A LOOK AT NEOLITHIC BELIEFS
Across all the Late Neolithic tribes and clans in "The Eye of Time", there is a very similar set of religious beliefs. Their universe is populated - and influenced, if not controlled, by spirits who inhabit both animate and inanimate objects (animism) and with whom humans must deal in order to have a say in the way their world unfolds around them. The way they do this is through part time religious practitioners called "seers" (shamans, witch doctors, 'clever men', & medicine men in various recent tribal societies), and they achieve this through trance visions and spirit journeys in which they can talk with both natural and ancestral spirits to heal or understand both medical and social illness. Behind all this there would be a cosmic life-force or energy that powers existence (animatism) and which both seers and spirits use to enhance their powers and abilities (yes, this is exactly 'the Force' in Star Wars).
Anthropologists have recorded this belief system among hunter-gatherer and agricultural tribal societies across the world from Siberia and the Canadian Arctic to the southern tips of Africa, South America and Australia. The question is, how far back can it be traced? Despite localised practices and the unstructured nature of the religion, the core beliefs and cosmology are remarkably similar across the globe, which might suggest a very ancient origin for the concepts. But finding clear evidence for particular religious beliefs in prehistory has never been easy.
In the late 1960s, an archaeologist in South Africa, David Lewis-Williams, put forward a theory that the stone age rock art of the region was a representation of shamanic trance experience among the San hunter-gatherers who had painted it. It took him more than a decade to persuade his contemporaries that his was a valid approach, at which point he began to offer a similar interpretation for European Palaeolithic cave art. I'm not sure he ever really won that round, but his theory is at least now considered along with longer established interpretations by many European archaeologists.
According to Lewis-Williams, religion is the way in which we interpret, through our cultural filters, the neurological signals our minds create when we enter altered states of consciousness (asc). Our brains are "hard-wired" to produce these signals that include dots, hatching, zig-zags, and spirals. We all experience these in dream states, daydreams, migraines and sometimes in fevers, but some people are able to bring on an intense asc, including hallucinations, through mind-bending drugs, sensory deprivation, or rhythmic self-mesmerism (i.e. trancing). In small-scale hunting societies these people can become shamans – religious practitioners who journey through the asc into a separate reality (the same one Castaneda was on about, whether or not he actually experienced it) which they interpret as the spirit world.
He suggested that there are several intermediate stages between full consciousness and full trance: The lightest asc brings out the geometrics listed above, with sounds such as buzzing and the swishing of wind or water. As the consciousness slips further towards trance, the mind begins to interpret these designs as more familiar objects: bees, snakes, fishing nets, animals, and ladders. Then comes a significant transition, accompanied often by the sensation of passing through a vortex or tunnel (as in near-death experiences, another form of asc) before emerging on the "other side", where the images have become real. Lewis Williams reckoned that almost all prehistoric art in Europe, America, Australia and Africa could be seen as images representing these transformations. He further cited the illustration of a limited range of animal species in the art of any region as evidence that these were not simply hunting scenes or pictures of everyday events. He held that the artwork depicted these asc experiences, either to share them with other shamans, to explain them to other people, and/or to aid the shamans to find their way to the correct mind-set and enter the spirit world on subsequent occasions. In many traditions, the shift into other realities is accompanied by physical changes, in which the shaman 'becomes' a spirit animal for the journey (Figs 1 & 2). The shift is also sometimes likened to 'dying' or 'drowning' and Lewis Williams has frequently drawn attention to examples of these scenarios in prehistoric art.
Fig 1: Therianthrope (half animal/ half human) in Game Pass, Natal Drakensberg. The figure is seen as a shaman transforming to an antelope - the head & hooves are already gone. His hair stands on end as an indicator of trance.
Unlike Castaneda, he never says (or denies) that these other 'realities' exist, but simply posits that they were very real to the people of the time. These beliefs would have formed an integral part of their cosmos, the parts and totality of which were often reflected in art, architecture (the symbolic organisation of space) and ritual activity (such as burials).
Finally, Lewis-Williams turned his attention to more complex societies. In 2005 he published “Inside the Neolithic Mind” with David Pearce. In this work the authors took as examples sites in the Near East (Nevali Cori, Jericho, Catal Hoyuk, and Gobekli Tepe) and in the British Isles (Bru na Boinne, including Newgrange, and Bryn Celli Ddu in Wales) to show how the art and architecture reflected a continuation of similar beliefs beyond hunting societies.
The idea was that, as with the earlier cave art, the entoptic (mind-created) images at tombs like Newgrange and Bryn Celli Ddu were used by shamans to focus their minds on achieving trance states to commune with the ancestors in the tomb. Not all tombs had this artistic element, but the dark interior, like the darkness of a cave, would add to the sensory deprivation used to boost asc transformations and communication with the spirit world. Lewis-Williams and Pearce's work is a pretty academic thesis, well supported by ethnographic observations throughout, and too long to deal with in detail here, but I would recommend it to anyone interested in the subject as essential reading, whether you end up believing it or not.
In Neolithic Britain there was a widespread tradition of communal burial for a selected elite of the population. These people were buried in Long Barrows, Portal Dolmens, or Passage Graves (in different parts of the country) that were regularly revisited and where the ancestral bones were handled or moved around during rituals at key times of the year (summer & winter solstice etc). There were no grave goods to indicate status or power, and the bones were often mixed up, or stored by bone type rather than together as skeletons. It seems that what was important was not the individuals, but the group they belonged to.
Around some of these tombs – the Passage Graves in Scotland and Eire especially – is some wonderful abstract art (Figs 3 & 4). This shows zigzag lines, diamonds, chequer patterns, concentric rings and spirals. The long barrows of Western England tend to be art free zones, but one, Stoney Littleton, has a large spiral ammonite set into the wall next to the entrance to the burial chamber. All these images may be interpreted in terms of the neurological effects of asc: they are the geometric shapes that people see in migraines, the early stages of trances, near-death experiences and drug-induced trips. Spirals may often also metamorphose into the tunnels and vortices seen in these states (with the light at the end), the transitional phase into a full hallucinatory state, death, or, in the minds of our Neolithic ancestors, the spirit world. So entering a passage grave or barrow may have been seen as entering the vortex or tunnel that leads through into the spirit worlds - where the dead ancestors reside (as they do indeed in tombs).
We simply don’t know what became of the rest of the population on death. Some were evidently cremated, but there simply are not enough bodies in the communal graves to be the surviving sample of the whole Neolithic population. Estimates vary as to the proportion of the population treated in this way, but centre round 5%; a significantly small number. These chosen few continued to interact with the living through the use of their bones in religious ceremonies, and the probable reburial of some of those ancestral bones in special places such as deep pits or the ends of ditches; places where the boundary with the underworld has been physically thinned.
It is
thought by an increasing number of archaeologists that the bones and burial
sites were being revisited as representatives of the ancestral spirit community,
who could be approached to mediate with the rest of the spirit world on behalf
of their living descendants. If this were the case, it would make sense to pick
for this task people who in life had had experience of these same negotiations:
the shamans or "seers".
Lewis Williams deliberately avoided using Stonehenge as an example because of
the controversy he thought it would arouse, so that we may never know how he saw it fitting into his overall
pattern. I think it fits very well (see other articles on this blog), both with
the cosmology as a whole, and as a place for (and physical aid to) shamanic
trancing. I have dealt with the cosmology/ heart of the world aspect elsewhere;
here consider for a moment the idea that Stonehenge worked as a physical aid to
asc.
The ditch provides a symbolic separation and distancing from the outside world, a sensation further enhanced by the ring of close set stones in the circle, which experiments have shown to block and alter sound travelling in and out of the monument whilst at the same time creating an effective visual barrier. Drumming or chanting in the circle would be amplified by the stones, enhancing both rhythmic and sensory routes into trance. The sheltered inner area, with the impassable "gates" of the trilithons and the focus created by the tallest trilithon and the Altar Stone provides a doubly segregated zone where direct contact with the spirit world is possible, either to the underworld through the stones themselves or to the heavens through the open air above them. Added to this, let's not forget that Stonehenge also functioned as a burial ground: the ancestors were on hand within the bounds of the monument to come when needed.
Fig 4: Newgrange front entrance: with "courtyard" where we believe rituals involving the ancestors inside were performed. Is the decorated kerbstone here original, or put there to close the tomb off?
This interpretation is without any direct archaeological support at this stage, but it shows that such a functionality would work. And there is some evidence of art on the stones. Apart from the famous axe-heads and daggers, there are several other 'faces' - mostly natural, and two or three low-relief shapes that could be pecked. One of these, on Stone 16, is a crude spiral. So perhaps., after all, there is something in the stones and the structure that gives an indication of the way the building may have functioned. It makes you think, doesn't it?
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