James David Lewis-Williams

“Rock art sites were symbolic vaginas, and entry into the wall of a rock art site was thus akin to intercourse.”

“The Upper Palaeolithic figures known as ‘wounded men’ occur at Cougnac and Pech Merle, two sites in the Quercy district of France.”

“The notion that an image is a scale model of something else (say, a horse) requires a different set of mental events and conventions from those that perceive the social symbolism of red marks on someone’s chest.”

“The principal aim of a vision quest is to ‘see’ a spirit animal that will become the quester’s animal-helper and source of his power.”

“Around 30,000 years ago, in the Aurignacian, at the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic, someone or some group in the Eyzies region invented drawing, the representation in two dimensions on the flat of the stone of what appeared in the environment in three dimensions.”

“The cerebral cortex, the outer ‘skin’ of the brain, contains as many as ten billion neurons. This complexity is daunting. Yet it is out of complex interactions between the billions of neurons that consciousness arises.”

“Consciousness has evolved biologically and can therefore be explained biologically.”

“According to Martindale’s view, as we drift into sleep we pass through: – waking, problem-oriented thought, – realistic fantasy, – autistic fantasy, – reverie, – hypnagogic (falling asleep) states, and – dreaming.”

“Sexual arousal and penal erections are associated with both altered states of consciousness and sleep.”

“In altered states of consciousness, the nervous system itself becomes a ‘sixth sense’ that produces a variety of images including entoptic phenomena.”

“San religion is built around belief in a tiered universe. As do other shamanistic peoples throughout the world, the San believe in a realm above and another below the surface of the world on which they live.”

“Primary consciousness is a state of being aware of things in the world – of having mental images in the present.But it is not accompanied by any sense of a person with a past and future…”

“Entering a cave” or rock was a metaphor for a shaman’s altered state; therefore, caves (and rocks more generally) were considered entrances or portals to the supernatural world.”

“Primary consciousness is a kind of ‘remembered present’…”

“In southern Africa, a great many figures are ithyphallic. This feature has generally – and rather vaguely – been taken to refer to ‘masculinity’, but the painted contexts of the figures seems to confirm that, as in North America, sexual arousal was a metaphor for altered states of consciousness.”

“Shamanism is not simply a component of society: on the contrary, shamanism, together with its tiered cosmos, can be said to be the overall framework of society.”

“The ‘wounded men’ may, I argue, represent a form of shamanistic suffering, ‘death’ and initiation that was closely associated with somatic hallucinati”

“The portable animal statuettes were therefore far more than decorative trinkets: they were reified three-dimensional spirit animals with all their prophylactic and other powers.”

“There were at least four contexts in which San shamans acquired insights into the spiritual world: – the trance dance, – special curing rituals, – viewing rock art, and – dreams.”

“The first two-dimensional images were thus not two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional things in the material world, as researchers have always assumed. Rather, they were ‘fixed’ mental images.”