James David Lewis-Williams Quotes

A shaman’s activities as a sorcerer, or his own conscious act of entry into the supernatural world, were a kind of “killing”.

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

For the makers, the paintings and engravings were visions, not representations of visions.

In Lascaux and other sites, hoofs are depicted to show their underside, or hoofprint.

To understand the ‘wounded men’ of Upper Palaeolithic art, I now consider somatic hallucinations; these include attenuation of the body and limbs, polymelia (having extra limbs or digits), and, the one on which I focus, pricking and stabbing sensations.

Under certain social circumstances, which may have varied from time to time and place to place, certain people (shamans) saw a relationship between the small, three-dimensional, projected mental images that they experienced at the far end of the intensified spectrum and fragments of animals that lay around their hearths.

Certainly, the sensory deprivation afforded by the remote, silent and totally dark chambers, such as the Diverticule of the Felines in Lascaux and the Horse’s Tail in Altamira, induces altered states of consciousness.

Shamans submit to death in order to serve their communities.