David Lewis-Williams Quotes
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I argue that the first image-makers were acting rationally in the specific social circumstances ... they were not driven by ‘aesthetics’.
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Some researchers believe that dreaming is what happens when sensory input to the brain is greatly diminished: the brain then ‘freewheels’, synapses firing more or less at random, and the brain tries to make sense of the resultant stream of images.
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Improved memory made possible the long-term recollection of dreams and visions and the construction of those recollections into a spirit world.
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The first point to notice is that the Transition cannot be explained by climatic change alone: human change was not the direct result of marked environmental change. The crucial period did see a colder climate peaking at about 35,000 years ago, but Neanderthals had survived previous climatic instability.
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The elaborately executed art on the ceiling in the Altamira cave did not fit current notions of Palaeolithic ‘savagery’; it was too ‘advanced’ for the period.
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A shaman’s activities as a sorcerer, or his own conscious act of entry into the supernatural world, were a kind of “killing”.
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Certainly, the sensory deprivation afforded by the remote, silent and totally dark chambers, such as the Diverticule of the Felines in Lascaux and the Horse’s Tail in Altamira, induces altered states of consciousness.
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Art was not simply a foregone conclusion, the final link in a causal chain. It was not the inevitable outcome of an evolving ‘aesthetic sense’, as some writers suggest.
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Higher-order consciousness] involves the ability to construct a socially based selfhood, to model the world in terms of the past and the future, and to be directly aware.
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The very idea of Palaeolithic art was deeply disturbing. Was not art one of the great achievements of high civilizations?
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I believe it is reasonable to assume that higher-order consciousness developed neurologically in Africa before the second wave of emigration to the Middle East and Europe.
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The Upper Palaeolithic figures known as ‘wounded men’ occur at Cougnac and Pech Merle, two sites in the Quercy district of France.
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It is the task of San shamans to activate their supernatural potency, to cause it to ‘boil’ up their spines until it explodes in their heads and takes them off to the spirit realms – that is, they enter a state of trance at the far end of the intensified trajectory.
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Primary consciousness is a kind of ‘remembered present’…
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To understand the ‘wounded men’ of Upper Palaeolithic art, I now consider somatic hallucinations; these include attenuation of the body and limbs, polymelia (having extra limbs or digits), and, the one on which I focus, pricking and stabbing sensations.
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I suggest that the type of consciousness – not merely the degree of intelligence – that Neanderthals possessed was different in important respects from that of Upper Palaeolithic people, and that this distinction precluded, for the Neanderthals, both image-making and elaborate burial.
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Shamans submit to death in order to serve their communities.
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I now argue that entry into Upper Palaeolithic caves was probably seen as virtually indistinguishable from entry into the mental vortex that leads to the experiences and hallucinations of deep trance.
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In Lascaux and other sites, hoofs are depicted to show their underside, or hoofprint.
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A lack of methodology in Upper Palaeolithic art research has led to confusion of priorities.
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The economic base of a social formation, the infrastructure, includes the social relations of production the produce the material necessities of life. In doing so, it produces the superstructure, that is, ideology, belief, religion, and juridical controls.
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For the makers, the paintings and engravings were visions, not representations of visions.
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The portable animal statuettes were therefore far more than decorative trinkets: they were reified three-dimensional spirit animals with all their prophylactic and other powers.
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If researchers seek only the kinds of order with which Westerners are today familiar, they will miss, or reject as disorder, all other orders.