21
See also: Animism in early societies 24–25 ■ The power of the shaman 26–31 ■ Created for a purpose 32
■ Living the Way of the Gods 82–85 ■ A rational world 92–99
In this twilight zone between
sleep and waking, life and death,
light and dark, lie the dreams,
hallucinations, and states of altered
consciousness that suggest that
the visible, tangible world is not
the only one, and that another,
supernatural world also exists—
and has a connection with our
own. It is easy to imagine how the
inhabitants of this other world were
thought to influence not only our
own minds and actions, but also
to inhabit the bodies of animals
and even inanimate objects, and
to cause the natural phenomena
affecting our lives.
A meeting of worlds
The figures of humans, animals,
and human-animal hybrids in
Palaeolithic cave paintings are
often decorated with patterns that
are now thought to represent the
involuntary back-of-the-retina
patterns known as entoptic
phenomena—visual effects such as
dots, grids, zigzags, and wavy lines,
which appear between waking
and sleep, or between vision and
hallucination. The paintings
themselves represent a permeable
veil between the physical and the
spirit worlds.
It is impossible to ask the
Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers of
Europe about the beliefs and rituals
that lie behind their cave paintings,
but in the 19th century it was
still possible to record the cultural
and religious beliefs of the /Xam
of southern Africa, a now-extinct
clan of San hunter-gatherers who
made cave paintings reminiscent of
those of the Stone Age, for similar
reasons. The spiritual life of the
/Xam San offered a living parallel to
the religious ideas archaeologists
have attributed to early modern
humans. Even the clicks of the
/Xam San language (represented ❯❯PRIMAL BELIEFS
Unseen forces
are at work.Natural phenomena
such as the
weather and
the seasons are
out of our control.Our food
supply, the plants
and animals,
is sometimes
plentiful,
sometimes
scarce.There is danger
around us that
causes sickness
and death.Spirits seem to
appear to us in the
sky, the earth,
the animals,
or the fire.Since prehistoric times, the San
have renewed their rock paintings,
transmitting the stories and ideas
they depict down the generations.The Storm Bird blows
his wind into the chests of
man and beast, and without
this wind we would not
be able to breathe.
African fable