Shamanism, Consciousness and some thoughts on the Origins of Art

Last year, after reading 'The Mind in the Cave' and 'Inside the Neolithic Mind' by David Lewis-Williams I wrote a post about the limits of academia, or rather the limits academics impose on their own thinking. In these wonderfully informative and well-written books Lewis-Williams does some remarkable detective work and pieces together the links between rock art, both prehistoric and 'modern', and spiritual/shamanic experience. In establishing the similiarities between the 16,000 - 30,000+ year old European art of Lascaux and Altamira, and the San rock art of the Drakensburg Mts. - the most recent of which it is thought was produced only a few hundred years ago - Lewis-Williams proposed that both forms were a result of the same kind of spiritual experience. Initially excited by the books' exploration of prehistoric spirituality I was finally surprised and disappointed by the author's conclusions.

A few days ago I was reminded of this reaction on seeing, 'How Art Made The World', a 2005 TV programme based on the books. Watching Lewis-Williams discussing his work with fellow academic and the programme's narrator, Nigel Spivey, I re-experienced disappointment. Again, I was struck by what an enormous opportunity for the advancement of knowledge had been lost because of unwillingness to consider possibilities beyond the scientifically acceptable. Professor Lewis-Williams is an exceptionally well-regarded academic of international standing. All the greater then was my sense of missed-chance, on reaching the end of 'The Mind in the Cave' and reading the following:

'Shamanism and visions of a bizarre spirit realm may have worked in hunter-gatherer communities and even have produced great art; it does not follow that they will work in the present-day world or that we should today believe in personal spirit guides and subterranean worlds. We can catch our breath when we walk into the Hall of the Bulls without wishing to recapture and submit to the religious beliefs and regimen that produced them.' (p 291, The Mind in the Cave)

Reading the book there had been a sense that the author was walking an anxious tightrope: on the one hand, delighted to have cracked a 'code', a visual language so long misunderstood by archaeologists and others who had interpreted the images of men and animals as hunting scenes; on the other, limited by the constraints of academic discipline to simultanously reveal and repudiate the true value and nature of the spirituality that produced the art works on which whole careers have been based. There's something in the language above, in the militaristic terms, 'recapture and submit to', which says it all really: our culture, the predominantly Newtonian, materialist, culture, is vastly superior to the benighted, spiritual superstitions of our ancestors, remote and modern, and no intelligent person could possibly find any value in them today.

I might have had greater understanding for Lewis-Williams' position on this had there not been an increasing range of scientific study on the nature of spirit, consciousness and cognition - on precisely what Lewis-Williams wrote about in 'The Mind in the Cave'. His conclusions ignore decades of work by quantum physicists such as Amit Goswami, Ludwig Bass and Casey Blood, who proposed the 'non-locality' of consciousness, and astrophysicists such as Arne Wyller, who suggested in 1999 (The Creating Consciousness) that consciousness, not biology, played the key role in evolution.

As a result, Lewis-Williams' otherwise fascinating research is fatally flawed: everything that the artists who painted on rock experienced happened exclusively within their heads, from which it follows that the only link between the art of the San and the artists of Altamira and Lascaux, is the physiological and chemical similiarities of their brains. The possibility that the similarity in the work might be a result of shared spirit, or shared consciousness is not even considered. This kind of reductionist thinking is becoming rapidly out-moded; it is 20thC thinking. Had the author of The Mind in the Cave taken a step along a new path and considered that:

The problem with science has always been that most scientists believe that science must be done within a different monistic framework, one based on the primacy of matter. […] quantum physics showed us that we must change that myopic prejudice of scientists, otherwise we cannot comprehend quantum physics. So now we have science within consciousness, a new paradigm of science based on the primacy of consciousness that is gradually replacing the old materialist science. […] the new paradigm resolves many […] paradoxes of the old paradigm and explains much anomalous data." Healing Journeys, Interview with A. Goswami ...

... he might have come to a more expansive, more remarkable conclusion, one that could have freed his own mind from the small cave of biological materialism. A conclusion, dare I say, that would have been more satisfying, for me at least.