Orientation
From the time of the Renaissance until representational art began to be challenged at the end of the 19th century, most of us think of secular art as consisting of separate disciplines – dance, theatre, singing, painting, sculpture and writing. The exception to this was the theatrical work of Richard Wagner, a German composer, theater director, essayist and conductor who understood that combining the arts can create altered states of consciousness in the German public. Speaking religiously, the Catholic church was and is a master at creating altered states of consciousness in its followers with the use of stained-glassed windows, organ music, singing and incense filling the senses. Needless to say painters and sculptors were employed to carry out a single vision – the worshiping of God.
I argue that in the beginning of the human species all the arts were one in the service of creating magical states of consciousness and magical rites of passage for their participants. It was only after the formation of class societies in the ancient world that the arts became secular disciplines practiced by specialists. With the secularization of the arts the purpose of art lost its unitary focus and artists, painters and musicians worked to satisfy the whims of their different individual patrons. However, in the Ice Age conditions of Cro-Magnon hunter gathers living in caves doing magical rituals correctly and memorably could mean the difference between intergenerational survival or petering out at best or death at worst. This article is based on two wonderful books. One is John Pfeiffer’s book The Creative Explosion and more recent work by David Lewis-Williams The Mind in the Cave.
Why should what happened 20-25 thousand years ago interest socialists? From the end of the 19th century socialists, at least in Mordor, have been very bad at creating rituals. Socialists rather allowed rites of passage rituals, pilgrimages, sacred sites, calendars, to be hollowed out by capitalists. As secularists and atheists many socialists thought that rites of passage were silly and not worth bothering about. See my article “The Mythology Ritual and Art of Romantic Socialism: Socialism’s Lost Heart and Soul.”
Today socialists have a golden opportunity to understand how to do rituals right by studying the intense and meaningful practices of so long ago, practices that existed for 9,000 years. They have been chiseled and tempered to a fine point of perfection in harmony with the forces of natural selection.
I Play, Art and Necessity
Play as a precursor of art and rooted in decision-making of the brain (rather than genetics)
Play among reptiles and lower species is questionable and the evidence for it is scanty. According to Pfeiffer (The Creative Explosion) play emerged with the appearance of warm blooded mammals 200,000 years ago co-extensively with the evolution of the brain. Pfeiffer claims that art is a more elaborate form of play and that each has an adaptive function of being able to react creatively to unpredictable situations.
What play and art have in common involves imitation, pretending, fantasy, freedom to improvise, to be able to make and break rules and to create surprise. One advantage of play is that it provides training for real life fighting and escape tactics. On the negative side, play does use up energy which could be expended on more immediate circumstances, like feeding and resting. A second advantage of play is that it promotes friendship and cooperation, but at the same time it could result in serious injuries. Lastly, play invites innovation – exploring and probing which is analogous to random genetic mutations. Yet play can be dangerous if it involves distractions from watching for dangerous predators. If the art in the caves is just an advanced form of play, Pfeiffer explains why the benefits of it outweighed the costs in the time period between 29,000 and 20,000 BCE.
II Description of the Caves and Methodology
“The way in leads through a metal door, down a flight of stairs, through another metal door, to the threshold of the hall. It is pitch dark inside, and then the lights are turned on. Without prelude, before the eye has a chance to become intellectual, to look at any single feature, you see it whole, painted in red, black and yellow, a burst of animals, a procession dominated by huge creatures with horns. The animals form two lines converging from left and right, seeming to stream into a funnel-month, toward and into a dark hole which marks the way into a deeper gallery.”
The following is a description of the main hall or rotunda of the Lascaux in southern France. Lascaux is one of at least 200 caves in western Europe containing examples of the first prehistoric art. According to John Pfeiffer, about 90% of the sites are located in France and Spain. Most of the images are large animals and when humans appear, they are distorted. Inside the caves temperatures and humidity remain practically constant slowing down the deterioration process of the art. Two of the most astounding findings are that rather than the making of spontaneous images by solitary artists there was planning and collaboration going on in the organization and placement of figures. Secondly, there was collaboration according to Andre Leroi-Gourhan. What was going on in the caves was a kind of theater for creating altered states of consciousness. Fire was used not just for heating, but for stage design. The gallery extends nearly three football field deep into the earth
“The ceilings of the Great Hall… is an undulating surface of hills, valleys, ripples in rock…every contour used by the artists to enhance the feeling of full-bodied living creatures. Red and black paintings surround two small holes bored into the side of the walls by natural forces. As you stare at these entranceways to another realm, suddenly and without voluntary control – the pictographs break the artificial visual reality that we assume…Suddenly the paintings encompassing the recessed pockets began to pulse, beckoning us inward. The added effects—a nighttime setting, firelight, shadows dancing on the walls and the resonation of aboriginal chanting – could induce even more profound experiences.”
Today we have many more facts about the occupiers of the caves than we did a century ago. For example, we know far more sites—both underground and open air; we have detailed inventories of most of the sites; we have maps showing the precise location of each and every image; many of the images have been data and we have the ingredients of many of the paints which were used to make the images. What we do not have is a grounded explanation of what is going on.
The stages of the exploration of the caves in Spain and then France has been documented by John Pfeiffer, among others. Briefly, exploration began in the 1880s by Don Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola discovery of painting he identified as extinct bison. He linked pieces he had found in France to paintings in Altamira and declared it was created in Paleolithic times. For a number of reasons archaeologists considered this a hoax and paid little attention. Early in the 20th century more caves were discovered and Abbe Henri Breuil spend years doing watercolors to preserve them in the late 1950s
Methodology
In order to begin to explain things what happened we need a method of approach. The questions we have must be organized in order to distinguish foundational questions which must be answered before others can be asked. We must also identify which questions can be left aside without getting in the way of developing an explanation. How do we know what is significant? There is a diversity in the forms of the caves. Some have single entrances while others have multiple entrances. Some have stone arches which allow light to penetrate while others have only small openings through which just one person at a time can squeeze. Once inside the caves, how important is the animal distribution on the walls? How important are the techniques used—engraving, painting or sculpture? How important are the size of the images and what does it say about their value? Once we make a choice about the highest and lowest priority of these considerations then the explanations as to what was really going on will become more clear.
III Altered States of Consciousness: Cave Routes
According to Leroi-Gourhan it is not only the caves that were designed to alter states of consciousness, but the routes leading to selected chambers as well as the chambers themselves. The process of getting there and what the researchers found when they arrived were part of the same designed ordeal with obstacles intentionally put in the way, according to Jean Clottes. From the standpoint of physical endurance, the caves can be broken down the way hiking trails often are—easy, medium and difficult. The easy caves have passages which are high (not requiring stooping down) and wide, with some lighting. This was probably accessible to the entire group. The medium size caves have lower ceilings requiring stooping and crawling and inadequate lighting requiring an individual to carry their own lighting. The passages themselves are uneven and covered with mud. The most difficult caves would require modern equipment equivalent to mining—hard hats, mechanics coveralls, deep treaded boots, ropes and wire ladders. They are needed to climb the sheer walls, pits and other hazards. These hazards created opportunities for altered states.
It might not be too far-fetched to say that the more difficult the route, the greater the altered state would result. The deeper chambers were not for all groups, but probably for special initiation rituals conducted by specialists. The easiness or difficulty of the journey through the caves must have corresponded to grades of secrecy in prehistoric ceremonies. Secret knowledge probably included the ways of producing special lighting, knowledge of echo effects to create illusion and knowledge in the painting of anamorphic effects. For example pictures are drawn in trick perspective so their appearance depends on the angle of viewing. The easier the access to the cave, the closer to common knowledge is of the entire group.
IV Discovery of Prehistoric Art in Three Stages
The discovery of the caves can be broken down into 3 periods. The first explorer, de Sautuola was more interested in the artifacts on the floor of the caves rather than what was on the walls and ceilings. Nevertheless, the discovery of the paintings was billed as the work of prehistoric artists. The experts believed this was a hoax because the paint was so fresh and because there were no traces of soot. They didn’t bother to investigate. This cave was located in Alta Mira in the foothills of Northern Spain.
In 1895 cave art was discovered in France. In 1901 three more discoveries of cave art were reported, two just outside Les Eyzies and one in the Pyrenees. From the turn of the century to roughly 1960 a remarkable Catholic priest, Henri Breuil, dedicated his life to authenticating, recording and copying the art. His dedication was amazing:
During one of his visits to Altamira, Breuil painted 8 hours a day for three weeks, doubled up in crawl-in spaces lit by candles, making water color copies of the animals on the ceiling of the Great Hall.
Leroi-Gourhan succeeded Breuil. He sought to place the paintings and engravings in a chronological framework based primarily on sequences in the development of style. Starting in 1957 he spent three years visiting 66 out of 110 art caves and rock shelters known in France and Spain and counting and mapping positions of every one of 2,188 animal figures including horses, bison, mammoths, ibexes and oxen. He noted the tendency of certain animals to be located in certain parts of the caves. For example, 92% of oxen and bison are located in the central zone and 86% of horses. It is especially understandable that the difficult caves would lend themselves to altered states of consciousness even among the archaeologists studying them. Pfeiffer describes how easy it is to miss things that are there and to see things that aren’t there, for a great majority of the paintings are not obvious. The strain of looking takes its toll and self-hypnosis must be guarded against by taking frequent breaks.
V Competing Theories About the Discovery
Art for art’s sake
One theory about art in the cave is the “art for art sake” theory. This is the notion that some individuals had the leisure time for decorating themselves and their world. This is based on universalistic principles involving an appreciation of symmetry. This theory became more far-fetched because the art was done in subterranean locations, not easily accessible. Why would the people who made this put themselves in this position. Secondly, we find that people who lived under very harsh conditions also made art. This undermines the notion that societies must have a critical amount of leisure time in order to make art. Lastly, the paintings on the wall were by no means symmetrical.
Sympathetic hunting magic
A more common argument is art in the service of magic, specifically hunting and/or fertility magic. The idea is that the paintings on the wall would create a sympathetic relationship with the animal which they wanted to kill or breed. The problem with this theory is that only about 15% of upper Paleolithic bison images seem to be wounded. A bigger problem that Pfeiffer points out is that what was on the walls were not the animals that were actually hunted. Finally, the theory of hunting magic does not explain why Neanderthals didn’t paint on walls, despite the fact that they also hunted large animals and their diet included large portions of meat.
Conflicts between groups
A third explanation by Max Raphael argues that the cave art is expressions of antagonisms among social groups. For example, animals depicted in combat represent antagonistic clans. Animals which were depicted inside each other express alliances in social struggles. Against Breuil, Raphael claimed that images should be seen, not as isolated instances but should be studied as compositions. He further noted that different species tended to predominate in specific caves.
Levi-Straus structuralism
Also as a follower of Levi-Strauss structuralism Raphael believed that what was belief presented in the cave was a myth designed to overcome the contradiction of binary opposites. Then he divided the images of animals along with signs into male and female and tried to explain what was going on as attempts to overcome this binary opposition. Leroi-Gourhan’s research was abandoned for a number of reasons one because:
- The diversity of the topography of the caves makes it impossible to compare them with one another in terms of entrance, central region and deep zones.
- His classification system was too static and didn’t consider ecological changes in conditions which might affect the animals or signs drawn. The binary oppositions were too ahistorical.
Pulling the pieces together
David Lewis-Williams claims that Annette Laming-Emperaire and Andre Leroi-Gourhan made the greatest 20th century contribution to the study of Upper Paleolithic art. For one thing they agree with magical theories in that the difficulty of access meant that there were sacred intentions. However, that does not mean the animals were painted for any kind of food subsistence. Secondly, they gave up the notion that hunter gatherers in this time period had much to do with contemporary hunter-gatherers, so they resisted drawing from the sacred practices of hunter-gatherers in different climates and different ecological zones. Like other theorists they recognized that the art was of significant complexity and skill to abandon the notion that these Paleolithic hunters had a simple mental life. Like Max Rafael they believed all images should be studied as planned compositions.
Laming-Emperaire argued that the distribution maps should be developed according to the following criteria: position of the works in a cave; associated archaeological remains found with the work; how the work seemed to be used; and the content and form of representation. Leroi-Gourhan divided the animals found into four groups:
- smaller herbivores—horses, ibexes, stags, reindeer, hinds
- large herbivores—bison, aurochs
- peripheral species—mammoth, deer, ibexes
- dangerous animals—feline, bear, rhinoceros
He further divided the caves into a number of areas—entrances, central areas, and deep areas.
VI Magical Theatrically Theory
Pfeiffer’s thesis is that the paintings in the cave along with whatever rituals were enacted
were ingenious theatrical mimetic devices used by Homo sapiens (as opposed to Neanderthals) to coherently and efficiently process an information explosion that occurred between 30,000-20,000 BCE in Europe. This included better tools, knowledge of new materials and coordination of efforts of larger groups of people. One of the best ways of keeping conflicts of larger groups under control was the invention of a special kind of coming together. Paleolithic art had a group function—sharp increases in ritual and ceremony.
According to David Lewis-Williams, the caves were being used in a systematic way to alter states of consciousness with a sophistication that would make any stage director sit up and take notice. For example, shadows were used to complete pictures. The experience of moving shadows causes images to appear and disappear. The use of fire also helped to create atmosphere. These altered states are not limited to visual but are also acoustic.
There is a material, neurological , not merely psychological basis for widespread shamanistic beliefs. Research has shown that low frequency drum-beats produce changes in the human nervous-system and induce trance states…There is thus a neurological explanation for shamanistic use of drums.” David Lewis-Williams
VII Who did it? Tools and Social organization: Neanderthals vs Homo sapiens
The title of the Pfeiffer’s book is called The Creative Explosion because there was nothing to foreshadow its beginnings. Pfeiffer argues that people probably have been making pictures in the sand, decorating wood, animal hides and other perishable materials including their own bodies during earlier times but these works did not endure. The author searches for the reason for the explosion. Why the art? Why 30,000-20,000 BCE? Why in Western Europe?
Cro-Magnon attained many advantages over Neanderthals including the use of tools, the quality of their social life and their cultivation of natural resources. In terms of tools, they used more tools, a greater variety of tools and a greater variety of materials. They exploited these materials more efficiently than did Neanderthals. Lastly, Cro-Magnon drew on the material from greater distances, acquiring flint from between 50 and 100 miles away. Cro-Magnon also cultivated a wider range of plants and animals. Its social life included more people coming together for longer periods and communicating over larger distances.
Tool transformation
Compared to Neanderthals, Homo sapiens didn’t just make tools, they made tools for the development of tools. Homo sapiens made tools for working bone (ivory and antler). Furthermore unlike Neanderthals Cro-Magnon treated it differently than if it were flint. Bone is less brittle and softer than flint could be worked more readily to produce a number of otherwise impractical implements.
Another difference is that the tools of Homo sapiens took longer to make. Whereas Homo sapiens kept their tools, Neanderthals used their tools only for immediate use and then got rid of them. Therefore, Neanderthals put less effort into them. Homo sapiens also transformed the materials through heating and slow cooling. They did not simply accept the materials at hand in their natural state.
Lastly the invention of the bow and arrow exploited the springing energy of the curve that the spear lacked. Compared to the spear the bow and arrow had more range and power. It was quieter, hence more of a surprise to whatever was being hunted. Furthermore, whereas a spear required vulnerability in that you have to spring out of a hiding place in order to throw it, using a bow and arrow would allow one to maintain cover, making its use less dangerous. Finally, the bow and arrow required less body preparation. With a spear, close fighting was required and injuries would be sustained. A bow and arrow is lethal at a distance. Homo sapiens were more ingenious in the use of fire. Whereas Neanderthals used fire, the fire was started on flat-living floor surfaces whereas Homo sapiens prepared hollows, encircled them in stone and scooped out the bottom to create a draft. While not all these tools and processes might have been used to create magical theatrics, it does show that we were in a more sophisticated position to exploit these materials when we were making magical theatrics.
Expanding social organization
Why expand sociality? Twenty thousand years ago maximum advancement was reached by glaciers. This occurred at the same time as an increased efficiency in tool making. With rising population and competition for resources, groups had choices to either join into larger groups or try to survive in smaller groups. For those groups who chose to join other groups there was an increasing reliance on the large scale killing of animals and exploiting a wider range of species—limpets, mussels, salmon and more and more plants. Hunting in large groups required creating loyalties extending beyond self and a few blood relatives to wider and wider communities. Interestingly, Randall White points out that largest cave sites have the most portable art, meaning these large groups are mobile. This inter-group organization was for groups that rely heavily on hunting reindeer. This demanded aggregations and greater mobility and monitoring wider regions because reindeer migration routes are less predictable than the routes of many other game.
People coming together for mass hunts do not go their separate ways in a hurry. Everyone has a share in the enterprise. There are rules for dividing the spoils, meat to be distributed and stored, dried or smoked or put into deep-freeze. (pg. 61)
These groups are more likely to push themselves to expand their verbal language skills:
As people came together in massive hunts, they had more to say to each other. Vocabularies must have expanded to keep pace with the increasing numbers of items to name, more ways of doing things and things to do, more kinds of everything from tools and tool making to hearths, pavements…more gradations of meaning, more people, more intricate relationships between people and things and between people and people. At the same time, there may have been trends working in the other direction. Language may have evolved words designed to save words, to improve the efficiency, convenience and the speed of communicating.
On the other hand, when people rely on smaller game they tend to work in smaller groups, dispersing in families. There is no basis for group inequality to emerge because there is nothing holding people together in larger groups. But when groups rely on larger game and engage in mass hunts, or a resource is concentrated in a coastal setting with a rich resource base, they stay in one place year-round. The relationships between groups then becomes an issue. This is not to say there was equality within Neanderthal societies. However, what inequalities existed were between individuals, not subgroups. One indicator of status differences between subgroups of Homo sapiens is the use of ornaments to indicate status. As far as we know Neanderthals did not have status ornaments.
VIII The Origins of Image-Making in Homo sapiens
Primary and secondary consciousness
According to Gerald Edelman, the fundamental cell type in brains are neurons. Neurons are then connected to other neurons by synapses. These connections are facilitated by the generation of neurotransmitters, which are chemical substances that allow electrical impulses to cross over from one neuron to another. From this crossing over Edelman says this is how consciousness emerges. He divides consciousness into two types, primary and higher-order consciousness.
Primary consciousness includes chimps, most mammals, some birds and probably no reptiles. This world consists of being aware of things in the world and having mental images of them in the present but not in the past and future. Animals with primary consciousness see the room the way a beam of light illuminates it. Only that which is in the beam is explicitly in the remembered present while everything else is in darkness. It has long-term memory and can act on it. But it cannot be aware of that memory or plan an extended future for itself.
Higher order consciousness involves recognition by a thinking subject of his or her own acts or affectations. It has a model of the past and future in addition to the present. In higher order consciousness the subject is conscious of being conscious. This being can construct a socially based selfhood to model the world in terms of the past and the future. Why are we discussing this? Because it is connected to why only Homo sapiens, not Neanderthals, could have been co-creating magical theatrics.
Primary vs Higher Order Consciousness
| Primary consciousness | Category of Comparison | Higher Order Consciousness |
| Awareness of things in the world | Range of awareness | Awareness of things in the world and awareness of self |
| Mental images in the present | Mental Images and time | Mental images in past, present and future |
| Has long-term memory but cannot be aware of it or act | Range of long term memory | Has long-term memory, can be aware of it and act on it |
| No | Place of planning | Yes |
| Some birds, most mammals, chimps, not reptiles | Which species? | Humans, dolphins, crows, ravens |
Where do Neanderthals fit in?
How do we know Neanderthals didn’t paint in the caves? According to Lewis-Williams,
Neanderthals have a different type of consciousness and it precluded both image making and elaborate burial because of the neurological structure of their brains. Neanderthals could not:
- remember and entertain mental imagery derived from a range of states of consciousness—introverted states, dreaming, altered states;
- manipulate and share that imagery because they are not likely to have verbal language;
- socialize that imagery or conceive of an alternative reality;
- recognize a connection between mental images and two and three-dimensional images;
- couldn’t recognize two and three dimensional representations of 3 dimensional things in the material world and
- couldn’t live in accordance with social distinctions beyond physical.
In sum: Neanderthals had the neurological potential to experience dreams and hallucinations but not to remember them in any significant way; to act upon them or to use them as a basis for social discrimination.
Neanderthals vs Homo sapiens States: Prospects for Magical Theatrics
| Neanderthals | Category of Comparison | Homo sapiens
|
| Primary consciousness | Level of consciousness | Higher order consciousness |
| Present oriented | Hunting strategies | Past and future oriented
Can foresee the migration of herds in particular times and places |
| Have it but not capable of long-term recollection of dreams and visions | Range of long-term memory | Improved memory made possible long-term recollections of dreams and visions |
| Could not conceive of a spirit world
No afterlife translated into burial sites |
Implications for the spirit world | Can construct those recollections into the spirit world
Afterlife translated into burial sites |
| No | Verbal language | Yes |
| Without verbal language dreams and experiences cannot be spoken to others and consolidated | Constrictions and possibilities of verbal language | With verbal language dreams and experiences can be spoken to others and consolidated |
| By not being able to socialize the imagery could not conceive of an alternative reality | Ability to conceive an alternative reality | By socializing the imagery we can conceive of an alternative reality |
IX Magical Theatrics in the Service of Initiation Ceremonies
Art of memory
Pfeiffer argues that there are a number of ways of preparing the brain for altered states. These include sheer monotony—which includes solitary confinement; concentrating on a hypnotist’s words; isolating individuals in a dark soundproof chambers and immersing them under-water in tanks. Under all these conditions the brain begins to daydream. From this sensory deprivation in the caves the mind begins to wander. They are now in a middle zone. They have been pulled from the everyday world of moderate sensory information to a state of sensory deprivation. Now initiates are pulled to the other extreme of sensory saturation by sacred specialists. Sensory saturation includes dancing—slapping thighs, stamping on the ground or drumming. This intensifies and controls the twilight state. Percussion instruments and drums can affect the brain most strongly when it comes to evoking a twilight state. Drums stimulate the auditory cortex. Seven to nine beats per second is the same rhythm as brain waves. In this twilight state the person loses their guard. This includes: the ability to doubt; ask questions; criticize; distinguish between cause and effect and differentiate between fantasy and reality.
Pfeiffer emphasizes the importance of involving all the senses. The richer the experience, the more associations are attached to it the more widespread is its ripple in the brain and its ultimate representation in the hierarchies and networks of memory. These include the sight of painted bison, drumbeats like bison hoof beats, singing and chanting high-imagery words describing bison stampeding and dance based on movements of bison on the run. It is not just visual stimulation which occurred but it was coupled by acoustic stimulation:
Caves are wonderful places for acoustic as well as visual effects. Underground ceremonies must have been designed to take advantage of and shatter the silence as well as the darkness, to bombard the ear as well as the eye…Imagine the sound of bullroarer nearby in an underground labyrinth, the sound of flutes rising high and clear as a human cry or a bird from some place impossible to locate.
A song sung inside a tube-like corridor would not be heard until someone passed directly in front of the opening directly across the sound beam, which is roughly the acoustical equivalent of a light switch or coming suddenly around a bend upon an illuminated painting….anamorphic music could be created as readily as anamorphic art—music unrecognizable from one position and taking on the shape of a known melody from another.
But it is not only changing the normal input of the senses that is important. Telling stories which link all the new information into a framework is vital. How can words be used to stimulate memory? Any words that evoke action and emotional commitment are more easily remembered. Lastly, the ability to form images into the story serves memory well. The words should be middle level…not so abstract as to have no imagery, such as facts or statistics, but not so concrete as to limit the power of association and the power of suggestion.
Finally there is the perception of irregularity. This included bringing the participants to unfamiliar, alien and unpleasant places with significant changes in temperature, light and texture of the ground. These caves were cool in the summer and warmer in the winter. There is an intensity of shafts of light from the open air contrasted to the darkness of the caves. Both the floors and the ceilings were irregular. The floors were slippery in places with pits to fall into and rocks to trip over. The high contrast and unpredictability of perception has the effect of making people pay attention and alert, These may have the makings of flashbulb memories.
Initiation techniques
The initiation process was a device used for preparing people for imprinting new information about other people, places and objects. The psychological impact is that of shaking the individual up by trying to erase or undermine their everyday world. When a participant is confused and uncertain about what is happening or about to happen coupled with the fear of being lost and never finding one’s way out the individual is more willing to believe almost anything. Imagine an individual going for days in an initiation ceremony without seeing anything but rocks and then suddenly seeing a painting. The meaning of the painting would be even more vivid.
Techniques were used to make images appear suddenly. Those initiated might be brought to a certain spot, blindfolded and then shown the painting. Another technique is leading people around a sharp bend into an illuminated side chamber. Still another device would be to hide and then run from the hiding place with burning torches into a dark painted chamber. As the anthropologist Victor Turner says, the novice is betwixt and between: he is ungrounded in the world he knows, yet he is not born anew. He lives in a state of “liminality” or “fruitful darkness”.
It is not just the environmental atmosphere that must be changed, but also the appearance of the people doing the initiating. The shaman had to look different than in everyday life to capture attention. Props included masks, body painting, exotic ornaments and amulets. The sounds needed to be different, uttering antique words and phrases along with messages associated with novelty and surprise.
Altered states can be induced by sensory deprivation, fatigue, pain, fasting and ingestion of psychotropic substances. The most common hallucinations include: death/killing; aggression/fighting drowning or going underwater; flight; sexual arousal/intercourse and body transformation (fusing with animals and the experience of bodily distortions). People saw walls of the cave as a membrane between themselves and spirit world and placed objects into the walls and floors of caves to send fragments of animals back through the membrane into the spirit world. The powers of the underworld allowed people to kill animals, provided people responded in certain ritual ways, such as taking fragments of animals into the caves and inserting them into the membrane.
From play to art: the adaptive advantage of the art in the caves
At the beginning of this article I wrote that Pfeiffer discussed how the advantages of play outweighed the costs in energy use, injuries and danger relative to possible predators. The same well may be true for the art in the caves. Apparently, the advantage of training for real-life fighting and escape tactics would be especially important in hunting large herd animals, less than in fighting other groups. Also, the importance building and sustaining relationships outweighed the time lost to feeding and resting or in the loss of energy. It would seem that the cost of losing some time as individuals resting and feeding is more than paid back by the group feeding and resting which would occur after the result of group work.
Furthermore, the ritualistic aspect of art would promote friendships among strangers who do not share a high proportion of their genes. Though the rituals promoted less individual innovative thinking in terms of the ability of the individual to act creatively, as a social being would be enhanced because they would be able to deal with large numbers of people, complex social relationships and more complex tools. While some of the rituals lead to serious physical injuries, the overall benefits of these rituals for social creativity must have outweighed the costs. The possibility that these rituals would distract individuals for the reality of other predators is not realistic given the intensely social nature of humanity. People do not spend all their time in the caves. Further, they have already learned that these caves are safe from other animals or they wouldn’t have been chosen as sites. The caves are used in the service of pragmatic social ends: surviving in a cold environment with less diversity of resources, while initiating through ritual the next generation.
X Why Magical Theatrics Should Matter to Socialists
What is needed is not de-enchantment but re-enchantment
I would think that socialists being social, would be hip to what is going on with these caves. After all, we must not only point out the manipulative nature of enchantment, but we need to be dialectical and ask how we could use these techniques we just discussed to promote socialism. The construction of a sacred space (whether a church or a ballpark), a dramatized story, ritualized gestures, and the use of music and the arts to alter consciousness is not just superstition in the service of the ruling class. Come on! What went on the caves occurred between egalitarian hunter gatherers. Marx’s claim that religion is the opiate of the people does not apply in his primitive communism of these hunter-gatherers. It is part of our bio-evolutionary heritage to be interested in these things. The alternative to a reified otherworldly religion is not de-enchantment of Max Weber, as so many dry-as-dust socialists seem to think. We must build a “this-worldly” pagan enchantment that is a foundation for socialist socialization for the next generation. The techniques used in the caves could be and were used for celebration of the change of seasons, pilgrimages, as well as just rites of passage ceremonies all informed by singing, dancing, sculpting, painting and mask-making.
Socialist holidays peppered throughout the year
Socialism has certainly had its events that could be claimed as peak experiences or even religious experiences. Anyone who had participated in a revolution knows these moments are euphoric and unforgettable. Anyone who participated in the Occupy Movement will not soon forget it. But what about budding socialists who have never had revolutionary experiences? What do we have to offer them in the way of inspiring collective experiences before a revolutionary process begins? Throughout the year religion, nationalism and sports which
typical Marxists think of as oppressive escapist institutions aren’t only that. Baseball has its opening day in April, the All Star game is in July and the World Series is in October. Religion has its holy days peppered throughout the year. Nationalism has its holidays – President’s Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Veteran’s Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas. What is missing under socialism is a similar pageantry of rituals, joining in song and dance along with regular places to meet and celebrate. All of these things could build a theatrical stage scaffolding for extraordinary revolutionary events. Hunter gatherers in the cave knew this.
Rites of passage
There is a sad lack of yearly seasonal rituals that keep the fires burning between one revolutionary generation and the next. Religion, nationalism and sports all have ways of linking the important events of the year to the lifetime of the individual. Catholics have confirmation at roughly the age of nine and Hispanic Catholics have a Quinceañera around a girl’s 15th birthday. The socialist and communist movements used to have youth groups which initiated them into socialism. People of different ages were given very specific tasks to do relative to up-coming campaigns. There were socialist children’s magazines and books. In his book Ritual, Politics and Power, David Kertzer points out that the Communist Party in Italy once competed with the Catholic Church over the right to baptize. They did something similar at funerals. Socialists badly need to get re-involved in rites of passage once again: socialist births and baptism, coming of age rituals, socialist marriages and socialist deaths. We can’t cede this to religious traditions. We can learn how to do this from Cro-Magnon in the Ice Age caves.
Making pilgrimages
In San Francisco, once a year in July there is something called “LaborFest”. This is a month-long series of movies, talks, music, panels and plays held at various locations around the city. A comrade of mine would give a walking tour of downtown Oakland and revisit some of the various scenes of the General Strike in San Francisco. Between 50 and 100 people attended this walk every year. Most major cities in the United States have their version of special places connected to labor strikes. Why aren’t they celebrated? There could be LaborFests in every major city in Yankeedom!
In sports an individual might visit Cooperstown (Baseball’s Hall of Fame) for their birthday. Nationalism has its pilgrimages to the Washington monuments in the summer. What does socialism have to offer?? Would it be possible to have an experience of socialism before the revolution, Socialist need to be swept away. We need some Love Potion Number 9.
Singing and dancing
Of course the mighty Internationale heads any list of music for socialists. Any of you who have seen the movie Reds will remember the scene of Jack Reed talking to Russian workers as the Internationale swelled in the background and the red flags flew. However, we have much more than just this song. Some of the best radical songs in the world came out of the Industrial Workers of the World songbook. Why aren’t these songs sung on a regular basis throughout the year by socialists, not just by Wobblies? Do socialists dance? Well of course we do, but not as much as we could. As Red Emma Goldman once said, “If I can’t dance to it, it’s not my revolution”.
Sacred sites and new calendars
In her book Romance of the Communist Party, Vivian Gornick reports that one of her interviewees told her of a co-operative housing development called United Workers Co-op Association consisting of two five-story buildings, each a block square. There were club rooms, meeting halls, a library, nursery schools, a community center, a print shop and an auditorium. People read, talked, held meetings, danced and flirted. It was a little city within a city. Janet Biehl, Murray Bookchin’s biographer, tells a story of how these places were a substitute home away from home for Murray. The buildings stayed open to the wee small hours of the morning. Why can’t we have these kinds of sacred sites again? During and after the French Revolution the leaders created a revolutionary calendar to symbolize breaking with the old world. Capitalism is failing badly. Don’t we need to get busy with drafts of a new world socialist calendar?
Bringing it on home
To summarize, what we need is designated times of the year, perhaps every season, in which socialists in every major city come together, sing and dance across generations, celebrating “holy days”, the birthdays of the great socialists. At the same gatherings, there is time allotted to celebrate rites of passage and make pilgrimages to the scenes of the great labor struggles in that city.
I have no doubt many pagan socialists like Starhawk have already stepped forward to connect political activity with pagan rituals. There are many more processes to be connected and many more people are needed. Any socialists who have an appreciation for theatre, interior design and social psychology should step forward. More earth, less air; more water, less air; more fire, less air. This last section is heavily dependent on my article Re-enchanting Socialism: How Not to Throw the Baby With the Bath Water
Conclusion
I began my article by challenging the notion that all the arts are simply secular disciplines done to either satisfy the public or to find personal meaning. I argue that all the arts were once in the service of creating magical altered states of consciousness. I review other for theories of what went on in the caves: art for art’s sake; sympathetic hunting magic; conflicts between groups and Levi’s Strauss’s structuralism. I describe the sites and the routes in the caves and argue against the belief that the paintings in the caves could have been done by Neanderthals. I describe two states of consciousness, primary and higher order consciousness and conclude that only Homo sapiens have higher states of consciousness that could have made those paintings. I conclude that the paintings were done as part of a theatrical set to create an initiation ordeal. I close my article by arguing that socialists could learn a great deal from these rituals and the theatrical set could vitalize socialist rites of passage, pilgrimages, observation of yearly holidays as well as singing and dancing in the service of creating a socialist neo-pagan culture in the 21st century.
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Barbara MacLean.