Customer Reviews

The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Any book challenging Established Truths deserves a place in your library. This exquisite example closely and vividly investigates the world of Western European rock art. Not an "art critic's" analysis, Lewis-Williams explains the roots of this enigmatic form of human expression. In so doing, he offers new insights into the idea of "spiritual realms" and the formulation of religions. With research delving in areas ignored or forgotten, the author demonstrates why our views of our Paleolithic forebears needs revision. Of foremost importance is the need to shed the notion of "primitive" as a quality attributed to our ancestors. The cave artists were "modern" humans in every sense of the term.

Lewis-Williams opens his study with a review of the first overturning of how we view humanity's track. Cave art had been found as early as the 17th Century, but the discoverers had no idea of the stretch of time those pictures had crossed. Not until the great insight of Charles Darwin, relying on Lyell's vast idea of an ancient earth, did it become possible to view cave art as remnants of prehistoric human life. The technology that could accurately date these pictures pushed the date of their creation back thousands of years. New finds set human artistic expression to more than 75 thousand years ago.

Lewis-Williams contends that these artefacts are the result of a sharp change in human intellect. About 75 thousand years ago, in various places at different times, the human consciousness experienced an elaboration. The immediate environment no longer was the limit of experience. Humans added what is known as "higher order" consciousness to the "primary consciousness" that allowed us, along with most other animals, to survive. Now, the more developed brain could achieve new levels of thought - "altered states of consciousness" in the author's term. Under certain conditions, the brain might even be imaging itself. Without any means of understanding the images they seemed to be "seeing", Paleolithic humans interpreted these visions as representing a "spirit" world. That world might be "above" in the skies or "below" in the earth. Caves acted as the perfect intermediate place to try to comprehend and react to these phenomena. The more tactile of these "vision-seers" would use the cave walls to depict their visions. Ultimately, the rocks became viewed as a "membrane" between the real and spiritual worlds. The spirits, or "gods" could now be portrayed visibly and even communicated with.

Lewis-Williams meticulously details how many of the paintings and symbols were rendered. The harsh glare of modern electrical lights, he reminds us, obscure the shifting and apparent "movement" that would be observed by people bearing the flickering oil lamps and torches into the caves. That "reality" gave the images greater impact on the artists and viewers as they worked and communed with the spirit world. No universal pattern emerges from these cave "studios", the author makes clear. Some may have allowed a large gathering to participate, either in the creation of images or in supplementary rituals. Others clearly allowed but one or a few attendees due to the restricted nature of the passages or the rooms containing the graphics. These are not, he says, the renderings of a Paleolithic leisure class, but working images vital to the population concerned. Some may have been strictly local, while others served wide-spread communities at various times and circumstances.

With many excellent renderings of cave art images, some in colour, to enhance the text, Lewis-Williams presents a logically developed and well-substantiated scenario. He stops his analysis at what can be seen and inferred from what we know of Paleolithic people. Yet, if you wonder what would drive people into the deep and darkened recesses of a hillside cave, just walk into the nearest cathedral or even small community church. These are dark, quiet places, severing the visitor from the travails and pressures of daily living. Communing with spirits is the raison d'etre of such temples. Are they the modern expression of the forces that drove our Paleolithic ancestors? [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

The author posits a fascinating explanation for the origin of art and the creation of images by early mankind: the evolution of the human mind. He theorizes that the people of the Upper Paleolithic harnessed altered states of consciousness to fashion their society and used imagery as a means of establishing and defining social relationships. Cro-Magnon man had a more advanced neurological system and order of consciousness than the Neanderthals, and experienced shamanic trances and vivid mental imagery. It was important for them to paint these images on cave walls that served as a membrane between the everyday world and the realm of the spirit.

Hallucinations were instrumental in personal advancement and the development of society. He refers to the pioneering psychologist William James who already in 1902 pointed out the different states of consciousness and to Colin Martindale who identified the following different states: Waking, realistic fantasy, autistic fantasy, reverie, hypnagogic and dreaming. The sense of absolute unitary being (transcendence/ecstasy) is generated by a spillover between neural circuits in the brain caused by factors like meditation, rhythmic stimulus, fasting etc. The essential elements of the religious experience are thus wired into the brain.

Two case studies are used in support of this theory: South African San rock art and North American rock art. Chapter 8 is especially fascinating since it offers possible solutions to certain puzzles of cave art, like the mixture of representational and geometric imagery. The author believes that the trail of images from the cave entrance to the dark, almost inaccessible recesses represents a connecting link beween the two elements of an "above/below" binary opposition. Physical entry into the caves reflected the entry into the mental vortex that leads to the hallucinations of the deep trance state. In other words, the trail from the conscious mind to the deep recesses of the subconscious.

This book provides much food for thought about our earliest ancestors and about the evolution of consciousness. Graham Hancock's absorbing work Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind was written in defense of Lewis-Williams' theory. In addition I recommend William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience, R M Bucke's Cosmic Consciousness, Rupert Sheldrake's Chaos, Creativity and Cosmic Consciousness plus Stone Age Soundtracks: The Acoustic Archaeology of Ancient Sites by Paul Devereux as companion reading to Lewis-Williams' fascinating text. The book includes many figures and 97 illustrations of which 27 are in colour.

David Lewis-Williams has developed a unique insight into the early modern humans that painted the caves of Europe. He reasons that being modern anatomically, the function of their minds that were dependent on brain anatomy must also have been comparable to ours. He makes an excellent case that what we call "altered states of consciousness" were used by ancient shamans to access the spirit world and to interpret it to others in their culture. It is not the real world that is illustrated on the cave walls, but visions and halucinations obtained in various levels of trance. All members of the community could relate to those visions because of common experiences like dreams. For the shamans, this was a source of personal and political power and signaled a stratification of society. The author's ideas are communicated persuasively and interestingly. He makes us think without ever becoming ponderous.

I came to read this fascinating book through my interest in art history rather than anthropology or archaeology, as I wanted to know how such technically dextrous images came to be created 45,000 to 35,000 years ago. Lewis-Williams book is eminently readable for the layman - no specialist knowledge is needed to understand, enjoy and appreciate the history and research that the author meticulously unfolds in order to 'solve' the mysteries of these extraordinary cave paintings. I recommend this book to anyone with an interest in art, psychology, anthropology, archaeology, history and even neurology - it is an eye-opener. Enjoy!

Jacket blurbs by Colin Renfrew and Brian Fagan sold me this book; I'll be very skeptical of their recommendations in the future. Simply put, the author has arrived at a complex of ideas about the belief systems and rituals of Stone Age people. He skews data to support his own beliefs to such an extent that his plausible and well-supported conclusions are called to question and sort of lost in the clutter of wierdness. Check the illustration on page 140. Four figures are depicted and their signifacance explicated. Two figures are shown doubled over at the waist. Long, stick-like things protrude from their bellies and project out of their backs. Long streams of something issue from abdomens and faces. The other two are facing the first pair, in throwing postures. One of them also is streaming something from his body. Show this to anybody (I've tried it)and they'll immediately recognize that what's going on is a deadly fight. The author says the four men "dance a trance, or healing, dance...one of them bleeds from the nose". At least he recognized the blood. How about that streaming from abdomens? Ignored. How about the spears stuck through the bodies? Totally ignored. A lot of the book is like that. I want my money back.

I guess this shouldn't be a surprise given that this is ancient prehistory, but I found a lot of the conclusions VERY speculative. Basically the author is trying to make the argument that the appearance of these paintings has something to say about very specific changes in human consciousness. The author introduces lots of related topics to support his conclusions, but in the end its all speculation. I gave it 3 stars because at least its interesting, readable speculation. Some high points for me:
1) The cave paintings originated in separate places well after the last migration out of Africa. This implies that it could not have been a genetic change that prompted it (modern humans have very little genetic variation compared to most mammals - don't think this is mentioned here).

2) The cave paintings have patterns to them - certain animals tend to be drawn near each other, a small set of animals account for most of the images, certain symbols seem to be associated with certain animals, and there might be a pattern of where in the cave certain animals appear. This may have been stable over a very long time - maybe thousands of years. Sounds like religion to me.

There were other things of interest too, but this gives an idea. Overall, I found the facts interesting, but some of the conclusions on dreams, consciousness, etc. very speculative.

For an academic, this is a highly readable book, since academics usually write in such boring prose styles that they put one to sleep after a couple of paragraphs. But this is a good read throughout; the author is able to articulate himself clearly and demonstrates his points systematically. The only problem is, the points he articulates are mostly wrong.
First, Lewis-Williams tries to get us to believe that Neanderthals were congenital atheists, since, unlike Cro-Magnon Man, they did not make art. While this is true, Lewis-Williams goes on to insist that not only did they not make art, but that since they did not make art, this meant they were incapable of symbolic thinking, and therefore could not and did not visualize the existence of an afterlife or an alternate realm of spirit forces. Apparently, Lewis-Williams has mistaken the inability to appreciate the aesthetic emotion of the beautiful for an inability to recognize the sublime, a totally different aesthetic category altogether, and one, moreover, that has nothing to do with images, but precisely with the recognition of tremendous power, whether we are discussing Goethe's "shudder of awe" at the perception of the numinous, or simply the awareness of great destructive force. So, in contrasting Neanderthal man with Cro-Magnon man, we are really dealing with two different types of aesthetic categories, not, as Lewis-Williams thinks, an inferior and a superior mode of consciousness. The general tendency toward aniconism, furthermore, is a cultural style, not a lack of intelligence, as anyone who has examined the history of religion knows, for both Judaism and Islam eschewed the use of images, as did the Byzantine Iconoclasts and the Protestants. So Lewis-Williams's assertion that Neanderthal man had a primary, i.e. animalistic type of consciousness, whereas Cro-Magnon Man had a secondary, i.e. properly human, type of consciousness, seems to me to be an example of racism toward Neanderthals, rather than valid cultural discourse.
There are some great insights in this book, to be sure. Lewis-Williams's ethnographic parallel of Upper Paleolithic art with the cosmology of San Bushman rock art is striking, for it suggests that Paleolithic man did not think of the rock walls of his caves the way we would, but rather as soft permeable membranes dividing this world from the spirit world. The Paleolithic artist, like the San Bushmen, is not so much representing animals in his art as coaxing them through from the spirit world into this world. This apparently seems to explain the phenomenon, reiterated all throughout Paleolithic art, of animals painted as though they were half-emerging from the rock.
But when it comes to undertanding Paleolithic art in terms of the category of shamanism, Lewis-Williams seems to have no idea what he's talking about, for he compares the ecstatic trance states into which shamans enter to mere daydreaming or falling asleep. But when a shaman shamanizes, he is not daydreaming, nor is he falling asleep, but actually entering into a hyper-aware state of consciousness in which he communes with spirit powers who give him knowledge and information concerning the physical world. In doing this, he is able to bring back information that will help cure the sick, realign the magical powers of the cosmos so that the animals will become abundant or actually see the cosmos in a structured, multi-dimensional reality. None of this can be dismissed as a mere altered state of consciousness analogous to fantasizing or daydreaming. The shaman is communing with real spirit powers in a real spirit world, and the health and happiness of the entire community depends upon his gaining of that vital knowledge, whether the knowledge imparted has to do with certain botanical herbs or the whereabouts of game. Lewis-Williams dismisses the ontological reality of all this with the word 'hallucination,' which is decidedly NOT what the shaman is up to.
Nor is Lewis-Williams the least bit aware of the astronomical significance of Paleolithic art, as it is coming to light in the work of the German professor Michael Rappenglueck, whose book Himmelskarte aus der Eiszeit still awaits translation into English.
But if you like your Paleolithic art with a dash of materialism, rationalism and racism, then this book is for you.

this is one of the most impressive books i have ever read (a message that should not inspire confidence, because no one will really know whether I have read in my life 2 or 2000 books)- cave art is one of the greater mysteries of human culture and expression, and every theory necessarily will be a little speculative. This book takes you by the hand, leads you into the absolutely fabulous world of cave art, and comes with a remarkable theory- it's amazing to see how this book makes the link with the fat that our brains are hard-wired to "understand"/"see" in a "religious" (apologies for the over-simplification) way- a view which seems to be more and more confirmed (see eg God's Brain)- links those to natural phenomena which take place in our brains under certain circumstances (entoptic phenomena, visions etc), and comes with a very convincing view on the difference between the more accessible art and the hidden art deep down in narrow caves. we all have to accept we will most likely never know the why and the how, but this is by far the most revealing, comprehensive and convincing theroy i've ever read on the subject.

Did you think up to now that cave art might be of a somewhat remote scientific and cultural interest? Do you still cling to that dualism of the two cultures believing that only science is real science? Read this book and you will forget about that. First you get some interesting lessons in history of sciences the discovery and explanation of paleolithic art can tell. Further on the author sums up briefly but adequately the essentials of a scientific theory of knowledge. A well defendable concept for the development of consciousness and the resulting social changes is presented. Typical stages of altered consciousness link cave art to shamanism and mystical experience as found in the religious tradition ever since. Common neurobiological and neuropsychological mechanisms (which can be also be oberved in near-death experiences by the way) account for all that. It's just a small step from the paleolithic cave to modern neurotheology as pursued by Newberg and others. When it comes to their social impact these phenomenons of the human mind have an ugly and a beautiful face as we know all to well. Lewis-Williams is at once imaginative in his explanations and uncompromising in his philosophical position: We should distinguish between the pleasure we can derive from works of art we owe to religious devotion and "the terrible belief that God ist speaking directly to us and telling us not only how to order our own lives but also to impose that order on other's lives. What is in our heads is in our heads, not located beyond us. That is the crux of the matter, and is does not diminish Bach, Shakespeare, Donne and Wordsworth." (P. 291)

Pays as much attention to how its argument is made as to promoting the argument itself--that prehistoric cave art is probably the product of a shamanic religious tradition. Clearly written, carefully documented, aimed at both the art historian and the general reader, shows the impact on art and culture of the entire spectrum of human consciousness, from rational alertness to dream and trance.