The Dream on the Rock

Visions of Prehistory

Fulvio Gosso, Peter Webster

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781438448749, 9781438448756
• eBook ISBN: 9781438448763
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Dream on the Rock takes an interdisciplinary approach to contextualizing and historicizing the phenomenon of shamanism from the Neolithic Age until the beginning of the Iron Age. Fulvio Gosso and Peter Webster argue that rock art and other ancient materials provide a glimpse of the fundamental role played by nonordinary states of consciousness in our social and evolutionary prehistory. Ultimately, the authors offer a comprehensive exploration of shamanism, religion, and the origins of human consciousness, along with evidence that hallucinogenic plants may have played a key role in this process.

1

Foundations of the Research

The “Religious” Problem and the Origins of Consciousness

If by “religion” we mean (1) a structured system of repeated and repeatable cults and rituals, (2) a reference to alleged divinities or supernatural beings, (3) the existence of some kind of officiants’ hierarchy, (4) places specifically assigned to this purpose, and (5) a notable number of followers or believers who recognize themselves in these practices, then there is no doubt that such a religious or proto-religious form in so-called prehistory did not exist, at least until the Middle/Late Neolithic period. Moreover, the worldwide distribution of “advanced” religious forms took place gradually and in different and widely separated places. Extensive world areas were as yet excluded from it when such anthropological phenomena began to appear in India, Egypt, and the Middle East.

Leroi-Gourhan’s palaeontological researches systematically demolish the insubstantial “scientific evidence” about presumed cults of the bones, the mythical cult of the bear, and funerary rituals demonstrating with purported certainty the existence of postmortem expectations. The discovered finds are too scarce and the possible number of variables too high. He concludes, not without some justified sarcasm:

Prehistory is a kind of clay-headed colossus, whose fragility increases as one ascends from the ground to the head. The colossus’ feet, made up of geological, botanical and zoological evidence seem solid; but already the hands turn out to be more friable, since the study of prehistoric practices is marked by a large conjectural halo.

As for the head, this one, alas!, crumbles at the slightest touch … the prehistoric man modifies his own religious personality, and now appears as a bloody sorcerer, then devout collector of ancestors’ skulls, and again rutted dancer or sceptical philosopher—according to the authors.¹

The complete ignorance by many scholars of the role played in prehistory by Non-Ordinary States of Consciousness (henceforth NOSCs) and associated psychoactive substances has deep historical roots. None of the researchers from the end of the nineteenth century on have dealt with the “primitive mentality,” the epiphany of the “sacred,” archaic supernatural beliefs, or magic and proto-religious “visions.” None have ever dealt with the matter of the origin of the sacred from a point of view we may call “laic,” that is, as a result of knowledge acquired over a period of time employing actual tools able to act on the mental faculties, tools capable of enlarging the psyche of normal consciousness, the ordinary perception of reality.

Many are the renowned names involved, from Comte and Durkheim to Malinowski and Lévy-Bruhl, to Frazer and Eliade. We should not really be surprised by such ignorance in light of Enlightenment Positivism, Historical Materialism, and Judeo-Christian culture, each of which has established and different reasons, sometimes opposed, to evade recognition of the importance of the NOSC and its influence on human evolution.

It is quite clear that Palaeolithic prehistoric man was essentially a “technological man” driven by a condition of necessity aimed at resolving primary survival needs, and that this “habit of mind,” this practicality, predominated in his behavior even in areas not strictly linked to impelling material needs.

Giving a name to surrounding objects and phenomena is the first step in making them less dangerous and more intelligible; the next step lies in establishing cause and effect relations that work if they are repeatable and allow the “subduing” of objects, phenomena, or associations.

That fire burns, warms, lights, and cooks are facts that don’t need scientific explanations, but that it could be initiated and controlled is already a subsequent shift to a relationship between fuel, supporter of combustion (oxygen), and tinder. That through either lightning or spontaneous combustion, regarding it as a “gift” from the heavens with a contribution of spirits of the air and Father Sun is simply another way to signify the same concept that has nothing “religious” about it, even if it introduces as magical a vision of things prescientific:

It is true that remarkable differences in structure and functionality are found between religion and magic, between the priest’s and magician’s ritual practices, but the culture medium is the same, and one wouldn’t at all say that the differential characteristics disfavour magic. Ancient tradition, open to individual experience and creativity, the active initiative of making, the inventive and feverish practice of the “arts” and “works,” of industrious activities on natural phenomena and events, has for millennia often been typical of magical practices. We see evidence of such practices even in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, in pre- and para-scientific research. Mauss and Hubert wrote: “For its practical purposes, the mechanical characteristics of many of its applications, the pseudo-experimental appearance of some of its main notions, it [magic] resembles the laic techniques” (General Theory of Magic, pp. 86–87). And further: “Magic is essentially an art of doing and the magicians have carefully used their know-how, their tour de main, their manual skill. It was the future of pure production; it does with words and gestures what technicians do with work. Fortunately the magical art has never gestured in vain. It has dealt with matters pursuant to real experiences as well as discoveries” (p.139). The same magical attitude towards nature, acting upon it according to its laws, and even violating or modifying them as well, is generally a predisposition to scientific acting and technological inventiveness. This, in antithesis to the religious attitude of submission to the “sacred,” of dependence “as creatures,” subjects to the divine, etc.²

We may note also that the alleged “cult of the dead” is very far from a merely religious vision of the phenomenon. On the contrary, it seems consequent upon a quite material logic. The body without life is for a certain period persistent to the individual who has inhabited it. As such, it has to be preserved by burial, protecting it from carnivores’ forays. It has to be nourished with foods, herbs, and supplied with tools that are stored in the tomb in order to allow the deceased a continuation. And finally, affection for the dead requires the preservation of the bones, nothing more and nothing less.

It is quite normal that in the first close-knit communities specialization of family and multifamily tasks were begun, the sturdier, braver, faster, healthier, the ones better endowed with a sharper sight and manual skills, became hunters and warriors. The women devoted themselves to bringing up the children, gathering and selecting herbs, tubers, roots, mushrooms, fruits. Early experimentation in this field must have been dramatic, especially in lean times, with the significant risk of ingesting poisonous and toxic substances, some with the deceit of pleasant tastes. And it is surely through such trial and error that the existence and use of psychoactive and hallucinogenic substances entered into our ancestors’ store of knowledge and experiences.

Very probably the first discoveries and revelations about the “other” vegetal properties dealt with pain reduction and curative uses, but also other less-explored hypotheses are possible. For example, at low doses the Psilocybe mushrooms seem to enhance one’s attention and concentration level and sharpen visual perception and discriminating abilities, a useful result for hunting. Other substances such as coca leaves, but also the fly-agaric, enhance resistance to fatigue and hunger, augmenting performance abilities for any tasks at hand.

Evolution generates new occupations and stores of knowledge that could be socialized and exchanged. The shaman-healer, man or woman, is one such agent or “employee,” whose natural habitat was a specific metacommunicative context, the “wild nature” dimension³ propaedeutic for entry into other dimensions inaccessible in the ordinary state of consciousness of daily routine.

To find today a “wild nature,” a forest, taiga, or desert, we have to make long and expensive journeys and the charm of the place can be quickly extinguished by a passing aircraft or the untimely trill of a mobile phone. The same safety-ensuring conditions with which we travel, (weapons, food, medicines, various suitable technologies) make doubtful even the possibility of this particular relationship with nature.

During the prehistoric epoch it was sufficient merely to exit one’s cave or hut to be plunged into this certainly dangerous but also undoubtedly exciting and imaginative dimension. It was in this not only geographical but also mystical place that the senses resounded, expanded—the emotions, discoveries, and curiosities fed not only the body but also the spirit.

From an ethnological point of view,⁴ we identify three kinds of shamanism: (1) an elemental or primary one aimed at ensuring a positive outcome in hunting, good health, fertility, (2) a secondary complex shamanism dealing also with home, familiar, and community rituals, with a greater formal complexity and employing plenty of paraphernalia, and (3) a syncretic shamanism acting in parallel with complex religious systems (Lamaism, Hinduism, Shintoism, etc.), predominantly female. The clients of the first two typologies are restricted to family clans and the village, while the shaman’s common features seem to be typically individualistic concerning both the powers exercised and the knowledge transmitted. He seems to operate in relative solitude, and there isn’t in fact a shamanic coterie, a group of specialists who consult and collaborate.

In this case as well the hypothesis of a religious significance appears very feeble at best, if not nonexistent. That the shamanic tradition is ancestral and provides for the abundant use of psychoactive substances is acknowledged by the great majority of experts on this topic, and supporting references coming from the study of rock art are numerous. We will revisit this subject repeatedly in the following chapters. It remains here to understand how the origins of the religious problem arose.

It is merely hypothesis, but, paradoxically, it could be precisely the absence or the transcendence of the shamanic figure (also through forms of mythical deification, see Dionysus, Morpheus, Odin, etc.) and his substitution that has quickened this course.

In absence of the shaman-interpreter, the decoder of visionary mysteries, there is room for a plurality of points of view (this is in fact the meaning of the word Darshana in Hindu philosophy). This multiplicity requires wide-range cosmological and unifying systematization. It is significant that the authors of the most ancient texts, such as the Tantra and Taoist writings, are unknown, but the passage to such complex and still very laic forms, taking other roads in other contexts, studded with divinities to soothe and worship, is an evolution of the natural “spirits,” both animal and vegetal.

But beyond the codification of spirituality, the sacred, and the mystic, a more mundane problem arises: the administration of the political power that follows.

The concept of a “visionary élite” implies the existence of a group invested with power that is preserved over time, through the political-religious management of the authority conferred by the knowledge procured by the visions (as in psychopompic and funerary rituals of the Neolithic epoch). The result being that the rest of the population is excluded from direct experience and practices of the vision.

The élite’s power concerns not merely the ability to manage ecstatic techniques, whether or not they employ supporting psychoactive substances. It is more complex, since it implies the political ability to extend to the group the “fruits” of the vision “metabolized” by the élite, and to manage the resulting power, creating an expectation in the larger group, the aforementioned “believers,” who believe without directly sharing the vision itself.

The neuropsychological approach thus complements sociological accounts of the political role of megalithic tombs by identifying types of “spiritual” experience and showing how this experience and its imagery may have been manipulated and keyed into the structure of the tombs to reproduce social and economic domination.⁵

During the passing of time, the visionary élite sets itself up as a caste, obtains temporal power, generates affiliations and social structures, deepens and codifies its knowledge, and with the advent of writing historicizes the resulting religious edifice to make it temporally enduring. The result is that it becomes even more “true,” increasing the consent of the masses, and also becoming productive from a material, economic, and political point of view. It aids the occupation of new territories, the management of the masses, the control of sexuality and male-female relationships, it invents prayers, sacraments, and apotropaic gestures, which replace the old magic with a new one, it purports to open a preferential channel with the divinity, drives away previous beliefs, and creates cult locations: The Age of Religions has arrived.

The use of psychoactives now becomes “sacramental” and continues as before, even more so and openly in, for example the pre-Columbian civilizations. It becomes masked by new denominations, the Moly in the mythical Kabiria, the Kykeon in Eleusis, the Babylonian Aradea, the Vedic Soma, the Persian Haoma … The suspicion is strong of the presence of such a feature in the Egyptian cults as well as in Buddhism, Mithraism, even Christianity, whose iconography is studded with hallucinogenic mushrooms from as early as AD 500.⁶

Primitive mentality seems to be ruled by an elemental dualistic principle⁷ very similar to what happens in the infantile differentiation process. The plurality of opposites introduces an order into the world and nature: night and day, hot and cold, hunger and satiety, pleasure and pain, sun and moon, rain and drought, male and female. These are the logical constitutive relationships of space-time of the individual and the group, the base elements around which there is collective agreement, a shared reality thus leading to culture construction.

The process primed by psychoactive substances in particular and more generally by NOSCs, involves a suspension of this shared reality, introducing unexpected variables, remodeling the dualistic scheme of thought, putting in a critical position the certainties of the consensus reality. The process certainly forces questions about existential complexity and the order of the world. The experience is the “dream” and dreamer’s dimension, a fruitful dimension, creative, also mystical and spiritual, even religious if set and setting promote such an outcome. But that was not the case with prehistoric man. It follows that

[t]he so-called technologies of the sacred are just this: technical devices, which are sometimes extremely refined, devices that redefine and confirm cultural equilibrium, devices that repair, metabolise and resist through recall, reconfirmation, and re-elaboration within the structure of the fundamental codes. Likewise, consider the induced NOSC as a passageway into the organism, by means of an individual or group representing a specific culture. A crisis, a questioning of the human organism or the shaping of the universe, all of these things are cognitised, thus making way to co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Foundations of the Research
• 2 Sites of the Research
• 3 The Significance of the Research
• 4 Origins of Psychedelia (Peter Webster)
• Notes
• Index
• Back cover