James David Lewis-Williams Quotes
In Lascaux and other sites, hoofs are depicted to show their underside, or hoofprint.
A shaman’s activities as a sorcerer, or his own conscious act of entry into the supernatural world, were a kind of “killing”.
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.
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.
In altered states of consciousness, the nervous system itself becomes a ‘sixth sense’ that produces a variety of images including entoptic phenomena.
The ‘wounded men’ may, I argue, represent a form of shamanistic suffering, ‘death’ and initiation that was closely associated with somatic hallucinati
The Upper Palaeolithic figures known as ‘wounded men’ occur at Cougnac and Pech Merle, two sites in the Quercy district of France.
Shamans submit to death in order to serve their communities.
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.
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.
For the makers, the paintings and engravings were visions, not representations of visions.
Once human beings had developed higher-order consciousness, they had the ability to see mental images projected onto surfaces and to experience afterimages.
Improved memory made possible the long-term recollection of dreams and visions and the construction of those recollections into a spirit world.
I believe it is reasonable to assume that higher-order consciousness developed neurologically in Africa before the second wave of emigration to the Middle East and Europe.
Primary consciousness is a kind of ‘remembered present’…
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…
Consciousness has evolved biologically and can therefore be explained biologically.