Southern Africa is home to one of the most fascinating, and yet least well-known, art traditions in the world. Running in a near continuous line of rock shelters from the Cederberg in the West to the Drakensberg-uKhahlamba mountain range in the east, as well as across other sites in the subcontinent, the rock paintings and engravings of the indigenous hunter gatherer peoples of South Africa and beyond – the Bushman, San, or Khoi-San peoples and their cultural ancestors – represents one of humanity’s most distinctive art styles and, until its extinction some 150 to 200 years ago, one of the longest running.

I have been fortunate enough to see some of this rock art for myself during visits to South Africa. This is especially significant for me as I was first switched onto Bushman rock art in my twenties, when a fellow artist showed me a book of the art and I realised that many of the images I had seen before. As a child I suffered from terrible and often dazzlingly visionary migraines, and much of the imagery from those formative and dysphoric life experiences resonated with some of the geometric and abstract imagery (Rimell, 2014b) seen accompanying the more familiar figures of humans and animals. I was immediately fascinated.

Rock art sites are found throughout Southern Africa, but they are particularly concentrated in the aforementioned line which starts in the Cederberg in the Western Cape, continues through the Langeberg and Outeniqua mountain ranges in the Southern Cape, as well as in the Klein Karoo just to the north of these, eastward to the Maluti range in Lesotho, and then into the Drakensberg-uKhahlamba mountains (Vinnicombe, 1976) where some of the most spectacular artworks are preserved. Other areas of intensely concentrated paintings can be found in the Brandberg Massif in Namibia (Fliegel Jezernicky Expeditions, 2010), the Tsodilo Hills in Botswana (Rimell, 2014a) and the Matopo Hills in southwestern Zimbabwe (Garlake, 1995; Parry, 2000), as well as Mashonaland in northern Zimbabwe (Garlake, 1995) and the Limpopo province of South Africa.

Among all of these, I have so far visited six sites, one named Ikanti near Underberg in the Drakensberg, and several in the Southern Cape, Pietersrivierkloof in the Outeniqua mountains, Ezeljagdspoort in the Klein Karoo and three sites – Veldmansvlei, Romanskraal and Buchukloof – in the Langeberg within the Hessequa District. Despite the fame of the Drakensberg and Cederberg paintings, this series of articles will generally focus on the sites and the art within this central region, at least at first, and narrate site visits to each of the sites listed above.
 
Further inland are other sites, such as in the Great Karoo of the Northern Cape where a large number of geometric and abstract rock engravings are to be found (Dowson, 1992), and the Limpopo Basin where Bushman paintings are associated by later Bantu-speaking peoples with a kind of spiritual ‘capture’ of prey animals (Eastwood & Eastwood, 2006). Dowson (1992, pp5-7) notes that the engravings tend to disclose a different subject matter to the paintings: the former tend to have a stronger entoptic and geometric character than the paintings, which focus more on naturalistic depictions, although not exclusively.

A note needs to be briefly made on the term ‘Bushman’, which is sometimes pejorative. There is in fact no word to refer to contemporary and recent historical hunter gatherer groups of Southern Africa which does not have negative connotations or roots. The word ‘San’, for example, is commonly used in academia, but it derives from a Nama word saan, ‘vagabond’ (Deacon, 1994, p5), while Bushman derives from the Dutch pejorative bosjeman ‘bush-man, wild person’. Since several members and descendants of these groups that I have met were proud to call themselves ‘Bushman’, I use this term with absolutely no pejorative connotations whatsoever. I also use specific ethnic terms for tribes and bands of Bushman people, such as /Xam, !Kung, Ju’/hoansi, !Xõo, and so on (*1). In quotes where ‘San’ is used, however, I retain the original author’s usage. (On this see Deacon, 1994, pp4-5 & Hitchcock & Biesele, 2014)

Precise dating of rock art is notoriously difficult to ascertain, but there is general agreement that the tradition in South Africa likely began some fifteen to twenty thousand years ago (see Vinnicombe, 1967, pp105-8 for a variety of dates; see also pp133-37 & Mazel, 2009a, pp81-94) and continued until the extinction in the early twentieth century of Bushman cultures such as the /Xam (Lewis-Williams & Challis, 2011, pp33-36), and the hunter-gatherers of the Maluti and Drakensberg ranges whose names have not come down to us (Vinnicombe, 1967, pp9-103). The final phase of art shows, in some places, the coming of the Voortrekkers into the South African interior from the Cape Colony, with men on horseback and leading carts (Parkington, 2008, p25).

Parkington (2006, pp22-25) reports that secure dates for the rock art in the Cederberg is very sparse: he generally assumes the date range for most of the art is from 4000 to approximately 200 to 300 years ago, but Elands Bay cave has revealed ochre-stained tortoise carapaces and limpet shells in deposits around 10,000 years old, suggesting that people were making paint at that time. Furthermore, he reports (2006, p24) on a find at Steenbokfontein, in which a fragment of wall painting had fallen and was buried under deposits at least 3500 years old, and he notes that elsewhere in southern Africa, similar evidence suggests an age of at least 7000 years for wall painting.

Mazel reports (2009a, pp81-97) that dating techniques have greatly improved since the 1970s, and gives a series of radiocarbon dates (p90) for encrusted organic deposits overlaying several paintings in the Drakensberg of between 1000 and 2900 years old. Parry notes (2000, pp9-13) meanwhile that Bushman peoples disappeared from Zimbabwe some 2000 years ago, which sets a minimum age for the rock art in the Matopo Hills, and she suggests (2000, p13) from stylistic evidence that rock art in the region may stretch back to 13,000 years ago. The finding of the Coldstream Stone in deposits dating to 9000 years ago (British Museum, 2016) also supports this ancient date for the painting traditions.

The majority of the rock art now visible across Southern Africa, however, is likely to represent the most recent phases of imagery, perhaps no more than two to three thousand years old at most. This estimate resonates with the date for much of the rock art in the Klein Karoo region given by archaeologist Vicky Nardell as “up to two thousand years old” (Oudtshoorn Courant, 2015), and despite the dryness of the inland areas such as the Karoo, the climate conditions of much of southern Africa (such as the Cederberg and Maluti-Drakensberg ranges) are not favourable for the preservation of rock art images over many tens of thousands of years that we see for the Upper Palaeolithic cave art of southern France and northern Spain.

Early attempts to understand Bushman rock art were centred upon the pervasive belief that KhoiSan peoples were incredibly primitive and incapable of the kind of subtle thinking and refined religious sensibilities (Lewis-Williams & Dowson, 1989, pp23-26) that we now know to be disclosed in the art. Late nineteenth century ethnographer Wilhelm Bleek was prescient when he said that Bushman rock art was

“…an attempt, however imperfect, at a truly artistic conception of the ideas which most deeply moved the Bushman mind, and filled it with religious feelings.” (Lewis-Williams, 2004, p55)

Bleek also spoke of Bushman paintings disclosing a “higher character” (Lewis-Williams & Dowson, 1989, p29) beyond mere idle daubings or art for art’s sake. However in a colonial age where licences were still being granted by South African authorities to hunt and kill Bushman peoples as if they were animals, his was a lone voice of reason.

It was not until the twentieth century, and the arrival in South Africa of people such as the famous Abbe Henri Breuil, that a semi-serious attempt on the understanding of these artforms was attempted (Lewis-Williams, 2004, pp2-6). However, racial undertones still persisted, and while Breuil attempted to bring his ‘sympathetic hunting magic’ hypothesis from European Upper Palaeolithic cave art into Southern Africa, suggesting a similar kind of idea for the Bushman paintings, he is perhaps most well-known for his theory (in Breuil, 1948, pp1-13) that the so-called ‘White Lady of Brandberg’ in Namibia represents a young woman of Cretan origin who had somehow found her way to Southern Africa with her attendants, and there was then commemorated in the indigenous artwork of the period.

His florid prose describing his encounter with this figure, however, hides the implicit assumption that only with some prehistoric arrival of a white person was the Bushman suddenly capable of ‘Great Art’. His fanciful and Eurocentric beliefs also blinded him as to the true nature of this image, which a closer examination reveals to be male as Lewis-Williams narrates:

“Had he [Breuil] been a bit more careful, he would have seen that the figure has a penis. Moreover, the penis is ‘infibulated’, that is, it has a short line drawn at right angle across it, and to, make the questions that this overlooked detail raises even more interesting, the line is fringed with small white dots. These dots suggest that the infibulation is associated with another feature of San rock art… a sinuous bifurcating red line, similarly fringed with white dots… Breuil’s ‘charming young girl’ is certainly male and has no features to distinguish it from other elaborately detailed San rock art images.” (Lewis-Williams, 2004, p5)

The red lines fringed with white dots that Lewis-Williams mentions here pierces to the heart of Bushman rock art, for as we shall see, these lines, and many of the painted depictions point not merely to representations, but of manifestations, of !gi, the /Xam word for an immanent supernatural power experienced by shamans (Lewis-Williams & Challis, 2011, pp56-57). This becomes even more clear when we consider the /Xam word for shaman was !gi:xa ‘one who is full of !gi’ (Lewis-Williams & Challis, 2011, pp56-57; the plural is !gi:ten), and terms of similar meanings exist in the languages of the Ju’/hoansi and the Nharo. It is possible, then, that the so-called ‘White Lady of Brandberg’ might well turn out to be the ‘Painted (Male) Shaman of Brandberg’, an image which is much more fitting – and indeed positively generic as we shall see – to the themes and concerns of Bushman rock art.

A more serious attempt at understanding the art in the mid-twentieth century was explored by artist Walter Battiss (narrated in Lewis-Williams, 2004, pp5-9). His method was to ignore all theories and gaze at the art itself – its techniques, colour choices, compositions, and so on – as if one were in an art gallery. This approach of aesthetic enjoyment (Lewis-Williams, 2004, p6) attempted to gain some kind of objectivity towards the art, however his work essentially ran along lines of Western assumptions about what art should be: an aesthetic pursuit primarily towards composition and technique.

Such views are now known not to be applicable to Bushman rock paintings and engravings. In the first place, the pervasive Western notion that the art medium – the paint, the canvas, the gesso board, and so on – are little more than passive or transparent surfaces upon which art is imposed, or through which art is created, is diametrically opposed to the Bushman conception. As we shall see in subsequent articles, the Bushman artist did not conceive of the rock surfaces upon which she painted as simply a place to make art: rather the rock was a living surface and liminal boundary into a world of spirits and supernatural power held to exist beyond the rock walls (Lewis-Williams & Dowson, 1990; Lewis-Williams, 2004, pp98-106). The artists constantly made use of features of these walls, such as cracks, inequalities, fractures and fissures to suggest painted figures, objects and magical phenomena emerging from or receding into this supernatural realm. In ensuing articles we will see constant – and very often ingenious! – expressions and reminders of this principle.

This idea of using the rock features suggests a profoundly different approach to composition, and this difference is compounded by another common feature of Bushman rock art, overpainting and superposition of images (Lewis-Williams, 2004, pp29-48). At many rock art sites, images are crowded onto a single panel in a particular locale, despite the presence of other relatively flat walls nearby which in principle could have been used for art but were not. Instead, later figures are painted over earlier figures, and sometimes the surface of the rock is smeared with red ochre before painting the later images.

Here is also another disclosure of supernatural power: if the art itself is a manifestation rather than representation of this power, such crowded overpainting begins to make sense. Once art is situated upon a particular panel, the rock panel itself becomes potent and attractive as a site upon which to paint – and potentially, a place where contact between this world and the world of the spirits can be more easily made – and in front of which rituals and trance dances may have been performed (Lewis-Williams & Dowson, 1989, pp35-36; Lewis-Williams, 2004, pp259-61). This would then account for why certain panels accrued large amounts of crowded images, and others of apparently equal artistic potential did not. Lewis-Williams has furthermore shown (1972; also 2004 pp35-39) that in the majority of cases, it is often elands or human figures which are involved in these overpaintings, suggesting some specific, deliberate and ritualistic action rather than a random spread of overpainting driven by the demands for space: other depictions of animals are only very rarely overpainted.

In subsequent articles, we will begin to see why certain sites were chosen in the first place, since the environment in which they were located seem to already disclose some magical, potent or otherworldly property which likely invoked the attention of the Bushman artists. The site may have commanded excellent views over the surrounding countryside, or was located next to a waterfall and pond whose water was dark in colour due to the presence of a natural mineral. Alternatively, a supernatural potent animal, such as the bee or a swift, may have had its nest very close to the site of the paintings, or the rock art was located at the top of a kloof, or ravine cut by a small stream, a challenging terrain up through which it was necessary to climb in order to arrive at the site. The Bushman artists seemed to have nearly always chosen their sites in this way: in particular, sites in the Klein Karoo seem to have been oriented closely towards the presence of water.

A third example of difference is the paint itself, and particularly red ochre paint, which was a sacred and ritual substance redolent with supernatural power. How reports (1962, pp34-35; see also Lewis-Williams, 2004, pp254-55) on a Lesotho oral tradition that a particular type of speckled red ochre called qhang-qhang (*2) in the Sotho language (possibly this would be !haŋ!haŋ in Bleek’s /Xam orthography) was sought, and an elderly Sotho informant in Lesotho of the early twentieth century (who had learned to paint with /Xam Bushman artists some years previously) reports how this was heated until red hot, ground into a fine powder, then mixed with the blood of a freshly killed eland by a young woman on the night of the new moon (How 1962, pp35-37; Lewis-Williams pp255-56). Furthermore, Sotho people believed that qhang-qhang in its raw form was a powerful medicine that could ward off lightning and hail.

This idea of paint as a ritual object with supernatural powers communicates deeply with the modern understanding of Bushman rock art as essentially shamanic in nature, an idea first conceived in the 1980s by David Lewis-Williams and fellow researcher Thomas Dowson at the University of Witwatersrand’s Rock Art Research Institute (see for example Lewis-Williams, 1980; Lewis-Williams & Dowson, 1989; Lewis-Williams & Dowson, 1990). Independently, Patricia Vinnicombe was also making the connection between /Xam and Kalahari ethnography (1976, pp299-313), oral traditions from Nguni peoples about Bushmen in the Drakensberg, Maluti and Eastern Cape regions (1976, pp97-103), and depictions of ‘sorcerers’ in the rock art (1976, pp306-308 & pp315-37).

David Lewis-Williams in particular transformed the nature of the research field by seeking to develop three separate strands of epistemology (see Lewis-Williams, 1995; also 2004, pp133-161) regarding Bushman rock art, and the prehistoric religion and society of the artists who created the images. These are: i) the rock art itself, closely studied, recorded and reproduced along with its archaeological, geological and environmental context, ii) nineteenth century /Xam ethnography from the archive of Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd, which contains very many important cultural details not always understood at the time, along with twentieth century ethnography of Kalahari Bushman peoples such as the !Kung, and iii) the neuropsychological model of altered states of consciousness, in which objective psychological studies of the effects of altered states and visionary experiences are applied to study of the rock art imagery.

The example of paint manufacture above is a good access point into the intercommunication of these various elements, illuminating our understanding of Bushman culture and the shamanic nature of the rock art, and illustrating how deeply embedded with many other ritually important events in the Bushman mind the practice of art-making was.

Lewis-Williams reports (2004, p255-57) that the ritual of paint-making in which eland blood is used implies that a group of Bushman people would need to hunt before any painting could take place. Hunting is enfolded into a whole array of social attitudes and religious beliefs in all Bushman cultures, and none more so than the hunting of the eland, which is both the largest antelope and the most supernaturally potent in Bushman conception. This hunt would set off a sequence of ritual associations relating to this supernatural potency.

An informant of partial Bushman descent in the Tsolo District of the Transkei (now Eastern Cape province) was interviewed by Pieter Jolly (in Jolly, 1986, pp6-9), and she narrated how this eland hunt took place. The narrative has striking visionary elements:

“A young girl would accompany the eland hunting party and [she]… 'hypnotised' the eland. She did this by pointing an arrow, which had 'medicine' on it prepared by the medicine men, at the eland. The eland would become dazed and semi-paralysed. It would be led back to the hunters to the cave under their supernatural control. Here it became dizzy and would slip and fall. It would be killed by having its throat cut.” (Jolly, 1986, p6)

The informant further described how the eland would murmur and tremble when near death, and emit foam from its nose. After it died, cuts would be made on the eland’s forehead, neck and rib cage to extract blood, which was mixed with fat to make medicine. Some of this mixture was also mixed with paint (1986, p7)

Lewis-Williams speculates (2004, p256) that the young girl may have been a new menstruant, since such women were held to be at the peak of their supernatural power (and menstrual depictions are sometimes seen in the rock art). He also notes that a Great Dance ritual or trance dance would often follow the hunting of an eland in many Bushman cultures, and we thus see the basic theme of supernatural potency arising again, since such rituals were held to open the participants to the experience and accumulation of shamanic power. He further notes (p257) that since shamans often bleed from the nose during the trance dance, we again have the resonating idea of blood: he argues that two types of blood – eland blood and shaman’s blood – were directly or indirectly involved in the making of paint, but if his speculating about the new menstruant was correct, then a third blood type was also obliquely enmeshed in this nexus of cultural associations.

Thus, the process of making paint for rock art was not merely an isolated occasion in Bushman thought, but a ritually potent event deeply embedded within a complex of other, equally emotive and supernaturally powerful events, including: i) the eland hunt itself; ii) the young girl’s magical hypnotising of the eland; iii) its dizziness and apparent trance along with its death throes apparently mirroring the behaviours of the shamans in trance; iv) the staging of a Great Dance after the hunt in which ritual potency was amplified, and these dances may have been held at rock art sites such as Romanskraal and Ezeljagdspoort where large flat areas suitable for dancing are seen; and  v) the making of paint from the eland’s blood and fat, mixed with powdered red ochre, which itself may have been a supernaturally potent substance judging by the ritual nature in which it was handled and prepared

A word should be said about the various colours and styles of paintings visible in the rock art. Across Southern Africa, many of the same pigments appear to have been used, with only minor local variations, and while there are variations in the subject matter from region to region (including some imageries unique to each region), the depictions of human and animal figures tends to be broadly similar over the widely dispersed areas. This suggests a common visual language, and by implication a common set of cultural conceptions, even among differing language groups. Such commonality is also seen in the ethnographies of contemporary and historical Bushman groups (Lewis-Williams, 2004, p52).

Both Vinnicombe (1967, pp131-33) and Mazel (2009a, p94) elucidate the various styles seen and attempt to decipher them into a roughly chronological sequence for the Drakensberg paintings, as follows:

Phase I paintings are, as Vinnicombe describes (p131) “mostly very fragmentary and little can be deduced as to their content and style.” They are mostly monochrome in dark reds and maroons. Mazel notes that some antelope and human figures conform to this style and the paint is effectively stained into the rock face.

Phase II paintings consist of human figures and animals in bichrome red and white colours, and sometimes polychrome with varying shades of red with white, and with some shading visible between the tones. Black is sometimes introduced for human figures, and the white tones are sometimes only evident due to bleaching on the rock face, the original paint having faded.

Phase III marks the development of a fully polychrome technique. Colours include various red ochres, purples, oranges, pink and tan/brown tones, as well as black and white pigments, and expert shading between tones is often seen. Elements of perspective are also introduced, such as foreshortening and frontal views of antelope images (see Rust & van der Poll, 2011, p26), and human figures show fine details of “facial markings, beaded bands and decorative thongs or tassels” (Vinnicombe, 1967, p132) as well as close attention to expertly rendered body proportions and dynamism. Mazel reports (2009a, p94) that sometimes individual brushstrokes can be seen in this phase.

Phase IV is the final phase in the sequence. Here, the shaded polychrome style becomes less visible, giving way to greater usage of black and yellow colours along with red ochres without shading between tones. Mazel notes (2009a, p94) that the paint in this phase sometimes lacks a binding medium, and eland images are more stylised, stiffer and more block-like than the naturalistic images of previous phases. He also notes that later styles in this phase consist of monochrome pinks and brown-reds (i.e., typical red ochre) in parts of the Drakensberg.

The majority of rock art sites I have visited have tended to evidence the last three of these phases, and particularly Phases III and IV. At Ikanti, I saw both polychrome images in shaded browns and white, as well as monochrome red ochre friezes. At Pietersrivierkloof in the Outeniqua mountains, a dazzling array of styles was seen, all superimposed on one another, including polychrome shaded browns and white, bichrome red and yellows, monochrome red ochre, monochrome white, and bichrome white and black. Monochrome red ochre of various tones including reds, oranges and purples and monochrome yellow ochre images were seen at Veldmansvlei, as were bichrome red and overpainted yellow

Polychrome images are particularly common in the Drakensberg, whereas in other areas such as the Cederberg and Langeberg, monochrome red ochre images tend to predominate. However, at Langeberg sites such as Romanskraal, faint trances of yellow ochre are visible, suggesting that some of the sites in the latter regions may well have originally been polychrome but have since faded, leaving only the red ochre. The continuation of Bushman culture – and by extension, rock art traditions – in the Drakensberg until the mid-to-late nineteenth century (Vinnicombe, 1967, pp97-103), and the disappearance of these people from the Cederberg and Langeberg many years or centuries previously, might lend the impression that Drakensberg paintings are, on the whole, newer, leading to the better preservation of the polychrome elements.

Parkington narrates (2008, pp38-42) that red ochres could come in several different tones from orange to purple and were made principally from “weathered oxides or hydroxides of haematite and limonite.” (2008, pp39-40) Iron-rich shales were also sometimes used to achieve a bright pinkish tone. Black tones, meanwhile, appear to have been made from powdered manganese dioxide and white was made from clays which is often fragile and easily damaged or faded. It is not clear exactly what the binding medium would have been in all cases: despite the ritual narration above, it is unlikely that eland blood was used for every single painting, and Parkington suggests (2008, p41) that egg white, plant saps, blood and fat may have been used, or a mixture of these. He also notes that the fine lines and adhesive quality of the paint generally rules out water alone as a medium.

Parry, meanwhile, reports some evidence in the Matopo Hills of Zimbabwe that ostrich eggs contributed to the binding medium – both the egg white and yolk appear to have been used together – which suggests an early use of a tempera style of painting. There are occasional depictions of ostriches, and in the Klein Karoo, half-human half-ostrich therianthropes are reported by Rust & van der Poll (2011, pp40-45), suggesting the use of ostrich eggs may have had a ritual dimension. Keeney & Keeney further report (2015, pp4-9) from his Ju’/hoansi informants that visions of ostrich eggs are extremely important in the religious understanding of contemporary Kalahari Bushman cultures. Thus, again, we see a continuous movement between paint, supernatural power, religious vision and ritual.

Contrary to earlier beliefs about Bushman culture, the /Xam and other peoples who painted the rock art did not merely create illustrations of daily life (Lewis-Williams, 2004, p13). In fact, the art has a strongly religious flavour, with depictions of rituals, dances and gatherings in which the participants appear to be richly decorated in their finery, bearing bows and quivers of arrows, or wearing a kaross, a type of large animal skin cloak.

Predominant in the religious life of the Bushman was the Great Dance (Bannister & Lewis-Williams, 1998, pp74-75), a healing trance dance officiated by shamans who fell into altered states of consciousness (Lewis-Williams & Challis, 2011, pp51-72), and very often felt themselves transformed into animals or as passing into the world of spirits to effect their healing methods. Dances such as these are still performed by Kalahari Bushman peoples such as the Ju’/hoansi (Keeney & Keeney, 2015), and the same bending-over postures, linked arms and gestures such as pulling the arms sharply backwards which are seen in Ju’/hoansi dances are also seen in the rock art (Lewis-Williams, 2004, pp63-64; Lewis-Williams & Challis, 2011, p101).

)Similarly, the inner experiences of the shamans are also seen in the rock art: therianthropes of half-human half-animal figures, or animals with a few human attributes, are very common depictions, as are elongated body forms suggestive of altered states of consciousness (Lewis-Williams, 2004, p120). Transformations of humans into animals, as well as strange body modifications, may also be suggestive of the experiences within trance dance rituals.

In addition to depictions of the Great Dance, rituals relating to the rain and weather control are also commonly seen. Perhaps the most ubiquitous is the killing of a ‘rain’ animal (Vinnicombe, 1967, pp314-344; Lewis-Williams & Challis, 2011, pp110-31), a visionary event in which one or more ‘rain sorcerors’ (in the words of nineteenth century /Xam informant /Hanǂkasso; Lewis-Williams & Challis, 2011, p99), or shamans of the rain, entered the world of the spirits to capture an eland, elephant or other supernaturally potent creature, and then ‘kill’ it and lead it across the sky, its blood falling as rain to replenish the land so that the people could feed themselves. There is a finely-rendered, although faint and partially obscured, representation of this ritual at Pietersrivierkloof, which we will see in a forthcoming article. Some images which were previously considered to be hunting scenes may well depict this event.

Predictably, the animals which Bushman peoples believed to be the most supernaturally potent are the ones which are most commonly depicted. The eland, the bearer of !gi par excellence (Lewis-Williams & Challis, 2011, p57), is the most commonly seen, as is the elephant which was also a supernaturally potent animal (Lewis-Williams, 2004, p114) in the conception of Bushman peoples. Surprisingly, depictions of /Kaggen, the Mantis, the principal shaman trickster figure in /Xam mythology, appear to be quite rare, however, since /Kaggen was also held to transform himself into many other guises (Vinnicombe, 1967, p158), so it is possible he is present as other, non-insectoid, animal figures and has therefore not been often identified. He is also closely associated with the eland in myths and spiritual conception, as the Maluti Bushman Qing explained in the 1870s:

“We don’t know [where /Kaggen is] but the elands do. Have you not hunted and heard his cry, when the elands suddenly start and run to his call? Where he is, elands are in droves like cattle.” (Vinnicombe, 1976, p170)

The choice of animal depictions in the rock art is biased towards supernaturally potent animals and therefore highly selective (Parkington, 2008, p69-73) when compared to what Bushman hunters would have seen in daily life, or when considered in light of their customary diet, which mostly consisted of small animals like the dassie or young antelopes, and a great deal of plants such as tubers, none of which are seen in the paintings. Furthermore, regional variations in this selectivity can be seen in different areas: Parkington reports (2008, p68) that the eland and elephant were most common in the Cederberg and other areas of the Western Cape (and, in my own experience, in the Langeberg and Klein Karoo as well) but in the Drakensberg the elephant is a rare sight, being replaced by the rhebok. Similarly, in the Tsodilo Hills of Botswana, the most common depiction by far is the giraffe, suggesting this may have been a ritually important or supernaturally potent animal.

There are also plenty of images which do not pertain to the shamanic or to supernaturally potent animals or dances, for example, those pertaining to menstrual rites. At Willcox’s Shelter and Sorceror’s Rock in the Drakensberg are two images (Vinnicombe, 1967, pp152-53) which seem to evoke androgynous, therianthropic and menstrual associations (Knight, Power & Watts, 1995, p94) while at Fulton’s Rock, there may be seen a depiction of the Eland Bull Dance, a rite for new menstruants (van der Post & Taylor, 1985, pp60-61 & Plate 44). Fight scenes, such as the image called ‘Veg ‘n Vlug’ (‘fight or flight’) in the Cederberg (Parkington, 2008, pp64-65) and processions (Vinnicombe, 1967, p109) like that seen at Ikanti in the Drakensberg are also sometimes found.

A final note needs to be made on the use of the word ‘shaman’, since its usage in any rock art archaeological context is disputed by some researchers, particularly by Bednarik, although he seems not always to understand the subtleties of the approaches to Bushman rock art taken by Lewis-Williams and his colleagues (Bednarik, 2013, pp491-94). What is clear from both twentieth century ethnography in the Kalahari and nineteenth century ethnography among the /Xam people is that about half of all men and a third of all women are ritual healers whose methods include altered states of consciousness and the entrance into a world of spirits to effect their cures. For sure, Bushman ritual healers are markedly different from the classic Siberian shaman or the indigenous Amazonian curandero, but in this experiential light, I agree with Lewis-Williams’ point (2004, p190) that the endless logomachy in some academic circles about what does or does not constitute a shaman adds very little to our understanding about the rock art or prehistoric Bushman culture, or indeed the prehistoric rock art of any culture.

The entrance into an altered state and the constant depiction of this experience in the rock art is one of ten aspects of shamanism that Lewis-Williams lists (2004, p196) and contrary to Bednarik's words (in 2013, p493), it is more than mere performance. Rather the practice reflects a pervasive experience in Bushman culture specifically and human culture more generally, whether it is termed shamanism or not, and it is the various aspects of this experience (rather than its nomenclature), along with the cultural institutions with which it was intimately associated, that are expressed in the rock art. Furthermore, as Lewis-Williams says, the shamanic interpretation is

“… not a final, monolithic ‘explanation’ of San rock art. Rather, it opens up to limitless possibilities for new and ever more detailed insights into the iconography and… into San mythology, cosmology and social relations.” (2004, p95)

I hope therefore that this series of articles with accompanying images, recording my personal site visits and highlighting the particular aspects of Bushman rock art which most fascinate me, will bring to wider appreciation this scintillating art tradition, and by the time the series ends, that the reader will agree that the images and visual records of the Bushman painters deserve to stand with the best that human artistic endeavour has produced in its complexity and visionary intensity.

This article is the first in a series of articles about Bushman Rock Art, and subsequent articles will be centred around visits to sites that I have personally made. One site in the Drakensberg, Ikanti, was visited in 2010, while in 2016 and 2017 I have visited several sites in the Western Cape province, including the famous Ezeljagdspoort. In many cases, a site might contain several panels of paintings, or consist of different sites within close proximity (within a few hundred metres) of each other. Since the subject matter of each panel or sub-site is different, these will often be dealt with in separate articles.

However, preceding the site visit articles in many cases will be some short articles about generic features of Bushman rock art which are intended to ‘prepare’ the reader for the imagery seen in the subsequent site visit article. So for example at Ikanti Site #1, a frieze of painted polychrome elands is seen, along with a fragmentary depiction of what may be a rain-making ritual, and so preceding this site visit will be two articles exploring eland paintings and rain-making in Bushman art and culture. Hopefully, this approach will make the detailed descriptions and photographs of the site visit articles a more immersive and enriching experience for the reader!

*1 – The symbols in these names are not punctuation, but represent click consonants in Bushman languages. The / symbol represents a dental click, similar to a ‘tutting’ sound, while the ! mark represents an alveolar click, like the ‘tock’ sound made to imitate a clock. Other click sounds include the palatal click represented by the ǂ symbol, the lateral click (similar to the sound made to gee up a horse) represented by a double // mark, and the bilabial click, similar to a kissing sound and found only in the /Xam and closely related languages, represented by the ʘ symbol. Clicks are very often combined with other sounds, and as such there are nasal clicks, voiced clicks, aspirated clicks, and so on. The /x at the beginning of the word /Xam, for example, represents a dental click with a heavily aspirated [x] sound, like the ‘ch’ in Scottish ‘loch’, pronounced at the same time. Other phonetic symbols commonly seen in /Xam orthography include ŋ which represents a ‘ng’ sound and a colon sign : which represents a long vowel, as in !gi:xa or !gi:ten. The ‘i’ in both cases is pronounced with the double the length of the other vowels in the words.

*2 – Fascinatingly, Vinnicombe reports (1967, p158) a number of different orthographic and dialectal variations on the name of the Bushman trickster-shaman deity, /Kaggen, the Mantis. These include Kaggen, Cagn, ctaggen, and most strikingly Qhang. It is possible therefore that the name of this red ochre pigment may have resonated with the name of the deity in the Maluti Bushman language, although this is a speculation based upon admittedly slender evidence

Bannister, Anthony & David Lewis-Williams (1998), Bushmen: A Changing Way of Life, Struik Publishers

Bednarik, Robert (2013), Myths About Rock Art, Journal of Literature and Art Studies 3 (8)

Breuil, Henri (1948), The White Lady of Brandberg, South-West Africa, Her Companions and Her Guards, South African Archaeological Bulletin 3 (9)

British Museum (2016), ‘South Africa: The Art of a Nation’ 27 October 2016 – 26 February 2017, on The British Museum, dated October 2016, url: http://www.britishmuseum.org/whats_on/exhibitions/south_africa.aspx, retrieved May 2016

Deacon, Janette (1994), Some views on Rock Paintings in the Cederberg, Department of Environment Affairs South Africa / Cape Nature Conservation / National Monuments Council of South Africa

Dowson, Thomas (1992), Rock Engravings of Southern Africa, Witwatersrand University Press

Eastwood, Ed & Cathelijne Eastwood (2006), Capturing the Spoor Rock Art of Limpopo: An Exploration of the Rock Art of Northern Most South Africa, David Philip Publishers

Fliegel Jezernicky Expeditions (2010), Upper Brandberg Expedition, Namibia, 21th June - 4th July, 2010, on FJ Expeditions, url: http://www.fjexpeditions.com/frameset/namibia10.htm, retrieved April 2017

Garlake, Peter (1995), The Hunter's Vision: The Prehistoric Art of Zimbabwe, University of Washington Press

Hitchcock, Robert K. & Megan Biesele (2014), San Khwe, Basarwa or Bushmen? Terminology, Identity and Empowerment in Southern Africa, on Khoisan Peoples, url: http://www.khoisanpeoples.org/indepth/ind-identity.htm, retrieved November 2014

How, Marion Walsham (1962), The Mountain Bushmen of Basutoland, J. L. Van Schaik Ltd

Jolly, Pieter (1986), A First Generation Descendant of the Transkei San, South African Archaeological Bulletin 41 (143)

Keeney, Bradford & Hillary Keeney (eds.) (2015), Way of the Bushman as Told by the Tribal Elders: Spiritual Teachings and Practices of the Kalahari Ju/’hoansi, Bear & Company

Knight, Chris, Camilla Power & Ian Watts (1995), The Human Symbolic Revolution: A Darwinian Account, Cambridge Archaeological Journal 5

Lewis-Williams, David (1972), Superpositioning in a Sample of Rock-Paintings from the Barkly East District, South African Archaeological Bulletin 29

Lewis-Williams, David (1980), Ethnography and Iconography: Aspects of Southern San Thought and Art, Man (N.S.) 15

Lewis-Williams, David (1995), Seeing and Construing: The making and ‘Meaning’ of a Southern African Rock Art Motif, Cambridge Archaeological Journal 5 (1)

Lewis-Williams, David (2004), A Cosmos in Stone: Interpreting Religion and Society through Rock Art, Altamira Press

Lewis-Williams, David & Thomas Dowson (1989), Images of Power: Understanding Bushman Rock Art, Southern Book Publishers

Lewis-Williams, David & Thomas Dowson (1990), Through the Veil, San Rock Paintings and the Rock Face, South African Archaeological Bulletin 45

Lewis-Williams, David & Sam Challis (2011), Deciphering Ancient Minds: The Mystery of San Bushman Rock Art, Thames & Hudson

Mazel, Aron D. (2009a), Images in Time: Advances in the dating of Maloti-Drakensberg Rock Art since the 1970s, in Peter Mitchell & Benjamin Smith (eds.), The Eland’s People: New Perspectives in the Rock Art of the Maloti-Drakensberg Bushmen – Essays in Memory of Patricia Vinnicombe, Witwatersrand University Press

Mazel, Aron D. (2009b), Unsettled times: Shaded polychrome paintings and hunter-gatherer history in the southeastern mountains of southern Africa, Southern African Humanities 21 (1)

Oudtshoorn Courant (2015), Help Preserve our Rock Art, on Oudtshoorn Courant, dated May 2015, url: http://www.oudtshoorncourant.com/news/News/General/136148/Help-preserve-our-rock-art, retrieved May 2017

Parkington, John (2008), Cederberg Rock Paintings: Follow the San, Creda Communications & Clanwilliam Living Landscape project

Parry, Elspeth (2000), Legacy on the Rocks: The Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherers of the Matopo Hills, Zimbabwe, Oxbow Books

Rimell, Bruce (2014a), Tsodilo: The Beginnings of a Human World, on Archaic Visions, dated April 2014, url: http://www.visionaryartexhibition.com/archaic-visions/tsodilo-the-beginnings-of-a-human-world, retrieved April 2014

Rimell, Bruce (2014b), The Migraine as Archaic Visionary Experience, on Archaic Visions, dated August 2014, url: http://www.visionaryartexhibition.com/archaic-visions/the-migraine-as-archaic-visionary-experience, retrieved August 2014

Rust, Renée & Jan van der Poll (2011), Water Stone & Legend: Rock Art of the Klein Karoo, Struik / Random House

van der Post, Laurens & Jane Taylor (1985), Testament to the Bushmen, Penguin

Vinnicombe, Patricia (1976), The People of the Eland: Rock Paintings of the Drakensberg Bushmen as a Reflection of their Life and Thought, Witwatersrand University Pres

It’s time for a reboot. Of late this blog wandered away somewhat from its original brief of bringing ancient artforms and mythology into modern attention and visionary inspiration. I am also mindful that the serialisation of ‘On Vision and Being Human’ lost some people due to its abstract complexity, so I will not be continuing the serialisation of that book here. Interested readers can either consult the complete book on Google Books here, or get a copy of it from Amazon or Lulu Books here.

The reboot of this blog, then, will return us to the original brief, and happily I have a bit more time for the foreseeable future. I intend to restart the blog with three principal strands. Firstly, in the intervening time I have had the great pleasure of visiting some Bushman rock art sites in South Africa, some of which were pretty special and quite remarkable in their imagery. So I will be writing some reports about those to post here, in the hope that readers will become initiated into what I consider one of the finest but least well-known art traditions of the world.

The second strand will be chapter extracts from my recent book Liminal Contact, which uses archaic imagery, cognitive anthropology and the experiences of modern painters to robustly challenge the Modernist fantasy of the death of painting, and eradicate that strange dogma once and for all. Some interesting case studies of Palaeolithic cave art, the murals of Çatal Hüyük, and Bushman rock art images illustrate how this challenge is possible, and modified forms of these chapters will be shared here.

Finally, I would like to start serialising another book of mine, one from a long time ago and much less abstract and theoretical than ‘On Vision…’ This is ELEUSIS, an artistic, mythological and anthropological exploration into the heart of the Eleusinian Mysteries. In this little book from 2012, I take a very different, much more holistic perspective from the psychedelic theorist or the theological occultist. It should be an interesting journey, but particularly interested readers can consult this book on Google Books as well.

Once again, apologies to those who had become regular readers and were disappointed by the lack of output – I hope that the forthcoming strands of Archaic Visionary inspiration will make up for recent absences!

“When he’s bright, we have rain. He is happy, we keep renewing him, smiling all the time… When they are dull, they are unhappy and we have droughts because people don’t come to paint them.”

These words of Wunambal elder David Mowaljarlai, in commenting upon a rock painting of Gunduran, a Rain Dreaming spirit, capture in microcosm the essence of the wandjina creator beings as understood by his people, the Wunambal of Donkey Creek in the Kimberley Range. These beings occupy a central place in the mythologies and teachings of the region, and are held responsible for the creation of many of the important landscape features in the Wunambal cosmos. Indeed, many Dreamings are told of these spirits, but the Dreaming in Aboriginal conception should not be thought of as mere liturgy or narrative, but rather as a unified nexus of story, landscape, ritual, ownership, genealogical history and magical creative action of the spirits about whom the Dreamings are told.

Wojin, the powerful wandjina at Wanalirri

Perhaps the most famous story of the wandjina is the story of Dumby (or sometimes, Tumbi), the owl who was the son of Wojin, one of the most powerful wandjina in the newly-created cosmos. Mowaljarlai tells the tale to photographer Jutta Malnic (who walks the land with him as part of research for a fascinating book) at a gorge called Wanalirri, where a large mural of Wojin can be seen, relating that two brothers had once found Dumby and began teasing him, tearing out his feathers and causing him pain:

“[Wojin] raged when he heard how the two boys had teased and hurt Dumby, plucked his feathers, flicked the naked little bird with speargrass and had then thrown him into the air: ‘Now see how you can fly!’. When Dumby told the wandjina of his misfortune, Wojin brought on an enormous flood that killed all the people in the area – except the two mischievous boys. They hid in the pouch of a kangaroo and started the whole tribe afresh.”

Thus we see here the beginnings of the Wunambal people into a world that appears to recognise the very great age of the landscape, older than the people themselves. The remainder of the story is associated with another site, Wullari or Donkey Creek, and Mowaljarlai waits until they visit there before continuing – since retelling a tale without passing through the very environment where the events are held to take place renders the telling meaningless – reminding Malnic that Dumby had gone to Wojin and his Council of Wandjina, asking them to ‘growl the boys’ in punishment for their mischief:

“When those Wandjinas came, their foot laid a path, they made tracks… At Wullari they gave title to their hosts, the Munmurra mob [a moiety of the Wunambal people], the people who later came to paint here at Donkey Creek. That title is like a seal, stamped on them forever… They represent the history, the Beginning, the journey and the reason of the track. We must pick up everything from a track – animal track, history, painting, images. We must follow it back to learn from the track, to know how to live with it, to pass it on. All this was brought together here at Donkey Creek.”

We are here witness to a powerful and complex mandala of subtle beliefs, highly contextual deeply founded upon journeys within specific landscapes, each journey conferring a sense of custodianship, in a system bearing little resemblance to anything we might recognise in the Western world.

The wandjina are principally cloud and rain spirits, but given that in the dry land of the Kimberleys, rain is what brings forth life from the parched soils, these spirits have become creator deities and informers of the sacred traditions of the Wunambal people. Indeed the word wandjina is likely derived from the Wunambal verb wanditj, translated by Mowaljarlai as ‘to build the building’, in other words, to engage in acts of creation, and we see Bee Wandjinas, Track Wandjinas, Cuckoo People and many others, responsible for bringing the landscape into existence and animation, and for the trackways and journeys across the world which they were the first to traverse during the period of Lalai, the active part of Creation at the beginning of the world.

The activities of the wandjina set the prototypes not just for ownership, but for the laws and customs of the people and in the fullness of time, each wandjina completed its journey, arriving at its destination where it painted itself onto the rock. Cowan narrates the deeper meaning of this ending:

“[They] ‘lay down’ in… caves. This ‘lying down’, though it implies death, in reality records the cessation of the wandjinas’ world-creating activities. They disappeared into the rock-face, leaving their images on the wall.”

Mowaljarlai & Malnic add additional details to this ‘lying down’, that passing out of this world, each one found a waterhole, a wunggud water where an Earth Snake is believed to reside, through which to leave, and it is notable that each site where wandjina images are painted is associated with a body of water nearby, containing the energies of both the wandjina and the Earth Snake within.

Indeed, Doring informs us that the word wandjina often bears the meaning of ‘water people’, a collective title of the Wunambal, Ngarinyin and Worora peoples of the Kimberleys, and whose significance is that the wandjina do not simply represent the creators, nor simply the ancestors of particular lineages within the three language groups, but a shimmering and continuously-present image of humanity within the landscapes as expressed through the laws, customs and narratives of the people.

The image of the wandjina conforms strictly to a set of conventions the individual features of which are redolent with meaning. Early wandjina are depicted as full humanoid figures, with mouths, arms and legs, but the typical later phase consists of the head and body only, and wide-staring eyes, surrounded by radial lines of power. These latter features are called the djagarra, and are often combined with rings around the head, representing malngirri, lightning, or various types of clouds from low, rain-laden clouds to high cirro-stratus clouds that signify the movements of the winds.

Most wandjina are depicted without a mouth – as Daisy Utemorrah relates to Malnic: “He has no need of a mouth, he sends his thoughts” – and the line running between the eyes does not represent a nose, but the place where the creative power flows down from the spirit into the world. The lack of a mouth also resonates with the white colour of the face of the wandjina, both of which symbolise mamaa, an immanent sacred power of rock art sites, as Ngarinyin elder Banggal relates to Doring in relation to Ngegamorro, an ancestral wandjina of the Ngarinyin people:

“You can see he has no mouth, you can see all this white thing… it’s beyond our knowledge, it’s very taboo… that’s why we call them mamaa.”

Creators such as Wallanganda, however, whose power sprang from their voice rather than their hands are sometimes shown with a small mouth, and the creative power is held to descend from the line between the eyes and emerge from the painted opening.

The story of Wallanganda is a particularly powerful one. According to Doring et al, Wallanganda represents “the entire Milky Way, a body of light forming the creator of the earth…” and Mowaljarlai concurs:

“Wallanganda travelled across the countries. As he walked over the soft ground, the soil formed and hardened into rivers, mountains and rocks. He made trees, shrubs and plants for his landscapes. He made all things of nature.”

Mowaljarlai narrates in detail how Wallanganda created humanity, appearing with his chest shrouded in mist and his head encircles by flashes of lightning and clouds of rain:

“Then came the time to make man. 'What shall I do now?' this wandjina said. He was seeing himself alone. He looked down and saw a child moving in a wunggud water [pool]. 'Oh, that is a kid moving,' said the wandjina. He picked us up and put us on his head and took us along – the image of the little fella, the image. Then he saw another picture in the water, a reflection of the wandjina, of himself. And he took some mud and formed the mud. He made man. He built a first man... It was a mould, a blueprint...”

Here is a striking mythical image, of a creator spirit reflecting himself in his creation and the making of a blueprint through which all humans can be created, in Mowaljarlai's words “as spirit individuals dreamed into a woman's womb”. This resonates deeply with the aforementioned idea of the wandjina as a continuously-present humanity expressed in the customs and sacred journeys of the people through the medium of the wunggud water, and Mowaljarlai underscores this in the continuation of the myth in which the first woman is created:

“Then the Creator made woman. He made the woman also from mud, like the man. We are all the same. Najjar [an alternative name for Wallanganda] means ‘same-like, copyright, spit image to himself’, as Wandjina. You can see it in rock art. Man and woman are walking about. The design of their bodies had been laid down on Earth.”

That human and wandjina are to be considered conceptually identical is powerfully illustrated by Wallanganda’s alternative name Najjar, and thus we have in this most significant of mythical images the idea of the primordial human image emerging from the wunggud waters through the actions of a creator who is simultaneously a rain deity, the body of the Milky Way stretching across the sky and the same primordial image he has himself created. This recursion is amplified by Mowaljarlai’s words that the blueprint is not merely found in “man and woman walking about” but in the rock art of the wandjina paintings too.

Wallanganda thus opens up an important concept which underlies all wandjina Dreamings, that although their actions took place in Lalai, the beginning of the world, their creative and magical actions are not confined to that primordial period, but are held to be continuously acting through the rock images – and through living human beings – within the field of the present time. This idea is encapsulated in the Wunambal notion of yorro yorro, disclosing a sense of permanent acts of continuous creation. Mowaljarlai makes this point several times to Malnic:

“[Wallanganda’s] deeds are Yorro Yorro, everything on earth brand new and standing up. Yorro Yorro is continual creation and renewal of nature in all its forms. He installed everything, and he gave it life to continue growing…”

And again, when Mowaljarlai and Malnic were travelling in an area close to Lejmorro, a site sacred to the Milky Way (and hence to Wallanganda) the precise location of which is now lost:
 
“Wandjina put people to tell the story of his Idea. And his Idea became the painting. The land was given and divided out to the people as caretakers to keep his Idea going. People who live today still carry on, because we are still of the same image as that ancestor mob dead-gone before us. Even today we still represent Creation. Yorro Yorro is ongoing, everything standing up alive.”
 
Here we see a wide-ranging link between the Idea of Creation – the powerful plan of the Creator who creates by “sending his thoughts” in a continuous flow of yorro yorro – the custodianship of the landscape by successive generations of people (another act of yorro yorro) and the images of the wandjina paintings. This image, this Idea, must surely be identical to the Najjar that Mowaljarlai mentions above, the ‘same-like’ which is an alternative name for the creator wandjina Wallanganda himself.
 
Banggal underscores this to Doring, in a powerful narrative told to him at a sacred water pool near Marranba Bidi, resonating with the notion of wandjina as ‘water people’ and of the emergence of new life as a precise recreation of the primordial actions of Wallaganda:
 
“This wunggud water here, holy water from wandjina… they made man, everybody, everything… We find children from water, that’s why we’re water people. We spirits hide in the water, come out in the open. We all belong [to] water because wandjina belong [to] water… That is why every man or girl, they come out from each wunggud water, wandjina gives us back… Our spirit come from water because we all come from spirit water…”

Such ideas inform an important worldview, expressed by Mowaljarlai at the beginning of this essay, that the paintings must be continually renewed for their creative power to retain their potency. Elkin, quoted in McCulloch, suggests something of the sanctity of such repainting rituals:
 
“To retouch a painted Wandjina causes rain, and to paint or retouch figures of animals, birds, reptiles and plants in a Wandjina gallery ensures the increase of the particular species in due season. The painting or retouching is the ritual; it is a sacramental act through which life is mediated to nature and to man.”
 
We may see this ritual as another act of yorro yorro, and custodianship passes down the generations of lineages whose spirits were born from the wunggud water at each site. Few Western observers have ever witnessed these magical renewals, the acts of profound re-creation likely being too sacred, too mamaa, for outsider eyes, since they ensure the continued preservation and animation of the world – indeed Banggal’s relating of the interrelationship of identity between humans and wandjina, symbolised by the wunggud water, suggests that to recreate these images to ensure the continuous creation of future generations of Wunambal and Ngarinyin people.
 
It is unclear now in the twenty-first century how many wandjina sites are being actively curated and tended. Rapid cultural changes taking place in the Kimberleys, from missionary activity beginning in the 1930s to the loss of lands to farming and sheep-rearing, along with the only-recently discontinued Australian policy of removing Aboriginal children from their families to attend Western schooling, has led to a profound loss of knowledge. Indeed, the precise locations of several important sites are now no longer known, including most significantly Lejmorro, the site sacred to the Milky Way which includes the image of Wallanganda himself (and hence, why this essay contains no image of this prominent wandjina). Many of the images are fading, since the lineages no longer exist to tend them, or have been forgotten in the drive to acculturate the Aboriginal peoples of the Kimberleys to Western norms, with the sad implication that an age-old cycle of yorro yorro may for some of the wandjina, be in the process of breaking.
 
There is, however, hope for the future. The emergence of intense interest in Aboriginal artforms among contemporary galleries in Australia and the wider world has allowed for a resurgence in wandjina painting, this time upon canvas, bark and other materials rather than rock shelter walls. Mowanjum Arts, a collective of Aboriginal artists from all three language groups of the Kimberleys, based near Derby in Western Australia, has since the 1970s sought to promote the culture and continued expression of the wandjina, as has the Waringarri collective based in Kalumburu at the very northern tip of the Kimberley range.

That this contemporary painting retains the sanctity, importance and magic of the original rock art tradition is suggested by Donny Woolagoodja, a Worora elder and leading member of the Mowanjum collective:
 
“Every race of people has a culture to follow. If you lose your culture you are floating... lost. The Mowanjum artists are strong and they know it is their job to pass on their knowledge to young people, to keep the spirit of the Wandjina alive.”
 
The appearance of an increasing number of books, two of which have greatly informed this essay, in which authentic Aboriginal voices (as opposed to Western interpretive voices) are heard as they travel through the sacred sites of their landscapes, also old much promise for the future. Mowaljarlai himself was eager that his knowledge should be passed to the next generation before he died, and perhaps transmission through books and art will lead to a return, in the fullness of time, to the original rock art sites to partake once again in the profound cycle of continuous creation and image identity of yorro yorro.

“…Once I walked my country
But I lost my place
Then I lost my dignity – spirit.
 
“Once when I walked my country
I was lizard and kangaroo
I was turkey and emu
And the Wandjina walked with me…
 
“I must remember, I must know
Might be an illusion
That holds me from my country.
 
“For I am Wunambal
I am lizard and kangaroo
I am turkey and emu
And I am spirit – rock
And I am Wandjina.”
 
David Mowaljarlai

In travelling across the Kimberleys with Jutta Malnic in the early 1990s, David Mowaljarlai was unable to find the site of Lejmorro, the site of the Milky Way where a painting of Wallanganda was said to be visible. However the Ngarinyin elder Nyawarra appears to have known a place where Walamba, the red kangaroo ancestor wandjina, was painted. Underneath this is an alcove where Nyawarra says the one-armed image of Laajmorro, the wandjina of the Milky Way, can be seen. Whether this is the same site as that sought by Mowaljarlai or whether this is a different site owned by the Ngarinyin to the Wunambal site Mowaljarlai was seeking I do not know, but the one-armed wandjina is here reproduced, with the hope, rather than the certainty, that this may be the image of Wallanganda…

James G. Cowan, Myths of the Dreaming: Interpreting Aboriginal Legends, Prism Press & Unity Press, 1994
 
Jeff Doring, Ngarjno, Ungudman, Banggal & Nyawarra, Gwion Gwion Dulwan Mamaa: Secret and Sacred Pathways of the Ngarinyin Aboriginal People of Australia, Könemann Verlagsgesellschaft, 2000
 
Susan McCulloch, Contemporary Aboriginal Art: A Guide to the Rebirth of an Ancient Culture, Allen & Unwin, 2001
 
David Mowaljarlai & Jutta Malnic, Yorro Yorro: Aboriginal Creation and the Renewal of Nature, Inner Traditions, 1993
 
Australian Stamp & Coin Co Pty, The Aborigines: Early Inhabitants of the ‘Top End’, url: http://www.australianstamp.com/Coin-web/feature/history/abdream.htm, retrieved August 2010
 
Mowanjum Arts, quote from Donny Woolagoodja on front page of website, url: http://www.mowanjumarts.com/, retrieved December 2014

Thus we can see from the preceding few pages [which is to say, the preceding chapters in posts made some nine months ago - see chapter 15 for a quick summary] how symbolic culture and language do not spring from a single aspect of the human being, but from a whole range of phenomena that are emergent in character and delocalised across the whole human system. Some of these phenomena include increased intelligence, a change in the colour of the eyes, female concealment of ovulation and amplified menstruation, greater control over vocalisations, a tendency towards coalitionary behaviours to suppress philandering and those who would cheat the emerging system, and the use of pigments to signal those collective attitudes.

Of relevance also are the previous discussed notions of simultaneity, in which an unseen and symbolic referent is laid upon a visible object or personage, and of the 'enacted epiphany' from a Bronze Age Cretan context, in which a human figure embodies a deity, a cultural feature found in several modern cultures including in Nepal. At this prototypical stage, however, the concepts of personage and referent (that is to say, new menstruant and proto-deity) are not likely to have been decoupled from each other: they are both seamlessly embodied in the dancing young woman of our portrait in a manner that discloses the potential for further evolutionary developments and cultural ideations.

We also find a surprisingly complex archetype emerging from this Palaeolithic situation, and one which challenges the received Jungian wisdoms that the first archetypes, such as Divine Mother or Father Figure, of the developing child partake of a relative simplicity which is founded on the primordial or upon the developmental. There is an adage in evolutionary biology, 'phylogeny not ontogeny', meaning that the development of the juvenile does not necessarily replicate the evolutionary history of a given species, an insight that seems particularly appropriate here.

Furthermore, in our image of a female-to-male transgendered therianthropic proto-deity we can perhaps find the forerunner of later images such as the ‘Lion Man’ of Hohle Fels (called the ‘Löwenmensch’ in German, a name which is gender-neutral) and the ‘Sorceror’ and ‘Bison Man’ of the Cave of Les Trois Freres in France. All three figures are assumed to be male (although the Löwenmensch is too fragmentary to definitively ascribe any gender) but it is quite possible that our model predicts that these represent symbolic costumes in a female-driven menstrual context. In this regard, we can note their possible association with shamanism and the perennial notions that while female and transgendered shamans are observed to be rarer among indigenous societies of Siberia and Plains Native America, they are considered as more powerful than male ones. This, too, may be an ancient echo of our primordial evolutionary state.

Perhaps the Palaeolithic image which is most relevant to our theme is the Willendorf Woman, an 11cm high limestone sculpture uncovered in Austria, depicting an overweight or heavily-pregnant woman with a featureless bowed head and pronounced vulva. It is partly coloured with red ochre in the folds of the breasts and pubic triangle, but evidence exists that it was anciently covered completely with this pigment. Cook narrates some other details of the figure:

“Her face is not depicted but incised concentric lines spiral round the head and are crossed by short deep incisions that give the impression of a woven hat or a braided hairstyle… The work on the lower arms is detailed. Incised zigzags around the wrists depict bracelets and the fingers of both hands are clearly defined….”

These details are remarkable and suggest some confirmation of the ‘sham menstruation’ aspects of our model, in a European Upper Palaeolithic rather than an African Middle Stone Age context: here we see a pregnant woman covered in red pigment, adorned by bracelets and braidings to amplify the signals that broadcast membership of a menstrual sisterhood. The signs of pregnancy indicate that she does not appear to be a new menstruant, suggesting a development of the Middle Stone Age model, and we might speculate that the sculpted artefact represented a sacred archetype of an older woman whose power authorised and embodied the menstrual realities of the model.

We need again to be cautious about the language we use here, noting how clumsy our words often are in attempting to meta-refer to the symbolic nature of language itself. In the wording of the portrait painted in the previous chapter (and indeed the one in the preceding paragraph), an astute reader will have become aware of the danger that a confusion of the literal with the perceived was encoded into the very structure of the description. The clouding effects of symbolic cognition are thus revealed in this consideration, in particular the way in which it tends to hide not only 'external reality' but our own symbolic cognitive processes as well. However, this is an aside.

The suggested connection, then, between the menstrual signalling of the female-to-male therianthrope and the visionary experiences of the shaman, may be a useful line of enquiry to follow, and our portrait of the proto-deity begs a number of interesting questions. We have seen that visionary experience (whether entoptic, construal or iconic) requires the presence of symbolic cognition to be regarded as perceptually significant and that pre-symbolic hominids would have either been terrified by the resultant images, or would have simply dismissed them, so might it have been possible at this point that a link was made between the symbolic unseen embodied and engendered by the menstruant proto-deity and the visionary unseen, as it were, entoptic and iconic imageries newly made significant by the emerging cognitive architecture?

Our portrait discloses a nexus of several essentially human traits, one of which is the capacity for dance and movement to engender trance, an awareness of which is, like many of the other traits we have been reviewing here, ubiquitous among human cultures. In the context of our model, dance and energetic movements would have had the principal function of amplifying the menstrual signals but altered states of consciousness would have been a possible secondary outcome and, at length, a primary purpose. It may therefore have been relatively quickly perceived by emerging proto-symbolic hominids (who may now be appropriately considered as cognitively-modern humans) that the unseen symbolic world could indeed be made visible through the visions engendered in this state.

Among chimpanzees, there are several behaviours which might be considered the ancestor of the link between dance movements and trance, the most famous of which is the intimidating 'charging display' of males which is accompanied by low-pitched calls and 'pant-hoots'. These pant-hoots are used by both females and males during times of high excitement and Hart narrates that the calls

“...begin with breathy, low-pitched hoots that segue into a series of quicker, higher-pitched in-and-out pants... [then] build to a loud climactic crescendo... Male chimpanzees sometimes accompany long-distance pant-hoots by drumming with their hands or feet on tree buttresses or hollow stumps or logs...”

while de Waal noted that several of the male chimpanzees under his study would look as though they were falling into a near-trance towards the end of their charging displays. There is thus some circumstantial evidence to suggest the link between movement and a trance-like state is perhaps to be regarded as very ancient indeed, a possibility that is amplified by current theories, exemplified by Mithen, that Neanderthals very likely bore the intelligence and sophistication for music and song displays, the evidence for which is embodied in recently unearthed bone-flutes from Neanderthal occupation levels at caves in Slovenia.

Lewis-Williams quotes from !Kung informants speaking of the ways in which dance can engender trance and cause n/um, a supernatural energy we have encountered before, to enter the body with spectacular consequences:

“...it boils in my belly and boils up to my head like beer... You feel your blood becomes very hot just like blood boiling on a fire... You dance, dance, dance. New n/um lifts you in your belly and lifts you in your back, and then you start to shiver. N/um makes you tremble; its hot... in your backbone you feel a pointed something and then it works its way up. The base of your spine is tingling, tingling, tingling. Then n/um makes your thoughts nothing in your head...”

He notes the similarity of these descriptions to kundalini from Hindu traditions and thus we may perhaps assume that these sensations of energy arrival during heightened consciousness states is yet another human universal. Lewis-Williams continues by saying that when the n/um reaches the head, the dancer enters a state known as !kia, which may be translated as 'trance' or 'altered state of consciousness', experienced as an 'opening up' from which the soul may leave the body and visit the spirit realm.

A strikingly similar experience is reported by Rätsch during a ceremony with a Nepalese shaman in which he fell into a trance, and experienced shakti, the primordial power that is the source of shamanic ability:

“My body vibrates… I lose normal consciousness. Suddenly I glance into my body. There I see a shaken-up spinal column winding its way like a snake of exploding light… my consciousness frees itself from my bones and races out of me…”

This idea, that trance-engendering visions should be linked to an unseen world, seems perfectly natural to cognitively-modern humans already endowed with symbolic culture and an awareness of the significance of vision, but if we are to apply it to a Middle Stone Age African context in which that link might may or may not have been made, we require a demonstration of evidence. Intriguingly, like the 'Female Cosmetic Coalitions' theory, this hypothesis also bestows a specific prediction upon what we should see in the archaeology: that we expect the earliest artefacts we can confidently term 'artforms' to suggest visionary and entoptic phenomena in their visual content, and they should be intimately associated in some way with systems of menstrual signalling. Remarkably, this is exactly what we see.

Since 1991, archaeological work on the Blombos Cave on the Western Cape coast in South Africa has revealed a wealth of artefacts relating to life in the region dating from 100,000 to 70,000 years ago. Among the more fascinating finds in the 2002 season of research were a number red ochre artefacts inscribed with cross-hatching designs, uncovered from strata suggesting a date of some 75,000 years before the present. Henshilwood tells us that nine ambiguously engraved ochre fragments were found, however, there were also two which were much more clearly engraved, with the engravings visible on one side while the other sides of the artefacts had been modified by scraping and grinding, suggesting that they had come into use for pigment production.

The patterns on the two artefacts differ slightly but are predicated on simple geometric criss-cross designs, bounded on the top and bottom by two parallel horizontal lines, and divided through the middle by a third horizontal line which splices the lozenge shapes liberated by the criss-cross design into triangles. Lewis-Williams remarks that it is unlikely that these artefacts at Blombos were the first ever artefacts of their kind, but they are, to date, the earliest known objects inscribed with symbolic design that archaeology is currently aware of.

We should note that red ochre was likely to have been of considerable ritual value, and Blombos cave appears at some periods to have been a centre of activity for ochre production. A wide range of interpretations for the symbolic import of the designs has been proposed, but we should note that while it is possible that the designs may have been reinterpreted in terms of any number of potential social or emerging spiritual realities, the choice of design itself seems likely to have been entoptically-inspired.

Lewis-Williams follows an interesting line of enquiry relating to the siting of the patterns on the narrow edges of the artefacts rather than the larger flat surfaces where the pattern might be more easily seen:

“Easy visibility does not seem to have been the engravers' priority. Moreover, the patterns on both pieces neatly fill, and so seem to be in some way related to, the narrow edges of the ochre. I therefore ask: do the patterns therefore refer to something inside the ochre...? Perhaps this 'something' was released by the grinding of the larger surfaces and then deployed in powder form in an emotionally charged ritual. From hints such as these, slender as they may be, it is beginning to sound as if this 'something' may have been some sort of spiritual concept, power or being.”

Thus we have in these two small artefacts from the Middle Stone Age in Southern Africa the possibility of a connection between artefacts of essential use in menstrual rituals (the red ochre), an emerging sense of the entoptic or visionary (the pattern) and the immanent supernatural power that such a ritual might engender, conceived by the early hominids as dwelling within the ochre itself. Henshilwood posits a different, but related, view, that the evidence from Blombos suggests some individuals exhibited proto-shamanic attributes or a supernatural imagination:

“[T]he ‘divine’ ability of individuals who have a different ‘essence’ to others within a group and are able to communicate with supernatural agencies is open to interpretation. Innovative behaviour, such as the engraving of abstract images on ochre, may be the result of the inspirational ‘essence’ of one individual… and be generated by ‘religious’ thoughts typically activated when people deal with emotions like death, disease or birth.”

It is notable in this regard that several years later, a number of ochre-stained seashells were also uncovered at the site, and the interpretation that these were used to mix ochre pigments with water for body paint intensifies the link between ochre and ritual practice.

Engraved ochres have also been found at Klasies River and several other sites in the Western Cape: the appearance of this phenomenon over several sites of divergent age suggests that the practice of ochre engraving was not a local phenomenon but a general one. Similar patterns have been found on fragments of inscribed ostrich eggshells at Diepkloof Shelter in the Western Cape dating to around 60,000 years ago, though with interesting variations that Riel-Salvatore speculates may have disclosed incipient notions of individual expression within an iconographic tradition, and given the context at hand, may possibly have symbolised some individual responses to personal entoptic experiences, albeit in a wider symbolic and social tradition.

Some of the earliest parietal artforms of the Eurasian Upper Palaeolithic beginning around 41,000 years ago at El Castillo, and a little later at nearby sites such as Altamira, feature  geometric images called tectiforms, as well as rows of dots in deep or secluded parts of the caves, that recall entoptic and even construal visionary forms. The 'Tectiform Recess' at El Castillo forms a chamber with a steeply-reclining wall which precludes walking – to enter, one must shuffle carefully in the confined space. Similarly at Altamira, a large tectiform is found in a difficult-to-access space in the deepest part of the cave. These are purposive and private spaces that lend themselves to interpretations of quiet contemplation and call to mind initiations or 'vision-quest' rituals of Plains Native Americans in which the hopeful visionary is left for days alone. Hopman makes the point with regard to tectiforms in cave art in general that:

“A possible explanation could be that the Palaeolithic people experienced trance and saw entoptic phenomena in the dark cave thanks to sensory deprivation of sight. In the absence of any stimuli, the brain creates images for us to see. It is likely these experiences were considered to be religious experiences, or contact with the spirits.”

Given that in both El Castillo and Altamira, these tectiform friezes are closely associated with animal masks – large construal images of faces highlighted with charcoal in the living rock – it is not too much of a speculation to suggest these tectiforms may have deliberately followed entoptic forms in seeking to engender visions in the firelit darkness of the cave.

Lewis-Williams also notes that in the San Bushman rock art traditions evidence in the Drakensberg mountains of South Africa, dating from 24,000 years ago to the present, unpainted engravings contain a great deal of geometric forms, but painted works of animals or ritual scenes almost never do, suggesting an ancient distinction between two types of art was being made at some juncture following the Middle Stone Age occupancy at Blombos.

Watts notes an important point here, that “...it is almost inconceivable that the... occupants of Blombos were engraving such designs onto pieces of ochre while not doing similar things with ground ochre on their bodies.”

In this regard, we have already suggested previously that the first canvas was the human body and, indeed, the presence of red ochre in human habitation sites beginning 160,000 years ago cannot be adequately explained by any other means. The association of red ochre with skeletons from both Neanderthal and anatomically modern humans at Qafzeh and Skhul from 100,000 years ago demonstrate clearly that cognitively-modern humans were adorning the dead with ochre (and in passing here we should recall the 'not alive' aspect of our model), intensifying Watts' insistence that it must also have been used on the living.

Body paint obviously does not survive in the archaeological record, except rarely in artistic depictions, and so the content, symbolic meaning and patterns must be closed to our knowledge, however the presence of geometric forms on the Blombos red ochre and Diepkloof eggshell artefacts points towards these designs representing the fragmentary survivals of a wider symbolic tradition anciently present in the proto-cultures of the Western Cape. It seems reasonable to assume that similar entoptic forms, then, may have been used as body adornments, a tentative conclusion which may be supported by ethnographic evidence from modern indigenous traditions visible today.

Another project has been “Liminal Contact: A Cognitive and Anthropological Response to the ‘Death’ of Painting”, another book essay I intend to publish at the end of summer 2016, and which suddenly burst into my consciousness while I was away travelling in Crete. Time to reflect led me to realise I had found a comprehensive way to kill off the Modernist so-called ‘death’ of painting once and for all! So I have been devoting much energy to this new book recently.

These projects led me to postpone the formal publication of my first book ‘On Vision and Being Human’ until April 2016, when I return from South Africa.

There has also been a sea change in how I approach my writing, and my book ‘On Vision and Being Human’ (of which there are as yet nine more chapters to serialise here) has made me realise that I have in its pages the bones and rough edges of a possibly-new philosophy, which for now I am calling ‘Visionary Humanism’. This is much wider than the purview originally envisaged for ‘Archaic Visions’ and so in April/May 2016 I will be reorganising my online writing projects to align with that new venture. This blog will form an important part of that of course, but regular book publications – one a year I hope – and a new blog of musings and speculations on medium.com or elsewhere are likely to emerge from that reorganisation.

So, in summary, I promise that normal (or perhaps better 'altered and improved'!) service will resume very soon, around April 2016. The serialisation of ‘On Vision and Being Human’ will continue, as well as some stand-alone articles and responses to my South Africa visit. Until then, keep glowing creative and thanks for reading!

Our journey so far has been a strange and twisting road, involving the raising and subsequent shattering of a Classical Image of a World-Beyond-Worlds, the realisation that our perception of 'hidden realities' and visionary textures is primarily founded upon the structures of our neurology, and we have discovered that the apparently cold, directionless and blind processes of Darwinism do not lead us into a kind of existential desolation, but towards a human image endowed with strange beauty and blessed with a lively sense of the sacred, albeit one radically modified from the traditional definitions of that word. In so doing we have now have the capacity to do something which perhaps few other humans have been able to do since the end of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle in the majority of human populations: gaze into the eyes of the first human proto-deity and see in her primordial yet counter-intuitive visage apparitions of the whole complex of associations under discussion.

The young woman, a new menstruant at threshold of womanhood, stands silently with her eyes closed at the very peak of her fertility, a phenomenon so threatening to the social order – the 'world' in symbolic terms – of the tribe that she is shielded from all her peers and the males of the group to be enfolded in the warm, red ochre arms of her mothers and grandmothers, and eventually hidden from view entirely. The females fear the disruptive attraction she commands over the males, an attraction that has the power to kill children and splinter the tribe if it were to cause the perennial male primate philandering to make a resurgence.

But the males fear her too, for it is not just the women who bear a sense of belonging. They are brothers of the hunt, they are beginning to express profound attachments to a parallel symbolic world of blood, and they can see that in her attraction, there is the nightmare of banishment. In this moment, invisibly lost in the sisterhood, she is the embodiment of the invisible world that is beginning to emerge.

She disappears from sight, hidden away in a place known only to the women, where only her closest relatives may attend to her. They raise her from the ground, lest her awesome power should cause a storm, or a flood, or the ending of the (again, symbolic) world. At length, perhaps during the few days of the New Moon, she is painted with red ochre and dressed for her reappearance as a woman. The cry of the women goes out and the men dash to attend, arriving to be greeted by an array of red-painted apparitions. Slowly, the women part to reveal what in later epochs will come to be called an epiphany, but it is of a profoundly strange kind, for the girl who disappeared is no longer visible.

Only the world of symbolism embodied by the invisible girl's equally unseen moral force can resolve the tension of instincts that follows. Every sensual perception that she is a young woman in the prime of life is over-ruled by a newly evolved symbolic cognition that insists on her her 'otherness', and the very danger of her fertility paradoxically signals her unavailability to the males and her safety to the females. Now, in place of the girl is an upright-walking antelope, covered in red ochre patterns: a female-to-male transgender therianthrope who holds a stick which every man knows is the symbolic phallus that informs their own sexuality, while across her thighs are patterns that symbolise the currently-invisible moon.

She begins to dance, mimicking the movements of all the male animals she knows, but especially the Antelope Bull. The intense signalling of her body paint, bead decorations and even animal parts becomes a collectively-held fiction based upon no directly verifiable situation, yet the deceit becomes more real than the evidence of the tribe's own eyes. Her hyperreality is not based on accurate semblance but on an energy-intensive explosion for the senses, amplified by her movements which become infused with an incipient simultaneity of human and antelope, female and male. She is magically unreachable, an embodiment of the hidden world for which the tribe are developing an emerging experience, and as the dance continues, she draws out a narrative which the tribe knows is being played out somewhere in the wilderness among the ‘real’ animals: she reaches out through symbolic associations to draw the animals near to watch.

The similarly red-painted women join in and dance like antelope cows, for wild animals are as the tribe well know all female, so the sight of this powerfully fertile 'male' creature attracts their attention. They approach to dance just as the women are dancing. She is becoming the First Animal Master, her dance is affecting more than just the tribe, and due to her strange attraction, the men know that in a few days those animals will be close enough to their home range for a hunt to begin.

There is nothing like her in the 'real world', nothing so intensely coloured or so strangely dressed, no animal or tribe member so bizarre looking. She is wholly different from the world of the senses and her unavailability begins to subtly change for some into an unknowability, a creature endowed with a force which seems to defy all the agencies of the everyday world and governs every aspect of the tribe's social reality. She becomes the embodiment of the raw and the cooked, the distinction of nature and culture, and the moral law that eating raw meat is as wrong as philandering sex because she is unavailable.

She is the evolutionary doorway through which verifiable signs become unhinged from directly perceivable reality, liquidly transforming words and gestures into expressions of unseen intentions and movements. This strange dancing creature who personifies this invisible realm gazes upon the world with wide and unsettling eyes that seem both dead and fascinatingly alive, for her many days alone and her magic dancing have placed her into a deep trance, and the final component of the full message of her actions to the tribe falls into place... ‘wrong species, wrong gender, wrong time, not alive... otherworldly’.

The first implication for this model is that we should see a ritually-governed sexual division of labour and lifestyle: females become care-givers and ritual magic-makers, and males become hunters and kin to the females. Such divisions can be inferred from extant archaeological evidence in the Middle Stone Age, particularly that relating to the emergence of the fire and hearth as central to hominid life in Africa as opposed to the Neanderthal hunting station in Europe. In this regard, examinations of hominid bones from this period is also revealing: archaic Homo sapiens bones only show signs of major injury on the male skeletons, whereas among Neanderthal bones from Europe show major injury scars on both genders, suggesting that among the latter, females engaged in hunting as much as the males.

This model also offers powerful prediction for the increased use of red ochre pigments to emerge in the Middle Stone Age in Africa, a usage which Watts argues has no known nutritional or functional basis. Knight, Power & Watts predict that some time around or immediately following the penultimate glaciation period around 160,000 years before the present, visible evidence of this should begin to show a marked increase in the archaeology, reflecting the employment of the pigment as an artificial body paint for sham menstruation and sex strike rituals:

“We have proposed that…red pigments should be the focus of the earliest symbolic tradition. The ochre record should document an initial period of sporadic ochre use (‘sham menstruation’ prompted only by the local incidence of real menstruation) followed by an explosion in such use (reflecting regularly monthly body-painting…)”

We should also expect to see exclusive use of red ochre despite the availability of other pigments, such as yellow ochre and charcoal. Knight, Power & Watts as well as Volman find all of this to be the case: in a survey of Middle Stone Age sites south of the Limpopo river in southern Africa, including the famous sites at Blombos, Rose Cottage and Cave 13B in South Africa, and Apollo 11 Cave in Namibia, there appears to be little in the way of evidence of red ochre usage before 200,000 years ago, followed by fragmentary evidence of usage beginning around 164,000 years ago (with localised heavy usage found at two sites) then developing into red ochre becoming an important part of the lithic assemblage recovered from sites dating to 130,000 years ago and afterwards.

Bar-Yosef Mayer & Vandermeersch review evidence of red-ochre-stained skeletons and pierced shell-beads from Qafzeh and Skhul in Israel dating to approximately 100,000 years ago, suggesting that by this time, this symbolic phenomenon was adaptive enough to spread through most of the human populations of Africa and into Eurasia coinciding with migrations of anatomically-modern humans. Indeed, these migrations may well have been triggered by the success of these new innovations in social culture and the resultant need to find new territories to support the expanding number of cognitively-modern humans making use of this incipient symbolic complex. Since the red ochre at Qafzeh is now associated with burial and death, this adds another interesting symbolic dimension to the ritual signal: 'wrong time, wrong gender, wrong species… not alive'.

Here again we begin to taste the idea of an incipient religious expression emerging from a developing symbol system: the ochre-covered woman associated with menstrual blood and the blood of the animal hunt now becomes associated with the blood of death, and an otherworldly transition begins to be made. As Grahn has noted, in the symbolic context under discussion, all blood is menstrual blood, and by becoming 'not alive', the red-painted female acquires a magical identity in an association with the blood-borne death of the hunt, an image amplified by the 'sex strike' purposive nature of the hunt itself.

Beyond archaeology, the 'Female Cosmetics Coalitions' model should also manifest itself in highly specific ethnographic features in modern hunter-gatherer cultures, and quite possibly upon later Neolithic cultures also. Some of these can be listed, for example the ubiquity of bride service towards a woman's family before marriage can take place, and early kinship systems being reckoned through the female line with only a weak focus upon fatherhood.

We should also expect a timing of hunt expeditions to be aligned with the phases of the moon, and indeed a taboo on hunting during the few days around the new moon is a common feature in many cultures which is often ascribed to the inability to hunt in total darkness. However, this interpretation fails rather if the taboo is also present during the day time, which for the San peoples of Southern Africa and the Hadza in Tanzania, it is.

There should also be a general rule of sexual abstinence before the commencement of a major hunt expedition, and a taboo on eating freshly-killed meat, due to a cultural raw/cooked distinction, thus regulating the men's appetites through a ritually-sanctioned requirement that 'wild' meat be 'tamed' by giving it to the women to be cooked and thus socialised, by which is understood, removed of the blood-borne dangers of the wilderness. Such dangers may take the form of a belief in vengeful animal spirits who will attack any hunter who transgresses these rules.

Vinnicombe tells that among the /Xam, a San people formerly of the Drakensberg mountains in South Africa, it was documented that among the extremely intricate rules that a hunter had to follow was the rule that, if he should hunt and successfully kill an eland, he may not consume any part of the meat, lest /Kaggen should follow the hunter's trail back home and taunt him in the night. There were also strict rituals to be followed to placate both the deity and the dead eland's soul, as told by the /Xam groups of Lesotho:

“Kaggen [sic], after punishing the son who killed his first eland, told him that he had to try to undo the mischief he had done. [There was] further related how a legendary chief, Qwantciqutshaa, killed an eland and purified himself and his wife. Qwantciqutshaa then told his wife to grind canna herbs... on the ground, and all the elands that had died came back alive again...”

Reichel-Dolmatoff's work among the Desana of the Colombian Amazon also resonates with the various facets of this predicted general rule above, and reports on the beliefs about deer and tapir that:

“...game animals are, in all aspects, female... and only those that have been transformed from strange forest creatures... into true people... can safely be... brought into one's tribe. Only the dark deer of the forest are viewed as dangerous estrous [sic] females and must be avoided. Native attitudes towards deer are highly ambivalent... deer are seen as clean, sleek forest maidens... on the other hand they are repulsive bitches in heat. Both tapirs and deer feed on forest products and not what people grow in their fields... there is a very definite 'otherness' about them... they belong to another dimension.”

Even the Desana word for deer, nyamá, relates to several words with both transformative and sexual connotations and the killing of a deer is often likened to the selection of a marital partner. Elsewhere he reports upon the preparations that the hunter must undergo before embarking on a hunt, which strongly relate to Vai Mahsë, the Master of Animals to whom all animals of the forest are subject:

“In order to obtain the Supernatural Master's permission to kill a game animal, the prospective hunter must undergo a rigorous preparation which consists of sexual continence, food restrictions and purification rites ensuring the cleansing of the body...For some days... the man should refrain from all sexual relations and... he should not have had any dreams with erotic content. Moreover, it is necessary that none of the women who live in his household is menstruating.”

The Desana generally consider women to have a pleasant odour, but not when menstruating, and Reichel-Dolmatoff elucidates the meaning of this olfactory change:

“Menstruation means that she has passed from her normal, human state to an abnormal one that links her to the beasts of the forest, and in this lies a great danger... to all men, to herself, her offspring and also to the game animals. Her state affects the very essence of nature's fertility and introduces a serious conflict into all man-animal relationships...”

Levi-Strauss reports that among the Tupari, the odour of a menstruating woman is believed to cause migraines in her male partner, a phenomenon demonstrating a link between the associations under discussion and visionary experience, and the apparent ubiquity of negative effects of menstrual odours among human populations may have a Darwinian function with respect to the ‘sex-strike’ image we have discussed. Scent also participates in the nexus of symbols surrounding menstrual seclusion rites, as we shall see.

In his anthropological fieldwork among the Mbendjele Pygmies of Northern Congo, Lewis showed that menstrual odours are said to anger large or dangerous animals such as gorillas, buffalo, leopards and elephants, causing them to attack anyone who smells of it. This belief is further elaborated into a system of taboos that defines sexual division of labour and proper sharing practices. This system is called ekila, a word which can refer to menstruation, blood, a hunter’s meat or the power of an animal, and as such it is a concept which neatly reproduces in microcosm much of the model under discussion.

Equally, however, the magical power of a menstruating woman's odour can have positive effects, as Reichel-Dolmatoff continues among the Desana:

“The Desana say that because of feral estrous [sic] odours, women will attract game from far away, and hunters might profit from this. Menstruating women often claim to have erotic dreams involving... animals, and in these cases, a man might take his wife along on a hunting excursion to serve as bait, because the animals will approach without fear.”

Cooking is also a very important ritual process among the Desana and a key concept for them in this regard is bogë, ripeness, a term linked to both menstruation and socialised food. All food must be transformed through cooking into bogë before it is safe to eat, and raw or roasted meats are generally shunned in favour of smoked preparations. Reichel-Dolmatoff also explores the nexus of associations between the female body and the cooking pot, noting among many other aspects, that female body painting and cooking pot decoration closely mirror each other.

In this complex of symbolism fire and cooking thus become artefacts of female control, power and of purification, indeed the process of cooking emphasises menstrual signals, since it removes blood from meat and thus permits male familiarity with it to be minimised. At length, the fire itself can become conceived as female. Among the Ainu, the hearth occupies the central position in a dwelling and is the embodiment of Fuchi, the kamuy or spirit of the fire, who presides over and protects the occupants as the most powerful deity in the pantheon. This hearth is the central focus in the famous bear-sending ritual in which a bear-cub is kept alive in the house for a year before being killed. During this time, the Ainu consider that the bear as 'the spirit of the mountains' (by which is meant, wilderness) is conversing at length with Fuchi as the embodiment of human sociality.

Shamanic practices also take place near the fire, and as such Fuchi acts as the mediator between the gods and the shaman, who are usually women. Ohnuki-Tierney elucidates the symbolic associations this siting has for the Ainu:

“...several aspects of shamanism reveal the importance of the female principle in Ainu culture: the rite is held in the woman's domain, inside the house and most importantly beside the hearth where Fuchi resides... It is here that women prepare the daily meals... In other words, shamanism is expressive of the act of cooking, the conversion of raw natural products into culturally acceptable food, and it also involves healing, the way humans prevent a person from returning to nature through death.”

Thus a symbolic association between menstruation, the blood of the hunt, fire, and raw/cooked distinctions as well as magical powers of various forms can be made which confirm the ubiquity of some of the aspects of the 'Female Cosmetics Coalitions' model. Indeed, fire may have been one of the earliest initiators of the whole process under discussion, since Kohn explains that during the first period of encephalization taking place among Homo ergaster populations some two million years ago, much of the energy costs may have been met by shrinking the gut, reducing the overall efficiency of the digestive system. We might thus suggest that fire permitted an ability to pre-digest food before it was consumed, a useful innovation which cooked and softened food, helping to meet the rising energy costs of the expanding brain. This is generally what is seen in the archaeological record, with the earliest evidences for fire usage coming in throughout the first period of encephalization. Gathering around a fire in the cold of a Eurasian winter or African night would thus have been a convenient locale from which further coalitionary behaviour might develop.

Another prediction of this model would be the suppression of competitive urges among hunter-gatherers, these drives being equated with philandering behaviours particularly among men, and there might also be a taboo against boasting. In connection with a discussion about the Hadza people of Tanzania, Knight says:

“Hunter-gatherers can be as competitive as anyone, but they are under pressure to compete in a paradoxical way. The struggle is to be perceived as non-competitive – and the best way to succeed in this is to be genuinely so. Esteem and corresponding status in a hunter-gatherer band goes not to the most dominant or assertive but to those best at establishing... [their] ability to join with others in transcending internal conflict, displaying generosity and suppressing attempts at dominance by selfish individuals.”

Indeed it could be argued that these ideals of human behaviour are found ubiquitously in some form or another across human society, encoded variously as codes of practice or immutable moral laws, albeit ones whose limitations are not always adhered to. Once again, the menstrual perspective on the origins of culture liberates quite naturally a moral code of behaviour not imposed from outside or from magical thinking, but as an essential, internally-consistent emergent feature.

We should also expect to see this model reflected in the earliest artforms of our species. It should be assumed that the first canvas for art was not the rock wall but the human body, with red ochre and later decorations such as perforated beads, the latter of which is found in the archaeological record from about 80,000 years ago from sites such as Blombos in South Africa and Taforalt in Morocco, amplifying the menstrual signals to indicate the unseen and symbolic world. At length, the drive to reify these constructs ever further would have caused early cognitively-modern humans to begin re-creating them in static visual form, an innovation which would have fossilised the import of the menstrual rituals, previously at their most powerful when actually being performed, into permanent form. These static forms would have required great effort, emphasising the ‘expensive ritual’ aspects of the model we are discussing.

We should expect early artforms to suggest the manifestation of the paradigm 'wrong time, wrong gender, wrong species… not alive', and indeed this is what we observe among the San peoples of Southern Africa, who until very recently maintained markedly similar hunter-gatherer lifestyles to those theorised for the Middle Stone Age, and in the same approximate region theorised as the urheimat for the symbolic practices here discussed. San ritual and rock art traditions are very ancient indeed: some images in the Drakensberg may possibly go back 25,000 years while in places such as Tsodilo in the Okavango Delta in Botswana, there is evidence for ritual behaviour beginning 70,000 years before the present.

Therianthromorphic females are particularly visible in this tradition, disclosing the 'wrong species' aspect of our model, and often shown in the context of menstrual rites. Van der Post & Taylor narrate the meanings behind a remarkable petroglyphic artwork at Fulton's Rock in the Drakensberg mountains of Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa. The rock surface, which is painted in purely red ochre tones, is somewhat damaged, but the image of at least two concentric circles of dancers surrounding a central covered figure is nonetheless clearly visible. They follow Lewis-Williams in reporting that it depicts a girl's first menstrual ritual:

“[Lewis-Williams] believes that the covered figure inside the incomplete circle is in fact a girl isolated inside a hut for the duration of her first menstruation, with one or two women to keep her company; that the female figures surrounding the hut and bending forward are women performing the ritual dance, and imitating the mating behaviour of female antelopes; and that the other figures (some definitely male, others probably so) represent the few men that join in the dance, some holding sticks which represent an antelope's horns...”

The girl in the hut and some of the antelope dancers also have heads whose shapes are deformed into forms reminiscent of an animal, perhaps an antelope or perhaps an eland, which is also seen at the base of the frieze. Van der Post & Taylor consider this animal's presence to be significant:

“Among the !Kung the dance that is performed around the hut in which the girl is isolated is the Eland Bull Dance, and it is fascinating to see... the shadowy figure of an eland... a symbol of the supernatural potency (n/um) that the girl is believed to have at this time... it is the source of the most powerful n/um...”

The Eland Bull Dance, which is justly famous, throws powerful light upon this petroglyph, but also, to a certain extent on the whole model. That the women dancing around the hut conceive of the new menstruant in the hut as symbolically male – 'wrong gender, wrong species' – is suggested by the movements of the dance itself, imitating the mating dances of the female antelopes in seeking a mate during the breeding season. The connection between the menstruant and n/um, immanent supernatural power, a quality which is also possessed by powerful shamans among the San people, makes explicit the connection between this image and the visionary abilities engendered by trance-based activities such as dancing.

The petroglyph seems to depict precisely what Knight, Power & Watts have been postulating: a female collective who surround a new menstruant to cover her in both ochre and symbolic associations, and who then amplify these associations with a ritual display in which all the customary signals of animal sexual behaviours are inverted. The presence of a small number of men here perhaps reflects non-philandering male kin who are also essential aspects of the model and of the emerging proto-symbolic cosmetic coalition.

Eland-headed figures also feature, as reported by Vinnicombe, in several hunting scenes at Soai's Shelter and other sites in the Underberg district in the Drakensberg. They appear cloaked, or partially occluded by a dead eland and in some respects appear to preside over the hunting action of the scene. In light of what we know, it might not necessarily be speculation to interpret these figures as female. Bleeding from the nose in San rock art of the Drakensburg consistently appears to denote an altered state of consciousness, and thus the resonance of the unseen with blood is again apparent.

Early artistic attempts to reify the magical world beyond the menstrual rituals through the creation of artistic imagery would have also caused, perhaps inadvertently, another innovation, one which needs little discussion to demonstrate its ubiquity among modern humans. The incipient magical power invisibly evident within these artforms would then have begun to transfer to the locales in which they were painted, liberating the concept of the sacred site. The adage “art makes the world sacred” seems particularly appropriate here.

Another important ethnographic prediction is the power of the menstruant, and especially the new menstruant to destroy the world, which from the perspective of the 'Female Cosmetic Coalitions' model represents the potential threat that a non-synchronous or cheating female presents to the emerging collective identity by encouraging competitive and philandering male behaviour, leading to the extinction of the power and thus the meaning of the menstrual symbolic signals. Grahn provides a neat review of some of the relevant aspects of menstrual seclusion rites, in which the new menstruant is ritually separated from the world by some means in order to prevent this situation from arising, and quotes an ethnographic example from the Tiwi people of Melville Island:

“During her first menstrual period, the [menstruant] is removed from the general camp and makes a new camp in the bush with a number of other women... includ[ing] her mother... No men are allowed in this camp... She cannot touch any water... for otherwise she would fall ill... She cannot look at bodies of salt or fresh water, for the maritji [spirits] might be angered and come and kill her... These taboos and several others... include not going near small bodies of water, lest they dry up. She must not take long trips over salt water or the maritji will blow up a storm.”

Power & Watts report a similar belief among the /Xam, in which the menstruant’s odour participates in the taboo against her coming into contact with water:

“The /Xam distinguished between the desired, gentle 'female' rain, which fell softly, and the destructive 'male' rain…  The danger lay in the maiden's capacity to summon and unleash this 'male' power. Violation of menarcheal observances roused the wrath of the being !Khwa, manifested as a whirlwind, black pebbles, lightning or Rain Bull… /Xam informants emphasized that !Khwa was attracted by 'the odour of the girl'.”

They also note that the word !khwa could refer to both menses and water, and that she herself was referred to as //kaan, a word meaning variously ‘maiden’, ‘rain’ and ‘raw, uncooked’.

We see here how the menstruant's power to break the collective and the symbolic world is constrained by her seclusion with close female kin, who surround her with strict taboos about water, for in this magical and threatening state she has the power to cause essential water sources to disappear or storms to be called. Grahn also quotes a story from the Toba people of South America in which a woman was menstruating, but her female kin did not leave water for her to drink, so she went down to the lake to drink, whereupon it rained until all the people were drowned.

We see vestiges of these practices in the superstitious attitudes that many Occidental religions have towards menstruating women, albeit inverted in a male-dominant modern social context to  an 'impure' rather than 'sacred' category. Grahn even quotes a common attitude among young women of the American 1950s – “don't go swimming or get wet when you have your period” – and the Toba tale bears considerable resemblance to the Yolngu story of the Wagilag Sisters, from Arnhem Land in northern Australia, and the presence of similar flood/destruction menstrual images in myths from so widely-divergent peoples across the world provides strong evidence for the model we are discussing.

Caruana & Lendon relate how two sisters are fleeing across the landscape of the Upper Woolen River, pursued by clansmen for some unspecified transgression, when they chance upon a waterhole. In their version, both sisters are pregnant but variants exist in which only one of the women is heavily pregnant and the other is menstruating:

“...one of the Sisters pollutes the waterhole, which arouses Wititj [the Olive Python] from his sleep. The younger Sister gives birth, further inciting the snake. Unsuspecting, the Sisters make camp, build a bark hut and try to cook the food they have caught, but things begin to go wrong – the animals and vegetables come to life and leap into the waterhole. Wititj emerges from the waterhole and creates a storm cloud with lightning and thunder... Frightened, the Sisters perform dances and sing sacred songs to deter the Python. Finally, the Sisters drop in exhaustion and Wititj is able to enter their hut and swallow them...”

Cowan narrates a variant of this story among the Yirrkala, in which the nature of the ‘pollution’ is powerfully elucidated. Here, it is only the elder sister who is pregnant, and she gives birth at the lakeside, and it is her post-partum bleeding which finds its way into the waters, arousing the serpent whose name is Julunggul in Yirrkala lore. The younger sister begins to frantically dance to placate the rising Julunggul, her exertions being energetic enough to cause her to begin menstruating, and these also find their way into the pool.

A remarkable nexus of relevant associations are visible here: the equation between menstrual flow and fertility is made apparent, and the women dancing before a chaotic male figure who is attracted by their blood emissions has bearing upon our image of the menstrual coalition’s displays to modify philandering (read: symbol-destroying) male behaviour. Knight  also narrates how the Rainbow Snake (that is to say, Wititj and Julunggul) represents a post-Palaeolithic male intrusion into, and appropriation of, the symbolic complex surrounding menstrual signalling, and something of this tension between genders is visible in this story.

Van der Post & Taylor also document a menarcheal rite among the !Xo people of the Kalahari. The moment that the newly-menstrual girl realises she is bleeding, she informs a friend or relative and then stays in the very spot where the realisation was made while the friend dashes back to the rest of the tribe to initiate preparations. A hut is hastily constructed and two karosses are set aside, one of which will be given to the girl for her journey to the hut, and the second for her to sit upon once arrived. They narrate:

“With a whoop of joy, [the new menstruant] !Kaekukhwe's mother, /Kunago, leapt to her feet and ran to where her daughter was sitting... Her mother bent down and took her daughter onto her back, while another woman covered her with the kaross so that even her face was lost to sight. Then she was carried back to the hut...”

As with other peoples, an array of taboos surrounds this emerging young woman lest she inadvertently cause disaster due to the awesome power she now embodies. Her condition inside the hut resembles simultaneously primordial nature of the wilderness outside socialised society and the child reborn from a symbolic womb:

“During the whole time of her menstruation the girl must not touch the earth, neither must sun fall upon her. She must wear no beads or clothes. Food is brought to her inside the hut where she remains alone for most of the time... No man may see her face for it is believed ill-luck will befall him... Every day the women dance around the hut, and on some occasions two or three of the older men join in...”

Van der Post & Taylor were surprised to learn that this particular dance was called the 'Gemsbok Dance' rather than the Eland Bull Dance but beyond the detail of the name, it appeared little different from the corresponding rite among the !Kung. He also noted that some of the most provocative movements from the women, which imitated most precisely the movements of the gemsbok, took place directly in front of the hut's entrance, within the sight of the menstruant who accordingly now became symbolically transformed into a male figure.

The resonance of the ritual with the rock art from Fulton's Rock a thousand miles south of the Kalahari struck van der Post deeply, and its similar resonance with everything we have been here discussing should, I believe, engender a profound sense of awe at the venerable age of the San peoples' traditions.

There is one final ethnographic example which is remarkable in its distilled encapsulation of the essence of our present discussion, that (to paraphrase Grahn) for cognitively-modern humans menstruation quite literally created the world. Becher narrates a tale from his ethnographic work with the peoples of the Surára and Pakidái people, a subtribe of the group famously known as the Yanomami. An episode from their creation myth bears retelling here:

“The earth already existed but was without people. The first man, Uruhi, came from the leg of the Xiapó bird... Shortly thereafter the bird's leg bore a second man, then a third, a fourth and finally a woman, Petá... Petá was the wife of Uruhi, the first-born... After one year, Petá gave birth to a strong and healthy boy... One night just for fun he aimed at the moon and shot an arrow. Immediately there was an eclipse of the moon and blood dripped down and flooded the entire earth. From this blood originated all the Yanomami...”

Becher reports that much of this blood congregated in a great lake in the sky, at the centre of which is a vagina. This is a powerful image, deeply linked into our complex of Middle Stone Age symbolism of blood, hunting, the new moon as a time of taboo and magic, and the creation of our humanity in a metaphorical sense. In a survey of indigenous South American weather lore, Wilbert interprets and deepens the picture further by explaining that for the Yanomami, there exists a correlation between rain and blood, and a variant to this tale is found in which:

“...the moon continually shakes blood from trees in the sky; it falls to earth in droplets containing human souls, ready to be incarnated through sexual intercourse...”

and that among the Sanemá, another subgroup of the Yanomami, menstruating women are seen as rain clouds, the heaviness of the menstrual blood being equated with the heaviness of rainfall. The clarity of this memory, and the ubiquitous presence of variants like it, continually re-creating different 'drafts' of the Middle Stone Age social reality, is remarkable in light of what we now know about our origins in a menstrually-inspired human symbolic revolution.

Dennett speaks of 'good tricks' that evolutionary processes will employ in order to strive towards maximal advantage. Not without deep insight does Kohn remark that Christopher Knight and his colleagues have constructed here the image of a trick of extraordinary cunning – almost supernatural! – through which archaically-minded Darwinian hominids were able to reconcile their competing interests to such a degree as to invert the majority of their instincts and drives, and come together as a collective which permitted the flowering of language, art, magic and the accelerated insights and advantages of symbolic culture.

As will perhaps be familiar to regular readers of this blog, the book explores the problems presented by visionary experience in the modern world, and suggests our propensity for symbolic cognition as a way to come to a new understanding of the human being in the twenty-first century as living in two different worlds, one of scientific evidence and one of imaginative colour.

The book is adorned with 30 beautiful monochrome visionary illustrations, and is supplemented with interesting endnotes and detailed references and annotations. It is being published by my own personal publishing imprint, Xibalba Books. Of course, the first draft will continue to be serialised here, but the final form of the completed essay along with all the extras is in the book!

The publication date is November 1st 2015 but preorders will be available from September 1st from this page - www.biroz.net/xibalbabooks/book-on-vision.htm. 'On Vision and Being Human' will also be available from Lulu, Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other notable outlets from Autumn 2015.

One of the perennial themes that emerges from even a casual glance of the australopithecine and hominid fossil record is a marked increase in brain size from a decidedly chimplike 350-500 cubic centimetres in Australopithecus afarensis (whose remnants include the famous 'Lucy' fossil) to around 1200-1600 cubic centimetres in anatomically-modern humans. This process, known as encephalization, was not however a steady, continuous one: rather there were two periods over which hominid brains appear to have taken major leaps in volume, the first being some two to one-and-a-half million years ago with the emergence of Homo ergaster, and the second between five and two hundred thousand years ago with the evolution of archaic Homo sapiens from ancestral populations of Homo heidelbergensis in Eastern and Southern Africa. It is the second of these periods which interests us here.

This extraordinary change in brain physiology would have had, from a Darwinian perspective, both costs and benefits to the hominids undergoing the process. The benefits of increased intelligence for an upright-walking hominid of average strength with little in the way of natural weaponry such as claws or fangs in the potentially hostile savannah, lakeside and coastal environments of late Pleistocene Africa need little commentary. A larger brain permits a hominid individual to invent solutions to overcome all sorts of challenges, including how to find food and how to defend oneself from predators.

However, what is perhaps less considered are the costs, most notably the reproductive costs to hominid females and the upper limit encephalization places on in utero brain development in the context of the width of the female pelvis. As brain size increased, the amount of time that it took to raise an infant to maturity lengthened as there was only a finite-sized aperture through which to be born, and to have altered the physiology of the female hips would have detrimentally altered the balance required to maintain an upright walking stance. Thus, much of the brain development which in apes and earlier hominids would have occurred in the womb now began to take place in the first few years of life. Knight, Power & Watts narrate some of the implications this phenomenon would have had:

“The extra costs arising from encephalization include the metabolic demands on the mother for sustaining brain growth in the infant... and the increased energetic requirements of foraging for a higher quality diet... Because [hominid] mothers bore these escalating costs, we must suppose that it was females who developed strategies to meet them. As maternal energy budgets came under strain, natural selection would have acted on... features of the reproductive cycle.”

The most notable change would have been the progressive suppression of the human female oestrus, whose function in other primates is to advertise the female's fertility, and the concurrent amplification of a misleading signal related to, but not signifying, fertility: that of menstruation which signals the approximate imminence of oestrus rather than its actuality. This startling change in signalling behaviour, which seems profoundly odd from a primate perspective, would likely have facilitated, or perhaps evolved in combination with, the process of encephalization. The reasons for its emergence are subtle and relate to male investment in childrearing, a behaviour largely absent in chimpanzees. This would have advantageously reduced the spiralling costs to hominid females, as Knight, Power & Watts elucidate:

“To drive up male investment, females needed to counter male philandering strategies... The human female appears ‘well-designed’ to waste the time of philanderers by withholding accurate information about her true fertility state. Concealment of ovulation and loss of oestrus... eliminated any reliable cue by which to judge whether a female is likely to have been impregnated...”

Males would thus have been forced to engage in lengthy courtships without ever knowing if or when the female was fertile, and while this would increase the costs to males, it would also permit confidence in their paternity. Menstruation thus becomes a useful, if confusing, signal only to males who attend females for longer periods of time. From this, a 'virtuous circle' of behaviour could theoretically emerge: greater confidence in paternity would lead to greater parental investment. However, it could be argued that once the male was sure the female was impregnated, and this could be ascertained through evidential signs of pregnancy, he might consider his job done and move elsewhere. The female would still bear the vast majority of the reproductive costs and this fragile system would be broken by the philandering behaviour of the cheating males.

We can already see a kind of struggle for investment and energy here between the genders in this behaviour: the reproductive strategies of males and females remained markedly different, and the female attraction towards males showing less philandering behaviours could have easily been subverted by cheating males using their intelligence to deceive the females. Females in turn would have utilised greater discernment in seeking out males, and thus, this dynamic would have driven an evolution towards greater intelligence, and increased the rate of encephalization, exacerbating the initial problem. At this stage, individual and egotistic drives remain the dominant paradigm here, but the dichotomy was to be broken with the next innovation in female behaviour.

Goodall reports that chimpanzee females often group together in male-independent, kin-aligned coalitions to share the burden of child-rearing, and it is likely similar coalitions would have existed among archaic Homo sapiens. This collective behaviour may itself have confused some philandering males, but it also presented the females with another technique to modify male behaviour in response to encephalization costs: that of reproductive synchrony, probably linked to environmental clues initially but eventually to the lunar cycle. Knight, Power & Watts elucidate the advantages of this synchrony:

“If females synchronize their fertile moments, no single male can cope with guarding and impregnating any group of females. Local, previously excluded males are attracted into groups by potentially fertile females... More males become available to the synchronizing females...”

and thus, faced with a coalition of synchronized females whose dominant signalling is oriented towards the imminence rather than the presence of fertility, philandering males lose control of the whole situation while males who are more likely to invest parental time are welcomed into the group, thus increasing their likelihood of being able to father a child for another time. The female collective thus begins to 'police' the access that males have to females, and could even begin to fake signals to ensure continued male presence, such as a non-menstruating female 'borrowing' the menses of her sisters in order to maintain the investment of the males. Here, then, we have the glimmers of the beginnings of a symbolic culture: menstruation as a collective deceit to modify and manipulate male behaviour.

However, again, we find that this is another fragile system that may be cheated, this time by a female who, as it so happens, is not synchronous with the group and who might seek out a philandering male independently of the collective, thus guaranteeing her child genes from an outgroup which may be advantageous. Any independently-cycling female will also stand out to any observant males within the collective, and her individual signal of menstruation thus becomes a powerful method of gaining multiple male investment in her time. This cheating female thus becomes a threat to the incipient collective, and it is in response to this threat that the first decisive movement to symbolic culture occurred, embodied in what has been termed the 'sham menstruation'. Power & Aiello explain:

“...we would expect [all] females within kin coalitions to manufacture synchrony of signals whenever a member was actually menstruating... We might then expect them to resort to cosmetic means — blood-coloured pigments that could be used in body-painting — to augment their “sham” displays... Such coordinated body-painting at menstruation would function as advertising for extra male attention. Provided females maintained solidarity within their menstrual coalitions, even if males were aware of which females were actually menstruating, they would not be able to use the information.”

In other words, the policing of male access to menstruating females, the confusion of signals with red ochre or other pigments and the collective bonds between females would have rendered even a true insight into who was really menstruating worthless, for the females would surely expel any male who attended too closely the genuine menstruants. We have here, then, proto-symbolic behaviour, a collective deception staged by a female coalition intent on maintaining continued male investment in parental concerns. This situation is near-unbreakable, simply because it is not worth cheating: the risks are too high. However, it is not true symbolism quite yet, though as Power & Aiello continue, by amplifying the 'sham menstruation' signals even further through regularity, archaic Homo sapiens females led themselves into an imaginary construct that was collectively-held and indefinitely-maintained, true symbolism:

“So long as female deceptive displays remained... constrained by the local incidence of biological menstruation, they would not be fully symbolic but tied to here-and-now contexts. Symbolic cultural evolution would take off when cosmetic displays involving use of pigment and body painting were staged as a default, a matter of monthly, habitual performance, irrespective of whether any local female was actually menstruating. Once such regularity had been established, women would effectively have created a communal construct of 'Fertility' or 'Blood'... no longer dependent on its perceptible counterpart. Ritual body-painting within groups would repeatedly create, sustain, and recreate this morally authoritative construct.”

Thus the alignment of reproductive synchrony with the regular phases of the moon allowed pre-symbolic archaic humans to move into an incipient symbolistic cultural state that bore a wide range of advantages for the practitioners. For example, sham menstruation displays could also have been used in areas of intense foraging, to variously encourage and mobilise males to engage in the gathering of food. The red painted female figure thus became a moral figure, informing an emerging collective percept, an incipient sacred rule, that males should be helpful and not philandering, and in so doing, created the social environment which led our species from cognitively-archaic hominids to cognitively-modern humans. The monthly ‘sham menstruation’ discloses a non-functional import, a ritual wholly divorced from any real-world referent, opening up an imaginary world in which incipient constructs such as 'blood', 'fertility' and 'moral force' were expressed symbolically through pigment and display.

We might postulate that the cognitive capacity to visualise this new reality may have then engendered yet further encephalization processes – it is known that many of the symbolic cognitions in question appear to have their neurological foundations in the most recently-evolved frontal and pre-frontal cortices of the brain – and the spiralling costs would have created the conditions whereby even increased male attention could not meet the energy needs of the females and their children. Knight and Power & Aiello theorise that it may have then become necessary to utilise this new-found moral force to motivate the males to do something rather paradoxical in this context: leave the female collective to hunt, thereby procuring food from a wider area or to kill animals for high-quality and energy-rich meat.

This was a high-risk strategy, since in their banishment the males may have abandoned their female kin and resumed their philandering behaviour with unrelated groups, but if we assume symbolism was adaptive, we can expect many early cognitively-modern human groups to have exhibited similar behaviours and thus female collectives that were not their kin would have generally been closed to them. Perhaps ironically, with an expanded cognitive capacity due to their incipient symbolism, the males may now have gained as a by-product an enhanced ability to conceive of effective hunt strategies or predict animal behaviour, and the dynamic existing between menstrual blood and red ochre in the sham menstruation ritual may have easily conflated with the blood of the hunt, binding them in an emerging web of symbolic associations.

The females also likely compounded this associative web through a mixture of moral obligation and reward by staging a 'sex strike', in which as Kohn explains:

“...women's displays, loud and vivid and emphatic, inverted the normal messages of [animal] sexual assent. To confirm the possibility of mating, an animal needs to verify that the potential mate is of the right sex and species and that the time is right for fertile sex. The message of the women's ritual was 'wrong sex / wrong species / wrong time'; or, in a word, 'No!' They were refusing sex collectively unless men went out to hunt and returned with provisions.”

Here, male behaviour is manipulated a further time, and Knight, Power & Watts surmise that the 'sex strike' may have arisen during a period of particularly high 'resource stress', perhaps caused by the re-establishment of an ice age some 160,000 years ago. Knight also notes an important implication of the strike for dynamics of autonomy and self-image among the emerging symbolic females:

“This [the 'sex strike'] was the way for females to demonstrate that their bodies now belonged to themselves. Just as the females in effect must have sexually boycotted the defeated Tyrant [an image of the philandering male which Knight uses here], so they would again have had to go on sex strike given any future signs of dominance-like [or philandering] behaviour in any of the males who were now allied to them... More precisely: any male who approached seeking sex without first joining his comrades in the hunt would have had to be met with refusal. No meat: no sex.”

The earliest developmental characteristic of this strike was likely to be wrong time – 'no sex now: go hunting' – but as the adaptive advantage of this spread across human populations in early Middle Stone Age Africa, the red-covered female coalitions began to develop into displays whereby the females became male ('wrong gender'), or the application of the symbolic menstrual blood of the hunt on their bodies conferred animal characteristics ('wrong species') upon them. An important point is that none of these signals – maleness, animal attributes, infertility – would have been visually evident in the immediate context: the displaying females were still obviously female, but selective pressures would have caused visual evidence, as it were, the artefacts of this world, to be subordinate to the much more authoritative symbolic evidence of an emerging unseen world. Indeed, Power’s summary of the model makes explicit the link between these menstrual signals and the incipient perception of deity:

“Because menstruation was valuable for extracting mating effort from males, non-cycling females ‘cheated’ by joining in with menstruating relatives, painting up with blood or blood substitutes to signal ‘imminent fertility’… Simultaneous with advertising fertility using cosmetics, late archaic/early modern females constructed taboos indicating refusal of sexual access except on condition of successful hunting. These involved signalling ‘we are the wrong sex and the wrong species’ in costly ritual performance to deter advances of non-cooperative males. Such ritual metamorphosis into gender-ambivalent therianthropes, highlighted by amplified bloodflow, constituted humanity’s first ‘gods’.”

The cognitive door was thus unlocked to reveal a variety of new social realities, including ideas of the sacred, that were understood according to non-perceptibly verifiable ideas which nonetheless had significant behavioural effects, and most elegantly, these symbols and their effects emerge easily from a Darwinian explication of the implications for encephalization coupled with what we observe for the sexual signalling behaviour of modern human females today.

It is at this point, as we draw near to a threshold over which, once passed we will come to a revolutionary new understanding of ourselves as humans, that we should take a moment to review precisely what we mean by symbolism and how it is proposed that symbolic cognition takes place in human culture. We have so far been working with three functional definitions of symbolism, whose inspiration springs from three very different fields of study.

Campbell's mythic definition of a symbol as being that which is “transparent to transcendence” established as basic formulation that a fundamental property of a symbol is extension of reference, that is to say, it moves beyond the directly perceptible or immediately verifiable into an unseen realm of meaning. McBrearty & Brooks mirrored this with a more functional definition as the cognitive ability to substitute people, objects and ideas with arbitrary referents, whose meanings are made real through cultural practice.

This emphasis on cultural practice contains an implication for symbolism: in order to maintain the importance of that which is unseen, symbolism must of necessity be collective in nature, and once established, the symbols are guaranteed by the traditions of that cultural practice regardless of any information perceived by individuals that acts to the contrary of the symbol. Sperber gives an example from the Dorze people of Ethiopia, among which there is the belief that the leopard is a Christian animal who will observe the fast days of the Orthodox Church, and thus not hunt on those days. It should therefore follow that on fast days, a Dorze should see no need to guard his animals, however Sperber notes:

“A Dorze is no less careful to guard his animals on Wednesdays and Fridays, fast days, than on the other days of the week. Not because he suspects some leopards of being bad Christians, but because he takes it as true both that leopards fast and that they are always dangerous. These two statements are never compared... Leopards are dangerous every day; this he knows from experience. They are also Christians; this is guaranteed by tradition. He need not seek the solution of this paradox...”

Symbolic information is thus shielded from 'worldly' information of individual experience and as such the belief in the leopard's Christianity is maintained despite empirical evidence to the contrary. We see in this dichotomy evidence of our World-Beyond-Worlds narrated earlier: the world of unseen and unverifiable symbols and the world of the perceptually visible are fundamentally not the same. De Lumley underlines this point:

“Symbolic thought represents one of the essential dimensions of human cognition, transcending the material world and integrating cogitation within a universe richer than that of the senses, and combining concepts, that is to say abstract notions, into a system of complex relations.”

Knight, Power & Watts expand upon Sperber's view in light of the case of the baboon deceiving its pursuers and their immediate dismissal of the imaginary predator once its existence could not be verified, using this to liberate a technical but ingenious definition of symbolism that comes from a primate perspective, as it were, looking at human culture from the outside rather than from within. This liberated our third initial definition used earlier:

“The human symbolic domain... is a realm of indefinitely maintained collective ‘deceits’, collective ‘fantasies’... It is as if the gang of baboons in our example all looked, saw no predator – but then joined in with their deceiver in pretending to see one. Clearly, they would not be predicted to do this unless they had some collective interest in perpetuating the fantasy...”

It is this collective interest, as it were cooperative behaviour, which reifies the symbol, in their view. In an exploration of the import of mythology, Sperber concurs with this assessment:

“Individual works are all potential myths, but it is their collective adoption that actualises... their 'mythicism'.”

Knight, Power & Watts quote Chase in defining symbolism as that which “requires the invention of a whole new kind of things... that have no existence in the 'real' world...” and consider human cognition to be coloured (or distorted, in their words) by a communal map, a copy of which is held psychologically by each member of the community and possession of which denotes membership of that community. In this sense, the link between symbolic cognition and religious practice which benefits the social group rather than the individual is made explicit:

“Among modern humans, all behaviour and all cognition occurs in the context of this additional map... Implanted by external public pressure, the motivational bias of such communal cognition is sociocentric, countering the bias of egocentric vision. Onerous social duties are presented, paradoxically, as attractive, while opportunities for sexual self-indulgence are marked ‘danger’ or ‘taboo’.”

Chase further argues that human social systems cannot function without these symbolic ‘maps’ and communal cognitions. Here are found the keys which underlie the insight that no explanation which revolves around individualist interpretations of Darwinism can accurately narrate the emergence of symbolic culture, ritual, language or art because these ubiquitously human features do not focus primarily upon the drives of the individual. Their most significant effects are rather to reduce, rather than increase, inter-individual competitive behaviours. Knight underscores this point in an exploration of the nature of ritual:

“Ritual is collective symbolic action which in the most powerful way organises and harmonises emotions. Without this, there could have been no early human language, no 'kinship', no culture. A society which was a mere assemblage of egotistic, competing individuals would have no ritual domain and could not have one... It can be said that societies or groups value ritual to the extent that they value the maintenance of collective solidarity...”

In collective action, then, there arises collective identity, which becomes encoded throughout the group's emerging society, in systems of kinship, totemic bonds and memberships of religion. Furthermore, this collective identity facilitates a new kind of cooperative behaviour that moves beyond kinship (‘kin selection’ or genetic relationship) or 'reciprocal altruism', setting a more trusting social environment for innovations such as language to arise. Watts notes that ritually-founded collective identity liberates ideas of the 'in-group' and 'out-group', distinctions which may have contributed to a proto-symbolic reality among early hominids as well as aided with the emergence of true language:

“Because collective rituals are costly, they demonstrate commitment. A consequence of commitment is the generation of trust. Once you have a ritual community [an 'in-group'] within which there is sufficient trust, you no longer need costly signals for internal use – you can afford to develop cheaper, coded forms of communication. Costly ritual continues to be required for signalling to an 'out-group'... and for the incorporation of new members... into the ritual coalition. Human speech communities were born out of the regular performance of such costly displays.”

Resonating with much of this, d'Errico explores a collective but functional definition of religion as “a set of socially shared and transmitted beliefs encoding a group's understanding of the essence of reality” and quotes Geertz:

“[Religion is] a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive and long-lasting moods and motivations in [humans] by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence, and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic...”

before noting that “in simple words, religion is about the deep symbolic content in life. Personal beliefs are of reduced interest here.”

We can readily see links with earlier discussions and the framework of an interesting picture is built up: Lewis-Williams' characterisation of the final stage of his 'intensified trajectory' as being of such powerful import as to be mistaken for reality, and the notion of the World-Beyond-Worlds being 'more real than real', resonate strongly with Geertz's words, while d'Errico's thoughts mirror Knight's image of the symbolic collective as working to suppress individual egotistic drives and create a sense of 'in-group' belonging. Here we also recall Eliade's model of the Eternal Return, in which individual 'profane' experience is dismissed in favour of a collective re-alignment with an 'eternal' sacred realm which is the primary source of meaning, and we note also the simultaneity enfolded into Sperber's paradox of the leopard.

However, Lewis-Williams and Eliade both belong to a venerable academic tradition which places primacy upon shamanism, visionary experience and 'archaic techniques of ecstasy' as the major factors responsible for the origins of religion, and even that shamanism forms a modern exemplar of the proto-religion of the Upper Palaeolithic. d'Errico departs from this tradition, considering that while shamanism (and hence visionary experience) was likely to have been practised in many early symbolic societies, this particular religious form should not be considered a universal of hunter-gatherer societies, nor that shamanism and the origin of symbolism should necessarily be linked.

Knight agrees, noting that the shaman is often conceived as bisexual, theriomorphic or transvestite, these being symbolic assessments that partake of a collective unreality and thus must have emerged, as it were, after the fact of symbolism itself. This causes us to require another possible origin of symbolism and symbolic cognition, and we can see that while we have here defined symbolism as primarily collective, it has not been made clear what powerful Darwinian motive could have arisen to drive the profound suppression of primate deceit strategies towards a collective level of trust and cooperation we see among humans everywhere.

Knight's view is that for trust to occur, it was necessary not merely to create symbolism, but to invent the deity, and thereby, as Kohn says, have a 'higher' power to swear by. But the ingenuity of his theory, developed further with Power & Watts, is that these powers and indeed all the strangeness of human symbolic culture, spring from a strict Darwinian view of human sexual behaviour, which from the point of view of every other primate – one might even say most other mammals – contains one extremely puzzling feature indeed!