Spirit and Art: and the Puzzles of Paradox

By Van James

Today, the word spirit and the term spiritual are often reserved for the religion page of the newspaper, held captive at church, or exiled to New Age circles. But the questions of origin andbirth, life and fertility, reincarnation and karma, and death and transformation have long been connected with spirit and have been communicated by means of art throughout the ages. Images of gods and goddesses, angels and demons may have given way to pictures of landscapes and abstract forms, but what can we understand from such changes? Throughout human history, spiritthe shamanic trance state, mystic revelation, divine inspiration, religious devotion, enlightened thinking, individual selfexpression, the Spirit of the Agehas inspired change and transformation in human consciousness. Art is a picture of the spirit, in its many forms, articulating what it means to be human. Any period in history can show us through its art the nature of human consciousness at a particular time. From the Paleolithic era to the present time, art has acted as a self-portrait of the human condition and has served as a family album or picture book of our humanity. Shamanic art is one of the earliest such self-portraits, at its height during the Paleolithic era, between circa 42,000 and 12,000 BCE. The term shaman, once used to describe the sages and medicine people of the Tungus tribes ofSiberia, is now generally applied to certain people and practices found in almost all indigenous cultures throughout the world. Three essential elements are found in most shamanic traditions: (1) Shamans voluntarily enter visionary states of consciousness, during which (2) they experience non-ordinary realms of existence where (3) they gain knowledge and power for themselves or for their communities (Cowan, p.3). This journey into the supersensory, where the shaman is helped by spirit guides that appear most often in animal forms, usually leads to initiatory crisis, an experience of oneness with the fabric of the universe, and the ability to prophesy, heal, and control natural phenomena. The paintings of the Paleolithic caves may have been used in this connection. By depicting animal images in caves, the shaman may have stimulated a supersensory experience, entered the Otherworld by means of altered consciousness, and gained knowledge through this contact. The ritual artistic act of painting and drawing, together with other means, can be seen as a vehicle for paleo-shamanic practices.

Neuropsychological research distinguishes three overlapping yet discernible stages of trance experience. These begin with the seeing of geometric forms, such as dots, circles, crescents, zigzags, grids, or parallel and wavy lines. These forms, called phosphenes, have a luminous, brightly colored, pulsating character that uctuates and metamorphoses. When the subject's eyes are open, these phosphenes are seen as though projected transparently upon surfaces such as rock walls. In the second stage of trance condition, some forms are given more signicance than others and are seen as images of objects: A crescent may be a bowl, a zigzag may be a snake, and a grid a ladder. The third stage is entered by way of a tunnel or vortex experience, at the end of which a bright light is seen. The geometric forms of stage one transform into the lattice structure of the vortex into which the subject is pulled. Animal, human, and anthropozoomorphic gures begin to appear. Subjects feel by this third stage that they can y and turn into animals or birds. Subjects become what they see. Jean Clottes and J. D. Lewis-Williams note that: These three stages are universal and wired into thehuman nervous system, though the meanings given to the geometrics of Stage One, the objects into which they are illusioned in Stage Two, and the hallucinations of Stage Three are all culture-specic. . . a San shaman may see an eland antelope; an Inuit will see a polar bear or a seal. But, allowing for such cultural diversity, we can be fairly sure that the three stages of altered consciousness provide a framework for an understanding of shamanic experiences (p.19) Although some researchers acknowledge the shamanic experience, it is often viewed as strictlyhallucinatory and illusory in nature. This raises the question, Do we regard all shamanic experiences as hallucinatory or are there such things as valid and objective spiritual experiences?

A Lapp shamans drum, collected in the early nineteenth century from northern Sweden, depicts thetraditional three worlds of (1) Middle Earth, the realm of human beings; (2) the Underworld, land of elemental spirits and souls of the dead; and (3) the Upperworld of gods and guardian spirits. The shaman rst descends into the Underworld in a trance state induced by beating the drum and then ascends to the Upperworld pictured as a ride on a sleigh drawn by a reindeer and followed by a dog (g. 1). During the Paleolithic era, entering a cave may have been equated with entering into deep trance by way of the tunnel experience. Images on the cave walls may have paralleled visions attained through altered states of consciousness, thereby providing a link between inner and outer experiences.

Many of the animal paintings are believed to have been blown or spat, rather than drawn with a brushliketool. In this way a very different relationship to the image was made possible. Michel Lorblanchetsuggests that spitting is a way of projecting yourself onto the wall, becoming one with the horse youare painting. Thus the action melds with the myth. Perhaps a shaman did this as a way of passinginto the world beyond. This technique can be seen as a way of breathing life into the image.

It is possible that many of the anthropozoomorphic gures depicted in some of the three hundredknown Paleolithic cave sites, and often called Sorcerers or Animal Masters, are indeed shamans onritual journeys or in visionary trance states. The Sorcerer of Les Trois Frres, for example, is atwo-and-one-half footlong, part-animal, part-human gure, fteen feet above the oor level of aFrench Pyrenees cave (g. 2). With stag antlers and ears, alert owl eyes, long hermit beard, bear or lion forepaws, human feet, and a short fox or pony tail, the gure oversees numerous animal images in the subterranean chamber. It is conservatively dated at about 14,000 BCE. Throughout primal history there are many examples of these anthropozoomorphic gures with stag antlers or cow horns. The gures found at Les Trois Frres and Le Gabillou (g. 3) are perhaps the most impressive examples of this Paleolithic theme. In later prehistory, hornor antler-crowned shamans are found represented in many places throughout the world (g. 4).

In the Nordic creation myth of the Edda, the World Stag stands atop the World Ash Tree, Yggdrasil.From the antlers of this mythic stag drops of water fall down, creating the twelve rivers or streamsthat give life to the world. Ernst Uehli suggests that the streams are a picture of the major nervesin the human head. According to him, this creation tale describes the head as an image of the cosmos, and the senses arise in order that perception of this cosmos may occur. Uehli connects the stag-man of Les Trois Frres to initiation practices and early mystery cults of the Paleolithic era. He suggests that the conductors of initiation for these cave mysteries called on the help of the stag imagination in order that the candidate would experience the forces at work in the forming of the head organization. According to Uehli, it is through penetrating such spiritual imaginations that primal humanity learned something of the signicance of the senses and the nervous system in a direct, instinctive manner. From this perspective, the antlers are a pictorial imagination of the formative life forces or chiconnected to nerve activity, ideation, and sense perception. In this way, the antlers are an earlyartistic representation of what was perceived by primal humanity as radiating light that extends beyond and around the head. In other words, antlers and horns may indicate primal halos or auras. The halo is well documented in the history of art as a spiritual emanation surrounding the heads and bodies of buddhas, bodhisatvas, saints, and spirit beings. Antlers, horns, halos, and crowns are pictures of extrasensory capacities that stand behind the spiritual activity of thinking or knowing beings. In the last line of the "Song of Amergin," one of the oldest remnants of Irish literature, Amergin,the Milesian bard, declares, "I can shift my shape like a god." This reference to the shamanic abilityto shape-shift (the capacity to live as, identify with, and become one with other objects, beings, and phenomena) might

also be translated as I am the god who creates in the head of man the re of thought. Put simply, this line might be paraphrased as I am the re of imagination or I burn with visions of the spirit world. Tom Cowan says about this phrase Shapeshifting occurs in the head and is analogous to re, the most radically transformative of the elements(p. 35). All of these aspects, contained in this simple phrase by Amergin, pertain to the artistic rendering of the horned and antlered Animal Master. Life, thought, imagination, vision, re in the head, and shape-shifting all relate to the antler-crowned shaman. So the question arises, Are these horns images of an extended vision, a new vision brought to birth in the Paleolithic caves through directed ritual artistic activity?

The spiritual meaning of horns is also mentioned in the Bible with the Hebraic prophet Moses, who, as the visionary author of Genesis and spiritual leader of the chosen people, is endowed with exceptional magic powers that are represented by "horns of re" emerging from his brow. Artists of the Renaissance depict this Old Testament gure with two horns of light or antlerlike columns of re rising out of his forehead. Perhaps the most powerful artistic rendering of this biblical prophet is the sculpture Michelangelo carved for the tomb of Pope Julius II (g. 5). The artist clearly depicts Moses with two horns upon his head. The horns are pictorial imaginings of the energy of vision and prophecy possessed by the shaman-initiate, as well as of the re of creative spirit that extends beyond ordinary brain-bound thinking. Although Michelangelo would not have intended such a thing, they can also be seen as a reference to the two-petaled brow chakra of Indian esoteric tradition associated with the pineal gland between the eyebrows, sometimes called the third eye.

Images such as the Sorcerer of Les Trois Frres lead us to inquire whether such anthropozoomorphic gures represent (1) actual creatures that lived at the time, (2) fanciful beings invented by early humans, (3) hallucinations, (4) shamans in animal costume, (5) supersensory impressions of the shaman priests seen through the still-visionary consciousness of primal peoples, or (6) spirit beings. In different cases any one of these possibilities may be true. However, it is likely that in many cases early humanity is depicting the supernatural animal forces, the spirit guides, as they pertain to primal human experience.

Ritual masks, costumes, headdresses, crowns, capes, and other garments that were featured in cave art were probably donned as clairvoyant faculties began to decline among primal humanity. The art of costume initially had its place in cultic practices and probably approximated the actual picture formed in visionary experience. This is not to say that more mundane uses were not possible for sacred objects. However, the original inspiration for sacred objects such as the table (altar), the wheel (solar symbol), the dagger (sun ray), the headdress (halo), and clothing (body aura) appears to have been ritually motivated in connection with early sacred practices. The wearing of animal skins and horns had the signicance of aiding the shaman on his or her vision quest or spirit journey to nd the Animal Master and spirit guide. In this regard, Joseph Campbell points out:
The masks that in our demythologized time are lightly assumed for the entertainments of a costumeball or Mardi Grasand may actually, on such occasions, release us to activities and experiences which might otherwise have been tabooedare vestigial of an earlier magic, in which the powers to be invoked were not simply psychological, but cosmic. For the appearances of the natural order, which are separate from each other in time and space, are in fact the manifestations of energies that inform all things and can be summoned to focus at will. (p. 93) ;">

A powerful image found at Lascaux depicts a bird-headed human gure positioned diagonally above astaff topped with a bird efgy, the bird features signifying the shaman's avian transformation and spirit ight (g. 6). The gure, probably a shaman, is immediately in front of an apparently disemboweled bison crossed with a lance. Often described as depicting a hunting accident, this picture is one of the most narrative images in Paleolithic art and suggests an animal sacrice. It is called the "wounded man" or "killed man" scene, but it may represent an initiatory trance death rather than a hunting mishap. The animal sacrice is made to the gods; the shaman enters into trance and is guided with the help of the animal spirit into the Otherworld. The bird staff is the magic symbol of the trance ascent, for wherever it is placed it becomes the bird-topped Tree of Life at the Center of the World and the vehicle upon which the shaman rises to the Upper World. The shaman, with erect penis, engages in a reversal of the birth experience as he enters the contracting and constricting uterine tunnels of Mother Earth to regain union with the nourishing maternal womb of creation. He is the "wounded man" in the sense that he suffers a death to his lower self in the trance condition and, aided by an animal sacrice, soars to the top of the Staff of Life. Robert Ryan characterizes the shamanAnimal Master's relationship to the cave as a returning to the source of creation. The ithyphallic shaman's penetration of the maternal cave of power is a return to the deep structures of the human mind, the formal source of our experience, and, at the same time, to the cosmogonic source. For the revelation of the cave art is that the two sources, human and cosmic, have concentric centers and that their shared center is inwardly encountered and experienced by opening the eye of the soul ... (p. 55).

To see the scene at Lascaux, one must pass through the great Hall of Bulls, an open chamber covered with exquisite large animal paintingsthe largest of which are bullsand proceed down a narrower, tunnel-like corridor to a well or shaft, "apparently the most sacred place in the sanctuary, rather like the crypt of an ancient church" (Ruspoli, p. 28). One must descend into this shaft to view the shamanic scene.

Another gure at Les Trois Frres, also ithyphallic, is portrayed with bison shoulders and head, but standing upright on human legs and feet (g. 7). Surrounded by a herd of thirty bison, ten horses, four ibex, and a reindeer, this part-human Animal Master seems to be directing the herd's movements as it plays what some believe to be a bowlike musical instrument. Others see the gure as having a bleeding nose, a typical side effect of the shamanic trance state. "Whether this Animal Master is a visionary picture of the Paleolithic shaman with his god?like capacities," says Marija Gimbutas, "or whether it is the shaman in ceremonial mask and regalia, one thing is clearthe Animal Master is an important spiritual reality for peoples from Asia to the Americas" (p. 175).

Ernst Uehli suggests that the horned and hoofed Animal Master is a visionary picture or primalimagination of an earlier stage of human development (g. 8). He also connects this gure with the Greek god Pan. Gimbutas too sees a connection and says of Pan: "Greek Pan was a mortal god of the forest. He was a shepherd and believed to be the protector of wild animals, beekeepers, and hunters. . . . There are more than 100 recorded cult places associated with Pan's name in ancient Greece. This seems to indicate that he was popular and widely worshipped, although he was outside the pantheon of great gods and goddesses" (p. 177). Pan is also linked to the Indian god Shiva, and the Indus deity Pashupati. Unfortunately, Pan later serves as the imagination behind the medieval Christian devil with its horns and supernatural power prodding humanity on toward the assertion of independent egohood with all its (in this case) negative attributes. The Animal Master, Sorcerer, or shaman is an important key to the imagery of prehistoric art as it captures in picture form the aesthetic missing link between the animal kingdom and the human being. Perhaps our long?lost ancestor is not the lower primate we've imagined for the past century and a half, but the elusive paleo-shaman Animal Master, as spirit and art have suggested for thousands of years.

References: " 1." Campbell, J. Historical Atlas of World Mythology. (vol. I.) New York: Harper and Row, 1988.

" 2." Clottes, J. and D. Lewis-Williams. The Shamans of Prehistory. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998. " 3." Cowen, T. Fire in the Head: Shamanism and the Celtic Spirit. San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993. " 4." Gimbutas, M.

Language of the Goddess. London, England: Thames and Hudson, 2001.

" 5." Lorblanchet, M. quoted in R. Hughes, "Behold the Stone Age," Time, February 13, 1995. " 6." Ruspoli, M. The Cave of Lascaux: The Final Photographs. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1987. " 7." Ryan, R. The Strong Eye of Shamanism. Rochester,VT: Inner Traditions, 1999. " 8." Uehli, Ernst. Atlantis und das R tsel der Eiszeitkunst. Stuttgart, Germany: J. Ch. Mellinger Verlag, 1980.

FIGURE CAPTIONSFigure 1. A Lapp shaman's drum, from early nineteenthcentury northern Sweden, illustrates the three worldsto which the shaman has access. Figure 2. The Sorcerer of Les Trois Frres, in a French Pyrenees cave, is an anthropozoomorphic gure with stag antlers and ears, owl eyes, a beard, bear or lion paws, a horse- or foxlike tail, and human feet. Anthropozoomorphic gures may depict shamans in ritual attire or spirit beings who guide the shamans. Figure 3. A gure at Le Gabillou, France, depicted with bison head and shoulders and human legs and feet, is described as a Sorcerer or supernatural Animal Master. Figure 4. The Siberian Tungus shaman with his antlers and ritual drum is depicted in this illustrationafter Nicholas Witsens drawing of 1705.

Figure 5. Michelangelo's sculpture of Moses, created for the tomb of Pope Julius II, depicts Moses inthe likeness of the Pope. Figure 6. Referred to as the Killed Man, this Paleolithic image depicted in the innermost cave sanctuaryat Lascaux in France is perhaps better described as Trance Man, for it may depict the shaman on his spirit ight beside a sacriced bovine. Figure 7. Another gure at Les Trois Frres, also ithyphallic, is portrayed with bison sholders and head, but standing upright on human legs and feet. Figure 8. These unusual anthropozoomorphic creatures pregure the Bushmen "ying bucks" of South Africaand the Pan gures of ancient Greece. They were engraved on a staff found in a rock shelter at Teyjat in the Dordogne region of France and suggest the shamanic Animal Master.