The Mind in the Cave
by David Lewis-Williams
Sometimes you simply have to roam through the bookstore; shopping online won't do. This title jumped into my hand at a major chain store, where the stock is imposing even if the atmosphere is antiliterary. Lucky me.
Lewis-Williams has studied rock and cave art for many years; he is a professor at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. (Quick, how many T's in "Witwatersrand"?) This book presents in detail his theory of how Homo sapiens communities in Western Europe, say from 35,000 to 10,000 years ago, came to draw, engrave and paint a bewildering range of images on the walls of deep caves like Lascaux and Altamira.
Not so many years back, it was common to think that hunters would go into these caves and do magic, drawing a bison in hope that they would kill one next time out. The explanation failed to explain some points: Why did they crawl so far from the surface? Why did some animals appear upside down and why did many have no feet? Why did the artists include people in a few drawings and why did some of the people have the heads of birds or other creatures? The magical tale may have seemed to hold up, but there were these nagging questions.
One way to clear them up would have been to find artists among those "modern-day Stone Age tribes" (depicted in a thousand National Geographic stories) who were doing this kind of magic and ask them. Trouble was that the dwindling hunter-gatherer peoples don't do art as hunting magic to any great degree, even the ones (like the San in Africa's Kalahari) who paint on rock or magically summon game. The real Stone Age cave art did not seem to connect with the present. You could regard this fact as a weakness of the theory, or you could see it as giving you scope to invent. Many scholars took the latter route, saying in effect "The Lascaux artists lived a thousand generations ago, and really there's no reason why their ways should relate to those of the people who live today in Africa, Asia, America."
Lewis-Williams begins with a different premise: The Upper Palaeolithic people in Western Europe had our anatomy and showed many signs of thinking our way; they therefore had our nervous system. A link does exist, and what we have learned of ourselves offers a way of thinking about what they did. There's even a control group, the Neanderthal people who occupied the same parts of the world for a couple of hundred thousand years before the H. sapiens came.
The part about the nervous system is a key because cave art is quite specific to modern human beings. Neanderthals didn't practice it, that we know of, just as they don't seem to have conceived of an afterlife or worn little carved horse pendants. If these contrasts point to a difference between sapiens and Neanderthal people, it is most likely a difference in brain wiring; at any rate, no other feature of anatomy seems able to explain why the two peoples didn't behave alike.
What then have we learned about ourselves that may shed light on the cave artists? Two things, both coming along mostly in the twentieth century. First, human nervous systems under certain stresses produce illusory images and patterns that the whole race shares. Gently press with your finger (gently!) on your eyeball at the outer rim of the socket, and you'll see sparks or converging lines or meshes. Go without sleep for a few days and you'll see things that are not there. (Some of them will be scary.) Ingest psilocybin and you'll hear space music as you see people melting through walls. I say these effects are illusory, but not every society agrees, and that brings me to the second point:
Hunting and gathering peoples that survive today (or did till recently) have an extraordinarily rich spiritual life in which they don't set "reality" and "illusion" apart in the same way Europeans do. Many such peoples (in the Americas, central and northeast Asia, Africa) depend on shamans to acquire and exercise power that lies in a "spirit" realm, which is no less real for not being accessible to those who have not entered an altered state of consciousness. And shamans not only recount or depict what they see in their trances, it turns out that they all see sparks, monsters and transformations.
Now if the hunter-gatherer groups we know about share such-and-such a behavior, and if there's an apparent close link between that behavior and the recorded history of our nervous system, then it seems possible we could draw some inferences about cave artists if we pursued the connection. That's what Lewis-Williams does, and does convincingly. He brings together knowledge about neurophysiology, modern shamanism, and the topography of painted caves.
It makes quite an exciting story: Through disciplines and straightforward techniques, shamans come to a series of states or levels in which entoptic effects (phenomena of the visual part of the nervous system) impose themselves on the world, visions appear, and finally hallucinations overbear all the senses. Most everyone goes through stages like this in the passage from alertness to sleep, but we regard hypnagogic and unconscious phenomena as defective, an absence of something, the next thing to insanity; shamans don't. They have real, but otherwise unknowable, things revealed to them in their altered states, and they are able to tap into power that comes only from the trance world.
Shamans in many societies create images of what they have seen. In fact, because those entoptic phenomena always appear two-dimensional (i.e., as if projected on a surface), an image painted on rock is just as real as what appeared in trance; the picture shares some of the power. What's more, power in the spirit world resides in beings of animal shape, spirit guides who test and counsel the shaman, and so the images often show these creatures. Getting close? Consider also that "dream" animals float in space rather than walking around on hooves.
If our recent knowledge can be projected back 30,000 years, we have an elegant way to explain why the pictures are there and why certain subjects appear and not others. The shamans of the time brought some of their spirit power through the membrane between realms by depicting their guides. The places they chose lay at the interface between the lower and middle tiers of the universe, perhaps where the walls were thinnest. The images not only reflected visions past but also conveyed to future shamans the intellectual context of their practices, since the shaman exists only within the society he or she serves and must communicate in order to make the power work for it.
You will be struck by the breadth of evidence Lewis-Williams can cite and the care with which he conducts his logic. This is a big book and a hard one, but worth the effort if you want to explore the monuments these ancestors left.
I said "hard," and it would not be fair not to say why it's hard. The author writes a meticulous but very, very grownup prose. He doesn't shy from big words; more than that, he seems at times to collect them in perverse clusters. Here's my favorite sentence:
Other components of consciousness, such as Descarte's dreams, are therefore considered aberrations and suppressed in formulations of what constitutes human consciousness.
The thorniness of that kind of writing doesn't sap the value of the work, but it means the reader has to focus closely. Good thing the book has gorgeous illustrations, and plenty of them.
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Mind in Cave