Music and rock art: a Saharan note

Rock Art Research, May, 2006 by Ahmed Achrati

   People thus did not (by intelligence alone) 'invent' images.
   The environment of at least some people (the seers) was
   already invested with images--a set of socially agreed
   upon symbolic images. All that was needed were the social
   conditions that made it advantageous for the seers and
   their communities to 'recreate' those evanescent images
   and thereby to gain control over them and to demonstrate
   to others their contact with the spiritual realms (ibid.: 266).

As to the human responsiveness to seers and their representation of the 'supernatural', Lewis-Williams's answer is simple: hallucination! Why? Because 'hallucinations are, in numerous societies, not "highly extraordinary"; they are part of daily life and are frequently discussed' (ibid.: 276).

And it is here, on the top of this circular and spectral reasoning, that ethnocentrism creeps in. 'In some societies', Lewis-Williams says, restating the modernist views of Max Weber,

   there are those who challenge the seers' revelations and
   (some of) the rules that they try to impose, but within the
   general framework of belief. These dissidents are able to
   assert their independence without wishing to overthrow
   the entire religious system. By contrast, other societies
   --post-Enlightenment, post-Darwin Western society is
   the prime example (ibid.: 276)

offering an alternative cosmology that does not require any belief whatsoever in supernatural entities. We now know that the 'rather natural' human propensity to believe (to us) manifestly absurd beliefs about spirit is created by the electro-chemical functioning of the human brain, a functioning that is, given the right intellectual circumstances not ineluctable.

And to leave no uncertainty as to his commitment to rationalism, Lewis-Williams concludes:

   Because of our present-day Western emphasis on acute,
   alert intelligence, we (rightly) dismiss any suggestion that
   dreams are the voice of the gods or spirits urging us to
   adopt certain courses of action. But that is not true of all
   communities; nor was it true of the West in medieval time
   (ibid.: 265).

And so, in this enthusiastic devotion to rationalism, the mother of all totalising concepts, the superstitious non-Western world is relegated to a fateful mental inferiority. But the truly tragic figure in this drama is the shaman, the one who communicates with 'manifestly absurd' spirits that are merely the creation 'the electro-chemical functioning of the human'.

iv. Trance-vested rock art, or the science of the un-Intelligent Designs

The sobering reality is that, not long ago, Lewis-Williams's very best of the post-Enlightenment, post-Darwin Western society gave us: the amiable Ronald Reagan, who enlisted the help of astrology in dealing with the nuclear menace to humanity, and George W. Bush II who seeks guidance from his 'Father' in matters of peace and war, not to mention the benevolent Jimmy Carter, who admirably teaches Bible School in his hometown most of the weekends. Nor should we forget the raging debate over Intelligent Design, a theology of which some of the shamanic interpretations of rock art are merely a secular version, and a kind of monadology that teaches that 'shamanism comes from a shamanic module', as Chris Knight humorously put it (Knight 2002: 89)