RE-READING GENESIS I: Shamanist envisioning discovered in Ice Age Creativity bringing this forward to the present
Introduction by Sandra Principe
When I first read Cave Art by Bruno David (2017), I was struck by his quotation from the memoir of the caver, Jean- Marie Cavet, who led the group that entered the Chauvet Cave in south-central France in December 1994:
“Magnificent, translucent stalactites hung from the ceiling like angels’ hair … The artists’ souls and spirits surrounded us. We thought we could feel their presence, were disturbing them.”
Because I had recently completed a certificate of theology, my instinct was to reread materials from my previous paleoanthropology courses. How could a focus on the paleolithic era of the last Ice Age, combined with my newly-acquired grasp of religious studies, help me engage ‘spiritually’ with our distant ancestors? More to the point, all that I had learned in religious studies did not help me to fathom the depths of our Homo sapiens beings (‘Wise-Man’ from the Latin for our species) I needed to deepen my understanding of the psychological sources of ‘Spiritual Vision’ – the most prevalent type of religious thought among preliterate peoples – summarized in my theological studies as ‘Primal Religions.’ I couldn’t do full spiritual justice to our Ice Age predecessors until I answered the question: ‘What is at the heart of our Homo sapiens lineage’? I believe it is the indwelling instinct, even an innate (birth-given) need, to praise the Creator-Godhead, who exists outside space and time. That’s not a concept easily conveyed theologically, unless we recognize that, more often, when a vision from higher sources of wisdom activates one’s interior imagination, we can reach beyond given times and places.
If we examine Philip Novak’s The World’s Wisdom (1994:355), we find some words of age-old shamanic wisdom attributed to Siberian Eskimos:
“An old shaman, for his pupil, does the special element called ‘his lighting .. or enlightenment.’ When the young shaman experiences this it is as if the house he is in rises; he sees far ahead of him, through mountains, the earth is a great plain ….He sees things far away, can discover souls… concealed in strange lands or in the Land of the Dead.
Part A. Ice Age Creativity:
- Early Modern Human Artistry, long in the making
Let’s return to the Chauvet Cave. In it, as many as 37,000 years ago, early European modern human artists and later on, other tribesmen, created art portraying marvelous Ice Age animals. They are astonishing for many reasons, but especially their over-powering physicality and remarkably expressive animation. I find it impossible not to look at them in books on Cave Art and wonder: Did those magnificent beasts look like the ‘gods of the lands’ to the artists who painted them? They were newly-arrived colonists from the Western parts of Asia (at which time Asia was not as extensively glaciated), and the animals depicted included huge and dangerous Ice Age herbivores, megafauna that were large-bodied and equipped with sharp horns like wooly rhinoceros, bison, aurochs and mammoths. They also featured predators, like cave lions, cave bears, leopards and the scavenging hyena.
While these galleries of early art are primarily of animals, a humanoid composite occurs once. Sketched next to a larger painting of several lions, male, female and a cub – chasing a bison – we see the lower part of a human figure . It has two legs, emphasizing the distinctive V-shaped vulva and womb, but it’s head is a bison’s. Jean Clottes says of this figure “[It is] a strange composition [sometimes called] …the Sorcerer” (Cave Art 2008:46-47). Brian Fagan (Cro-Magnon 2010:148) says this blend of femininity and black-horned bison is “reminiscent of ancient myths, a woman entertaining relationship with a god or supernatural spirit.” In my view, the vulnerability of these early people, surrounded by a super-abundance of Ice Age beasts, evoked equal but different vulnerability of the bison, which was preyed on by carnivores. Was this small sketch an appeal to helpful ‘spirit-figures’? Later I discovered such a prayerful idea was part of North American indigenous religious philosophy.
Jean Clottes, until 2002, the leading investigator of Chauvet Cave, in Cave Art (2008), characterizes those painted Ice Age animals as constituting “an imaginary museum,” and proposes the best way to interpret Ice Age artistry is through the shamanist traditions familiar to ancestors of indigenous people everywhere throughout the world.
We know that ca. 60,000-50,000 years ago, when humans departed from Africa, some eventually arrived in Australia. There, they practiced, and continue to practice, shamanist traditions, drawing and painting iconic images on rocks to mark out sacred geographical places. Such artistic giftedness using ochre crayons or ground-up pieces began even earlier, with an archaic society living on the South African seashore (Bruno David, 2017:126). There, artists collected ochres and ground them into pastes to decorate everyday objects using geometric patterns and cross-hatching techniques; perhaps also painting these designs on an overhanging cliff shelter like at Blombos Cave. They went there ca.101, 000 years ago and began foraging for food in the seas, presumably attempting to escape the inland heat of the Last Interglacial, when the climate was more over-heated than today. An inventive people they fashioned many useful tools and lived on in Blombos Cave and nearby Klasies River Cave for thousands of years. Their society dissolved roughly 75,000 years ago, just as the climate entered a cooling period.
The above date points to ca. 73, 500 years ago, when a super-volcanic explosion occurred on Mount Toba in Indonesia which devastated vast swaths of territories around the Indian Ocean and beyond, and which caused a volcanic winter lasting a thousand years. Fagan (2010:93-96) relates that Toba was “one of the greatest explosions of all time…the human cost was enormous … most, if not all of Homo sapiens populations of the Near East perished in the cold that brought famine… African populations declined to four-ten thousand females of reproductive age…”
- “Lionizing’ Symbolism in the thinking of Early European Modern Humans
Going back to southwest Europe, after ca. 40,000 years ago, archeologists found caches of sculpted ivory and bone. This suggested an artistic culture that continued as people moved westward from Eurasia, particularly rich findings emerging along the Danube in southern Germany. One of the most famous of these sculptures is ‘Lion-Man’ (Lowenmensch), which archeologists estimate is from 38,000 years ago, based on the age of the surrounding earth. His slim human body is topped by a lion’s head. It looks like a lion without a mane, and there’s some debate as to the lion’s gender. But the body is evidently male, and its posture is relaxed, as if pausing to gaze outwards, perhaps admiring the surrounding alpine landscape.
Because the climate 40,000 years was part of a warming phase in the Ice Age Cycle, (access internet to see Belgian astronomer Lutre’s graph showing earth’s axis tilt was farther from the north pole, effectively increasing solar radiations in the north), which benefited animals and early modern humans. One of the notable climatic exceptions was another major volcanic eruption; the Campanian in Naples Italy ca. 39,000 years ago. Westerly winds blew devastating ash clouds as far east as Eurasia at the Black Sea. Conversely, the mid-latitudes of southwestern Europe would have been spared its deleterious effects and enjoyed some respite from millennia of glaciers advancing in the north.
The image of the lionized man endured when, a millennium or so later, artists perpetuated the leonine symbolism in the wider context of the Chauvet Cave. It’s most pronounced in the Panel of Lions in the farthest chamber. Since Clottes points out that early Aurignacian humans seldom hunted and slew the giant Ice Age beasts with their light African weaponry, one must wonder if the sculptor of the Lion-Man wondered how or if he would ever become a lion hunter himself. It’s an interesting point, because his contemporaries, the Aurignacians, generally took down wild boar, deer, and smaller woodland game by casting spears from a distance. They would have more in common with the scavenging hyena than a pride of majestic lions.
In the Danube region by the Alps, early human-focused archaeological sites yielded numerous, sculpted Venus figurines symbolic of fertility and reproduction. Sculptors carved plump, rounded bodies, with pronounced buttocks, stomachs, drooping breasts of the pregnant woman, not unlike the rotundity of Chauvet Cave artists’ portrayal of Ice Age animals. Ice Agers realized many animals in their regions were fat-rich, and that that enabled them to survive severe cold. Since they, likewise needed that fat, it is unsurprising that these larger animals were admired even if rarely slain except by an opportunistic killing. Harcourt (2010: 157) comments on Cro-Magnon people living in the Danube Basin, “Adapt[ing] effortlessly to the ever-colder conditions … the first arctic-adapted cultures… essential survival was based on meats, fat and furs, needles and thread.”
Early modern humans wore the furs and hides of these fat-rich animals, and invented the bone awl, a sewing needle, to help create well-fitted garments. Whereas, the hardy Neanderthals, who lived in colder climates, simply wore animal furs like blankets. Elsewhere, I read that some of these early humans sheltered in underground caves to survive extreme cold, because they offered more stable temperatures than above-ground dwellings. However, these underground caves were popular with hibernating bears, so skill hunting was crucial at the times of their menacing appearances.
Presumably, Chauvet Cave artists painted cave walls in warm weather, when bears were less of a threat. They used ochres like black manganese, red iron oxide, and yellow ochre in their work, which depicts plump and rounded animals. Clottes notes that the artist/s utilized cave wall topography, bosses and fissures suggestive of animal forms, imagining distinctive images of one animal or another emerging out of the wall. Consequently, they developed sculptural approaches similar to those used by the ivory and bone sculptors along the Danube.
III. Chauvet Cave Art, Shamanism – akin to North American Indigenous Shamanism
The animal drawings and paintings covering the Chauvet Cave are primarily associated with the ‘Aurignacians’ and date to approximately 37- 29,000 years (Bruno David 2017: 31;37). Since its discovery in December 1994, modern visitors have been amazed and awestruck. Pablo Picasso, touring the cave, remarked, “We have invented nothing.” These days, the cave is closed, except to experts, and then only on certain days. This is due to humane contamination, which affects the artwork and makes it harder to preserve. More later on Clottes’ theory that the Aurignacian artists behind these works likely engaged in Shamanist practices comparable to those practiced by modern indigenous people around the world.
Thus I turned to peruse Lee Irwin’s article (1994) on North American Great Plains Indians, which contains shamanist-inspired visions collected by 19th century anthropologists. Their piety, prayerful rites, sacrifices, visiting of sacred shrines, stemmed from the pursuit of ‘spirit beings’ that, while sometimes human-shaped, often took animal forms. These shamans extended their worship of the natural world to a Supreme Deity they called ‘Manitou.’ Algonquin for ‘Spirit’, Manitou is the great mysterious Being Who rules over everything from humans to animals and weather. But sustaining these traditions was complicated in 19th-century America since their territory was already overwhelmed by European colonialists. One visionary foresaw cattle ranches taking over their lands, replacing buffalo herds. Irwin (1994:29 ) summarizes their religious philosophy as follows:
“….. most fundamental is its implicit, undivided wholeness… constituting the interactive relationships between many beings, visible and invisible, whose ‘homes’ are identified with particular ecological environments. The center of this wholeness is the earth, a living being … usually regarded as a life-giving female… Human beings, ‘the two-legged,’ live on the earth in shared relationships with other creatures, particularly grazing and herding animals… Other groups of beings exist within the earth and water … Yet another group of beings extend from earth up to the sky, the home of ‘the winged,’ and into the celestial: sun, moon and stars..”
A Sioux spokesperson described these celestial or cosmic beings as the ‘Thunder people’ who dwell in the clouds: “These Thunder people have large curved beaks resembling bison humps, their voices loud, and they do not open their eyes except when they make lightning… Their foes were giant snakes and the prehistoric water monsters…” These mythopoetic ideas offered an effective way to contextualize outbreaks of storms for the Sioux. Irwin (1994:32) suggests that the Plains Indians fused the realms of animals and humans; their vision-quests frequently appealed to the spirit of an animal to pass on its unique qualities to the visionary.
“While the Semitic religious tradition has posited divinity as synonymous with the ‘heavenly’ or ‘celestial’ realm, in Plains religious typology… the middle realm is the primary arena of religious manifestation… pervaded by the ‘four-legged animals who bestow gifts on the dreamer … …Any animal might metamorphose into a dream-spirit that appears as human but is a specific image of a particular animal power..”
One visionary said an animal’s particular quality was typified by its habitat. For instance, the elegance of the elk echoed that animal’s inherent harmony with the forest. So, a human keen to receive handsomeness to attract woman might appeal to the Elk-Spirit. Extrapolating this in regards to the ivory Lion-Man, we can infer its lionized head reflected early ambitions by the artist and his people to become fearless hunters in their new land. lands.
While I watched online Werner Herzog’s film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010), which explores the Chauvet Cave’s amazing Ice Age animals, what stood out to me most? I was struck by artists’ use of ‘whitening effects.’ These surrounded certain animals, often giving them an ‘energy field’ to emphasize their importance. One of the most striking examples featured a whitened pride of lions. To create the whitening effect, the artist first scraped the wall he wanted to draw on, exposing the underlying limestone. The artist might use black manganese to outline an animal’s eye, carefully preserving the whited-out interior socket. Bruno David (2017:150) sees whitening as a device for demarcating the animal from surroundings while darker colors create shading, curvature and depth.
It struck me that, as visionaries, Chauvet Cave artists wanted to suggest the celestial or cosmos, evoking cloud formations or the purity of a winter snowfall through a whitening technique. One striking example pf this in Great Plains Indians’ visions is the Lakota holy man, Black Elk, (1994:47). He was a sky traveler who ascended the clouds to visit his ancestors.
“Asd I lay in the tipi I could see through the tipi two men whom I saw before, coming with the clouds. They stood aways from me and stopped, saying: “Hurry up your grandfather is calling to you….” I followed these men up into the clouds and they showed me a vision of a bay horse standing there in the middle of the clouds.”
Writing about a different sky vision in 1918, John Fire described being “way up there with the birds… earth and stars moved below him..” (Irwin 1994:128). Fire was thus initiated into becoming a shaman.
IV. Jean Clottes’ View of Chauvet Cave Art as Shamanist
In Herzog’s film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, one investigator demonstrates how they identified an important artist. Experts discovered the handprint of a tall man whose little finger is visibly bent or crooked throughout the cave. His handprint appears near the entrance, and reappears on the Panel of the Lions at the back of the cave. Jean Clottes (2008:25) interprets this artist’s handprint as intentional and indicative of his understanding of Aurignacian shamanism.
“To venture underground was akin to moving between worlds, and this was done when the shaman went into trance for healing ceremonies. In this way, the shamans would encounter the spirits that lived inside the rocks and inhabited those mysterious, frightening places, contacting the gods through painting and engraving and gaining their good will or some of their power.”
Clottes views Ice Age art as Shamanist, both because of its endurance and the way its images and styles have since spread across the world. He writes (Cave Art 2008:24-25):
“The hypothesis that best accounts for the facts is that Paleolithic people had a shamanic religion and created their art within its framework, as suggested by Mircea Eliade, historian of religion, and later David Lewis-Williams. Plausible for two reasons. The spread of shamanic religions across the north of the planet and most of the Americas, leads us to believe that shamanism is based on a very ancient set of beliefs brought to America by those who began settling the continent in the Upper Paleolithic …. Widespread from African bushmen to Arctic Innuit and Siberian tribes..”
I wondered:Did the Creator-Godhead awaken the imaginative eyes of Aurignacian artists? If so, they are the first, as far as we know, to depict animal figures in their living animated splendor. The Chauvet Cave artists created a ‘sanctuary,’ infused with still living presences.
V. Chauvet Cave Whitening Features – suggestively ‘celestial’
Clottes also lists the animals portrayed throughout the Chauvet Cave (2008:40): There are forty horses, seventy-six mammoths, seventy-five felines, sixty-five rhinoceros, the odd stag, and several aurochs and bison. There is an owl engraved in red ochre at the cave entrance. It was carved on a rock that hangs upside-down. Notably, the artist first scraped the cave wall to give the owl a white background. Nearby a red-painted bear shows head, shoulder and fore-body. The hindquarters of a rhino are also red; and another rhino has little structures at its ears like wings. A mammoth was painted over the figure of some feline, and a lion over the mammoth.
As mentioned, before beginning to draw or paint, the artist scraped the cave wall down to its limestone whiteness, and in the paintings found in interior galleries black manganese was often used to infill the animal’s body. But a single horse was entirely drawn in white by engraving its outlined figure in the rock wall. The Rhino Panel (2008:40-41) is lavishly decorated with lions, one reindeer and seventeen rhinos with partial whiteness in, as well as around them, suggesting they are illuminated by the whiteness.
The large work called the Panel of Horses (2008:38), notably has two rhinos in fighting stance confronting each other. This panel’s focus on four horse heads (in black) is of interest artistically. Clottes calls it “A true masterpiece.” The four horse heads appear as a foursome, and opinion is divided about whether they represent a herd, or are the same horse in different stages of bending down to graze. In addition to the horses, the panel features twenty animals, stag, aurochs, two mammoth, lions and bison. They all appear behind the horses and seem to be drawn in a more distant perspective. Did this scene suggest a landscape as represented by these beasts? It’s possible. Wild horses like to graze near to woodlands, where stags and reindeer live. Aurochs liked swampy summer meadows, and mammoth sought out pools enriching greenery.
VI. Modern Scientists’ Views of Homo Sapiens as ‘cognitively’ superior to other Hominis
In ca. 60,000-50,000 years ago, many modern humans migrated from Africa towards Asia. They travelled steadily southeast into Asia, until, eventually from Eurasia turned to exploring southwest Europe around 45,000-40,000 years ago, when Neanderthals still existed in the region. During those migrations, they coexisted with other hominis, and occasionally interbred with them. Four other hominid populations perished before the Last Glacial Maximum from 26,000-18,000 years ago. Nevertheless, at least two, Neanderthals and Denisovans, left genetic traces in almost all modern humans, except forAfrican people whose ancestors never left their homeland.
By 37,000-29,000 years ago, the days of Chauvet Cave paintings, early European humans were surely intrigued by the distinctive breeds of Ice Age animals in the region. These were mostly grazers like the rhino, mammoth, bison and auroch. They differed from their African equivalents because they were ‘arctic-adapted.’ Despite this, as mentioned, the epoch from 40,000 to 30,000 years ago offered ‘an environmental optimum’ that suited humans and animals. It was the ensuing era, spanning 26,000 – 18,000 years ago, whose extreme cold wiped out other hominis in northern latitudes, with the exception of the Homo sapiens. They retained tiny amounts of Neanderthals and Denisovans genes. Eventually, early modern humans with genes of the latter two hominins, reached northern America, when small groups left the Siberian region towards end of Last Glacial Maximum. They brought with them significant cultural and Ice Age learning and arctic-adaptions, and dramatically changed life in the western hemisphere where until then only animals had flourished.
The brilliance of Charles Darwin’s observations of morphological changes, however slight, as adaptive to specific environments informs prehistorians’ studies of social and physical adaptions that enabled various hominis to live through the Ice Age. Darwin focused primarily on the beak differences between finches, but his discourse gave prehistorians a starting place for their discussions. Paleolithic experts commonly assume that early humans possessed superlative “cognitive skills,’ meaning they had language, unlike their Neanderthal contemporaries.
So far as archeologists can deduce, Neanderthals didn’t create art, or if they did, it never went further than using red ochre to color an occasional stone. They further stipulate that Neanderthals had minimal communication, because the surviving skeletons present under-developed vocal cords when compared to Homo sapiens. Language and artwork notwithstanding, their ability to survive the cold northern climates undoubtedly influenced their contemporaries, the more migratory modern humans. At times, Neanderthals retreated to southern climes such as the Mediterranean in cooler weather. Their last known archaeological site, dated 26,000 years ago, is in Gibraltar, where they engaged in marine foraging by the Mediterranean. This echoes the behavior of archaic African humans who lived on the shores of the Indian ocean.
Early European humans communicated through the creation of art and imagery that stimulated ideas of spiritual communion or symbolical transformations, and especially as composites of humans and animals in relationships. Presumably Shamanist sensibilities were imbued with an inner knowledge of the ‘Spirit-World,’ an inheritance from African ancestors. Those early humans that reached Australia brought an inculcation in Shamanist traditions with them. Isolated for over 50,000 years, they developed a distinctive aboriginal religious culture that retained significant commonalities with shamanist ideas practiced by other indigenous people. Can we surmise that Shamanist religious ideas that began as pictures and symbols, became the unique heritage common to modern humans found throughout the world up to today?
Geneticists and prehistorians continue to trace differentiations among Ice Age hominins species (Darwin-wise). Homo erectus lived in Asia for over a million years ago, and left his last bone relics on Indonesian island 30,000 years ago. Another, Homo floresiensis, dates 100-50 K, survived on an Indonesian Island. They were pygmy-sized and their appearance was similar to their ancestor, Australopithecus, who lived 4 million years ago in Africa. In a Siberian Cave, 50,000 year old Denisovan bones gave their name to the cave where they were found, but also passed on their genes to other early modern humans, some of which migrated to the Americas.
Part ‘B’, Bringing Shamanist Traditions forward to today, inherently the visionary faculty
VII. Capacity for visionary experience may be common to humans and animals alike
Let’s discuss the possibility of a common visionary experience in humans and animals. The idea that humans and animals can share a vision experience may have influenced North American Great Plains Indians’ understanding of spirit-beings that fuse the worlds of humans and animals, appearing sometimes as one or the other, and sometimes as both. It also reinforces the concept of the inter-relatedness of all beings between each other and the cosmos. But where do these visions come from? Likely, they originate in another dimension of reality, which exists beyond ordinary consciousness. Today’s psychologists speak of ‘extra-sensory perceptions’ occurring in visionary experiences when individuals relax into meditative states that facilitate openness to the ‘Spirit.’
Biblically, the outstanding example of an animal vision that outperforms that of the human, comes from Balaam and his Donkey (Numbers 22:21-39). Since the donkey could see an angel in their path, he repeatedly refused to walk through the apparition. When Balaam, a Trans-Jordanian, has his eyes opened by the Lord to realize the angel’s presence, he stops being frustrated with his disobedient donkey. He too could see the angel, and does what the donkey cannot. Balaam began to prophesy, relaying the angelic messenger’s words about the destiny of the Israelites. The angel conveyed higher truths quite beyond Balaam’s time or ethnic identity.
In ancient Egyptian civilization, people often reverenced animals. They appear regularly in symbols and iconography. They even mummified animals considered sacred, like the Nile breed of crocodile. A television documentary, Treasures of Ancient Egypt,’ Part 1, ‘The Birth of Art,’ features an interview with Salim Ikram, an Egyptologist at the Cairo Museum, who explains the ancient Egyptians’ reverence for animals. The Ancient Egyptians believed animals “Knew what the gods were going to do…The animals speak a different language than humans…” They exhibit prescient behavior regarding weather changes, etc. such as the crocodile laying eggs before annual flood. To ancient Egyptians, the animals seemed closer to God than themselves.
Regarding the above tale of Balaam and his donkey, reacting to the presence of an angel in their path, we may ask: how was it that it was an angel who delivered higher truth or wisdom as prophecy, beyond which thought-ideas neither animal nor man could have conceived? This story was preserved in Numbers, part of the collection of the books of Moses, since it foretold an elevation of the Israelites, not so much as a powerin the region, but as wisdom from On High. It was in keeping with what the Lord God told Moses of His intention that Moses’ people become “a kingdom of priests and scribes’ – the keepers of God’s Holy Words.
VIII. Otherworldly ‘Eternal Forms,’ contrasting with this Multi-formed Creation
When I studied theology, I struggled with the Trinitarian doctrine formulated by early Greek Christians who taught that the Triune Godhead of Father, Son and Holy Ghost was “One.” It wasn’t until I examined the “Eternal Forms” of Plato and Socrates that it began to cohere. These Eternal Forms were considered distinct from any earthly forms, and helped me makes sense of the early Christians’ philosophical paradigm. Socrates, in the Dialogue of Parmenides referred to “the many,” which universal term for earthly species was understood as multi-form and differentiated, quite distinguishing ‘the many’ from the singularity of the ‘One,’ elevated beyond all earthly forms; The One remains more perfect in the unchanging eternal realms. This was the first time language effectively distinguished between these eternal forms and earthly species in their multitudes, human, animals and plant always changing (see Darwin’s ideas on evolution of the species).
From Wikipedia, I read that the Eternal Forms can be understood as ‘Visions.’ From this conception of the visionary mind we may we ask; Did the Chauvet Cave artist portray the animals of his times, replicating their size, power and dynamic liveliness through his visionary experiences? Is this why the modern visitors of the painted cave sense “the presences of spirits/souls …” – a man in communion relationship with the animals by spiritual inspiration?
IX. Distinguishing Higher Sourced Visions from the everyday, etheric level
Can we think of the so-called ‘etheric’ level of consciousness as the realm of commonality of consciousness in animals and humans? Hypnogogic imagery, as described by psychologists, often involves waking dream-like imagery. Subjects access it while in relaxed a state, or lowered consciousness. They describe it as a feeling of sinking below consciousness and even alertness. I have experienced a version of this sensation, often after returning from the cottage. I find that scenes of the natural world flow back into my memory, highlighting scenes of especial beauty.
This is what I mean when I describe the ‘etheric level of consciousness’ as a rich source of mentally-formed imagery, neither dream image, nor realistically present . It exists only in the inner imagination. Every day I play relaxation tapes to help my mind empty itself. As I listen, I relax physically and mentally. My awareness sinks into another level of consciousness. I am not asleep, but physically released from bodily sensations. In this state, I often sense changes in the weather, like rain drops beating against the window or a blue sky with fleecy white clouds. They flash briefly across my mind. Often, I see an arm/hand extending downwards, although it isn’t always the same hand/arm.
Moving beyond these mundane, etheric, visions, there exist other, more potent versions akin to Plato’s conception of the “Eternal Forms.” These powerful visions can deeply affect the human mind. They emanate from a higher “Spiritual dimension” and grip one’s perceptions, such that one continues to dwell on the images after they pass. It is as though a Light shines down from on high, penetrating the mind like a Light-Beam that casts everything else out of mind. It suffuses the forefront of the mind with an energy of its own that blots out the physical. (Think of the Chauvet Cave artist trying to portray this by uncovering limestone whitening for important figures and their surrounding energy-field). As in Plato’s/Socrates’ conception, the visionary Eternal Form, is beautiful, often radiant in color. It vibrates the way film or television images do when they manifest on your screen. The image originates in a concentrated consciousness (in its singularity of pointedness), and encompasses a wide range of time and space. It may have a neon glow. This vision is not experienced as ‘earthly’ but seems like a ‘heavenly illumination.’
A More Highly Sourced Vision on the West Bank Road in Israel, 2003
In winter 2004, my daughter and I set out from Jerusalem to visit her American friend, who was teaching at the university in Jenin. As I relaxed in the back of the taxi, I saw its driver’s Christian Elioh (light), and in the distance I glimpsed a sign marking the biblical site of ‘Jacob’s Well’ in the empty lands to the west. The significance of this well comes from Genesis, which recounts Jacob’s dream of angels. He sees them ascending and descending from heaven, and he names the place where it happens ‘Bethel,’ or ‘Gateway to Heaven.’ I continued in my relaxed mental state as we drove along this empty road. Still in my relaxed state, I looked up at a high, eastern-facing cliff. I saw a giant hand reach down into the rocky cliff top and a blaze of light obliterated the stone itself. Dumfounded, I continued to meditate on this surprising apparitional event, but I never fully parsed its meaning. Evidently, it was a spiritual idea from on high with relevance to the present, and commemorated Jacob’s angelic dream-vision. But its specific meaning or significance remains elusive to me.
As of summer 2023, news reports say there are the beginnings of ongoing negotiations among key international leaders about the best way to relieve the longstanding Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Reports say these discussions are closed-door affairs, but from what I understand, Saudi Arabia, China and the U.S. are discussing how to persuade Israel to cease oppressing Palestinians. In return, Israel would gain acceptance throughout the Muslim Middle East.
X. Descending into the Psychotherapeutic Depths, Stanislav Grof
Stanislav Grof’s Realms of the Human Unconscious, Observations from LSD Research (1976) significantly impacted our current psychiatry, and especially today’s use of psychedelics to heal past trauma, persistent depression, and various other mental health difficulties. Grof outlines several stages of recovering past self-memories in his adult patients. He noted that LSD’s conscious-altering properties deepened these past memories and enabled a person to retrieve previously blocked or repressed memories that occurred from past traumas and family conflicts. Grof’s patients had to process these painful memories and unresolved issues before they could process the ‘Perinatal’ experience, or relive memories of their births. Grof believed doing this allowed the patient to simultaneously encounter the risk of death, especially if stuck in the birth canal, and that proximity to death solidified his patients’ will to live, especially once they remembered the moment of actual birth.
So, for many patients of LSD therapy, they find it possible to explore realms beyond their present time and space. Grof’s discussion of ‘Transpersonal Experiences’ (listed !976:156-157), includes extrasensory perceptions and insights beyond space and time. After the perinatal stage, patients may return to their earlier memories of time in utero. They may even access the memories of themselves in a previous lifetime or access the memory of an ancestor. In other words, they aren’t bound by our chronological understanding of time, but can move through it fluidly, assisted by LSD. Some patients experience the life of an animal, bird or reptile, and explore life as something other than human. Many report encounters with Spirit Beings, such as Christ or Virgil from Dante’s Divine Comedy, even if these figures are unfamiliar to the patient who witnesses them.
Let me interpret the Aurignacian artist’s experiences before painting Ice Age bestiary in their amazingly naturalistic presences. It’s possible he had a traumatic and threatening encounter with a formidable beast, but survived. Having survived, did he imagine he was saved by an unseen Being or power greater than the animal that attacked him? Greater even than the immensity of the mountain enclosing the cave? The religious understandings of the Plains Indians would suggest it was. Their conception of Manitou is of a being who rules over everything and holds life, death and destiny in his hands. The Aurignacian artist, rescued from death, could paint the awesome figures of Ice Age beasts – no longer afraid of them.
Grof’s more secular, ‘spiritual philosophy,’ however, takes us back the 1950’s -1960’s, when post-WWII, secular Existentialism was a popular and prevalent cultural philosophy. See Jean-Paul Sartre in Paris who declared in one of his writings, “Nothingness is at the heart of one’s being…” A kind of despair had set into the collective consciousness after the massive brutalities of the Second World War, and especially the holocausts. So, it’s unsurprising that Grof saw the ultimate Transpersonal realm as the ‘Void … Nothingness.’ It’s the epitome of a cosmic re-enacting of the ‘Perinatal’ experience as the human encounter with death.
XI. What Lies beyond this world, but the Light of Heaven ?
Stanislav Grof, along with his wife, Christina, in 1980, produced beyond death, a small book with illustrations from different faiths, accompanied by texts that occasionally referenced Realms of the Human Unconscious (1976), particularly his patients’ post-perinatal visions often of divine things. But his 1980 book, referenced here, features a section on ‘Encounters with Beings of Light,’ and the realm of the absolute, what Grof called “The Void, the primordial nothingness pregnant with all existence.” He also references writing from the Chinese Tao: “At death, the Primary Clear Light is seen … has such overwhelming radiance and beauty that the unprepared turn away from it in terror.” (See similarities with Plato’s Cave Myth.)
A little personal vision (summer 2023)
Recently, at the height of the Canadian wildfires, I woke repeatedly from a deep sleep and became aware of something mysterious. This awareness occurred over multiple nights, and seemed as if a film of light shone deep within my torso. When I disregarded my anxious thoughts and feelings, I realized this inner light that blossomed into awareness, sought to capture not just my attention but that of a ‘Greater Light.’ Leave it at that.
After further reflection on Grof’s observations on the human psyche’s descent into memories of birth, the womb, and the resultant transcendent experience, the following idea struck me. Grof, trained in Freudian psychoanalysis, in his psychotherapeutic guidance, guided the patient downwards through certain yogic centers or Chakras, as the patient recovered their past. With the release of ego control in the center of the stomach, consciousness enters the emotional/sexual chakra in the mid-abdomen associated with childhood trauma. Once patients enter the perinatal stage, the consciousness descends to the loins; This is the lowest chakra, and it’s associated with the instincts for physical survival.
Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor teaches an important theological observation that when the “impulse to life is given up, the attachment to life itself, this releases compassion.” In Grof’s psychology, the adult who relives his fetal-self facing death in the birth canal is liberated, and becomes able to access other realms of consciousness – yet does this simply lead to the realm of absolute ‘Nothingness.’.
The realms of consciousness Grof categorizes as the Transpersonal, represented explorations of human and animal existence, are ultimately surmounted by the Absolute, the Void of existential nothingness. We must reverse Grof’s descent into unconscious memories and move upwards into the heart’s region. My question in the introduction: ‘What is in the heart of Homo sapiens? The heart chakra is a source of boundless depths of love, compassion and pursuit of greater spiritual contact, always aspiring to attain the Blessings of the Divine. In Grof’s beyond death 1980, he reproduces an image from the tomb of Ramses VI. It shows the judgement of a deceased soul, who journeys with Horus to meet Osiris, who weighs and balances the heart of the human soul against the lightness of a feather. Why a feather? Possibly because Horus, as spirit-guide, is named for a falcon and that his mother Isis conceived him assisted by a bird-penis. While meditating on this, consider the echo of feather imagery in the Plains Indians’ religion, Black Elk wings his way upwards into the clouds.
XII. Repositories of a Great Spiritual Mystery – Valley of the Kings
In The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife, by Erik Hornung (1999), I read his translation of the important epic, The Amduat (What is in the Netherworld). The tale was told repeatedly in the tombs of the ancestral kings, and later by Karnack priests. Versions differ, and their texts vary in length and illustrations. Broadly, this story is the story of the sun-god’s nightly journey into darkness. In the earliest versions, the sun-god is represented by a ram-headed hieroglyph that combines the words for ram and soul., Ba– souled, he is an earthly form that drops below the horizon at night. He sails on his solar boat through landscapes seen from the Nile River. He witnesses seasonal changes that range from the well-watered Nile riverbanks to floods and even to sandy deserts, riddled snakes and scorpions.
The fact that the sun-god’s immersive journey through darkness encompasses such a variety of experiences suggest that night was a perpetual mystery to the Egyptians. One they sought to explain. Where did the sun go at night? Surely, a greater mystery is what lies on the other side of death? To them the next life began in the realm of Osiris. The Egyptians believed Osiris was once an earthly king. He was tragically slain and later resurrected by Isis. But the resurrection was temporary; Osiris chose to return to the netherworld to be the king of the dead.
The Amduat touches on the resurrection of the dead. It examines which of the newly deceased souls are most worthy of a reception in heaven, once the Highest Spirit of the Godhead arrives to over-light their utter despair. One of the central incidents of The Amduat is the miraculous appearance of the ‘Midnight Sun.’ Exactly midway in the Sun-God’s nightly journey, it is pivotal to the revival of a deceased king’s spirit, and continues to play a prominent role in reviving many other souls after his resurrection. While traveling on the solar boat, the Ba-souled Sun-God himself lies dead in the arms of Osiris, deep in an abyss. It’s a place of utter darkness that reflects the state of the drowned souls surrounding him. Hornung’s translation makes mentions of former kings, sceptred and crowned, sit awaiting the newly deceased king’s resurrection to take place at the midnight hour. Moreover, illustrations feature Horus in the solar boat holding the mysterious eye, symbolized by a carnelian stone. As midnight strikes, the mysterious Light of supernatural origins awakens the god, still presumed dead in Osiris’ arms. (Hornung 1999: 34-39). In later versions of Amduat, the Sun-God is no longer ram-headed, but wears a red sun disk, like Akhenaten’s sun deity, the ‘Aten.’
When I visited the Valley of the Kings in 2006, I was able to enter the tomb of Pharaoh Ramses IV. Rameses IV’s tomb wall has a few quotations from several different versions of the Amduat (Hornung 1999:30). The main chamber is colorful, and its radiance is overwhelming. The ceiling and walls shimmer with gold against a lovely blue background. Tutankhamun’s wondrous face mask, also featuring blue lapis and gold, echoes this celestial imagery and suggests the young king is beholding the glories of heaven after death. Towards the end, the Amduat says souls are gathered together from all corners of the world and are eventually swept into ‘The Great City,’ a place of heavenly brightness that dawns like the morning sun.
Conclusion:
A Roman anti-Christian intellectual, Celsus critiqued the historical Jesus, suggesting Jesus learned healing and transformation while in Egypt. Centuries later, Christian monks from various orders and communities, sought to emulate Jesus’ life by performing works of charity. One example is that of a Syrian monk, who sat with the poor and homeless in his cloister. He forewent sleep, instead praying that the angels would guard the vulnerable through the night.
When Jesus comes again, it will be like the Amduat’s Miracle of the Midnight Sun over the Nile. He too will shine in the darkness and awaken slumbering souls to His perfect over-light of the supremely illuminated Eternal Form. The Christ Spirit will bring to humanity a spiritual consciousness, inducing our prayerful appeals to the Creator-Godhead to help us adapt more wisely to changing climate realities.
Bibliography
1.Jean Clottes, Cave Art, New York and London: Phaidon Press, Ltd. 2008
2.Bruno David, Cave Art, London: Thomas and Hudson World of Art, 2017.
3.Brian Fagan. Cro-Magnon, How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans,
New York and London: Bloomsbury Press, 2010.
4.Stanislav Grof, M.D., Realms of the Human Unconscious, Observations from LSD Research,
New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., Inc., 1976.
5. Stanislav and Christina Grof, beyond death, The gates of consciousness, London: Thames and Hudson, 1980.
6.Alexander Harcourt, Humankind, How Biology and Geography Shape Human Diversity,
New York and London: Pegasus Books,2015.
7.Erik Hornung, The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife, Translated from the German by David Lorton, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999.
8. Lee Irwin, The Dream Seekers, Native American Visionary Traditions of the Great Plains,
Normon and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994.
8. Philip Novak, The World’s Wisdom, Sacred Texts of the World’s Religions, Harper Collins Publishers, 1994
9. Werner Herzog. Cave of Forgotten Dreams, film 2010, access online.
Historical Visions 