The Cave Painters

by Gregory Curtis

  What caused all these strident reactions? It certainly wasn't the book itself—or was it? Although neither Jean Clottes nor David Lewis-Williams knew it at the time, the idea for Shamans was hatched in June 1994 when the two men, who had been acquainted for many years, met again during a major colloquium on rock art in Flagstaff, Arizona. Jean Clottes had been pondering the forbidden subject of interpretation and now here was Lewis-Williams, who, several years earlier, had proposed a novel but controversial interpretation.

  David Lewis-Williams made his reputation with his work on rock art paintings in the Drakensberg Mountains of South Africa. These are elegant paintings by the San people created during the nineteenth century or earlier. They are complex and varied but often show herds of elongated elands with tiny heads. Some of the elands have human features. Smaller human figures sometimes float above the herds. They hold thin sticks and are riding on long, thin shapes that make the people, incongruously, appear to be skiing. Although these paintings were taken at first as mere representations of the animals and of people dancing, Lewis-Williams in 1981 published Believing and Seeing: Symbolic Meanings in Southern San Rock Paintings, in which he established that the paintings were really a spiritual meditation. The paintings were especially concerned with trances, with visions seen in trances, and with shamanistic rituals. Seeing the paintings in this light, Lewis-Williams was able to construct persuasive readings that accounted both for the major figures and for smaller figures that had previously been inscrutable.

  Lewis-Williams continued studying the relation between shamanism and rock art and, audaciously, in 1988 he extended his analysis to prehistoric art in Europe. He, along with a colleague named T. A. Dowson, published a paper titled “The Signs of All Times: Entoptic Phenomena in Upper Palaeolithic Art” in Current Anthropology, a prestigious journal with a provocative format. With each major article, Current Anthropology invites twelve to fifteen experts, especially experts who would be known to disagree, to write commentary that is published after the article. Then the author of the article writes a reply to the commentary. The language in these exchanges is usually scholarly and polite, but occasionally it turns cranky. The responses to “The Signs of All Times” were polite on the whole, including one by Paul Bahn, who eight years later would write the “Membrane and Numb Brain” review of Shamans. Bahn takes exception to this point and that, but he concludes by saying that the authors’ future studies “may well take us as far as we are ever likely to get into the minds of the Palaeolithic artists.”

  In “The Signs of All Times,” Lewis-Williams and Dowson declare that, while analogies from ethnology were flawed, they have discovered a different path, a “neurological bridge” that could take us back to the Paleolithic Age. That bridge is the human nervous system, which they claim was the same then as now. They say that when drugs, fatigue, pain, insistent rhythms, or other stimuli induce a trance, the nervous system produces a pattern of hallucinations derived from it and not from cultural clues. The pattern is the same for all people in all cultures at all times. Therefore, Paleolithic hunters had the same pattern of hallucinations during trances that we do.

  In particular the authors mean visions derived from the structure of the optic system. They call such visions “entoptic phenomena.” One example of entoptic phenomena is the jagged lines or herringbone patterns that some people see on the edge of their vision as a prelude to a migraine. Citing a considerable amount of modern research on the effects of mescaline and LSD, Lewis-Williams and Dowson identify six principal entoptic forms: a grid, parallel lines, dots, zigzags, nested curves, and filigrees. They also say that there are three stages of a hallucinatory trance, although they are not necessarily sequential or completely distinct. A subject experiences the entoptic forms and only those forms in the first stage. During the second stage, the subject tries to make sense of the entoptic forms by, for example, seeing a grid as a chessboard. And in the third and final stage, which is usually accompanied by the feeling of flowing through a swirling vortex, the subject experiences hallucinations that are so powerful they seem real. This is the stage when a San shaman might feel he had been transformed into an eland. Lewis-Williams and Dowson exhibit several charts showing that the entoptic forms appear in both San and Paleolithic art. More than that, various images from the art of both cultures appear to apply to each of the three stages of a trance. The sorcerer at Les Trois-Freres and the other man-animal figures found in Paleolithic art would be images from the third stage of a trance.

  Then the paper describes how the structure of the cave itself could have been determined by shamanism and the search for visionary trances. The smaller, difficult, out-of-the-way places that are covered with engravings are where individuals or small groups went to experience visions. The larger galleries were for rituals that many people attended. Thus people might crowd into the Hall of Bulls in Lascaux before only one or two or three went on to the Apse to seek and engrave their visions. The communally constructed galleries “may have been vestibules where novices absorbed the power of imposing and sometimes ritually renewed depictions before venturing farther into the caves or being left alone for their personal quest.” In other words, the large, communal galleries prepared those few going farther into the cave for what they were about to see in their coming visions. Then, having gone deeper into the cave to experience visions, the selected few traced the visionary images they saw on the walls of the cave in order to preserve and remember them. Thus, Lewis-Williams and Dowson say the Paleolithic artists “were merely touching and marking what was already there.”

  Jean Clottes was familiar with this paper and with the rest of Lewis-Williams's work. He approached him at the colloquium in Flagstaff and said, “David, you are familiar with shamanism, and I have a certain knowledge of Paleolithic art in the caves.” He then proposed that the two of them test the theories about shamanism in the painted caves in Europe.

  Lewis-Williams replied serenely, “Nothing would give me greater pleasure.”

  It was more than a year before their trip together began. But finally, in October 1995, they visited twelve caves, including Les Trois-Freres and Lascaux, that were in different parts of France and of many different ages. In the course of this journey Jean became convinced “that shamanism—both the concept of the universe and the practices it engenders in so many regions of the world—responds better than any other to certain particulars of the art of the deep caves.” The two men had intended to write only an article after their journey but decided to write a book instead. In fact, they decided to write a daring book. First, it would grapple with the “thorny problem of interpretation,” and second, more daring still, it would do so with ethnological analogies.

  “Shaman” is a word from the language of a Siberian tribe.

  From the time of Marco Polo, European travelers to Siberia had been astonished by certain honored members of the tribe who would dress in animal skins and antlers, dance while beating on a drum, and eventually fall into a frenzied trance. In that condition they could converse with spirits, tell the future, heal the sick, influence game animals, and so on. Similar beliefs and practices turn up in hunter-gathering societies in North and South America, Australia, Asia, and Africa. The means of inducing the trance include dancing; chanting; pain; deprivation of water, food, or light; and eating narcotic or psychotropic plants. Often these inducements are used in combination. But the goal of the trance remains the same: to enter the spirit world. Typically, shamanistic societies think of the cosmos as having three tiers. There is the upper tier of the heavens, then the world of everyday life, and finally the depths of the earth and the world below. The spirits live in the worlds above and below. The tiers are not necessarily sharply separated but tend to blend into one another. Shamans have the ability to travel in their trances from the everyday world into the world above and the world below and commune, not necessarily comfortably, with the spirits that live in both places.

  The Shamans of Prehistory consists of t
he theories Lewis-Williams expressed in “The Signs of All Times” buttressed and expanded by Jean Clottes's intimate knowledge of prehistoric art and life. The authors begin with the bones, shells, and flints stuck into the walls in Enlene and Les Trois-Freres as well as finger tracings and similar examples from other caves where the ancient hunters seemed to be touching the walls of the cave or trying to penetrate them in some fashion. The authors explain this behavior by turning to the shamanistic cosmos with its belief in an underworld. “Understandably enough, they [the Paleolithic people] would have believed that caves led into that subterranean tier of the cosmos. The walls, ceilings, and floors of the caves were therefore little more than a thin membrane between themselves and the creatures and happenings of the underworld.” And the frequent use of natural features of the cave wall to suggest shape or volume in the paintings shows that the walls themselves influenced the artists who made the images. According to the theories of Annette Laming-Emperaire and Andre Leroi-Gourhan, the artists had an ideal plan involving the pairing of various animals and they took the plan with them into the cave. But according to Clottes and Lewis-Williams, exactly the opposite is true. It was the shape of the cave wall that imposed certain animals on the artists.

  The image of the wall as a membrane between the real world and the spirit world leads Clottes and Lewis-Williams to a particularly beautiful interpretation of the presence of painted hands in so many caves. Usually, the hands were made by placing a hand and forearm against the wall. Then either that person or someone else blew or spat a number of tiny bursts of red paint until the hand and the wall around it were covered. When the hand was removed, the negative image of a hand outlined in red remained on the wall. The authors, though, don't think these hands are pictures in the usual sense. Instead, it “was the act of covering the hand and the immediately adjacent surfaces with (usually red but sometimes black) paint that was important. People were sealing their own or others’ hands into the walls, causing them to disappear beneath what was probably a spiritually powerful and ritually prepared substance, rather than “paint” in our sense of the word. The moments when the hands were “invisible,” rather than the prints that were left behind were what mattered most… Like the pieces of bone in Enlene, the hands thus reached into the spiritual realm behind the membrane of the rock, though in this case paint acted as a solvent that dissolved the rock.”

  This analysis, and the image of a hand covered with red melting into red-painted rock, has a combination of logic and emotional power that makes it believable. In the final chapter Clottes and Lewis-Williams let their imaginations range further. Using the structure of the caves and analogies with the behavior of contemporary shamanistic societies, they try to explain what happened in the caves. They begin by recapitulating Lewis-Williams's ideas that the larger rooms with well-conceived and finished paintings were a place to prepare those seeking visions for what they were about to see. Since there is always a degree of randomness in hallucinations, this preparation reduced the amount of idiosyncrasy and “tried to discredit any originality and individuality that may have challenged the religious and political status quo.” After the communal meeting in the large spaces, a few participants went on to the smaller, isolated areas of the cave. There they pursued their visions and swiftly sketched them on the walls. Or perhaps they searched the bumps and fissures in the wall afterward for vestiges of the visions and sketched in the remainder to re-create what they had seen. That done, the rite was over: “Transformed by their visions, filled with new power and insight, the questers returned through the entrails of the underworld, past the communally produced images that had prepared their minds, and out of the cave to rejoin their society in a new role, the role of shaman, seer, and intrepid penetrator of the underworld.”

  This whole scene is an imaginative vision itself, but it is not, as some critics claimed, a hallucination. It is consistent with the clear structure of the caves and with typical shamanistic practices around the world. And certain qualities of the paintings themselves, qualities that have puzzled researchers since the discovery of Altamira, support the ideas in Shamans. Why do the animals appear to be floating rather than standing on the ground? Why don't the animals appear in natural surroundings with trees, grass, rivers, and other features of the landscape? The painters didn't care at all about the relative size of the animals. A tiny mammoth might have a huge bison looming over him. How can that be? The animals, generally speaking, don't react to one another. The horses and bison in Leroi-Gourhan's pairing aren't doing anything and don't seem even to be aware of one another. Hunting is filled with drama, blood, and death. Why don't we see that drama? For that matter, as scholars have remarked since Breuil, the animals most frequently painted on the walls are not the ones most frequently hunted. But all of these apparent anomalies make sense if the animals on the cave walls are not real animals after all, despite the realism of the art. Instead, Clottes and Lewis-Williams aver, they were animals first seen as visions in a hallucination. This theory doesn't insist that all the paintings and engravings were done during trances, although some of them probably were. Large compositions such as the Hall of Bulls in Lascaux were obviously planned and took some time to execute. But in many cases their purpose was to reproduce the experience of being in a trance.

  Jean Clottes was extremely proud of The Shamans of Prehistory and thought that “no other explanation presently available fits and explains more hard Upper Paleolithic evidence.” He thought that this shamanistic interpretation would lead future research and mean that Shamans was the culmination of a lifetime of work that could take its place beside Breuil's Four Hundred Centuries of Cave Art and Leroi-Gourhan's Treasures of Prehistoric Art. Clottes's own proud feelings are the reason that the reactions against the book confused, dismayed, and angered him. If the silent treatment from his colleagues had been all, that would have been bad enough. But the attacks from many sides were loud and often personal and it finally got under his skin. In 2001 a new edition of Shamans appeared in France, and Clottes added an afterword that responded to his critics. With notes and bibliography it runs eighty pages. Paul Bahn's “Membrane and Numb Brain” review annoyed Clottes so much that at one point he counts the number of question marks—seven—and the number of exclamation points— fourteen—in the review in an attempt to show that Bahn was not developing a rational argument so much as frothing at the mouth.

  And Bahn's review certainly was filled with contempt and ridicule. He said that “these remarkable fantasies make one wonder if the authors have themselves conjured up these visions out of an altered state of consciousness, like latter-day Edgar Cayces.” Elsewhere he spoke of scholars who had contracted “shamania.”

  But the negative chorus included many more than just Paul Bahn. Part of the hostility came simply because, to some people, the discussion of trances and drugs suggested LSD, the excesses of the 1960s, and New Age goofiness. One critic said the book “surpasses in extravagance the psychedelic ravings of the minions of Carlos Castaneda.” Then, too, many scholars believe that interpreting the paintings is impossible. “The meaning has disappeared forever,” one critic said. Paul Bahn added, “A growing number of researchers have decided to abandon the vain quest for meaning.” Therefore, since the meaning of the paintings is exactly what Shamans tries to explain, it must be foolhardy and deluded. As for the rest of the criticism, most of it is either unfairly based on misunderstandings or omissions. Some of it is simply personal hostility. It is hardly the first time that has played a role in the highest realms of French prehistory.

  To be fairer to the critics than they were to Clottes and Lewis-Williams, Shamans does shamelessly argue from analogy by drawing on observations of shamanistic societies in the recent past and in the present and then applying them to the Paleolithic Age. Sometimes these comparisons lead to passages, such as the following, that are far more speculative than they should be: “The various participants would have experienced a range of mental states. Those who were m
ost intensely seeking visions may have used psychotropic drugs to induce deep trance. Others, caught up in the ritual dancing and music, believed that they could share some but not all of the insights that the leading shaman, or shamans, experienced. Still other people, on the fringe of the activity, were probably less intensely swept along by the rituals. They experienced euphoria, but did not themselves see visions.” Perhaps all this happened, but the authors surely cannot know who among Paleolithic people felt some euphoria and who felt less. This is what Annett Laming-Emperaire feared prehistory might become—a historical novel.

  In 2002 David Lewis-Williams published The Mind in the Cave, a lengthy book that elaborates the fundamental ideas he and Jean Clottes had expressed in The Shamans of Prehistory. But, unfortunately perhaps, the shamanistic theory has not inspired either many converts or new and productive research. Still, Shamans is a brave book and an important one. Despite occasional excesses, it confronted the meaning of the cave paintings head-on and argued for an interpretation that was consistent within itself and with the facts presented by the caves. Yes, that interpretation was suggested by ethnographic analogy, but that in itself doesn't mean it is wrong. Shamans arrived, it was vilified, and now it is generally ignored by academics. Perhaps its day will come.