I have suffered – if that is the right word – from migraines since I was a child, and I am lucky – again, if that is the right word – enough to be one of the twenty percent of migraineurs who experience both the visual aura that precedes the migraine as well as the visionary aspects during. Some of my most powerful childhood memories are of sudden dysphoria and immanent sensations of fractured consciousness which are the hallmarks of visionary experience engendered by migraines, and in a sense, I view them now as part of a natural feature of my neurology. This essay takes in a personal and prehistoric view of this important but challenging aspect of my life.
In his Manifesto of Visionary Art, artist and author Laurence Caruana elucidates a near-exhaustive list of the sources and inspirations from which Visionary Art can spring. It is worth quoting:
“...the sources of Visionary Experience are many and varied: dreams, lucid dreams, nightmares, hypnogogic images, waking dreams, trance states... hypnotic states, illness, near-death experiences, shamanic vision-quests, meditation... madness... day-dreaming, fantasy, the imagination, inspiration, visitation, revelation, spontaneous visions, psychedelics, reading and... the metanoic experiences brought on by Visionary Art itself.”
In his Manifesto of Visionary Art, artist and author Laurence Caruana elucidates a near-exhaustive list of the sources and inspirations from which Visionary Art can spring. It is worth quoting:
“...the sources of Visionary Experience are many and varied: dreams, lucid dreams, nightmares, hypnogogic images, waking dreams, trance states... hypnotic states, illness, near-death experiences, shamanic vision-quests, meditation... madness... day-dreaming, fantasy, the imagination, inspiration, visitation, revelation, spontaneous visions, psychedelics, reading and... the metanoic experiences brought on by Visionary Art itself.”
I Close My Eyes And All Is Not Dark, Bruce Rimell, 2009
I would add to this list: migraine. Not quite an illness, and neither spontaneous vision nor trance state, nor indeed a nightmare, the migraine experience resides somewhere between these sensations in a liminal and occasionally shamanic space. It is a profoundly dysphoric and fractured state of consciousness brought on (it is currently believed) by a temporary neurological disorder which is itself symbolically reinterpreted and projected back upon the migraineur's consciousness as something... well, if not quite 'real', then not quite 'visionary' either.
The debilitating headache and motion sickness sensations of migraine are relatively well-known, but perhaps less famous is the sudden and jarring photophobia and bodily disorientation strong enough to require rest and recuperation. For the one in five of us who experience the migraine with aura, however, the experience can be much stranger.
The debilitating headache and motion sickness sensations of migraine are relatively well-known, but perhaps less famous is the sudden and jarring photophobia and bodily disorientation strong enough to require rest and recuperation. For the one in five of us who experience the migraine with aura, however, the experience can be much stranger.
In The Dark I Can See My Own Brain
A migraine can begin at seemingly-random times in the day or night, sometimes linked to periods of stress, but other times not. The experience begins with the emergence of an 'absence' in the visual field, as if the human blind spot, normally unseen except under special conditions, has become starkly visible and thus enters conscious attention. Shards of flickering light appear, at first emerging from the 'absence' but then taking on a life of their own across the visual field and overlaying or even ripping through the reality normally perceived through our eyes.
These flashing forms are often of a brightness and intensity to physically hurt (and in the fullness of time, the head and the body follow) and a strange kind of blindness emerges in which the outer world is seen but drowned out by the intensity and physical shock of the flickering lights. They are often monochrome, or better still, a sickeningly intense white, as if staring into the sun, but occasionally, under cover of darkness, they take on colours. When they do, the flashing often shifts rapidly between primary colours, in which reds, greens and blues blur into white flashes before separating again and increasing the sense of visual disorientation. Another daylight feature is to see bright red and blue sheets of flickering bands while shadows and dark spaces in my field of view turn bright purple. It is as if the two-dimensional sheet of everyday reality is being shredded to reveal the raw sensations of colour that lay behind.
On the neurological level, however, something remarkable is occurring. For reasons not yet clearly understood, an electric wave has begun a slow progress of movement (at around 0.5cm per minute) across the folds of the brain's visual cortex, causing blood vessels to constrict and neurons to fire in unusual patterns. This wave may be involved in generating the headaches and dysphoria, particularly the stress the brain undergoes in seeking to manage and interpret this intra-neural oddity, but as it strikes a particular node or surface of the cortex, information is passed down the optic nerve from the visual cortex to the retina, reversing the customary flow of information as it were; this information is also passed to other modules of the brain as live, external data.
These flashing forms are often of a brightness and intensity to physically hurt (and in the fullness of time, the head and the body follow) and a strange kind of blindness emerges in which the outer world is seen but drowned out by the intensity and physical shock of the flickering lights. They are often monochrome, or better still, a sickeningly intense white, as if staring into the sun, but occasionally, under cover of darkness, they take on colours. When they do, the flashing often shifts rapidly between primary colours, in which reds, greens and blues blur into white flashes before separating again and increasing the sense of visual disorientation. Another daylight feature is to see bright red and blue sheets of flickering bands while shadows and dark spaces in my field of view turn bright purple. It is as if the two-dimensional sheet of everyday reality is being shredded to reveal the raw sensations of colour that lay behind.
On the neurological level, however, something remarkable is occurring. For reasons not yet clearly understood, an electric wave has begun a slow progress of movement (at around 0.5cm per minute) across the folds of the brain's visual cortex, causing blood vessels to constrict and neurons to fire in unusual patterns. This wave may be involved in generating the headaches and dysphoria, particularly the stress the brain undergoes in seeking to manage and interpret this intra-neural oddity, but as it strikes a particular node or surface of the cortex, information is passed down the optic nerve from the visual cortex to the retina, reversing the customary flow of information as it were; this information is also passed to other modules of the brain as live, external data.
Information flow reversal in the optic nerve during migraines
The location of the wave within the cortex at any point is translated by the brain into locations upon the visual field and hence, when migraineurs behold the flickering, jarring aura in front of their eyes, they are quite literally seeing a basic representation of the topological features of their own visual cortex as examined by the electric wave's movement. This is a remarkable experience: despite the pain and photophobia, in the darkness, migraineurs are seeing their own brain's cortex transposed onto the visual field!
Half-Icons and Palaeolithic Portals
Such flashing lights send the migraineur running for cover – to the security of bed, and darkness, where the flashing lights take on a visual quality that borders on the bearable before subsiding. But just as often, the flickering lines begin to organise themselves into jagged loops and circles, coalescing into a large central circle in the visual field, a blind hole of absence seemingly like a portal out from which iconicity and symbolically re-interpreted imageries come forth to be seen. It is as if the electric wave is reaching the very back of the visual cortex to become roughly circular in form, or perhaps it is moving upwards into the area of visual memory.
The language I’m using here is deliberately careful: these are no more visions of light than they are nightmares of darkness. They are fractured, distorted images only half-formed – some are bright, some deathly, while others are surreal or visually so odd as to be barely perceptible. They are not quite archetypes, not quite images, but shards and slices of images often lacking in dimensionality or coherence. Running legs burst out from the portal hole before disappearing; half an animal flickers on the boundary, causing it to expand momentarily before resuming its circular shape. Moments of visual clarity give way to twisting and flashing confusion and moving, watery figures emerge fully from the light before melting away in a shower of flickering shards.
This is not an easy experience to behold. A key theme here is an overwhelming synaesthesia: the images physically hurt, or have enfolded into their very being a volume of jagged sound that renders the migraineur with a profound sense of unease even when beholding an image of light. External sounds generate unpleasant images – even being touched by one's partner in reassurance can intensify the flashing or cause an awful buzzing to be released.
It wasn't until my early twenties that I discovered that many of these experiences were visually represented in prehistoric art from around the world, and constituted in particular a prominent feature in the Southern African rock art traditions from around 25,000 years ago to the present day. The first time I explored books of San Bushman rock art, I became transfixed by the navicular forms (so called as they were originally considered to have represented ocean-going vessels), becoming excited at having seen some of them directly, and even being momentarily transported back to dysphoric sensations that some of them had accompanied.
The language I’m using here is deliberately careful: these are no more visions of light than they are nightmares of darkness. They are fractured, distorted images only half-formed – some are bright, some deathly, while others are surreal or visually so odd as to be barely perceptible. They are not quite archetypes, not quite images, but shards and slices of images often lacking in dimensionality or coherence. Running legs burst out from the portal hole before disappearing; half an animal flickers on the boundary, causing it to expand momentarily before resuming its circular shape. Moments of visual clarity give way to twisting and flashing confusion and moving, watery figures emerge fully from the light before melting away in a shower of flickering shards.
This is not an easy experience to behold. A key theme here is an overwhelming synaesthesia: the images physically hurt, or have enfolded into their very being a volume of jagged sound that renders the migraineur with a profound sense of unease even when beholding an image of light. External sounds generate unpleasant images – even being touched by one's partner in reassurance can intensify the flashing or cause an awful buzzing to be released.
It wasn't until my early twenties that I discovered that many of these experiences were visually represented in prehistoric art from around the world, and constituted in particular a prominent feature in the Southern African rock art traditions from around 25,000 years ago to the present day. The first time I explored books of San Bushman rock art, I became transfixed by the navicular forms (so called as they were originally considered to have represented ocean-going vessels), becoming excited at having seen some of them directly, and even being momentarily transported back to dysphoric sensations that some of them had accompanied.
Vision of Unity Across 20000 Years, Bruce Rimell, 2008
Curiously, discovering this piece of knowledge started to change the nature, or perhaps the sensations, of migraine: I began to experience the sense of having a portal to the Palaeolithic in the back of my head, just under the crown, and the visual features occasionally would become recursive with obviously Palaeolithic imageries and entoptic petroglyphs forming strong components to this stage of the migraine.
Walking On Lightning Mountain
The third stage of a migraine is the rarest to occur, the most awful in terms of physical sensation but, in hindsight, has profoundly eye-opening qualities. The flashing lights briefly intensify without giving way to iconicity, before subsiding as a profound synaesthesia envelopes my body in a bizarre delirium.
My skin feels electric and moves stingingly with even the tiniest sound: ripples of sonically-expressed energy move in disordered ways over and through me, rendering the experience of my body as somehow intact yet simultaneously torn-apart, leaving my consciousness floating in a strange void which is very difficult to describe. Simultaneously, there is unbearable smoothness all around me, perhaps a reaction to the jagged electricity, and a sense that I am somehow climbing, as though moving or being dragged uphill on a difficult terrain accompanied by constant buzzing and shards of tactile body-lightning. Many years ago, I coined the phrase: Upon Lightning Mountain.
My skin feels electric and moves stingingly with even the tiniest sound: ripples of sonically-expressed energy move in disordered ways over and through me, rendering the experience of my body as somehow intact yet simultaneously torn-apart, leaving my consciousness floating in a strange void which is very difficult to describe. Simultaneously, there is unbearable smoothness all around me, perhaps a reaction to the jagged electricity, and a sense that I am somehow climbing, as though moving or being dragged uphill on a difficult terrain accompanied by constant buzzing and shards of tactile body-lightning. Many years ago, I coined the phrase: Upon Lightning Mountain.
The Way To Lightning Mountain Is The Way Into Me, Bruce Rimell, 2009
(Digital Remix 2014)
(Digital Remix 2014)
This terrain feels like the 'absence' in the visual field, or perhaps the portal hole, but now experienced bodily, with all the senses plunged into the void. Spontaneously, fractured narratives appear, dragging the migraineur unwillingly into their surreal story-cycle...
...Climbing, forever climbing, until I reached the edge of the smoothness which folded away downwards out of sight, there to find my mother screaming my name at deafening volume. I could not see her, but her voice had a physical form of intense power, each word screeching lightning shards out to every part of my inner cosmos. My whole body shuddered as if electrified, and then shattered...
...I was in two places at once, lying in my bed vomiting, and simultaneously throwing myself from the hallway balcony to crash, very neatly, head first, onto the stairs below, breaking my neck. In my delirium I was wailing “I should be out there, killing myself on the stairs”, words sure to strike terror into the parents of any eight-year-old child...
...returning home from a visit to Manchester, a migraine struck and the only way to wellness was to retrace my journey by spelling out backwards all the names of the places I had passed through to get home. The letters were written on sickeningly smooth paper... R..E..T..S..E..H..C..N..A..M, and so on, an arduous task I was close to completing until I entered a deep tunnel and found the letters for the town of Gloucester. I couldn't recite these letters backwards without vomiting heavily. Almost a sense of relief, except that when I retreated back into the bed, I was back in Manchester, facing the whole task again...
Such weirdness is ubiquitous on Lightning Mountain. Not quite nightmares, neither visions nor dreams, their synaesthetic strangeness has only been matched by my experiences with the Mazatec entheogen salvia divinorum: the flickering lights at the onset of a salvic voyage share parallels with the miraineur's aura and while the electric surreality is similar, salvia images are ever-moving and holistic, lacking any sense of fractured imprisonment.
...Climbing, forever climbing, until I reached the edge of the smoothness which folded away downwards out of sight, there to find my mother screaming my name at deafening volume. I could not see her, but her voice had a physical form of intense power, each word screeching lightning shards out to every part of my inner cosmos. My whole body shuddered as if electrified, and then shattered...
...I was in two places at once, lying in my bed vomiting, and simultaneously throwing myself from the hallway balcony to crash, very neatly, head first, onto the stairs below, breaking my neck. In my delirium I was wailing “I should be out there, killing myself on the stairs”, words sure to strike terror into the parents of any eight-year-old child...
...returning home from a visit to Manchester, a migraine struck and the only way to wellness was to retrace my journey by spelling out backwards all the names of the places I had passed through to get home. The letters were written on sickeningly smooth paper... R..E..T..S..E..H..C..N..A..M, and so on, an arduous task I was close to completing until I entered a deep tunnel and found the letters for the town of Gloucester. I couldn't recite these letters backwards without vomiting heavily. Almost a sense of relief, except that when I retreated back into the bed, I was back in Manchester, facing the whole task again...
Such weirdness is ubiquitous on Lightning Mountain. Not quite nightmares, neither visions nor dreams, their synaesthetic strangeness has only been matched by my experiences with the Mazatec entheogen salvia divinorum: the flickering lights at the onset of a salvic voyage share parallels with the miraineur's aura and while the electric surreality is similar, salvia images are ever-moving and holistic, lacking any sense of fractured imprisonment.
Deadeye, Bruce Rimell, 2003 (Digital Remix 2014)
Finally one emerges from the experience thoroughly exhausted. A descent into merciful sleep and disturbing dreams is a common way to end, but in truth the effect of the migraine persist for days afterwards. One is fragile, easily stressed, faintly photophobic, and susceptibility to another migraine is high in this period.
One thinks through mud, as if parts of the software of the brain have not yet come back online. Making choices, even simple ones, is difficult, partly because I often fail for a moment to understand what is happening: that I have to make a decision. Long sentences fragment in one's ear, complex thoughts dissipate. The head feels heavy, as if it has somehow become a beautiful crystal skull, once pristine, but now there are cracks deep within. The mind is subtly different, and feels as if some kind of neurological re-wiring has occurred. Who knows, it probably has...
One thinks through mud, as if parts of the software of the brain have not yet come back online. Making choices, even simple ones, is difficult, partly because I often fail for a moment to understand what is happening: that I have to make a decision. Long sentences fragment in one's ear, complex thoughts dissipate. The head feels heavy, as if it has somehow become a beautiful crystal skull, once pristine, but now there are cracks deep within. The mind is subtly different, and feels as if some kind of neurological re-wiring has occurred. Who knows, it probably has...
Archaic Visionary Experience
So what, in the context of Archaic Visionary Experience, is one to make of all this strangeness? It is estimated that up to 20% of people experience migraines at some point in their lives, and of those a sizeable majority suffer from them chronically for extended periods of time. For this high an incidence among humans of such a debilitating condition, how could something like this have possibly evolved? What possible benefits could it bear for sufferers, if any?
San Navicular, Bruce Rimell, 2007
Loder explains a number of theories suggest that migaineurs have both an elevated sensitivity to change and a lower threshold for habituation than the general population, meaning that when entering a new environment, one who suffers this condition tends to be slower in naturalising oneself to the situation and perhaps more anxious at the novelty. This may have advantages in being more sensitised to possible dangers in moving to new locales, a cautiousness that may subtly confer a survival trait in oneself and one's genetic kin. She also explores the possibility that migraines are the result of the complexity of the modern social environment impinging upon the migraineur's nervous system:
“At least part of the... prevalence of migraine might... be explained by interaction between the modern environment and a human nervous system that evolved in times of less sensory overload. Modern life is characterized by much more frequent exposure to many of the known triggers of migraine attacks than was the case during much of human existence... [including] bright light, loud noise, chronobiological challenges, altered sleep/wake patterns and emotional stress. We no longer live in caveman days, but given the immense periods of time required for evolution to act, correction of this mismatch between the human nervous system and the modern environment will necessarily lag behind the pace of environmental change by thousands or even millions of years.”
Both of these ideas point to an interesting possibility, that the nervous system of the migraineur is, perhaps, a little more archaically-oriented than the average human. A decreased habituative mentality would certainly be an advantage for spotting danger in nomadic hunter-gatherer situations, and a lower ability to cope with modern sensory inputs suggests a temperament primed for the kind of undistracted isolation that hunter-gatherer societies tend to enjoy.
And it is in the art of hunter-gatherer societies, from the Upper Palaeolithic to the modern day, where we see the clearest expressions of migraine-related imagery. I first recognised the relevant image-forms in San Bushman rock art, but European cave art also contains some powerful resonances with these experiences – indeed several of the tectiform structures from the previous essay on the art at El Castillo have an authentically migrainesque flavour – and it is with a selection of these primarily entoptically-inspired images that we here close.
“At least part of the... prevalence of migraine might... be explained by interaction between the modern environment and a human nervous system that evolved in times of less sensory overload. Modern life is characterized by much more frequent exposure to many of the known triggers of migraine attacks than was the case during much of human existence... [including] bright light, loud noise, chronobiological challenges, altered sleep/wake patterns and emotional stress. We no longer live in caveman days, but given the immense periods of time required for evolution to act, correction of this mismatch between the human nervous system and the modern environment will necessarily lag behind the pace of environmental change by thousands or even millions of years.”
Both of these ideas point to an interesting possibility, that the nervous system of the migraineur is, perhaps, a little more archaically-oriented than the average human. A decreased habituative mentality would certainly be an advantage for spotting danger in nomadic hunter-gatherer situations, and a lower ability to cope with modern sensory inputs suggests a temperament primed for the kind of undistracted isolation that hunter-gatherer societies tend to enjoy.
And it is in the art of hunter-gatherer societies, from the Upper Palaeolithic to the modern day, where we see the clearest expressions of migraine-related imagery. I first recognised the relevant image-forms in San Bushman rock art, but European cave art also contains some powerful resonances with these experiences – indeed several of the tectiform structures from the previous essay on the art at El Castillo have an authentically migrainesque flavour – and it is with a selection of these primarily entoptically-inspired images that we here close.
Inscribed mammoth tusk from Předmostí, Czech Republic. Commonly considered to represent a map of the Pavlov Hills, however the similarity with migraine imagery and other entoptic phenomena is striking. Upper Palaeolithic, Gravettian, 24-27 kYa BP
Geometric grids inscribed with fingers in wet clay around a natural hole at Hornos de la Peña, Spain. Lewis-Williams remarks that the pattern seems to be flowing out from behind the rock surface. Upper Palaeolithic, Magdalenian, 18-12 kYa BP
Migraine imagery on a frieze relating to puberty rituals and shamanic initiations. Unknown locale, Southern California
Images redrawn from various San Bushman rock art sites in the Drakensburg: i) a pointed shape similar to the migraine aura or sheets of light, ii) two 'navicular' shapes reminiscent of the portal of absence in migraine experiences – the second is construed as a swarm of bees, the buzzing of which is a common feature in advanced migraine experiences. Drakensburg Mountains, Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa
Images redrawn from various San Bushman sites in the Drakensburg: two navicular images reconstrued with iconicity. The first is striking for its visual resemblance to the portal of absence narrated above. Drakensburg Mountains, Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa
Part of a small frieze in the deepest recess of the cave, considered difficult to interpret. Most striking here is the painted fissure out from which iconicity appears to be emerging. Nanke Cave, Matopo Hills, Zimbabwe
Bibliography
Laurence Caruana, First Draft of: A Manifesto of Visionary Art, Recluse Publishing, 2001, available as a webtext via url: http://visionaryrevue.com/webtext/manifesto.contents.html
Jill Cook, Ice Age Art: Arrival of the Modern Mind, British Museum Press, 2013
David W. Dodick & J. Jay Gargus, Why Migraines Strike: Biologists are finally unravelling the medical mysteries of migraine, from aura to pain, Scientific American, August 2008, url: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=why-migraines-strike , retrieved March 2010
David Lewis-WIlliams, Reality and Non-Reality in San Rock Art, Raymond Dart Lectures,1988
David Lewis-WIlliams, The Mind In The Cave, Thames & Hudson, 2002
E. Loder, What Is The Evolutionary Advantage Of Migraine?, Cephalalgia Review, 2002, url: http://cep.sagepub.com/cgi/content/full/23/9/931 , retrieved June 2010
Elspeth Parry, Legacy On The Rocks: The Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherers of the Matopo Hills, Zimbabwe, Oxbow Books, 2000
Jill Cook, Ice Age Art: Arrival of the Modern Mind, British Museum Press, 2013
David W. Dodick & J. Jay Gargus, Why Migraines Strike: Biologists are finally unravelling the medical mysteries of migraine, from aura to pain, Scientific American, August 2008, url: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=why-migraines-strike , retrieved March 2010
David Lewis-WIlliams, Reality and Non-Reality in San Rock Art, Raymond Dart Lectures,1988
David Lewis-WIlliams, The Mind In The Cave, Thames & Hudson, 2002
E. Loder, What Is The Evolutionary Advantage Of Migraine?, Cephalalgia Review, 2002, url: http://cep.sagepub.com/cgi/content/full/23/9/931 , retrieved June 2010
Elspeth Parry, Legacy On The Rocks: The Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherers of the Matopo Hills, Zimbabwe, Oxbow Books, 2000
RSS Feed
