bull. But just like the paintings of Lascaux, it overwhelmingly tells of living beings imprinted on the sky.
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For the native Chumash people of southern California, the universe consisted of three disc-like worlds, floating in a great abyss. At the bottom was the Lower World, inhabited by deformed, malevolent beings. The Middle World, where humans lived, was supported by two giant serpents that triggered earthquakes when they moved. Above that, the Upper World was held up by a great eagle, whose wing movements caused the phases of the moon.
This cosmos was ruled by the sun, an old widower who lived in a quartz-crystal house in the Upper World and dined on human flesh. Each day he travelled across the sky, carrying a torch and wearing only a feather band around his head. At night, he gambled against Sky Coyote (probably Polaris, the North Star) to determine the fate of the people below. Not surprisingly, the Chumash watched the sun very carefully. But their knowledge of the Upper World didn’t just come from tracking the sky. They knew about it, as we’ll see, because they had travelled there themselves.
A few centuries ago, the Chumash thrived along the south-central Californian coast, and their journeys give us one more insight into what prehistoric people like the artists of Lascaux may have thought about the heavens. That’s because the Chumash lifestyle appears to have been very similar in complexity to that of Upper Palaeolithic Europe. They had round grass houses, beautifully carved wooden bowls, fine baskets and plank-built sea canoes which they used to catch swordfish weighing up to 270 kilograms. The men wore body paint and feather headdresses, the women had skirts of deer or otter skins, and they used shell beads for money.
There were perhaps 15,000 of them before the Spanish arrived in the eighteenth century. The soldiers who made first contact in 1769 described large towns with roofs piled high with barbecued fish. In the following decades, however, the population crashed, as the Chumash succumbed to the colonisers and their infections: typhoid, pneumonia and diphtheria.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Chumash culture and language had almost disappeared. But some traces survive, thanks to a linguist called John Peabody Harrington, who worked for the Smithsonian Institution. He dedicated his career to tracking down elderly speakers of dying languages across North America, persuading them to share everything they could remember about their heritage.
Eccentric and obsessive, Harrington worked alone. After his death in 1961, Smithsonian curators discovered hundreds of boxes that he had stored in warehouses, garages and even chicken coops throughout the western United States. Mixed with Native American-made flutes and dolls, dead birds and tarantulas, dirty laundry and half-eaten sandwiches, was what came to be known as ‘the Harrington gold mine’: photographs, sketches, notes and recordings detailing the words and beliefs of cultures that had been thought lost – including the Chumash.
A few years later, Travis Hudson, a curator at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, used thousands of pages of Harrington’s notes to reconstruct the most detailed account of astronomical beliefs for any hunter-gatherer community in the world. In his 1978 book, Crystals in the Sky, Hudson concluded that the Chumash knowledge of the sky was far richer and more sophisticated than western scholars had ever thought possible.
The Chumash elders interviewed by Harrington spoke of an Upper World filled with powerful, supernatural beings. The pole star, Polaris, was Sky Coyote, father of mankind and the being around which the rest of the sky revolved. The stars Castor and Pollux (the Gemini twins) were the sun’s female cousins, while Aldebaran was another coyote, who followed the Pleiades maidens across the sky. Orion’s Belt was ‘Bear’, and the Milky Way was a ghosts’ road.
The movements of these deities were intertwined with life on Earth. The Chumash knew that when the sun rose or set at a certain location on the horizon, or when particular stars appeared in a dawn or twilight sky, certain seasonal changes were about to take place on Earth: seeds would ripen, deer would migrate, the rain would come. The winter solstice, the point in the dead of winter when the sun reaches its furthest point south and days are shortest, was seen as a critical time for the cosmos. If the sun couldn’t be persuaded to return, darkness would fall and life on Earth would be snuffed out. The Chumash made careful observations to predict the solstice, and on the crucial morning conducted rituals, often in caves, planting quartz-tipped sun sticks into the ground to ‘pull’ the sun back onto a northern course.
This knowledge, however, was not for everyone. These celestial secrets were held by an elite group of astronomer-priests called the ’antap who formed what was essentially a secret society led by the sun-priest. They never shared their knowledge with commoners, and wielded great political influence, claiming that they were the only ones who could understand and influence the cosmic system around which Chumash life revolved.
The priests acquired their detailed astronomical knowledge from countless nightly observations, but also with the aid of hallucinogenic plants from the genus Datura (part of the nightshade family) that they used to go on ‘vision quests’. This allowed them to visit the Upper World, where they could contact supernatural guardians such as Coyote, predict and influence the future, and communicate with spirits of the dead.
It’s a practice called shamanism. The term comes from Siberia, where western travellers in the seventeenth century encountered religious leaders called saman among Tungusic peoples, but similar practices and beliefs exist in traditional hunter-gatherer societies all around the world. Shamans enter trance states to visit an alternate reality or spirit world. During such journeys they meet and gain power from spirit guides, and this allows them to fulfil a range of roles such as foreseeing the future, harming enemies, controlling the weather and animals, and healing the sick. Trances are induced in different ways – sometimes by hallucinogenic plants such as Datura or ayahuasca; by meditation, fasting or sensory deprivation; or by rituals such as drumming or dancing.
Western anthropologists initially rejected shamanism as not even worth studying, dismissing its practitioners as either conmen or mentally ill. But the Romanian historian of religion Mircea Eliade changed that with his seminal study Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, first published in English in 1964. Eliade surveyed the practice of shamanism throughout history, arguing that it is ubiquitous among hunter-gatherer societies from Siberia to North America to Tibet. Because these traditions are all so similar, he argued that they must descend from a common source in the Palaeolithic, which spread as people migrated around the planet, just like the myths studied by d’Huy. Shamanism, in other words, was humanity’s first religion.
Scholars have since questioned some of Eliade’s assumptions. But his work triggered a wave of popular and scientific interest in shamanism. There are now several lines of evidence suggesting that shamanic trances aren’t a purely cultural (or imagined) phenomenon, but represent a universal capacity of the human brain. Neuroscientists have measured characteristic patterns of brain activity in shamans undergoing spirit journeys which share some features with hypnosis and meditation, suggesting that they aren’t acting but really do enter a distinct, altered state of consciousness.
Meanwhile anthropologists have documented the experiences of thousands of westerners in such trance states, mostly triggered by drumming, and found that even when people have no idea what to expect, they report very similar experiences to traditional shamans. Western shamans argue that this is because the spirit worlds they visit are real, but scientists tend to see it as evidence that the human nervous system has the ability to generate specific kinds of visions and hallucinations. Both traditional shamans and westerners undergoing spirit journeys often meet and communicate with animals, or transform into an animal themselves. Another key feature is the experience of tunnelling down into the ground, or flying up into space, often passing through membranes or barriers to move from one layer to another. These types of visions are commonly reflected in the cosmological beliefs of hunter-gatherer societies: a tiered cosmos, with lower, middle and upper worlds, as seen by the Chumash, is an almost universal theme. Shamans in many different communities believe that they can contact the spirits of the Upper World, for example, by flying up to a specific constellation or star. So it may have been altered states of consciousness, rather than simple stargazing, that helped to create humanity’s first models of the universe.