I thought Lewis-Williams’ argument was very appealing, even though, as in the ‘Mind in the Cave’, he starts very grounded and scientific and then seems to run off on wild speculations before returning to evidence once again. This is, however, perhaps what makes it appealing, since his model seems to explain not only the origin of animal domestication but an entire cosmological shift away from ‘shamanism’. Of course, the shift away from shamanism is only necessary to explain if one accepts his arguments that shamanism was the origin of religion, art, cosmology, etc.
One aspect of his argument I felt it was necessary to think through in light of his earlier arguments was the claim that “the domestication of animals was already embedded in the worldview and social-ritual complex we have described before people began actually herding aurochs” (141), or more specifically its relationship to and implications for the rest of the work. Presumably this sentence refers to the ‘domestication’ or at least control of spirit animals, which, according to L-W, had been present since the Upper Paleolithic. The long-standing tradition of shamans controlling spirit animals gave rise to the domestication of ‘real’ animals when shamans tried to demonstrate and solidify their control of the spirit realm through their control of the tangible realm. This implies that there is a fundamental link between the ‘spirit’ animals arising from altered states of consciousness and ‘real’ animals. However, in ‘Mind in the Cave’, one of L-W’s central early arguments is that the ‘representational’ imagery of the Upper Paleolithic is not a 2-dimensional (and hence simplified) representation of the real world, but rather a perfectly accurate representation of the spirit realm. Thus it seems that domestication may not have been quite so embedded in the worldview of the Neolithic. Rather, it involved “accepting new understandings of the functioning of the human brain and the mental states that it produces” (34). In that sense, it required recognizing that images in the mind fundamentally arise from experience in the tangible world, and thus forging a link between the spirit and the tangible. I think the necessity of accepting that this shift took place in order to accept L-W’s arguments is evident when L-W’s descriptions of his hypothetical Paleolithic shamans are compared with his descriptions of his hypothetical Neolithic shamans. Indeed, the Neolithic shamans seem much more calculating than their Paleolithic predecessors, demonstrating their power in the form of architecture and domestic animals rather than relying on other people’s (admittedly less potent) experiences with altered states of consciousness to lend legitimacy to theirs. It almost seems as if the Neolithic shift was the result of the waning power of the shamans, who needed increasingly tangible demonstrations of their power to maintain control over an increasingly skeptical population. Of course, this is pure speculation, but if we take it one step farther, and suggest that increasing environmental pressure could have been seen as a failure of the shamanistic elite to obtain favors from the spirit worlds (hence leading to a questioning of shamanistic power), then we have returned, provocatively I think, to an environmental ‘cause’ of the Neolithic revolution.
I found ItNM very interesting, especially in light of the reading I am doing for Emergence of State Society. It seems, as Jeff pointed out, that LW and Pearce posit that it was the shifting religious mindset that led to domestication of animals and plants, as well as class-based societies. This is interesting to me because in my understanding Chatal Hoyuk was a kind of flash-in-the-pan settlement that was abandoned at some point before becoming a major city like Ur. If religion united the site, was it a religious implosion that divided it again? I wonder if these major religious building sites are dead-ends for the societies that build them or points in a common trajectory. LW and Pearce speculate that the fortunes of the mound-building groups waned as they shall-we-say wasted resources in competitive monuments. ItNM didn't seem to discuss the changing mindset of people adapting to agricultural life outside of terms of religious experience, which I found interesting. Granted that religion would not be a divisible part of their lives, but what about the physical life-style changes involved in forming villages, and especially in governing them?
Although I see a lot of value in Lewis-William's cognitive model, I can't help but think he is overestimating the degree to which we can climb on the archaeologist's Jacob's Ladder. By connecting images to an idea of a tiered cosmos, do we truly connect to the religious mindset of the people who built these monuments? Although LW's argument on the similarities between the actual religious experiences felt by San bushmen and other drug users, I think that it is equally important that those base experiences led to such different narratives of belief.
LW tries to hedge his bets by declaring "practice inseparable from belief" in religion, but I find that simplistic. 2 religions decorate their holy spaces with similar abstract symbols, and we are to suppose that fundamentally they are the same?
One concept in Inside the Neolithic Mind that I found very interesting was the divergences between our ideas of "birth" "death" and "wild" and the Neolithic ideas of these terms. Death for Western culture has evolved into a loss of consciousness that is never reversed. In some other cultures that may have included the Neolithic people, even if people regain consciousness they are thought of as being dead while during the time that they do not have it. It seems that in thinking about death in these terms, people would be able to have a closer connection to the spirit world. It is not something that can only be interacted with once life has ended. Death can be thought of as some sort of altered state, and Shamans can therefore have access to alternate realities from which they can gain images or idols. In addition to having a deeper connection to alternate mental states, when looking at the term "wild" it seems that non-western cultures could have a closer connection to the conscious world as well. Lewis-Williams discusses that there is less of a distinction between natural and man-made. They don't consider the term "wild" as being something other than what the world is, and can therefore adapt certain aspects of the world without changing its nature.
I agree with B.F.E in that while Lewis-Williams and Pearce focus mainly on how the religious experience may have changed people’s lifestyles, including agriculture and the domestication of animals, they largely ignored how this sudden change in lifestyle may have in turn affected people’s religious experiences. It seems to me that a sudden increase in plants and animals within close range of your home as well as the implied control over nature and animals by many individuals, not just shamans, would potentially have a significant affect on people’s views of the world around them as well as the unseen spiritual world. For example, Lewis-Williams and Pearce mention that “eventually, we suspect, the mystique and potency of corralled aurochs herds evaporated. Too many people came to possess animals, and the notion of wild, powerful spirit-animals was weakened” (148), but they do not go much beyond this in the influence of the development of agriculture and animal domestication on the religious experience. Surely, as indicated in this statement by Lewis-Williams and Pearce, the relationship between religion and agriculture / domestication, was not a one-way flow of influence, which they have mainly presented it as. Additionally, not only did Lewis-Williams and Pearce not really discuss the effects of domestication / agriculture on religion, they also did not mention the effects of agriculture / domestication on other areas of life, such as social structure, political structure etc. (However, these types of observations may be somewhat outside the scope of this book.)
Although I found this book, as well as Lewis-Williams' argument for these images in sites as a representation of a tiered cosmology and these past people's connections with religion, engaging, I found myself wanting more of an explanation of how these functioned in relation to the people beyond the simple connection to religion. Lewis-Williams begins to establish a connection with these images/sites with power/power relations/control, but he fails to develop any sort of argument as to how they function within a society beyond religion beyond a simple, "Religion and political control of land are always an explosive combination" (198), when discussing competition over the setting of Bru na Boinne, or "...seers were different from ordinary people. All too often researchers omit this kind of power when they consider prehistoric societies" (276) when briefly discussing divisions.
Throughout the book, Lewis-Williams addresses what the images/structures want on the surface by discussing what they possibly could represent, but his argument is lacking in actually discussing the effects of the images, thus what they actually want on a deeper level within a society. To me, it seems that these images, whether they represent a tiered cosmos and/or a subsequent journey within that cosmos in the establishment of religion or not, had some obvious function in the creation of power and power relations within these early societies. By not mentioning how he believes the images functioned in these societies beyond the large umbrella of "religion," Lewis-Williams does not completely provide an engagement with these images and structures.
I found Lewis-Williams and Pearce's statements about the different levels of consciousness to be very interesting. When having any sort of hallucination, each person will, in some way, have very similar hallucinations. He argues that these "derive from the sensation of passing through a vortex that is wired into the human nervous system" (68). When experiencing near death experiences, tunnels, holes, or even portals all of these are already pre-wired into our brains. He also states that, "hallucinations, as we have seen, are frequently projected onto a person's immediate environment-outside of one's head: hallucinations are therefore also part of this world" (69). The hallucinations that we share are all reflections of our particular environment. This could possibly represent the state of double consciousness; its a reflection of the world in our minds and the world/ reality that we live in.
As much as Lewis-Williams sold me in The Mind and the Cave, his blatant overarching analysis between two highly distinctive geographic regions (between the Near East and West) within his neurologically-based framework, applied to the phenomenon of the Neolithic Revolution, immediately turned me off for the remainder of Inside the Neolithic Mind. As much as he handles the architecture within the landscape of megalithic Western Europe and Near Eastern sites such as Cątalhöyük, he inadequately deals with the primary cosmological spatial distinction between these distant places. Whereas Cątalhöyük is situated within a domestic space, a house for the living and the dead, megalithic mortuary complexes such as “The Bend of Boyne” solely house the dead—whatever rituals took place within and around this landscape. How does this difference in location affect the cosmological, social, and political situation of that society? For one, it certainly makes it easier for the scientist, for Lewis-Williams, to explain domestication within a religious and politically-charged domestic space such as Cątalhöyük. Yet, how can you explain “sacred domestication” if the principle sacred place is separate from your main living quarters? Where did the megalithic “shamans” keep their sacrificial cows?
[If I had more time, I’d also critique on his deliberate disregard of the domestication of plants within this framework. I think that’s because plants with spirits aren’t as sexy as a cow existing within the profane and sacred realms—it’s not like there isn’t enough ethnographic evidence to support the idea of a religion worshipping and communicating with a Mother Nature Tree or Mother Goddess Corn, etc. Didn’t domestication of plants occur before that of animals?]
As I read further and further along, I couldn’t abandon my initial hesitancy over the use of the exact same theoretical framework for both locations. My other issue revolves around the subject-matter of the images themselves and the ritualistic objects utilized within these “altered states of consciousness.” Cątalhöyük confronts you with artwork, evoking memory of the Upper Paleolithic cave paintings, only with the inclusion of the human form, although still readily altered into strange states of being (e.g.: the decapitated bodies); with reliefs of breasts, female bodies, and other representations emerging from the walls themselves (sort of reminiscent of those horror films where the spirits struggle torso-first through materially-solid barriers); and with “burials” or offerings of human and animal remains, built into the “mural” wall itself, inserted via niches, or supporting part of the structure, as the aurochs’ skulls appear to symbolically do for the columns—what Lewis-Williams refers to as an axis mundi—between the “murals.” In contrast, megalithic art is highly abstract and focuses mainly on reproduction of the entopic phenomenon one experiences when neurologically-stimulated by these “altered states of consciousness.” Also important to note, the majority of mortuary remains found within these “megalithic tombs” are mostly human.
I really believe something cosmologically, spiritually, religiously, and politically special was going on within the communities of monumental megalithic-builders contrasted with the society of Cątalhöyük. While the megalithic tomb-builders appear to be evoking some kind of Great Ancestor worship (a means of communicating and traversing through the three cosmological levels Lewis-Williams lays out), Cątalhöyük seems to me like an Upper Paleolithic cave (and its deep connection to the spiritual world just beyond the cave walls—Lewis-William’s “membrane”) that invaded the living above-ground space of this community and was then molded, manipulated, and metamorphosized to create and support a newly-emergent cosmologically social and spiritual structure.
Why does one community’s “shaman” die (either through metaphorical bodily metamorphosis and the altering of one’s state of consciousness or actual biological death) and enter the spiritual world of animals and decapitated humans, while the other metamorphosizes the dead (through the ritual process of cremating the remains), and during the ritual thus dies himself (?) and travels (alongside the dead perhaps?) through a vortex to some non-artistically represented “afterlife” (at least within the confines of the ritual space…the megalithic tomb)—unless of course, the representation is in fact this eternal vortex, perpetually spinning and swirling upon itself into an oblivion of more spirals and more vortices?
Fine, spiritual experience and religion as an “institution” may be universally affected and partially founded by the neurological framework Lewis-William constructs, but beyond this basic notion, I really think he fails in applying it to the temporal, spatial, social, political, technological, and “cultural” complexity of the Neolithic Revolution. I would’ve liked more—much more.
I am interested in the discussion of "spirit animals" (p.142-144) and how these can be related to the idea of an idol. L-W and Pearce's discussion of different groups of people experiencing similar "religious" and altered consciousness experiences develops further the idea from "The Mind in the Cave" that mental image-making is an inherent function of the human brain. What I take from this is that idol-making, or at least image-making, by extension, is an inherent function of the human brain. This begs the question of whether or not, then, the actual image or idol is necessary, or if the human mind can be in a way both the idol and the idolizer at the same time. The concept of spirit animals seems to be an example of this, that it is not always necessary for the idol to be a physical entity - while the "spirit springbuck" discussed can at times take on a material form, it is essentially an abstract concept, and in both forms it is an idol - when it is in an actual animal it is giving that animal power and significance beyond its material form, and when it is a spirit it represents the shaman's power and connection to the animal and therefore is something to be "idolized". (I think this would be complicated to explain in Gell's way of describing relationships - is the spirit animal the agent acting on the shaman, or the other way around, or is each simultaneously both, and how would other people being told of the spirit animal and seeing it as a representation of the shaman's ability fit into the equation?)
I was very much intrigued by Lewis-Williams' mention of decapitated infants and "the discovery of human and animal blood on what may have been altars ... It seems probably that sacrifice, whether of animals or people, was part of Neolithic contact with the supernatural" (81). This reminds me of our discussion about the corpse as the basis of religion. How interesting that forcing a spirit to depart from its body is closely linked to communicating with other spirits, around us and in the distant realm of the spirits, that don't have bodies.
I’d like to specifically say about so-called ‘goddess figures’ found at Çatalhöyük. In this book, Lewis-Williams agrees with Voigt and Hodder, saying that Mellaart’s notion of great goddess which represents abundance and fertility does not have any substance in the interpretation of the figurines. Instead, he explains that “the female figure was the seers who could tame wild animals.” (p146) However, he mentions that the seating position of the figurine depicts giving birth. In addition, he states that the female means the death. Then, giving birth can be a passage to link between the living and the dead, and even between the upper world since the figurine represents the seer who links the upper world and the human world. In this sense, can we say that the female figures represent vertical three tiered cosmos instead of horizontality?
I was interested in the implications of LW and Pearce's discussion of eye imagery, especially in examples like the 'Ain Ghazal figures. They position the eyes as an indication of altered state, in which the person depicted (often, presumably, a shaman) experiences enhanced “seeing” through supernatural powers. Gell argued for eyes as indices of internal consciousness; here is a variant on that, in which a specific, altered consciousness is suggested through these dramatic eyes. When we ended class on Tuesday with the shift from absorbed to engaged images, I was thinking about how these shamanistic eyes, despite facing the viewer, are actually absorbed internally—their very inaccessibility to the rational-state audience viewing the icon contradicts the pattern of forward-facing expressions as engaged, and in doing so unsettles the viewers and forces them to consider the power of what the figure is actually engaged with (a supernatural realm, perhaps).
I agree with some other comments above that to say that seers' association with and perhaps even control of spirit animals created a framework that allowed for domestication to become a practical reality is problematic. But while Lewis-Williams, here and in Mind in the Cave, gave biology a primary place, political manipulations also played a role, and that role continues here. LW and Pearce argue that social division is just as central to ritual as social cohesion, in that some individuals and groups gain advantages through these communal practices; along those lines, they claim that “the hierarchy of the dead in some days paralleled (and reinforced) the hierarchy of the living” (79). In this political aspect of the argument we see that the spirit world evidently always maintained a connection with the concrete “real” world, that it was actively maintained through strategic social behaviors. So it seems like the Neolithic is positioned as a time of adopting new behaviors to act on these worlds perhaps more drastically (architecture, domestication) or even just more obviously, and that even if these developments followed from religious changes, those too comprised shifting practices rather than a new idea about the connection between the material and spirit worlds.
L-W focuses on the importance of human consciousness in art making throughout both his books, however, I think that he does not give enough attention to the physical human body in his theories about the origins of art. Art is the physical manifestation of inner thoughts, and so is the human body. L-W focuses on an intangible spirit realm and these “altered states of consciousness” are primarily influenced by experiences within the material world, and the place of the body within that world. It seems that Neolithic people did not see a ridged separation between the worlds of dreams and reality, and their placement of bodies and body parts perhaps shows their attempts at connecting reality and dreams. L-W writes of the “emergence of figures from the walls, as well as the possibility of human beings or, more probably, spirit beings crawling through walls” (111) at Çatalhöyük. He explains that physical bodies were literally placed within walls at the site, which indicates an attachment to the material of the body as well as to the spirit. The placement of dead bodies, and the use of body parts implicates the body itself as art object, through which the agency of the once living body is communicated, along with the agency of death, and those still surviving. In chapter 5 L-W writes of sacrifice as a means to “control ‘death’ as cosmological transition”(127) thereby empowering the sacrificer, which is similar to the way in which the making of images can bring power to the artist. But is the human body an object? What does it take to transform the body into an object? It seems that it is taboo to treat the living human body as an object, but once the inner life of a body has left it, the living are willing to treat the corpse as an object. The plastered skulls from Jericho are a prime example of the corpse used for art, with the inlaid eyes and plaster flesh indexing the power of a living body.
I'm still sort of stuck on the notion of idol as inorganic material. While the human is material, it grows and decays. The idol is an inorganic, living being. It is also permanent. It will always be a living subject. The capacity to index in a complex way (as Gell would put it) is infinite and in its infinity, it is eternal, immortal. L-W/Pearce's discussion of the omnipresent spurred my thoughts of this. These material, immortal objects have their eyes wide open in a penetrating gaze. And they never blink. They are omnipresent and omnipercipient (like the shamans interestingly...) In my last blog, I discussed the melancholy of being frozen mid-metamorphosis. What else can be indexed as a frozen/living/eternal being? Terror? Perhaps Gell's notion of complex indexicality best demonstrates why we respond so readily to certain objects as being idols, as entities with which we can share intersubjectivity. An omnipercipient gaze can induce terror, melancholy, a feeling of uncanny, powerlessness, what else?
One of Lewis-William's main points, building off French archaeologist Jacques Cauvin's, is that "major changes in thought (superstructure) preceded changes in subsistence (infrastructure): people changed their religion and symbolism before they became farmers, not as a result of becoming farmers" (23). Subsequently, LW also discusses Rousseau's claim that man is naturally born with a "religious internal cult" of sorts (43).
In jumping from mind-symbolism (the internal cult, religion) to material-symbolism, LW lists the issue of control as a key factor: "Cosmological control created a a more flexible and effective mechanism for social control... For an elite to control society effectively, they must seize control of the material and the intellectual means of production, though they may never manage to do so totally" (167).
This is a seriously radical claim to make. Admittedly, it reads like a logical bridge for the materiality / symbolism gap. However, it is also near-presumptuous. I'm unsure of how effective it is to use phrases like "For an elite to control society effectively" when addressing Neolithic people. This usage of Marxist terminology seems to betray assumptions about the workings of the Neolithic mind, workings which are no longer just about fixed neurological patterns. I think that even while Lewis-Williams tries desperately to avoid coming off as "teleological" or "fatalistic", claims like this one are fairly close to violating that limit.
As was stated, I find it very surprising that Lewis-Williams did not seem to bring up the topic of plant domestication. I don't really have any knowledge of plants depicted in the same fashion of animals but it would seem one would want some spiritual control over important plants as well as animals. Perhaps the theory of Neolithic people considering the sleeping dead can extend to them believing the seemingly inanimate plants lacking some sort of spirit with which to connect. The lack of eyes, an index of the internal, in plants could also be a factor in this exclusion.
What I found interesting was that Lewis-Williams did not make a parallel between the pillars at Gobleki Tepe, visions, and Egyptian false doors. The Gobleki Tepe pillars remind me of geometric images seen through altered states. They also parallel Egyptian false doors, which had hieroglyphics and images of the deceased. Both seem to echo entries into the unknown or spirit realms, both are underground, and both seem to emphasize the vertical dimension of the tiered cosmos. An aspect that I find troubling with Lewis-Williams is his ready acceptance of shamanism and religion as the precursor to agriculture. Are we to accept that the spread of agriculture was accompanied by a religious formation? We see parallels in Western Europe with shamanistic images and megaliths, but what about the LBK culture or the Neolithic communities in central Europe? There's a progressive spread of agriculture from the Near East, but do we readily accept the spread of a cult or religious influence? Another problematic view with Lewis-Williams belief is that agriculture started near cult centers. Did he not believe that caves in the Upper Paleolithic were slight cult centers for groups? Did they not have shamans? Why did agriculture not begin near these 'cult centers'?
Lewis-Williams and Pearce build on his neurological model of thinking about archaeological data throughout Inside the Neolithic Mind. His thoughts start off firmly grounded in the science of the matter, and branches out into other ideas along the way.
His discussion of religiosity, and its foundations within the human psyche, was something that I found especially intriguing. He says that most religious explanations are psychological or sociological, with the psychological downplaying the importance of religion within culture and the sociological basically equating religion with politics. The sociological model is seen as a way of cementing a society by giving them a common ground. Additionally, scholars have proposed that there are different forms of religiosity: imagistic based on sporadic ritual experiences and doctrinal which focuses on written and formulaic documentation. Clifford Geertz's definition offers a more complete view of the role of religion, which the authors use to build upon. They create a Venn diagram with overlapping circles of religion: experience, belief, practice; through the relationships of these, they seek to understand religion as an archaeological force.
One of the most powerful statements (which I think applies to more than just the subject at hand) comes in this section: "categorizing religions is not the same as explaining why they exist" (25). This holds true with archaeological sites, cultural differences, cosmological structures, etc. Finding a "meaning" or a standard into which something fits doesn't fully elucidate all of the information of importance. Meaning and classification aren't everything, it seems to say.
First off I just have to say that I love Lewis-Williams and Pearce and this book. It is so accessible and interesting to all audiences. Their stated desire to explore the “thought-lives” of the past and to look for a universal brain functional root for religions and cultures around the world in prehistory that initiated the trajectory still functioning today is so interesting and seems the logical next step for archaeology/anthropology. Their preliminary breakdown of religion is so simple and so profoundly true of religion in all its forms. Religious experience as neurological experiences of the profound and moving whether it is a feeling of connection with the entirety of the universe or a feeling that there is something greater out there than this human experience is so all encompassing. Limiting religious roots to the ideas around “altered states of mind” does not cover all the different experiences felt by all different people, not just the extremely holy or shamanistic. It is also a key move of theirs to then go to belief as a separate aspect of religion as belief is different than initial experience. Religious beliefs to the best of my knowledge really do rise out of an attempt to validate and codify these experiences; to make sense of them. It seems to me that it is actually here not in practice that we see a connection with idols. If, as we have discussed, idols and early art was a way for early people to work out the cognitive or brain functions and processes they were first experiencing, doesn’t it make sense that as they developed beliefs as a way to work out these experiences they created these idols to thicken their validation, codification, and understanding of these profound experiences. Furthermore a natural contingent of working out these experiences and codifying was putting these newfound beliefs into practice. Religious practice is materializing, in a broad sense of the word, these experiences and beliefs, bringing around their beliefs like they might have brought around idols. They were making their beliefs known as they brought them into the public or social sphere of whatever society we are dealing with. These aspects of religion although I describe them as a progression are for Lewis-Williams and Pearce inseparable as aspects of religion; religion wouldn’t be religion without all three of these. I think it is extremely insightful and interesting that they bring into their discussion a poem! Simply to read it as a poem it is highly revealing about the human experience and then to tie it in with the ideas on the birth of religion and its psychological roots is so enlightening. It is a beautiful poem as it has this wild erratic feeling to it yet it also clearly has a direction. I read it as saying that these religious/ psychological experiences are measureless yet belief or doctrine try to measure them and contain them in a rational framework. Yet they cannot be entirely rationalized as they are otherworldly and yet there is a single sacred river meandering slowly that is bringing us somewhere. However it brings us in “tumult to a lifeless ocean” where war is prophesied and there is only a shadow of the rare miracle of pleasure that is neither here nor there. Is the poet looking at religion that these profound experiences are all over the place and in trying to wall them in we are brought towards this lifeless ocean where war is present and pleasure is barely there. At the end he seems to make an allusion to the fact that music and perhaps art can bring us back to these profound experiences. Yet in working all this religion out, seeing and articulating these experiences and beliefs a person can end up being seen as holy and idolized where he of course mentions the power of the eyes. Poetry is such a psychological art and here the authors are, to grossly simplify it, trying to work out a psychological root of religion and culture and they use a poet who gets at these psychological processes in his own poem. The poets and the author seem to be dealing with such complex ideas and yet something about the way they go about is so simple.
After reading the first half of Inside the Neolithic mind, I cannot help but feel a little skeptical about the hallucinatory trajectory LW and Pearce map out early on in the book . The approach is logical and tangible and the prospect of understanding the universal neurological processes that we share with Neolithic or Upper Paleolithic people is exciting. I agree that the common visions or sensations people feel in altered states (geometric patterns, raveling through a vortex, flying, bizarre visions) are relatable across cultures. Still I feel that the stages he lays out at the beginning are too simplistic to explain the depths of human visions. I especially thought these definitions fell short when LW and Pearce discussed mortuary practices at Jericho, and Ain Ghazal, among other places. For example, the skulls with seashells inlaid in the eye sockets were configured at Jericho in a cluster, facing the same direction, which to the author suggests “That they were ‘seeing’ death as they did in life, but with greater percipience and sharing their perceptions” (77). I do not know why this explanation is the correct one for these particular skulls in this particular place. I think that if “each historical instance will be a unique product of an interaction between human neurology and culture” (46), it is hard to leave room for the illogical or inexplicable nature of life.
I find the idea of a neurological heritage to be intriguing and quite convincing. The notion that certain motifs and "artistic" or architectural patterns that can be found throughout the world at great temporal and spatial distances from one another lends itself to this kind of explanation. Reading about the architecture at Catalhoyuk reminded me immediately of the Peruvian site of Chavin de Huantar. Lewis-Williams argues about the importance of controlled movement through the levels and rooms at Catalhoyuk and the same argument has been made about the differentiated platforms of a complex gallery system at Chavin. There is also evidence for psychoactive drugs and shamanistic ritual behavior at Chavin which could be related to the construction and usage of a tiered architectural complex. The existence of similar cosmological patterns in Peru around 900 bce and in the Near Eastern Neolithic, as well as at many other sites in the Near East and in western Europe, can be understood with Lewis-Williams neurological model.
The main thing I find somewhat problematic however, is the way in which it feels as though Lewis-Williams approaches each case with the goal of fitting it into his formulated theory. He notes early on that most archaeologists are interested in differences rather than similarities (8). But at times it seems like he focuses too much on similarities without considering differences, or explaining away differences with the statement that "altered consciousness is therefore always situated in a social and political matrix. It is impossible to study altered states outside of a social context" (57). By acknowledging that altered states and therefore the similarities in the images represented in and by the altered states are joined to their social context, Lewis-Williams skims over differences that could illuminate varied origins for like images. Still, some similarities, particularly the replication of the cosmos vertically and horizontally through standing stones, holes, hearths, structures guiding and restricting sight, and sacrificial components (101) are convincingly explained if Rousseau's "true Theism" inside every person is the neuropsychological model.
Our reading and discussion last week of the Gobekli Tepe pillars and architecture provided an excellent introduction to some of the concepts in Lewis-Williams' Inside the Neolithic Mind. While a traditional explanation for the rise of sedentary life styles and permanent architecture was rooted in the fact that domestication sustained a larger population and set up social structures, L-W proves that this argument is all too simple. Like at Gobekli, more permanent structures and the domestication of animals may have been rooted in human mythic and religious beliefs-- that architecture, life, economy, etc. were not separated from the supernatural world. In other words, in the great case of which came first, the sedentary or religion, L-W articulates that religion may have been the catalyst for domestication. One of the most interesting findings and theories, in my opinion, dealt with the concept of permeable walls, that "walls stood between not only spaces but also states of being" (111). The people of Catalhoyuk incorporated meaning through dead bodies, objects, and decorations on the walls, making them "more than mundane living quarters" (111). The people seemed to be constantly interacting with these walls, as they re-plastered and reworked the mural images. Just as myths change over time and with each telling, the walls of these structures could be rework with new meaning, a tangible way of dealing with the supernatural. In our great quest to define idols, I would initially say that these structures are idols because of what they symbolize, how they are used, etc., but if they are a combination of secular and sacred, do they still count as an idol? Must an idol only have sacred meanings?
21 comments:
I thought Lewis-Williams’ argument was very appealing, even though, as in the ‘Mind in the Cave’, he starts very grounded and scientific and then seems to run off on wild speculations before returning to evidence once again. This is, however, perhaps what makes it appealing, since his model seems to explain not only the origin of animal domestication but an entire cosmological shift away from ‘shamanism’. Of course, the shift away from shamanism is only necessary to explain if one accepts his arguments that shamanism was the origin of religion, art, cosmology, etc.
One aspect of his argument I felt it was necessary to think through in light of his earlier arguments was the claim that “the domestication of animals was already embedded in the worldview and social-ritual complex we have described before people began actually herding aurochs” (141), or more specifically its relationship to and implications for the rest of the work. Presumably this sentence refers to the ‘domestication’ or at least control of spirit animals, which, according to L-W, had been present since the Upper Paleolithic. The long-standing tradition of shamans controlling spirit animals gave rise to the domestication of ‘real’ animals when shamans tried to demonstrate and solidify their control of the spirit realm through their control of the tangible realm. This implies that there is a fundamental link between the ‘spirit’ animals arising from altered states of consciousness and ‘real’ animals. However, in ‘Mind in the Cave’, one of L-W’s central early arguments is that the ‘representational’ imagery of the Upper Paleolithic is not a 2-dimensional (and hence simplified) representation of the real world, but rather a perfectly accurate representation of the spirit realm. Thus it seems that domestication may not have been quite so embedded in the worldview of the Neolithic. Rather, it involved “accepting new understandings of the functioning of the human brain and the mental states that it produces” (34). In that sense, it required recognizing that images in the mind fundamentally arise from experience in the tangible world, and thus forging a link between the spirit and the tangible. I think the necessity of accepting that this shift took place in order to accept L-W’s arguments is evident when L-W’s descriptions of his hypothetical Paleolithic shamans are compared with his descriptions of his hypothetical Neolithic shamans. Indeed, the Neolithic shamans seem much more calculating than their Paleolithic predecessors, demonstrating their power in the form of architecture and domestic animals rather than relying on other people’s (admittedly less potent) experiences with altered states of consciousness to lend legitimacy to theirs. It almost seems as if the Neolithic shift was the result of the waning power of the shamans, who needed increasingly tangible demonstrations of their power to maintain control over an increasingly skeptical population. Of course, this is pure speculation, but if we take it one step farther, and suggest that increasing environmental pressure could have been seen as a failure of the shamanistic elite to obtain favors from the spirit worlds (hence leading to a questioning of shamanistic power), then we have returned, provocatively I think, to an environmental ‘cause’ of the Neolithic revolution.
I found ItNM very interesting, especially in light of the reading I am doing for Emergence of State Society. It seems, as Jeff pointed out, that LW and Pearce posit that it was the shifting religious mindset that led to domestication of animals and plants, as well as class-based societies. This is interesting to me because in my understanding Chatal Hoyuk was a kind of flash-in-the-pan settlement that was abandoned at some point before becoming a major city like Ur. If religion united the site, was it a religious implosion that divided it again? I wonder if these major religious building sites are dead-ends for the societies that build them or points in a common trajectory. LW and Pearce speculate that the fortunes of the mound-building groups waned as they shall-we-say wasted resources in competitive monuments. ItNM didn't seem to discuss the changing mindset of people adapting to agricultural life outside of terms of religious experience, which I found interesting. Granted that religion would not be a divisible part of their lives, but what about the physical life-style changes involved in forming villages, and especially in governing them?
Although I see a lot of value in Lewis-William's cognitive model, I can't help but think he is overestimating the degree to which we can climb on the archaeologist's Jacob's Ladder. By connecting images to an idea of a tiered cosmos, do we truly connect to the religious mindset of the people who built these monuments? Although LW's argument on the similarities between the actual religious experiences felt by San bushmen and other drug users, I think that it is equally important that those base experiences led to such different narratives of belief.
LW tries to hedge his bets by declaring "practice inseparable from belief" in religion, but I find that simplistic. 2 religions decorate their holy spaces with similar abstract symbols, and we are to suppose that fundamentally they are the same?
One concept in Inside the Neolithic Mind that I found very interesting was the divergences between our ideas of "birth" "death" and "wild" and the Neolithic ideas of these terms. Death for Western culture has evolved into a loss of consciousness that is never reversed. In some other cultures that may have included the Neolithic people, even if people regain consciousness they are thought of as being dead while during the time that they do not have it. It seems that in thinking about death in these terms, people would be able to have a closer connection to the spirit world. It is not something that can only be interacted with once life has ended. Death can be thought of as some sort of altered state, and Shamans can therefore have access to alternate realities from which they can gain images or idols.
In addition to having a deeper connection to alternate mental states, when looking at the term "wild" it seems that non-western cultures could have a closer connection to the conscious world as well. Lewis-Williams discusses that there is less of a distinction between natural and man-made. They don't consider the term "wild" as being something other than what the world is, and can therefore adapt certain aspects of the world without changing its nature.
I agree with B.F.E in that while Lewis-Williams and Pearce focus mainly on how the religious experience may have changed people’s lifestyles, including agriculture and the domestication of animals, they largely ignored how this sudden change in lifestyle may have in turn affected people’s religious experiences. It seems to me that a sudden increase in plants and animals within close range of your home as well as the implied control over nature and animals by many individuals, not just shamans, would potentially have a significant affect on people’s views of the world around them as well as the unseen spiritual world. For example, Lewis-Williams and Pearce mention that “eventually, we suspect, the mystique and potency of corralled aurochs herds evaporated. Too many people came to possess animals, and the notion of wild, powerful spirit-animals was weakened” (148), but they do not go much beyond this in the influence of the development of agriculture and animal domestication on the religious experience. Surely, as indicated in this statement by Lewis-Williams and Pearce, the relationship between religion and agriculture / domestication, was not a one-way flow of influence, which they have mainly presented it as. Additionally, not only did Lewis-Williams and Pearce not really discuss the effects of domestication / agriculture on religion, they also did not mention the effects of agriculture / domestication on other areas of life, such as social structure, political structure etc. (However, these types of observations may be somewhat outside the scope of this book.)
Sarah E
Although I found this book, as well as Lewis-Williams' argument for these images in sites as a representation of a tiered cosmology and these past people's connections with religion, engaging, I found myself wanting more of an explanation of how these functioned in relation to the people beyond the simple connection to religion. Lewis-Williams begins to establish a connection with these images/sites with power/power relations/control, but he fails to develop any sort of argument as to how they function within a society beyond religion beyond a simple, "Religion and political control of land are always an explosive combination" (198), when discussing competition over the setting of Bru na Boinne, or "...seers were different from ordinary people. All too often researchers omit this kind of power when they consider prehistoric societies" (276) when briefly discussing divisions.
Throughout the book, Lewis-Williams addresses what the images/structures want on the surface by discussing what they possibly could represent, but his argument is lacking in actually discussing the effects of the images, thus what they actually want on a deeper level within a society. To me, it seems that these images, whether they represent a tiered cosmos and/or a subsequent journey within that cosmos in the establishment of religion or not, had some obvious function in the creation of power and power relations within these early societies. By not mentioning how he believes the images functioned in these societies beyond the large umbrella of "religion," Lewis-Williams does not completely provide an engagement with these images and structures.
I found Lewis-Williams and Pearce's statements about the different levels of consciousness to be very interesting. When having any sort of hallucination, each person will, in some way, have very similar hallucinations. He argues that these "derive from the sensation of passing through a vortex that is wired into the human nervous system" (68). When experiencing near death experiences, tunnels, holes, or even portals all of these are already pre-wired into our brains. He also states that, "hallucinations, as we have seen, are frequently projected onto a person's immediate environment-outside of one's head: hallucinations are therefore also part of this world" (69). The hallucinations that we share are all reflections of our particular environment. This could possibly represent the state of double consciousness; its a reflection of the world in our minds and the world/ reality that we live in.
As much as Lewis-Williams sold me in The Mind and the Cave, his blatant overarching analysis between two highly distinctive geographic regions (between the Near East and West) within his neurologically-based framework, applied to the phenomenon of the Neolithic Revolution, immediately turned me off for the remainder of Inside the Neolithic Mind. As much as he handles the architecture within the landscape of megalithic Western Europe and Near Eastern sites such as Cątalhöyük, he inadequately deals with the primary cosmological spatial distinction between these distant places. Whereas Cątalhöyük is situated within a domestic space, a house for the living and the dead, megalithic mortuary complexes such as “The Bend of Boyne” solely house the dead—whatever rituals took place within and around this landscape. How does this difference in location affect the cosmological, social, and political situation of that society? For one, it certainly makes it easier for the scientist, for Lewis-Williams, to explain domestication within a religious and politically-charged domestic space such as Cątalhöyük. Yet, how can you explain “sacred domestication” if the principle sacred place is separate from your main living quarters? Where did the megalithic “shamans” keep their sacrificial cows?
[If I had more time, I’d also critique on his deliberate disregard of the domestication of plants within this framework. I think that’s because plants with spirits aren’t as sexy as a cow existing within the profane and sacred realms—it’s not like there isn’t enough ethnographic evidence to support the idea of a religion worshipping and communicating with a Mother Nature Tree or Mother Goddess Corn, etc. Didn’t domestication of plants occur before that of animals?]
As I read further and further along, I couldn’t abandon my initial hesitancy over the use of the exact same theoretical framework for both locations. My other issue revolves around the subject-matter of the images themselves and the ritualistic objects utilized within these “altered states of consciousness.” Cątalhöyük confronts you with artwork, evoking memory of the Upper Paleolithic cave paintings, only with the inclusion of the human form, although still readily altered into strange states of being (e.g.: the decapitated bodies); with reliefs of breasts, female bodies, and other representations emerging from the walls themselves (sort of reminiscent of those horror films where the spirits struggle torso-first through materially-solid barriers); and with “burials” or offerings of human and animal remains, built into the “mural” wall itself, inserted via niches, or supporting part of the structure, as the aurochs’ skulls appear to symbolically do for the columns—what Lewis-Williams refers to as an axis mundi—between the “murals.” In contrast, megalithic art is highly abstract and focuses mainly on reproduction of the entopic phenomenon one experiences when neurologically-stimulated by these “altered states of consciousness.” Also important to note, the majority of mortuary remains found within these “megalithic tombs” are mostly human.
I really believe something cosmologically, spiritually, religiously, and politically special was going on within the communities of monumental megalithic-builders contrasted with the society of Cątalhöyük. While the megalithic tomb-builders appear to be evoking some kind of Great Ancestor worship (a means of communicating and traversing through the three cosmological levels Lewis-Williams lays out), Cątalhöyük seems to me like an Upper Paleolithic cave (and its deep connection to the spiritual world just beyond the cave walls—Lewis-William’s “membrane”) that invaded the living above-ground space of this community and was then molded, manipulated, and metamorphosized to create and support a newly-emergent cosmologically social and spiritual structure.
Why does one community’s “shaman” die (either through metaphorical bodily metamorphosis and the altering of one’s state of consciousness or actual biological death) and enter the spiritual world of animals and decapitated humans, while the other metamorphosizes the dead (through the ritual process of cremating the remains), and during the ritual thus dies himself (?) and travels (alongside the dead perhaps?) through a vortex to some non-artistically represented “afterlife” (at least within the confines of the ritual space…the megalithic tomb)—unless of course, the representation is in fact this eternal vortex, perpetually spinning and swirling upon itself into an oblivion of more spirals and more vortices?
Fine, spiritual experience and religion as an “institution” may be universally affected and partially founded by the neurological framework Lewis-William constructs, but beyond this basic notion, I really think he fails in applying it to the temporal, spatial, social, political, technological, and “cultural” complexity of the Neolithic Revolution. I would’ve liked more—much more.
I am interested in the discussion of "spirit animals" (p.142-144) and how these can be related to the idea of an idol. L-W and Pearce's discussion of different groups of people experiencing similar "religious" and altered consciousness experiences develops further the idea from "The Mind in the Cave" that mental image-making is an inherent function of the human brain. What I take from this is that idol-making, or at least image-making, by extension, is an inherent function of the human brain. This begs the question of whether or not, then, the actual image or idol is necessary, or if the human mind can be in a way both the idol and the idolizer at the same time. The concept of spirit animals seems to be an example of this, that it is not always necessary for the idol to be a physical entity - while the "spirit springbuck" discussed can at times take on a material form, it is essentially an abstract concept, and in both forms it is an idol - when it is in an actual animal it is giving that animal power and significance beyond its material form, and when it is a spirit it represents the shaman's power and connection to the animal and therefore is something to be "idolized". (I think this would be complicated to explain in Gell's way of describing relationships - is the spirit animal the agent acting on the shaman, or the other way around, or is each simultaneously both, and how would other people being told of the spirit animal and seeing it as a representation of the shaman's ability fit into the equation?)
I was very much intrigued by Lewis-Williams' mention of decapitated infants and "the discovery of human and animal blood on what may have been altars ... It seems probably that sacrifice, whether of animals or people, was part of Neolithic contact with the supernatural" (81). This reminds me of our discussion about the corpse as the basis of religion. How interesting that forcing a spirit to depart from its body is closely linked to communicating with other spirits, around us and in the distant realm of the spirits, that don't have bodies.
I’d like to specifically say about so-called ‘goddess figures’ found at Çatalhöyük. In this book, Lewis-Williams agrees with Voigt and Hodder, saying that Mellaart’s notion of great goddess which represents abundance and fertility does not have any substance in the interpretation of the figurines. Instead, he explains that “the female figure was the seers who could tame wild animals.” (p146) However, he mentions that the seating position of the figurine depicts giving birth.
In addition, he states that the female means the death. Then, giving birth can be a passage to link between the living and the dead, and even between the upper world since the figurine represents the seer who links the upper world and the human world. In this sense, can we say that the female figures represent vertical three tiered cosmos instead of horizontality?
I was interested in the implications of LW and Pearce's discussion of eye imagery, especially in examples like the 'Ain Ghazal figures. They position the eyes as an indication of altered state, in which the person depicted (often, presumably, a shaman) experiences enhanced “seeing” through supernatural powers. Gell argued for eyes as indices of internal consciousness; here is a variant on that, in which a specific, altered consciousness is suggested through these dramatic eyes. When we ended class on Tuesday with the shift from absorbed to engaged images, I was thinking about how these shamanistic eyes, despite facing the viewer, are actually absorbed internally—their very inaccessibility to the rational-state audience viewing the icon contradicts the pattern of forward-facing expressions as engaged, and in doing so unsettles the viewers and forces them to consider the power of what the figure is actually engaged with (a supernatural realm, perhaps).
I agree with some other comments above that to say that seers' association with and perhaps even control of spirit animals created a framework that allowed for domestication to become a practical reality is problematic. But while Lewis-Williams, here and in Mind in the Cave, gave biology a primary place, political manipulations also played a role, and that role continues here. LW and Pearce argue that social division is just as central to ritual as social cohesion, in that some individuals and groups gain advantages through these communal practices; along those lines, they claim that “the hierarchy of the dead in some days paralleled (and reinforced) the hierarchy of the living” (79). In this political aspect of the argument we see that the spirit world evidently always maintained a connection with the concrete “real” world, that it was actively maintained through strategic social behaviors. So it seems like the Neolithic is positioned as a time of adopting new behaviors to act on these worlds perhaps more drastically (architecture, domestication) or even just more obviously, and that even if these developments followed from religious changes, those too comprised shifting practices rather than a new idea about the connection between the material and spirit worlds.
L-W focuses on the importance of human consciousness in art making throughout both his books, however, I think that he does not give enough attention to the physical human body in his theories about the origins of art. Art is the physical manifestation of inner thoughts, and so is the human body. L-W focuses on an intangible spirit realm and these “altered states of consciousness” are primarily influenced by experiences within the material world, and the place of the body within that world. It seems that Neolithic people did not see a ridged separation between the worlds of dreams and reality, and their placement of bodies and body parts perhaps shows their attempts at connecting reality and dreams. L-W writes of the “emergence of figures from the walls, as well as the possibility of human beings or, more probably, spirit beings crawling through walls” (111) at Çatalhöyük. He explains that physical bodies were literally placed within walls at the site, which indicates an attachment to the material of the body as well as to the spirit. The placement of dead bodies, and the use of body parts implicates the body itself as art object, through which the agency of the once living body is communicated, along with the agency of death, and those still surviving. In chapter 5 L-W writes of sacrifice as a means to “control ‘death’ as cosmological transition”(127) thereby empowering the sacrificer, which is similar to the way in which the making of images can bring power to the artist. But is the human body an object? What does it take to transform the body into an object? It seems that it is taboo to treat the living human body as an object, but once the inner life of a body has left it, the living are willing to treat the corpse as an object. The plastered skulls from Jericho are a prime example of the corpse used for art, with the inlaid eyes and plaster flesh indexing the power of a living body.
I'm still sort of stuck on the notion of idol as inorganic material. While the human is material, it grows and decays. The idol is an inorganic, living being. It is also permanent. It will always be a living subject. The capacity to index in a complex way (as Gell would put it) is infinite and in its infinity, it is eternal, immortal. L-W/Pearce's discussion of the omnipresent spurred my thoughts of this. These material, immortal objects have their eyes wide open in a penetrating gaze. And they never blink. They are omnipresent and omnipercipient (like the shamans interestingly...)
In my last blog, I discussed the melancholy of being frozen mid-metamorphosis. What else can be indexed as a frozen/living/eternal being? Terror?
Perhaps Gell's notion of complex indexicality best demonstrates why we respond so readily to certain objects as being idols, as entities with which we can share intersubjectivity. An omnipercipient gaze can induce terror, melancholy, a feeling of uncanny, powerlessness, what else?
One of Lewis-William's main points, building off French archaeologist Jacques Cauvin's, is that "major changes in thought (superstructure) preceded changes in subsistence (infrastructure): people changed their religion and symbolism before they became farmers, not as a result of becoming farmers" (23). Subsequently, LW also discusses Rousseau's claim that man is naturally born with a "religious internal cult" of sorts (43).
In jumping from mind-symbolism (the internal cult, religion) to material-symbolism, LW lists the issue of control as a key factor: "Cosmological control created a a more flexible and effective mechanism for social control... For an elite to control society effectively, they must seize control of the material and the intellectual means of production, though they may never manage to do so totally" (167).
This is a seriously radical claim to make. Admittedly, it reads like a logical bridge for the materiality / symbolism gap. However, it is also near-presumptuous. I'm unsure of how effective it is to use phrases like "For an elite to control society effectively" when addressing Neolithic people. This usage of Marxist terminology seems to betray assumptions about the workings of the Neolithic mind, workings which are no longer just about fixed neurological patterns. I think that even while Lewis-Williams tries desperately to avoid coming off as "teleological" or "fatalistic", claims like this one are fairly close to violating that limit.
As was stated, I find it very surprising that Lewis-Williams did not seem to bring up the topic of plant domestication. I don't really have any knowledge of plants depicted in the same fashion of animals but it would seem one would want some spiritual control over important plants as well as animals. Perhaps the theory of Neolithic people considering the sleeping dead can extend to them believing the seemingly inanimate plants lacking some sort of spirit with which to connect. The lack of eyes, an index of the internal, in plants could also be a factor in this
exclusion.
What I found interesting was that Lewis-Williams did not make a parallel between the pillars at Gobleki Tepe, visions, and Egyptian false doors. The Gobleki Tepe pillars remind me of geometric images seen through altered states. They also parallel Egyptian false doors, which had hieroglyphics and images of the deceased. Both seem to echo entries into the unknown or spirit realms, both are underground, and both seem to emphasize the vertical dimension of the tiered cosmos.
An aspect that I find troubling with Lewis-Williams is his ready acceptance of shamanism and religion as the precursor to agriculture. Are we to accept that the spread of agriculture was accompanied by a religious formation? We see parallels in Western Europe with shamanistic images and megaliths, but what about the LBK culture or the Neolithic communities in central Europe? There's a progressive spread of agriculture from the Near East, but do we readily accept the spread of a cult or religious influence?
Another problematic view with Lewis-Williams belief is that agriculture started near cult centers. Did he not believe that caves in the Upper Paleolithic were slight cult centers for groups? Did they not have shamans? Why did agriculture not begin near these 'cult centers'?
Lewis-Williams and Pearce build on his neurological model of thinking about archaeological data throughout Inside the Neolithic Mind. His thoughts start off firmly grounded in the science of the matter, and branches out into other ideas along the way.
His discussion of religiosity, and its foundations within the human psyche, was something that I found especially intriguing. He says that most religious explanations are psychological or sociological, with the psychological downplaying the importance of religion within culture and the sociological basically equating religion with politics. The sociological model is seen as a way of cementing a society by giving them a common ground. Additionally, scholars have proposed that there are different forms of religiosity: imagistic based on sporadic ritual experiences and doctrinal which focuses on written and formulaic documentation. Clifford Geertz's definition offers a more complete view of the role of religion, which the authors use to build upon. They create a Venn diagram with overlapping circles of religion: experience, belief, practice; through the relationships of these, they seek to understand religion as an archaeological force.
One of the most powerful statements (which I think applies to more than just the subject at hand) comes in this section: "categorizing religions is not the same as explaining why they exist" (25). This holds true with archaeological sites, cultural differences, cosmological structures, etc. Finding a "meaning" or a standard into which something fits doesn't fully elucidate all of the information of importance. Meaning and classification aren't everything, it seems to say.
First off I just have to say that I love Lewis-Williams and Pearce and this book. It is so accessible and interesting to all audiences. Their stated desire to explore the “thought-lives” of the past and to look for a universal brain functional root for religions and cultures around the world in prehistory that initiated the trajectory still functioning today is so interesting and seems the logical next step for archaeology/anthropology.
Their preliminary breakdown of religion is so simple and so profoundly true of religion in all its forms. Religious experience as neurological experiences of the profound and moving whether it is a feeling of connection with the entirety of the universe or a feeling that there is something greater out there than this human experience is so all encompassing. Limiting religious roots to the ideas around “altered states of mind” does not cover all the different experiences felt by all different people, not just the extremely holy or shamanistic. It is also a key move of theirs to then go to belief as a separate aspect of religion as belief is different than initial experience. Religious beliefs to the best of my knowledge really do rise out of an attempt to validate and codify these experiences; to make sense of them. It seems to me that it is actually here not in practice that we see a connection with idols. If, as we have discussed, idols and early art was a way for early people to work out the cognitive or brain functions and processes they were first experiencing, doesn’t it make sense that as they developed beliefs as a way to work out these experiences they created these idols to thicken their validation, codification, and understanding of these profound experiences. Furthermore a natural contingent of working out these experiences and codifying was putting these newfound beliefs into practice. Religious practice is materializing, in a broad sense of the word, these experiences and beliefs, bringing around their beliefs like they might have brought around idols. They were making their beliefs known as they brought them into the public or social sphere of whatever society we are dealing with. These aspects of religion although I describe them as a progression are for Lewis-Williams and Pearce inseparable as aspects of religion; religion wouldn’t be religion without all three of these.
I think it is extremely insightful and interesting that they bring into their discussion a poem! Simply to read it as a poem it is highly revealing about the human experience and then to tie it in with the ideas on the birth of religion and its psychological roots is so enlightening. It is a beautiful poem as it has this wild erratic feeling to it yet it also clearly has a direction. I read it as saying that these religious/ psychological experiences are measureless yet belief or doctrine try to measure them and contain them in a rational framework. Yet they cannot be entirely rationalized as they are otherworldly and yet there is a single sacred river meandering slowly that is bringing us somewhere. However it brings us in “tumult to a lifeless ocean” where war is prophesied and there is only a shadow of the rare miracle of pleasure that is neither here nor there. Is the poet looking at religion that these profound experiences are all over the place and in trying to wall them in we are brought towards this lifeless ocean where war is present and pleasure is barely there. At the end he seems to make an allusion to the fact that music and perhaps art can bring us back to these profound experiences. Yet in working all this religion out, seeing and articulating these experiences and beliefs a person can end up being seen as holy and idolized where he of course mentions the power of the eyes. Poetry is such a psychological art and here the authors are, to grossly simplify it, trying to work out a psychological root of religion and culture and they use a poet who gets at these psychological processes in his own poem. The poets and the author seem to be dealing with such complex ideas and yet something about the way they go about is so simple.
After reading the first half of Inside the Neolithic mind, I cannot help but feel a little skeptical about the hallucinatory trajectory LW and Pearce map out early on in the book . The approach is logical and tangible and the prospect of understanding the universal neurological processes that we share with Neolithic or Upper Paleolithic people is exciting. I agree that the common visions or sensations people feel in altered states (geometric patterns, raveling through a vortex, flying, bizarre visions) are relatable across cultures. Still I feel that the stages he lays out at the beginning are too simplistic to explain the depths of human visions. I especially thought these definitions fell short when LW and Pearce discussed mortuary practices at Jericho, and Ain Ghazal, among other places. For example, the skulls with seashells inlaid in the eye sockets were configured at Jericho in a cluster, facing the same direction, which to the author suggests “That they were ‘seeing’ death as they did in life, but with greater percipience and sharing their perceptions” (77). I do not know why this explanation is the correct one for these particular skulls in this particular place. I think that if “each historical instance will be a unique product of an interaction between human neurology and culture” (46), it is hard to leave room for the illogical or inexplicable nature of life.
This from Sara R.:
I find the idea of a neurological heritage to be intriguing and quite convincing. The notion that certain motifs and "artistic" or architectural patterns that can be found throughout the world at great temporal and spatial distances from one another lends itself to this kind of explanation. Reading about the architecture at Catalhoyuk reminded me immediately of the Peruvian site of Chavin de Huantar. Lewis-Williams argues about the importance of controlled movement through the levels and rooms at Catalhoyuk and the same argument has been made about the differentiated platforms of a complex gallery system at Chavin. There is also evidence for psychoactive drugs and shamanistic ritual behavior at Chavin which could be related to the construction and usage of a tiered architectural complex. The existence of similar cosmological patterns in Peru around 900 bce and in the Near Eastern Neolithic, as well as at many other sites in the Near East and in western Europe, can be understood with Lewis-Williams neurological model.
The main thing I find somewhat problematic however, is the way in which it feels as though Lewis-Williams approaches each case with the goal of fitting it into his formulated theory. He notes early on that most archaeologists are interested in differences rather than similarities (8). But at times it seems like he focuses too much on similarities without considering differences, or explaining away differences with the statement that "altered consciousness is therefore always situated in a social and political matrix. It is impossible to study altered states outside of a social context" (57). By acknowledging that altered states and therefore the similarities in the images represented in and by the altered states are joined to their social context, Lewis-Williams skims over differences that could illuminate varied origins for like images. Still, some similarities, particularly the replication of the cosmos vertically and horizontally through standing stones, holes, hearths, structures guiding and restricting sight, and sacrificial components (101) are convincingly explained if Rousseau's "true Theism" inside every person is the neuropsychological model.
This from Fran:
Our reading and discussion last week of the Gobekli Tepe pillars and architecture provided an excellent introduction to some of the concepts in Lewis-Williams' Inside the Neolithic Mind. While a traditional explanation for the rise of sedentary life styles and permanent architecture was rooted in the fact that domestication sustained a larger population and set up social structures, L-W proves that this argument is all too simple. Like at Gobekli, more permanent structures and the domestication of animals may have been rooted in human mythic and religious beliefs-- that architecture, life, economy, etc. were not separated from the supernatural world. In other words, in the great case of which came first, the sedentary or religion, L-W articulates that religion may have been the catalyst for domestication. One of the most interesting findings and theories, in my opinion, dealt with the concept of permeable walls, that "walls stood between not only spaces but also states of being" (111). The people of Catalhoyuk incorporated meaning through dead bodies, objects, and decorations on the walls, making them "more than mundane living quarters" (111). The people seemed to be constantly interacting with these walls, as they re-plastered and reworked the mural images. Just as myths change over time and with each telling, the walls of these structures could be rework with new meaning, a tangible way of dealing with the supernatural. In our great quest to define idols, I would initially say that these structures are idols because of what they symbolize, how they are used, etc., but if they are a combination of secular and sacred, do they still count as an idol? Must an idol only have sacred meanings?
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