Shamanic art usually means the paintings, carvings, drums, masks and body decoration made in and for shamanic cultures, and more loosely any art that grows out of shamanic experience. The oldest rock and cave art, made by hunter-gatherers tens of thousands of years ago, is often read as showing shamanic journeys and shape-shifting between human and animal. That reading is disputed amongst archaeologists, but the art itself is clear evidence that the symbolic and spiritual life of our hunter-gatherer ancestors is very old.
What is shamanic art? #
Art made in and for shamanic life. In shamanic cultures, painted drums, masks, carved objects and body paint were rarely made only for decoration; they were part of practice. Ochre, for example, has long been used in shamanic societies for body painting, and this was rarely done purely for ornament.1 Archaeologists studying ochre in the deep past add a caution: it also had practical uses, in tanning hides, as an insect repellent and sunscreen, and in glues, and the authors of one study of the ochre from Hohle Fels cave in Germany think that practical and ritual uses were probably “occurring simultaneously and perhaps intertwined together”, as is often the case in living cultures.2 See What are shamanic masks?
How is a shaman like an artist? #
Both have to give form to something that has none. Think of a painter depicting a story from the life of a saint. The story is abstract, and to bring its gift into the world the artist has to choose a scene, the light, the clothes, where people look, and inevitably brings the imagery of their own time and place and their own personality. A shaman does the same in a journey: the realms are just beyond our comprehension, and to make their healing gifts tangible the shaman has to interpret them, in imagery the people they journey for can understand.3
There is one important difference. What makes a painting great is often its artistic licence. What makes a journey great is how true a representation it is: how much it comes from Spirit, not from the shaman’s own licence. So the aim is not to bring nothing, since that is impossible, but to be as aware as possible of what we bring.4 See Is shamanic journeying imagination, and how are journeys co-created?
Why does some art move us more than other art? #
Because some art is closer to Soul. Human-made things have no Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer Soul. Even so, they can be modelled on Soul, and the closer something is to the Stories of the Lower-World, the more it moves us. That is why great art can move our Souls, and why some paintings move us more than others: the great ones convey something of Soul.5 Great art also rarely spells things out. It suggests, and asks for ‘the beholder’s share’, the viewer’s own work of engaging with it and finding its meaning, and a Lower-World journey works in just the same way.6 See What part do music, rhythm and dance play in shamanism?
How old is rock art? #
Very old, and it keeps getting older. Carbon dating showed in the 1990s that the oldest paintings on the walls of Western European caves date to more than 35,000 years ago.7 In Sulawesi, Indonesia, a painted hunting scene in which some figures have been interpreted as part-human, part-animal was first dated to at least 44,000 years and has since been re-dated to at least about 48,000,8 and a scene of three human-like figures with a wild pig at Leang Karampuang is at least 51,200 years old, the oldest known picture story.9 Hand stencils in another Sulawesi cave, on Muna island, are older still, at least 67,800 years.10 Older still are the engraved ochre from Blombos Cave in South Africa, about 77,000 years old, and an ochre-processing area there dated to about 100,000 years.11 All of these were made by hunter-gatherers. See Where does shamanism come from?
Does rock art show shamanic journeys? #
Many people who journey think so. The European cave paintings are often thought to depict shamanic practices, and if so, shamanism is at least 35,000 years old.12 Seen through the eyes of someone who has done shamanic journeys, the paintings often look like depictions of journeys and of what journeys feel like, with the shape-shifting between animal and human they so often involve. These are pointers, not proof, and what the paintings mean is disputed, as the next section sets out. See What are transformation practices and shapeshifting?
What is the neuropsychological model of cave art, and why is it disputed? #
The best-known shamanic reading of rock art comes from the South African archaeologist David Lewis-Williams. In The Mind in the Cave (2002), and with the French prehistorian Jean Clottes, he proposed that shamanism or a shamanic form of religion existed throughout the Upper Palaeolithic.13 His model, set out again with David Pearce in Inside the Neolithic Mind (2005), describes three stages people may pass through as they go deeper into an altered state: first, geometric shapes such as dots, zigzags and grids; then a stage of trying to make sense of these shapes as familiar objects; and then, through a tunnelTunnel. The descent at the start of a journey. Still middle-world territory, all the way down: the Lower-World begins only where you emerge. More about this or vortex, full hallucinations, in which people may see animals and feel themselves changing into them. The authors stress that this is an idealised model and that not everyone passes through every stage.14 They draw on ethnography from many peoples, the San hunters of southern Africa amongst them.
Critics doubt that any single theory can explain the art. The archaeologist Bruno David places shamanic readings in a wave of interpretation that began in the 1980s and says that, like the “Grand Theories” before them, they “paid no real attention to the reasons why particular cultures had made art”.15 The science writer Michael Bond surveys the hunting-magic, totem and shamanic readings and concludes that “All these theories have largely been rejected”, partly because they lean on modern hunter-gatherers whose reasons for making art may not apply to the Ice Age.16 The writer Barbara Ehrenreich questioned whether the famous ‘bird-man’ of Lascaux was a shaman in trance at all.17
Lewis-Williams and Pearce reply that their model is not deterministic: the nervous system supplies the kinds of experience, but culture supplies the content, so that the same sensation means something quite different to a Westerner and to a San hunter. The human nervous system, they write, “is a resource, not a puppeteer.”18
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism stand on that model? #
Close on the experience, apart on what it is. The tunnel and the shape-shifting described in the model are familiar to people who journey. But Lewis-Williams and Pearce locate the experience in the human nervous system, whilst Therapeutic Shamanism does not reduce the Upper-WorldUpper-World. The realm of Father Sky and of Spirit: spacious, rarefied and clear, layered in tiers, offering not escape but perspective. Not better than the Lower-World: we ascend rooted, and bring the gifts back down. Read the full answer and the Lower-World to something inside us; they are not mistaken for the human unconscious.19 What we experience there is co-created, in that we give the realms detail and form in order to interact with them, but the realms themselves are real.20 See What is the Lower-World? and What happens in the brain during a journey?
