happily co-exist, emanating from the same symbol without being stifled by fear of paradox.

Vertex

Middle English hwerfen, ‘turn, change’. Spelt in The Ormulum by Ormin (12th century Lincolnshire) as wharfen. The variations are endless: hweorfa, ‘whirl, what is hastily turned around’; hweorfan, ‘a turning, winding round’, cognate with Norse hvarf, ‘a sharp bend’; Old Norse hwerfi, ‘bend, crook’. Among these words is certainly the origin of, or a major influence on ‘Wharfe’, which turns and winds along the valley floor before and after Ilkley.

‘Verbeia’ has always been related to ‘Wharfe’, and a trip back to the ver- words in Latin gives us, if not a confirmation of the link, at least some fruitful and irresistibly fascinating associations. Many of our own ver- words come from the Latin vertere, ‘to turn’. ‘Vertebra’ means ‘something to turn on’, describing the backbone’s interlocking pivotal structure. ‘Vertex’ is ‘the highest point’; in anatomy it refers to the crown of the head, where hair spirals. Latin vertex literally means ‘that which turns’, but can refer to ‘top, crown, summit, pole, whirl; whirlpool, eddy’. Properly it refers to the turning point, especially the Pole Star, around which all the others turn. ‘Vertical’ stems from these associations—straight up to, or down from, the crown or summit. ‘Vortex’ is a variant of ‘vertex’. Dictionary definition: ‘a mass of whirling fluid, whirlpool or whirlwind; a system viewed as swallowing up or engrossing those who approach it’. ‘Whirl’ is related to the Old Norse hvirfill, ‘circle’; and, along with ‘twirl’, relates to the Gaelic Tuirl, ‘to descend suddenly, to come down rapidly with a gyratory motion’. ‘Vertigo’ is from Latin vertigo, ‘whirling’, again from vertere.

The closest word I’ve found to ‘Verbeia’ in any language is from Anglo-Saxon, which couldn’t have influenced the Roman altars in Ilkley—they invaded Britain after the Romans left. Nevertheless, the word wer-bære is ‘a weir where fish are caught’, which keeps the river connotations, as well as the idea of turning, as weirs (and wharves) redirect the flow of rivers.

‘Verse’ is another vertere word, because at the end of a line of poetry, one ‘turns around’ and starts a new one, unlike the linear flow of prose. Countless -verse words in English express contrary direction: converse, perverse, inverse, reverse, you get the idea.

Vertere itself comes from the Indogermanic root √WERT, ‘to turn, become’. Also root of the Old English wyrd, ‘destiny, fate, that which happens’. Sanskrit vrt means ‘to turn, turn oneself, exist, be’.

Shamanism

Brighid, patroness of poets & writers, healers & doctors, and of blacksmiths. Goddess of fire. She appears to be a late pagan distillation of the core elements of archaic shamanism.

The shaman is the original poet, the tribal myth-maker who pulls up a ‘secret language’ from the depths of ecstasy, the hidden roots of language.

The shaman is the healer par excellence, the witch-doctor.

A Yakut proverb says that smiths and shamans are from the same nest. Shamans often meets a smith during initiatory trances, who dismembers and then re-forges the shaman’s body in his furnace. Both smiths and shamans are respected and often feared in Siberian tribes, because both possess esoteric transformative knowledge.

Most importantly, both are masters of fire. "Mastery over fire . . . is a magico-mystical virtue that . . . translates into sensible terms the fact that the shaman has passed beyond the human condition and already shares in the condition of ‘spirits.’" (Mircea Éliade) Firewalking, eating hot coals, generating ‘inner heat’ for magical use, melting snow with will, drying wet sheets wrapped around the body while sat outside in freezing weather… Many tribes express magical power in terms of heat; Hindus call powerful divinities jvalit, ‘possessing fire’; Indian Mohammedans in communication with God become ‘burning’. The !Kung dance for hours around a fire to awaken num, a primal life energy that rests at the base of the spine and in the pit of the stomach. When it ‘boils’, it ascends the backbone, and when it reaches the skull, the shamanic kia trance occurs. Those experiencing kia can feel compelled to leap into the fire or handle the glowing embers.

Verbeia’s equation with Brighid is poetically supported by her forest of linguistic associations: verse is the ‘turning’ form of poetry; we have the Goidelic guerif, to heal; both these aspects are deepened by her undoubted link with spring waters, inspiring and healing. Her fiery nature should be obvious by now.

Further, Verbeia’s possible links to all the spiralling vertere words echoes one of shamanism’s most basic features. The Centre of the World, the World Tree, Mountain or Pole, the shaman’s path to the lower and upper realms of the other world. Through kundalini yoga, and the Greeks’ cerebro-spinal ‘life-force’, this may be equated with the human spine. Raise the kundalini serpent to the crown chakra, through the vertebrae, past the crown of the skull, where hair spirals round in a vertex.

One impulsive evening I went up to the moor and spent the night alone at the Badger Stone. While drifting off, I opened my eyes suddenly and was startled beyond belief. One star in the sky was motionless, and all the others were drifting rapidly north across the sky. This persisted, as I stammered and reeled, for about 10 seconds. Then, in a gratefully received shift of perspective back to reality, I realized that the single ‘star’ was a satellite arcing across the sky. My mind, for some reason, had played the ‘relative motion’ trick you often get on trains, where the station appears to be moving when the train sets off.

This is one of the few cards from the ‘Vertical Oracle’ divinatory deck that arrived from Antero Alli shortly after I finished this writing. Make your own connections! For more info, see Vertical Pool.

Later that week, I was playing with a toy planetarium at a friends’—a small light over which you place a clear perspex hemisphere with all the constellations marked on it. I put it in a dark cupboard, and played with it by spinning the dome around. Instantly the memory of dream (probably inspired by the shifting stars experience) from a night or two back flooded into me, and I had to stop turning the dome because of the dizzying memory rush. In the dream I was out in the open, and the entire night sky was revolving around one star above me, which was surrounded by bizarre light formations. Inspired by this, I searched out beliefs about the stars, particularly the Pole Star.

The Turko-Tatars, like a number of other peoples, imagine the sky as a tent . . . In the middle of the sky shines the Pole Star, holding the celestial tent like a stake. The Samoyed call it the ‘Sky Nail’; the Chuckchee and the Koryak the ‘Nail Star.’ The same image and terminology are found among the Lapps, the Finns, and the Estonians. The Turko-Altaians conceive the Pole Star as a pillar; it is the ‘Golden Pillar’ of the Mongols, the Kalmyk, the Buryat, the ‘Iron Pillar’ of the Kirgiz, the Bashkir, the Siberian Tatars, the ‘Solar Pillar’ of the Teleut, and so on. A complementary image is that of the stars as invisibly linked to the Pole Star. The Buryat picture the stars as a herd of horses, and the Pole Star . . . is the stake to which they are tethered.

Mircea Éliade

Macrocosm is reflected in microcosm for such peoples, who identify the Sky Pillar with the pole in the centre of their yurt or tent.

Ancient Saxons called the Pole Star Irminsul, termed ‘the universal column which sustains all’, and passed the idea of the ‘Pillar of the Sky’ or ‘Pillar of the World’ on to the Lapps of Scandinavia. Similar concepts survive in Romanian folklore. For Chuckchee and Altaian shamans, the Pole Star is a hole in the sky through which they pass into the upper levels of the spirit world.

The Swastika Stone carving, Ilkley Moor

My attention shifted from these findings to the Swastika Stone. Nine cup-marks in a cross formation, surrounded by a whirling swastika groove, with a curious appendage to one arm. The north-south line of cups is aligned to less than a degree off magnetic north—pointing straight at the Pole Star. This connection was thrown a bit by the fact that the swastika appears to rotate in a clockwise direction, whereas the stars in the northern hemisphere go anti-clockwise round the pole, rising in the east and setting in the west. But if it was meant to be some sort of connection between the earth and the sky… Try pointing your finger and making an anti-clockwise circle in the air, following the stars. Imagine you are drawing a rotating disc. Now move your hand, the disc, downwards until you are looking at the ‘other side’ of the disc, looking down your finger instead of up it, but keeping it moving in the same direction. It will now appear to be moving clockwise. If the stone describes the base of a Sky Pillar, extending down from the Pole Star to the ground, the clockwise motion of the swastika makes perfect sense—it maps the motion of the stars down onto the rock. Cup-and-ring petroglyphs may be seen to echo the same image. The groove or ‘tail’ becomes the Sky Pillar, the cup the Pole Star, and the rings the paths of the revolving stars.

(I should note here that I’m not moving towards the general idea that cup-and-ring patterns are maps of stellar constellations. Perhaps some involved rudimentary attempts at this, but no one seems to have found accurate correspondences in any existing patterns. They seem to be more to do with the sky as an access point to alternate realities.)

The swastika is a near universal symbol that should be reclaimed from the Teutonic boot-boys of the mid-20th century. It is found in Buddhism and Hinduism, on goddess-related artifacts from Bronze Age Greece, and in British Celtic metalwork from the 1st century BCE. As a petroglyph, it is found in abundance in Val Camonica, northern Italy. Here there are 16 carvings almost identical to that near Ilkley, and 68 others with differing arm orientations, all spread over 27 rocks. They date from the 7th to the 1st century BCE. The symbol is also found in Sweden, along with many other designs based on the so-called Celtic Cross, the wheel with four spokes. "Across the Romano-Celtic world, from Britain to Czechoslovakia, the wheel was the symbol for the sky, representing either the sun alone, or the whole turning heaven." (Hutton) Most interpreters, indeed most surviving religions who still use it, see the swastika as a sun or fire symbol. Its connection with fire-oriented cults is strong, but the Ilkley carving is oddly positioned if it has anything to do with sun worship—it faces squarely north into the Wharfe valley. One possible sun connection exists, though. The ‘appendage’ cup, in relation to the central cup, is roughly aligned to the summer solstice sunrise in the northeast. The groove around it forms a sort of hook shape which, if turned in the same direction as the ‘spin’ of the swastika, would haul the solstice sun across the sky.

A Norse fylfot from the Isle of Man

The Three Legs of Man

On the Isle of Man a Norse cross from around the 10th century was found standing in a groove in a large round stone in a churchyard. At its bottom is a fylfot, or swastika-like design, incorporating four spirals bound together. Of course, the national symbol of Man, the Three Legs, is a three-legged swastika.

Bridget’s Cross

February 1st in Man, until recently, was Laa’l Breeshy, ‘Bridget’s Feast Day’ (‘Wive’s Feast Day’ in northern England). A parish church, a nunnery, and no less than seven of the ancient keeils or cells on the Isle are named after the Irish saint. A favourite form of Bridget’s Cross, central to Imbolc folk-rituals in Ireland, suggests a swastika.

Oddly, the Bible gives us a link between stones and ascension into the sky. Check out Genesis 28:10. Jacob spends the night in a place where he gathers stones together for pillows. "And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it." Vastly impressed by this place, he sets his pillow-stone up as a pillar, and anoints it with oil. He names the place Beth-el, ‘sacred stone’.

"Throughout the world, certain images of ascent were used—the shaman’s spirit could rise on smoke, ride along a rainbow, travel up a sunbeam and so on. But from northwest Europe to Tibet none was more ubiquitous than the ladder. . . . It shows the remarkably universal aspects of shamanism, then, that the image of a human figure atop a ladder occurs also in southern African rock art." (Devereux) The Zulu word form -qab associates trance-states with ascension and art: ukutiqabu, ‘recovering from fainting’; ukuqabela, ‘to climb to the top of a ladder, tree or mountain’; ukuqabela, ‘to paint’.

Ladder-like carvings on the Panorama Stone, Rombald’s Moor, opposite St Mary’s Church

In some cup-and-ring designs on Rombald’s Moor, the single groove ‘tail’ becomes a ladder-like image. The interlocking cup-and-rings may be series of levels of the spirit world penetrated by a shaman’s consciousness. These varied and sometimes messy patterns evoke shamanism still evolving, humans repeatedly grappling with deep trance states, plumbing the depths behind and ascending the heights above the rocks, attempting to haul descriptions of their journeys back to the earth.

If this shamanic idea holds water, the dating of the moor’s petroglyphs poses problems for the orthodox study of their significance. Most of the comparable Italian and Scandinavian glyphs are dated to the late Bronze Age or the Iron Age, the latter half of the 1st millennium BCE. Was there a Celtic or proto-Celtic shamanism that continued the traditions of much older cultures? Cup-and-rings appear in Neolithic tombs in Ireland. Paul Bennett, a local researcher who knows the moors here better than anyone I’ve met, believes the Swastika Stone could date to 2000 BCE or earlier—and its complexity suggests that the simpler cup-and-rings are even earlier. People lived on Rombald’s Moor from as early as 7000 BCE, so this is entirely possible.

More perplexing of all is the complex of shamanic associations constellated around Verbeia’s possible etymologies. Possibly language playing tricks, but they’re compelling tricks, evoking the vertical pillar up to the Pole Star… the ascent into the sky vortex, ‘a system viewed as swallowing up or engrossing those who approach it’… the vertebrae of the spine, the vertiginous whirling motion of a fiery climb to the vertex…

Liminality

I approached the Badger Stone once to do a brief ritual. As I neared it, it started to rain. I was reminded of my first visit, but I tried to shift my attention back to the present to focus on my ritual. After I started, I was soon forced back to the present. The rain pelted harder and harder, the wind grew more fierce, and at the peak of the ritual the rain turned into savage hail. It was blowing hard from behind me, hurting my head, and coming in at an almost horizontal angle, creating a tunnel-like effect before me—and an extremely conducive state of mind! I wound down, and the hail returned to rain. I left the site, and the rain stopped.

When the sun rose after I had the ‘shifting sky’ experience, just before it cleared the clouds on the horizon, it started to rain lightly. I jumped up to run for cover, but decided to stay and see the sun up with some chanting. It was beautiful. Glowing sun bursting up, gentle rain, and behind me a magnificent rainbow. I finished chanting, left, and the rain stopped. I kid you not.

Memories of these experiences shouted for attention when I read Ruth Whitehouse’s book on cave-based cults in Neolithic central Italy, Underground Religion. The apparent sacred significance of water in ‘abnormal states’ (stalactites and stalagmites, bubbling or hot water, steam) to these people led her to recognize the importance of ‘liminal’ (marginal, borderline, cross-over) states in their beliefs. Cave mouths, between dark and light… stalagmites, hard water… steam, gaseous water… and ultimately the shaman, between this world and the other, a mediator. For numerous shamanic cultures, the rainbow is a prime liminal phenomenon, produced in the conjunction of sun and rain, fire and water, bridging the gap. Fire and water. Brighid. Verbeia. Why should they preside over such contradictory elements?

Atl-tlachinolli, Aztec hieroglyph for burning water

The Aztecs, according to Laurette Séjourné’s Burning Water, believed that liberated consciousness could only be achieved through an internal bodily battle, a "blossoming war". Victory is attained through the union of opposites; the Aztec "vision of Earth as Paradise is based on the concept of the dynamic harmony between water and fire." Their hieroglyph for the "blossoming war" is called atl-tlachinolli, from atl, ‘water’, and tlachinolli, ‘something that has been burned’. This symbol always accompanies Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent, the Aztecs’ mythic originator. Bird-and-snake figures are frequent in myths across the globe, and probably represent the union of chthonic earthly realms (snake) with the skies above (bird). The Aztec symbol for the union of heaven and earth is the cross, perhaps the most basic possible representation of liminality (cross-over). The quincunx (a cross formed by five points, the four cardinal points and a centre) is "the most frequently occurring sign in the Meso-american symbolic language." The number 5 represents the centre, the point where heaven and earth meet, and the quincunx also symbolizes the heart, "the meeting-place of opposed principles". Curiously, one of their symbols for the Fifth Sun (or Era), the Sun of Movement, the Era of Quetzalcoatl, the unifying "Law of the Centre", is a swastika-like glyph.

Aztec ‘movement’ hieroglpyh from Teotihuatecan

An Aztec qincunx

How all this spiritual cartography relates to human experience is crystallized for me in the Aztec vision of the heart as the centre, where opposites unite. We are impoverished if we can only feel one emotion at a time. All pure emotion, I find, is profoundly ambiguous. Polysemic. Anger and exhilaration, joy and bittersweet sadness, sexual bliss and terror, tender love and fear, weeping at orgasm… ‘Emotions’ are the words and concepts we tack on to the chaotic flows of psycho-biological energy around the body, flows which have no anchors and no true boundaries.

Potent emotion, when cut loose from judgement and prejudice, becomes ecstasy.

References

• T.A.Z. by Hakim Bey
• Foucault edited by Lawrence D. Kritzman
• The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles by Ronald Hutton
• Upper Wharfedale by Harry Speight
• The Language of the Goddess by Marija Gimbutas
• Pagan Celtic Britain by Anne Ross
• The Origins of European Thought by Richard Broxton Onians
• Love’s Body by Norman O. Brown
• The Prehistoric Rock Art of Argyll by Ronald W.B. Morris
• The Rock Pictures of Europe by Herbert Kühn
• One Medium, One Mind by Grant S. McCall
• Shamanism and the Mystery Lines by Paul Devereux
• The Aborigine Tradition by James G. Cowan
• The Goddess of the Stones by George Terence Meaden
• Shamanism by Mircea Eliade
• Burning Water by Laurette Séjourné

ZDNet report that Microsoft are issuing a tool to remove swastika symbols from a font embedded in its latest version of Office. MS’s font ‘Bookshelf Symbol 7′ was derived from a Japanese character set, and contains two swastika symbols. An MS spokesperson commented, "There was no indication of malicious intent."!!! ZDNet are enlightened enough to comment on the long sacred history of swastikas, notably as a Buddhist symbol in China and Japan. Here’s what they don’t comment on:

1. The symbol for Microsoft Office 2000—the Windows colours locked in a jigsaw fashion—had a noticeable swastika in its centre, though the new Office 2003 logo now is more ambiguous. PC nonsense is one thing; inconsistent PC nonsense is just crying out to be laughed away.
2. Malicious intent?! Really, I won’t be able to sleep well tonight if I even suspect that neo-Nazis have infiltrated Redmond’s typography department, and even as I type are brutally, without mercy, inserting symbols that people find offensive into font packages. I mean, fire the lot of them! We can never be sure!
3. What happens when some poor secretary at the Jewish Defence League is compiling a report on neo-Nazi activity, and needs to include a swastika symbol?
4. Let alone the secretary at a Buddhist retreat in Japan…
5. What about that lit bomb symbol in WingDings? Who wants to blow me up? There’s a skull-and-cross-bones in there for Christ’s sake! Microsoft say they’re trying to combat software piracy, but this is surely a major flaw in their strategy.

In related bullshit, Los Angeles County have raised concern about the use of the terms ‘master’ and ‘slave’ in IT products. Any home PC tinkerer will be familiar with the terms, used to indicate control relationships between two devices and processes. Well, apparently some people feel the terms "are antiquated and may be needlessly offensive".

[Dennis Tafoya, director of the Office of Affirmative Action Compliance] instructed employees in Los Angeles County to cover the terms with tape and to re-label devices as ‘primary’ and ‘secondary.’

The county also sent letters to 1,000 vendors concerning the issue. The county asked the vendors to remove product labels that could be considered offensive.

"We are not into changing industry standards, but we do have a responsibility to look at terms that may have upset someone," Tafoya said.

I can accept the idea that in stuff made from now on, maybe something like ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ would be both technically accurate and placate those insatiable, unhinged PC-heads. But… covering the terms with tape? Are they trying to be metaphorical about America’s attempts to deal with its dark past? They really think black people in Los Angeles will be spared being reminded of their subjected history if they don’t see the word "slave" printed—in a quite accurate descriptive capacity—on a network cable? They don’t think their subjected present will suffice?