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

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Summary: Are We Wired for Art?
Review: Are we wired for art? And for otherworldly visitations? This is exactly what author David Lewis-Williams proposes in his book THE MIND IN THE CAVE: CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE ORIGINS OF ART. The first four chapters deal with the history of man's thinking on antiquity and how theories of the 19th century such as Lyell's geology theory and Darwin's theory of evolution changed the way we think of prehistory. It also tangles with modern theories and the possible interaction of Homo sapiens with Neanderthals. Chapters 5 and 6 give more recent examples of rock and cave art from the San of Southern Africa to the Native North Americans. Chapter 7 weaves the discussion of shamanism into the picture as to what the images were. Chapter 8, the author compiles all his evidence and thoughts to propel his theory of art, shamanism, brain, mind, and states of consciousness. Chapters 9 and 10 deal with the caves themselves, their structure and their possible uses. The writing in this book is gorgeous and the thoughts are beautifully lucid. Anyone interesting in the beginnings of mankind and his relation to this world and the world of art and spirit will enjoy this book. It will also interest in anyone interested in shamanism. Many pictures, 27 of them in color, notes, a list of further reading and an index are also included. I look forward to reading more books by this author.

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Summary: Anatomically and Mentally Modern Humans
Review: 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.

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Summary: Yet Another Failure to Understand Shamanism
Review: 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.

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Summary: Late Pleistocene Self Delusion
Review: 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.


Rating:
Summary: Stimulating & Thought-provoking
Review: 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. I would like to recommend William James' "The Varieties of Religious Experience," R M Bucke's "Cosmic Consciousness" and Rupert Sheldrake's "Chaos, Creativity and Cosmic Consciousness" as companion reading to Lewis-Williams' fascinating text. The book includes many figures and 97 illustrations of which 27 are in colour.