of religion Mircea Eliade changed that with his seminal study Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, first published in English in 1964. Eliade surveyed the practice of shamanism throughout history, arguing that it is ubiquitous among hunter-gatherer societies from Siberia to North America to Tibet. Because these traditions are all so similar, he argued that they must descend from a common source in the Palaeolithic, which spread as people migrated around the planet, just like the myths studied by d’Huy. Shamanism, in other words, was humanity’s first religion.
Scholars have since questioned some of Eliade’s assumptions. But his work triggered a wave of popular and scientific interest in shamanism. There are now several lines of evidence suggesting that shamanic trances aren’t a purely cultural (or imagined) phenomenon, but represent a universal capacity of the human brain. Neuroscientists have measured characteristic patterns of brain activity in shamans undergoing spirit journeys which share some features with hypnosis and meditation, suggesting that they aren’t acting but really do enter a distinct, altered state of consciousness.
Meanwhile anthropologists have documented the experiences of thousands of westerners in such trance states, mostly triggered by drumming, and found that even when people have no idea what to expect, they report very similar experiences to traditional shamans. Western shamans argue that this is because the spirit worlds they visit are real, but scientists tend to see it as evidence that the human nervous system has the ability to generate specific kinds of visions and hallucinations. Both traditional shamans and westerners undergoing spirit journeys often meet and communicate with animals, or transform into an animal themselves. Another key feature is the experience of tunnelling down into the ground, or flying up into space, often passing through membranes or barriers to move from one layer to another. These types of visions are commonly reflected in the cosmological beliefs of hunter-gatherer societies: a tiered cosmos, with lower, middle and upper worlds, as seen by the Chumash, is an almost universal theme. Shamans in many different communities believe that they can contact the spirits of the Upper World, for example, by flying up to a specific constellation or star. So it may have been altered states of consciousness, rather than simple stargazing, that helped to create humanity’s first models of the universe.
In their 1998 book The Shamans of Prehistory, the South African rock-art specialist David Lewis-Williams and the French cave expert Jean Clottes applied ideas about shamanism to Palaeolithic sites such as Lascaux. Lewis-Williams had previously studied nineteenth- and twentieth-century rock art of the nomadic San people in South Africa. The San explicitly relate their art to shamanic vision quests, describing the figures as shamans in animal form, for example, or spirit guides.
Lewis-Williams followed up with a bestselling 2002 book, The Mind in the Cave. All human beings have the same nervous system, he argues, and the people of the Upper Palaeolithic were anatomically the same as us, so it’s probable that they would have experienced the same kinds of hallucinations. In modern western society, he points out, we tend to dismiss trance states and visions as abnormal or suspect. We value logical, rational thought. But studies of shamanism show that shifting states of consciousness exist, and are highly prized, in pretty much every traditional society on the planet. By seeing cave art only through our own literal lens, perhaps we are missing the point. Entering the deep, narrow caves of France and Spain would have been just like penetrating the nether spirit realm, so perhaps the shamans of prehistory went into the caves on vision quests – just as Chumash shamans did 20,000 years later – and painted what they saw onto the rock walls.
The theory would help to solve several mysteries about the paintings in Lascaux and other Upper Palaeolithic caves. First, it might explain the abstract, geometric patterns that are common, such as dots, grids, zigzags and wavy lines. Such optical effects are commonly seen during the first stages of trance, points out Lewis-Williams (people suffering from migraines often see them too). The Tukano people of South America, who induce trances using yajé, a brew made from a psychotropic vine, often paint the geometric symbols they see during visions onto houses or bark.
It would also help to explain the bizarre hybrid figures seen in Palaeolithic art, such as a bison man at Chauvet cave in southeast France; or the Sorcerer at Trois-Frères cave in the southwest, which has the ears and antlers of a stag, athletic human legs and haunches, a horse’s tail, and wizard’s beard. In deep trances, people often report seeing images of animals, people and monsters, and can feel as though they are blending with them.
Finally, Lewis-Williams’s ideas make sense of images in which the artists incorporated features of the cave walls, as well as cases where people often touched and treated the walls: making hand stencils, finger trails, or even filling cavities with mud and piercing it with fingers or sticks. If caves were seen as portals to the underground spirit world, then the cave walls would have been the boundary between the two realities, a membrane through which spirits could appear. ‘The walls were not a meaningless support,’ he says. ‘They were part of the images.’
In essence, during such spirit journeys, the physical reality of the cave became entwined with the spirit worlds that existed in the shamans’ minds. Each informed the other. People would have entered the cave and painted the visions they saw, physically transforming the walls. At the same time, paintings left by previous visitors would have primed and shaped their own visions. Reality was being revealed to them at the same time as they were helping to create it.
Lewis-Williams focuses on caves as a metaphor for the underground realm; he doesn’t talk much about the sky. But the evidence from more recent communities suggests that journeys to the Upper World were crucial too, and were also represented on cave walls. The Chumash priests regularly decorated caves with celestial features, including the sun and moon; the Tukano painted parallel chains of dots to represent the Milky Way. Rappenglück argues that interpreting symbols in caves like Lascaux as resulting purely from hallucinations is missing something. They were part of an overall ‘cosmovision’, in which the caves represented not just the Lower World, but the cosmos as a whole.
We can’t ask prehistoric shamans directly what that cosmos was like, but after studying the astronomy of the Chumash, Travis Hudson concluded that their universe was ‘inextricably linked to man and filled with vast sources of powers which influenced all things’; an endlessly recurring cycle of reincarnation ‘in which matter was neither created nor destroyed, but transformed into life or death’.
The beliefs of modern-day western shamans seem to fit that interpretation. Sandra Ingerman, a practitioner and author based in New Mexico, describes the altered states of shamanism as revealing a different view of reality, in which other living beings are seen ‘not as objects but as a web of life, where all of life is communicating’. It’s a web that includes not just animals and plants, she says, but the sun, moon and stars. Meanwhile Jo Bowlby, who qualified as a shaman among the Q’ero elders of Peru and now runs a healing practice in London, recalls her first experience with ayahuasca. At a night-time ceremony in the Amazon rainforest, under a blanket of stars, she was offered half a mug of ‘putrid’ drink. At first, she was horrified to see her hands transforming at lightning speed into every type of animal foot imaginable, finishing with a lobster claw, but then she became overwhelmed by a feeling of pure ecstasy. It was everything and nothing, she says, like being in outer space. And the lesson she learned has stayed with her ever since: ‘You realise how huge and amazing this universe is. It’s an experience of connection, of feeling part of something. We are not separated or isolated. The same energy that feeds the trees feeds you.’
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In September 1940, Marcel Ravidat and his friends at first told no one of their startling discovery at Lascaux. The next day, 13 September, they returned to the cave with better lamps and a rope, setting off at ten-minute intervals to make sure they weren’t followed. After further widening the entrance, they explored every corridor until, far into the cave, just past the densely engraved Apse, they came across a vertical shaft too deep to see down. The boys paused. Who would go first?
Again,
