the South African rock-art specialist David Lewis-Williams and the French cave expert Jean Clottes applied ideas about shamanism to Palaeolithic sites such as Lascaux. Lewis-Williams had previously studied nineteenth- and twentieth-century rock art of the nomadic San people in South Africa. The San explicitly relate their art to shamanic vision quests, describing the figures as shamans in animal form, for example, or spirit guides.
Lewis-Williams followed up with a bestselling 2002 book, The Mind in the Cave. All human beings have the same nervous system, he argues, and the people of the Upper Palaeolithic were anatomically the same as us, so it’s probable that they would have experienced the same kinds of hallucinations. In modern western society, he points out, we tend to dismiss trance states and visions as abnormal or suspect. We value logical, rational thought. But studies of shamanism show that shifting states of consciousness exist, and are highly prized, in pretty much every traditional society on the planet. By seeing cave art only through our own literal lens, perhaps we are missing the point. Entering the deep, narrow caves of France and Spain would have been just like penetrating the nether spirit realm, so perhaps the shamans of prehistory went into the caves on vision quests – just as Chumash shamans did 20,000 years later – and painted what they saw onto the rock walls.
The theory would help to solve several mysteries about the paintings in Lascaux and other Upper Palaeolithic caves. First, it might explain the abstract, geometric patterns that are common, such as dots, grids, zigzags and wavy lines. Such optical effects are commonly seen during the first stages of trance, points out Lewis-Williams (people suffering from migraines often see them too). The Tukano people of South America, who induce trances using yajé, a brew made from a psychotropic vine, often paint the geometric symbols they see during visions onto houses or bark.
It would also help to explain the bizarre hybrid figures seen in Palaeolithic art, such as a bison man at Chauvet cave in southeast France; or the Sorcerer at Trois-Frères cave in the southwest, which has the ears and antlers of a stag, athletic human legs and haunches, a horse’s tail, and wizard’s beard. In deep trances, people often report seeing images of animals, people and monsters, and can feel as though they are blending with them.
Finally, Lewis-Williams’s ideas make sense of images in which the artists incorporated features of the cave walls, as well as cases where people often touched and treated the walls: making hand stencils, finger trails, or even filling cavities with mud and piercing it with fingers or sticks. If caves were seen as portals to the underground spirit world, then the cave walls would have been the boundary between the two realities, a membrane through which spirits could appear. ‘The walls were not a meaningless support,’ he says. ‘They were part of the images.’
In essence, during such spirit journeys, the physical reality of the cave became entwined with the spirit worlds that existed in the shamans’ minds. Each informed the other. People would have entered the cave and painted the visions they saw, physically transforming the walls. At the same time, paintings left by previous visitors would have primed and shaped their own visions. Reality was being revealed to them at the same time as they were helping to create it.
Lewis-Williams focuses on caves as a metaphor for the underground realm; he doesn’t talk much about the sky. But the evidence from more recent communities suggests that journeys to the Upper World were crucial too, and were also represented on cave walls. The Chumash priests regularly decorated caves with celestial features, including the sun and moon; the Tukano painted parallel chains of dots to represent the Milky Way. Rappenglück argues that interpreting symbols in caves like Lascaux as resulting purely from hallucinations is missing something. They were part of an overall ‘cosmovision’, in which the caves represented not just the Lower World, but the cosmos as a whole.
We can’t ask prehistoric shamans directly what that cosmos was like, but after studying the astronomy of the Chumash, Travis Hudson concluded that their universe was ‘inextricably linked to man and filled with vast sources of powers which influenced all things’; an endlessly recurring cycle of reincarnation ‘in which matter was neither created nor destroyed, but transformed into life or death’.
The beliefs of modern-day western shamans seem to fit that interpretation. Sandra Ingerman, a practitioner and author based in New Mexico, describes the altered states of shamanism as revealing a different view of reality, in which other living beings are seen ‘not as objects but as a web of life, where all of life is communicating’. It’s a web that includes not just animals and plants, she says, but the sun, moon and stars. Meanwhile Jo Bowlby, who qualified as a shaman among the Q’ero elders of Peru and now runs a healing practice in London, recalls her first experience with ayahuasca. At a night-time ceremony in the Amazon rainforest, under a blanket of stars, she was offered half a mug of ‘putrid’ drink. At first, she was horrified to see her hands transforming at lightning speed into every type of animal foot imaginable, finishing with a lobster claw, but then she became overwhelmed by a feeling of pure ecstasy. It was everything and nothing, she says, like being in outer space. And the lesson she learned has stayed with her ever since: ‘You realise how huge and amazing this universe is. It’s an experience of connection, of feeling part of something. We are not separated or isolated. The same energy that feeds the trees feeds you.’
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In September 1940, Marcel Ravidat and his friends at first told no one of their startling discovery at Lascaux. The next day, 13 September, they returned to the cave with better lamps and a rope, setting off at ten-minute intervals to make sure they weren’t followed. After further widening the entrance, they explored every corridor until, far into the cave, just past the densely engraved Apse, they came across a vertical shaft too deep to see down. The boys paused. Who would go first?
Again, it was Ravidat who took the plunge. Heart racing, he climbed down the rope, nervous not because he doubted his own strength but because he feared his younger friends might drop him. When his feet touched the bottom, 8 metres down, he raised his lamp to the walls and saw one of the strangest scenes in all of cave art.
It features a stick man with a bird head and prominent penis – the only human figure in the cave. Often described as ‘the Dead Man’, he lies at a 45-degree angle with his head back and his arms and fingers splayed. Bearing down on him is a bristling bison, head low, horns thrust forwards, with a black spot on its shoulder and a series of loops hanging beneath its belly, as if its guts are falling out. Directly beneath the man is a bird perched on a vertical staff.
This bizarre tableau has mystified generations of scholars. But d’Huy and Rappenglück both suggest that the secret to understanding it may lie in the sky. With a slight shift in perspective, it is the man who stands vertical, looking to the heavens as the bird stick and bison follow him upwards. D’Huy suggests that the scene might show the Cosmic Hunt, as hunter and beast rise into the sky to become constellations. That would explain why the bison, despite its aggressive position, doesn’t appear to be charging forwards. The black spot on its withers might be a star, and black marks on the ground beneath could be the bloodstained leaves of the hunted animal, signalling the onset of autumn.
It is no more than ‘a plausible hypothesis’, d’Huy admits. But the shaft scene does look strikingly similar to a Neolithic rock painting from the Maia river in Siberia that is thought to represent an early version of the Cosmic Hunt, in which a hunter takes aim at an elk with the sun hanging under its belly. Perhaps the loops beneath the Lascaux bison, too, represent not its intestines but the sun.
Rappenglück, meanwhile, thinks the birdman is a shaman with a staff, and that the bison is his spirit-helper, guiding his journey to the sky. Similar scenes appear in the art of modern-day shamanic cultures, such as the ecstatic shaman in flight to the sky, penis erect and bound to a celestial bull, that appears on a tipi of the Oglala people in North America. Rappenglück further suggests that the eyes of the Lascaux bison, birdman and bird correspond to Vega, Deneb and Altair – the ‘Summer Triangle’ – among the brightest stars overhead in summer. Twenty thousand years ago, this trio never set but rotated around the northern celestial pole, indicating the time of night like a giant sky clock. Perhaps the people of Lascaux imagined this constellation as a celestial shaman (the Palaeolithic equivalent of the Chumash’s Sky Coyote), turning each night around the