upper-palaeolithic-art

In southern Africa, a great many figures are ithyphallic. This feature has generally _ and rather vaguely _ been taken to refer to __asculinity_, but the painted contexts of the figures seems to confirm that, as in North America, sexual arousal was a metaphor for altered states of consciousness.

I now argue that entry into Upper Palaeolithic caves was probably seen as virtually indistinguishable from entry into the mental vortex that leads to the experiences and hallucinations of deep trance.

The Upper Palaeolithic figures known as __ounded men_ occur at Cougnac and Pech Merle, two sites in the Quercy district of France.

Certainly, the sensory deprivation afforded by the remote, silent and totally dark chambers, such as the Diverticule of the Felines in Lascaux and the Horse__ Tail in Altamira, induces altered states of consciousness.

For the makers, the paintings and engravings were visions, not representations of visions.

In altered states of consciousness, the nervous system itself becomes a __ixth sense_ that produces a variety of images including entoptic phenomena.

Shamans submit to death in order to serve their communities.

Primary consciousness is a state of being aware of things in the world _ of having mental images in the present.But it is not accompanied by any sense of a person with a past and future_

Shamanism is not simply a component of society: on the contrary, shamanism, together with its tiered cosmos, can be said to be the overall framework of society.

To understand the __ounded men_ of Upper Palaeolithic art, I now consider somatic hallucinations; these include attenuation of the body and limbs, polymelia (having extra limbs or digits), and, the one on which I focus, pricking and stabbing sensations.

Under certain social circumstances, which may have varied from time to time and place to place, certain people (shamans) saw a relationship between the small, three-dimensional, projected mental images that they experienced at the far end of the intensified spectrum and fragments of animals that lay around their hearths.

San religion is built around belief in a tiered universe. As do other shamanistic peoples throughout the world, the San believe in a realm above and another below the surface of the world on which they live.

Once human beings had developed higher-order consciousness, they had the ability to see mental images projected onto surfaces and to experience afterimages.

Entering a cave_ or rock was a metaphor for a shaman__ altered state; therefore, caves (and rocks more generally) were considered entrances or portals to the supernatural world.

The portable animal statuettes were therefore far more than decorative trinkets: they were reified three-dimensional spirit animals with all their prophylactic and other powers.

According to Martindale__ view, as we drift into sleep we pass through: _ waking, problem-oriented thought, _ realistic fantasy, _ autistic fantasy, _ reverie, _ hypnagogic (falling asleep) states, and _ dreaming.

Improved memory made possible the long-term recollection of dreams and visions and the construction of those recollections into a spirit world.

Some researchers believe that dreaming is what happens when sensory input to the brain is greatly diminished: the brain then __reewheels_, synapses firing more or less at random, and the brain tries to make sense of the resultant stream of images.