We have begun to sketch a history of consciousness by following the traces in ethology and archaeology to determine how our ancestors manipulated their consciousness with rituals. But in the previous chapter, we had to pause to consider the social, psychological, and neurobiological aspects of how ritual achieves its ends by changing the physiology of its participants toward internal coherence within each psyche and social coherence binding members of a band. We humans share with other primates the capacity to tune our autonomic nervous system, and the drive to do so under various conditions. The behaviors which perform this tuning improve the effectiveness of our primary survival mechanism, social organization.

          Over the billions of years feeding, reproducing, dying and mutating that occurred before Homo sapiens arrived with a reflective (“co-creating”) awareness, changes in consciousness were accomplished only through phylogeny. Evolution produced ever more powerful nervous systems, culminating in the expanded cerebral cortexes that primates found essential for their society-based survival strategies. In 50,000 years, our species has experienced no changes in our neural apparatus. Rather we have spent all this time learning how to take advantage of the potential built into our brains and psyches. Imagination, altered states of consciousness, and directed thinking can be used in so many combinations and toward so many different ends that our psychic explorations are on-going even today.

          Evolution increased the capacity and complexity of the cerebral cortex, making it possible for apes to live in larger bands than monkeys, and Australopithecus in larger, more nuanced social groups, yet. When gossip began to take over the grooming function, societies emerged at human levels of size and diversity. Another Rubicon was crossed, when we learned to talk about biology, physics, tool design and flavors of meat. Rituals continued to be performed by all these species and through all changes in human culture, but the flexibility of language accelerated the process of change — and perhaps most importantly for our self-understanding, addressed also the issue of why we were dancing and singing. At least since our Cro-Magnon ancestors replaced the Neanderthals in Europe, it appears that our species has been sketching out the meaning of our primate rituals with narratives intended to make sense of who we are and what we do.

          Our cognitive imperative will not tolerate the apparently irrational and absurd things we find ourselves doing and compels us to come up with explanations. From the Ice Age caves to modern physics, we are driven to go beyond the data and come up with more comprehensive and imaginative accounts for how things have come to be and why. Physics has achieved its successes by honing the cognitive imperative and forcing it to couch its explanations in mathematical language that conforms to experimental evidence. But it still reveals its mythic and metaphorical origins. Nobel Prize winning physicist Robert B. Laughlin, for instance, describes how mathematicians, visionaries, and computer modelers work together to define, simplify, and solve crucial problems (R. B. Laughlin, 2005). Each is a specialist in a different human faculty, and their cooperation achieves results that none could achieve on his own. Discovering how to integrate our personal psychic faculties is what each of us has to learn to do in our own life, and it is the central theme of the history of consciousness from the Paleolithic caves to the present. Contrary to the delusion of our monophasic society, imagination and altered states are essential parts of our psychological armamentarium. Robert Laughlin and his associates in science “throw off unconsciousness” when they use them. They make these faculties part of their “steady work.”

          The biogenetic structuralists allude to the integration of such faculties when they say, “The evolutionary course has been from reliance on the perceptual field as frame, to reliance upon intentionality as frame” (C.D. Laughlin, et al., 1990: 183). Millions of years ago, Paramecium oriented itself entirely by its “perceptual field,” what it perceived in the ambient water in which it swam. By the time monkeys evolved, we find individuals deliberately misdirecting one another’s attention (one aspect of intentionality) so as to steal some food or a moment of orgasmic bliss with a forbidden partner. Among chimpanzees, alpha males need to have third-order intentionality, what we have called a “soap-opera mind,” in order to manage their troops with fairness. As we move further up the “phylogenetic ladder,” societies get larger and the range of difference in personality, temperament and role playing increases proportionately. These more recent and sophisticated developments belong to the “frame” of intentionality. Humans are concerned not only with what we intend, but how we intend it. Manipulations of the intentional frame have characterized the human project for the last 50,000 years.

          As we resume our survey of the history of consciousness, we will limit our attention to the Near East and Western Europe, the source of our Western heritage and the most intensively studied region of the world. It is unfortunate that we will largely ignore Asia, Africa, Australia and the Americas, but some limitation of focus is essential to prevent this section of the book from growing too large and distracting our attention from the main issue, which is the relationship between evolution, history and the archetypes.

Consciousness in the Upper Paleolithic

          When wishing to characterize human consciousness in the Upper Paleolithic with a brief phrase, we have mentioned the cave paintings, for they are monuments to the awareness of the earliest members of our species. As statements about a civilization’s consciousness, they correspond to the pyramids and Sphinx of Egypt, the Cathedrals Gothic Europe, and the North American effigy mounds. Mute and enigmatic as they are, they tell us a people was gripped by an idea and disciplined itself to “steady work” for generations in order to produce such enormous, well-planned and decisively executed statements. Death was a central concern for the cave painters and evidently understood, in part, on analogy with trance. When our ancestors lost ordinary consciousness and the empirical world, they entered an invisible cosmos somewhat similar to the “kingdom of light” entered by our contemporaries who have had near-death experiences — for these developments are governed by our human nervous system and common to all.

          The relationship they had with the rock walls was similar to what Jung discovered in “original thinking.” The images were given to them in subtle hints, images constellated by the cracks and bumps. Incidentally, Jung did the same thing with the rock walls of the “medieval tower” he built on Zurich’s Upper Lake. He saw animals and human figures in the uneven surfaces of the carved and mortared blocks and helped them to emerge with hammer and chisel. [1]

Symbolic penetration. The images so constellated inevitably belonged to the mythic narratives that gave meaning to their existence. Neural networks, corresponding to the foundational elements of the myth, had become fairly well-wired and stable through frequent repetitions of ritual and recitations of sacred stories. They resided in the brain as pre-assembled wholes, “cultural archetypes,” ready to fire preferentially any time some associated shape or sound occurred in the empirical world. This describes the process the biogenetic structuralists call “symbolic penetration.” It is roughly the same principle we described in Chapter 7, regarding the constellation of complexes. The difference is that complexes describe the quirks of a single personality, while mythic associations will be more broadly human, bear the imprint of a specific civilization, and be accompanied by grander feelings, such as awe, expansiveness and oneness with the cosmos.

          Jung spoke of active imagination as a process that lends sufficient energy to unconscious contents to bring them into the conscious field. What this means in our quasi-neurobiological language is that the meditative stance the ego assumes when it wishes to begin active imagination “tunes” the human nervous system. One decides, in effect, to stop “talking to oneself” about what one observes. One turns down the incessant prattle and linear, directed thinking of the dominant hemisphere so as to privilege the gestalts of the non-dominant hemisphere and allow them to move into the foreground of the intentional field. Furthermore, since the non-dominant hemisphere is connected to the parasympathetic system, the ANS is also being tuned in the direction of altered states of consciousness. We can easily verify this situation by sitting down to practice the “original thinking” of active imagination. If we have any success at all, we will find ourselves sinking into a state of calm, steady, slow breathing in which we are both alert and relaxed — that condition of body-and-mind that the parasympathetic system supports.

          Narrative thinking itself, as Alexander Marshack has shown us in his account of Peking Man’s relationship with fire — the fact that wood has to undergo a drying process before it can be used, that fire “sleeps” in its ashes, and so forth — had already been a capability of Archaic Homo. But such early stories were closely bound to empirical, perceptual facts. What bursts out a half a million years later and produces the painted caves was the capacity to go well beyond the empirical, to tell stories that explore an immense zone of uncertainty related to life, death and the cosmos, and to use those stories about invisible cosmic planes and their preternatural protagonists to describe the life of the soul after death and the mystical significance of mammoths, horses and aurochs.

Ritual and the control of society. The layout and painting of the caves was a function of a new sort of hunter-gatherer society. Alliances between bands of ever-growing size and surpluses made possible by mass killings of animal herds enabled certain families and clans to commission such huge “public works” projects as the painted caves. Because the new populations were far too large to permit everyone inside cave galleries at the same time, it seems only reasonable to agree with Brian Hayden, Steven Mithen, David Lewis-Williams, John Pfeiffer, and other authors we have cited, that the rituals performed in the caves must have had political and economic significance. Rituals and feasts must have been employed, as so often in human history, to gain control of laborers, to promise rewards for services not yet rendered — rather the way political fund raisers and pancake breakfasts are used today. The biogenetic structuralists agree. In the Upper Paleolithic context, mythic symbols could become persuasive tools in the hands of the families who controlled the surpluses, allowing them to gain control also of the mental states of the economically less fortunate (C.D. Laughlin, et al., 1990: 176). “Through the manipulation of ritual, leaders (A) may orient or reorient B’s perceptions, affect, and outcome analyses and thereby influence B’s preference structures in relation to some set of action alternatives” (McManus, 1979b: 274).

Consciousness in the Mesolithic

          The “Old Stone Age,” the Paleolithic, was characterized by the lifestyles and social strategies of hunter-gatherers; and the “New Stone Age,” the Neolithic, saw the wide-scale introduction of agriculture. But there was a long, uncertain transition that took our ancestors from (a) a hunting lifestyle that was thoroughly egalitarian, precariously subsistent, and dependent upon harmony with the cycles of nature, to (b) a farming lifestyle that was hierarchical and distinctly inegalitarian, depended on stored surpluses, and championed the conquest of nature. For some 5,000 years, humans learned elements of cultivation and domestication and then abandoned them as the climate changed, only to take them up again later on. This period of transition is called the “Middle Stone Age,” the Mesolithic.

          The most obvious change that brought the Paleolithic to an end was the gradual retreat of the ice — back to the earth’s poles and mountain tops. The first effects of the global warming process, however, were far less evident at the southern edge of the glaciers than they were hundreds of miles further to the south, where rain began to fall more frequently and more abundantly. As the glaciers melted, they released water that had been bound up as ice. This raised sea levels and filled in lowland areas with lakes and swamps. Thousands of square miles of liquid water was free to evaporate in the newly elevated temperatures, thereby supplying the atmosphere with rain clouds to soak the arid earth and cause it to bloom abundantly with grasses and trees.

The Natufian people in the Near East. When the climate began to change, not long after the last of the caves had been painted, complex hunter-gatherers began founding “Natufian” villages in the Middle East (ca. 14,300 12,800, b.p.). At ‘Ain Mallaha, north of Lake Tiberias in what is now Israel, wild cereal grains were being ground into flour with stone mortars as large as boulders, and nuts were stored in plaster-lined pits. Evidence shows that the Natufians had extensive knowledge of the plants in their vicinity, not merely those with economic value. They were evidently curious and played close attention to the details of the world around them. They learned to grow plants from cuttings, and exchanged them with friends and relatives. Mithen believes the exchange of cuttings and the cultivation of “wild grasses” was symbolically associated with their origin myths (Mithen, 2003: 29-37).

          Although they cultivated plants, they had not learned to domesticate them. They kept “wild gardens.” Real domestication produces a new variant. It is an artificial “selection” process, whereby one of a gene’s alleles (variant forms of the same set of DNA instructions) is chosen and another left behind. For example, the ripe seeds of wild wheat have a brittle connection with their stalks. This means the slightest touch — much less the swipe of a sickle — causes most of the grain to fall to the ground and be lost. Wild wheat is efficiently adapted to a world in which it has to reseed itself, but inconvenient for farmers. Domesticated wheat, in contrast, has a tighter, less brittle bond between stalk and grain so that nearly all the ripe seeds can be gathered and brought home. Under ordinary circumstances, since the grain from the most brittle plants is the hardest to gather, humans will inevitably bring home more seeds from the plants with the least brittle attachment and plant them in their gardens. The ripe seeds from these plants will be more tightly bound at harvest time, when again the most brittle seeds will be lost. “In ideal circumstances, as few as twenty cycles of harvesting and resewing in new patches would have transformed a wild brittle type of wheat into the domesticated non-brittle variant” (Ibid., 38).

          By this very natural and unconscious process, the planters would have selected the plants whose genes most tightly bound their grain, and thereby produced a real domestic variety. But the Natufians did not. The Mesolithic is defined in part by “wild gardens.” The Natufians frustrated the domestication process ingeniously by harvesting the wild wheat when it was not quite ripe and before it became brittle. They were observant enough to see the problem and work out a solution, but it was less satisfactory than genuine domestication. For that, the world had to wait another 3,000 years.

          As our ancestors began to leave the Upper Paleolithic behind, therefore, they began expanding their awareness in a new direction. The cave-painters produced and exploited altered states of consciousness in an introverted manner. The Mesolithic people, however, expanded their consciousness in a more extraverted manner, as they learned to explore and exploit the natural world in new ways. They may not always have hit on the most efficient solution, but they were clearly studying nature and learning new techniques. For example, to provide ever greater, more impressive feasts, families learned to capture wild animals and keep them alive, well-fed and ready for a slaughter and feast that was essential to their rituals (Hayden, 2003: 174).

          The same theme of pursuing familial aggrandizement by controlling surpluses applies also to trade and to burial practices among the Natufians. They conducted a vigorous trade in dentalium shells collected along the Mediterranean coast and used them in jewelry for personal adornment and the advertisement of personal and familial wealth. The shells could also be traded to groups further inland for other items. But luxury goods could only maintain their status as signifiers of wealth as long as they remained relatively rare. Thus, “the key to maintaining [wealth and power] may have been to ensure that limited shells were in circulation within their village. The most effective way of doing that was the regular removal of large quantities by burying them with the dead” (Mithen, 2003: 33). Burial was, therefore, taking on a dual symbolic role. It evidently had spiritual and cosmic significance related to notions of the soul and afterlife, and also a profane meaning as a political and economic statement concerning who had power over whom.

The Younger Dryas. Between 12,800 and 11,600, b.p., the climate turned colder and the rains diminished, drying out the Middle East. This 1200 year-long period is referred to as the Younger Dryas. “Later” Natufians had to move 700 miles north and east of ‘Ain Mallaha to the foothills of the Taurus and Zagros Mountains. They built villages like Hallan Çemi Tepesi in what is now Turkey with the most elaborate architecture yet seen, lived on nuts and fruits they gathered in the forest, and hunted goats, deer, and wild boar. The climate forced them return to a more strictly hunter-gatherer lifestyle, mobile and egalitarian, but far less wealthy. They buried individuals, now, rather than families, and the burials were temporary. After an interval sufficient for the corpse to be reduced to a skeleton, the graves were dug up and the bones carried — all jumbled together in baskets, often missing parts, especially the skulls — back to the deserted village of their golden origin, ‘Ain Mallaha, a “sacred site existing in the nether world between history and myth,” where they were reburied (Ibid., 46-51).

          Contemporary with the late Natufian village of Hallan Çemi Tepesi in Turkey, was Abu Hureya on the banks of the Euphrates in what is now Northwest Syria. Changes in Abu Hureya over the course of the Younger Dryas give us a convenient model for understanding the adaptations Mesolithic people had to make as the climate swung back and forth. Around 11,000, b.p., the village was built right on the edge of a forest, making it convenient for the people to stroll out every day to gather fruits and nuts. Resources were abundant and the gardens were wild. But as the extended cold spell took effect, the forest retreated due to strongly reduced rainfall. Fruit and nuts became more scarce and the trip to gather them more burdensome so that the people had to rely on their wild grasses for a significant proportion of their nourishment. By 10,000, b.p., the draught had become so severe that the site of Abu Hureya had to be abandoned. Three centuries later, however, the mini Ice Age had come to an end, the rains began to fall, and the people returned to the site of their ancestors’ village with new skills. They had domesticated wheat, rye, and barley (Lewis-Williams & Pierce, 2005: 21).

          Precisely what must have happened in those 300 years will be discussed in a few pages when we get to the Neolithic revolution; but for now it is enough to observe that dry conditions had evidently forced them to master the art of domestication (Mithen, 2003: 53). This was characteristic of the Mesolithic Age in general. The Upper Paleolithic, with its fairly stable conditions of drought and ice, had placed a premium on knowing where to be and when, so as to intercept herds of animals that migrated with the changing seasons, and kill large numbers of them. Vegetation was scarce and unreliable. But with the coming of the Mesolithic, mass killings of animals herds were no longer necessary; the warmer weather was less conducive to storing surpluses of meat; and with the new flora and fauna made possible by the rains, it was no longer necessary to be precisely at the right place at the right time. Life had become more variable, and the rules could be rewritten as the situation demanded. The world had become less predictable and less harsh, and human consciousness adapted and became more flexible, too (Ibid., 148f).

Ceremonial burial sites. Lepenski Vir (8800 7800, b.p.), which Steven Mithen calls “the first hunter-gatherer village in Europe,” was built beside the Danube River, “the Mesolithic Highway.” The remains of canoes and fishing nets have been found there, and the Mesolithic Age is characterized by the exploitation of fish and other sea foods (Ibid., 161). Indeed, Mesolithic villages near the seacoast are often identifiable by the huge mounds of discarded shells they left behind.

          Brian Hayden does not agree with Mithen that Lepenski Vir was an everyday residential village. He thinks the evidence points to intermittent use, that it was “a cemetery for the veneration of ancestors.” He points to the large, carved boulders, elaborate hearths, and numerous prestige items. They are not what one would expect for day-to-day domestic tasks; and must have had, rather, a grander, more ceremonial function. The fact that small structures resembling homes are found there does not necessarily mean that Lepenski Vir was a village, for such structures appear in various parts of the world in the form of cemeteries where rituals are periodically held — e.g., Maya sites in Mexico, Vanuatu in New Hebrides, and modern Vietnamese lineage houses (Hayden, 2003: 205).

          Most convincing for Hayden’s argument is the fact that the Mesolithic site on the Danube resembles cemeteries on the Northwest Coast of North America, still used by Native Americans as feasting locations where the descendants of the dead honor them from time to time but do not reside. Another trait the Pacific sites share with those of the European Mesolithic, despite their being separated by nearly nine millennia, is the large number of individuals who died a violent death, which “likely indicates high levels of competition over resources and wealth” (Hayden, 2003: 162). Steven Mithen may disagree about the function of Lepenski Vir, but he agrees, in general, that there were such ceremonial burial sites during the Mesolithic, and that they were used as places of ritual to maintain societies, exchange gossip, tools, furs and luxury items (Mithen, 2003: 168f).

The end of the Mesolithic. Mithen, however, has a different explanation for the violent deaths, which increased notably in Northern Europe after about 7500, b.p. Certainly the cause was competition, but in Mithen’s view it was not the intra-societal pressures of families fighting one another for local supremacy so much as it was a struggle over diminishing resources due to the arrival of the first waves of Neolithic farmers. By 8,000, b.p., Mesolithic hunter-gatherers living in the general vicinity of the Danube were hearing rumors of a new people who lived in great wooden houses and controlled the game. Soon they found their neighbors using polished stone axes, firing clay vessels, and herding cattle (Ibid., 178). Evidence from mitochondrial DNA (“mt-DNA,” the genetic material found not in the nucleus of a cell but in tiny structures called mitochondria that produce a cell’s energy) shows that the Mesolithic people were not slaughtered by the farmers or driven away. Their mt-DNA survives in the Europeans of today, proving that they had to have intermarried with the newcomers and become Neolithic people themselves.

          Thus, the distinctive remains left by Mesolithic hunter-gatherers — deer and wild boar bones together with tiny split-stone blades (“microliths”) used for weapon-points and scrapers — gave way to the Neolithic package of timber-framed houses, pottery, polished stone axes, and domesticated crops and cattle. The Mesolithic people gradually became farmers. First by trading fur, game, and women for prestige items, and then by selectively adopting a few Neolithic practices. Eventually, there was no longer room for semi-nomadic hunters in a land occupied by farms, and Mesolithic culture collapsed completely (Ibid., 189).

THE NEOLITHIC

          In order to come to grips with what human consciousness was doing in the Neolithic Age, we will first need to describe what archaeology has uncovered. To this end, we will discuss a few sites from the beginning of the Neolithic in the Near East, and then a few more from the end of the Neolithic in the British Isles. These two regions, far apart in both space and time, are yet deeply similar. After establishing these facts on the ground, we will be able to consider what was occurring in human consciousness by looking at the process of domestication, the arrangement of funeral rites, and the tensions that arose between hierarchical political organization and shamanism.

The Neolithic in the Near East

          A shift in diet away from seafood is one of the characteristics of the Neolithic Revolution, but reverence for the past retained fish as an offering to be buried with the dead — as though to nourish the soul of the departed in the afterlife, but perhaps as a guide to show the dead the way to the sea. For, “The Neolithic dead were frequently placed in rivers that, of course, eventually find their way to the sea. The sea seems to have become part of the underworld in a way that earlier Mesolithic people did not accept” (Lewis-Williams & Pearce, 2005: 284). Such facts strongly imply that the agricultural revolution that swept up across Europe from the Near East was — in the first instance — not so much a rational response to changes in climate and population as it was a change in consciousness. It certainly involved new ways of living, new sources of livelihood, and new techniques of cultivation, but the impetus for changes in lifestyle seems to have been led by changes of a mythic nature. In their book, Inside the Neolithic Mind, David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce argue that the Neolithic was a “symbolic revolution” in which “changes in thought (superstructure) preceded changes in subsistence (infrastructure)” (Ibid., 23).

          The “domestication revolution,” that is the turn to agriculture using domesticated plants and animals, began around 11,000, b.p., in the Near East and traveled north and west into Europe by two routes. One followed the Danube, building farms along its banks, and the other followed the seacoast along the Mediterranean and up the Atlantic coast. By 5500, b.p., when it had finally reached the British Isles, the Neolithic Age ended; for by this time bronze tools had begun to replace stone. The first wave of the new way of living, called “Pre-Pottery Neolithic-A,” brought the first substantial cemeteries — neatly laid out, in contrast to the random arrangement of Mesolithic graves — and secondary burials.

          We have already seen one form of secondary burial in connection with the Mesolithic Natufians who had to leave ‘Ain Mallaha on account of the drying of the climate, but who periodically returned baskets full of their ancestors’ bones to the village of their mythic/historical origins for reburial. In the Mesolithic, a secondary burial may have been as much practical as it was mythic. But the practice seems to have taken on a new and rather uncanny meaning for the earliest Neolithic people. In the second wave of cultural change (“Pre-Pottery Neolithic-B”) skull and ancestor cults had become a key feature of the symbolic revolution along with bull imagery (Hayden, 2003: 169-201). Much of the imagery from this period is rather disturbing.

Nea Nikomedeia. One of the first farming villages in Europe was Nea Nikomedeia in Greece (9500, b.p.). Remains of the village reveal that it was comprised of separate, self-sufficient households, all arranged around common outdoor fireplaces. Having devoted themselves entirely to farming, to the family “ownership” of the land they cultivated, the tendency to distinguish themselves as families grew stronger in the Neolithic than it had been among their hunter-gatherers ancestors. The village lasted about 2500 years, and was finally abandoned apparently because the soil had been exhausted (Mithen, 2003: 167).

          Village residences were built of reed bundles, plastered with clay and fastened to a framework of oak saplings. One larger building, about thirty feet square, apparently served a ceremonial function. “Clay figurines sit upon wooden tables. Most are of women — moulded to have thin cylindrical heads, pointed noses and slit eyes. Arms are folded, with each hand grasping a breast made from a tiny knob of clay. Their diminutive size is compensated for by enormous, near-spherical thighs” (Ibid., 164). Plastered reed figurines are common in the first Neolithic villages. Precisely what they mean may be hard to specify, but they are uniformly associated with the earliest agriculture in the Eastern Mediterranean area and surely point to a new symbolic/mythic understanding, a new stage in the history of consciousness.

The eyes of ‘Ain Ghazal. Two or three hundred years after the founding of Nea Nikomedeia, the largest of the Neolithic towns, ‘Ain Ghazal, was established at the outskirts of what is now Amman, Jordan (Ibid., 83). The structures were a good deal more substantial, having rectangular stone walls and lime-plastered floors. Evidently people no longer knew one another’s business, as they had in hunter-gatherer settlements, for here much took place behind thick walls (Ibid., 76). Again, clay statues constructed on reed armatures were found, but this time they have “eerily large eyes outlined by black, oval ridges,” and they are not arranged on tables but buried under the floors of long abandoned houses. Mithen believes that before burial the statues were carried in procession, arranged in a meaningful group upon a platform. He notes that one figure depicts a woman thrusting her breasts forward with her hands — therefore reminiscent of the knobby breasts at Nea Nikomedeia and of wall decorations to be mentioned below, found at Çatalhöyük (Ibid., 84f).

          A minority of the dead were also buried beneath the floors — undoubtedly the bodies of the powerful, while average citizens were buried elsewhere. Being buried under the floors of residences, they had to have been “serial burials.” A first burial, or some other treatment, had to remove the soft tissues from the skeletons (Ibid., 101). This is again reminiscent of secondary burials at ‘Ain Mallaha in the Mesolithic Age, but with entirely new significance. Furthermore, the parallel practice of burying the big-eyed statues and the bones of powerful ancestors under the floors suggests that those statues have something to do with how the dead were regarded. “Their ability to ‘see’ was beyond anything that ordinary human beings could experience. They were frighteningly omnipercipient” (Lewis-Williams & Pearce, 2005: 75).

          We have to think that the souls of the dead must have had such powers, a quality enjoyed by the most powerful of shamans who could travel through the invisible planes of the cosmos. Lewis-Williams and Pearce quote Waldemar Bogoras, the great pioneer in collecting anthropological evidence of shamanism in Siberia a century ago. He found that the eyes of a Chuckchee shaman were universally said to be so striking that one destined to become a shaman could reliably be recognized by his gaze,

. . . [which] is not turned to the listener, but is fixed on something beyond him. In connection with this, they say that the eyes of a shaman have a look different from that of other people, and they explain it by the assertion that the eyes of the shaman are very bright, which, by the way, gives him the ability to see “spirits” even in the dark (Ibid., 70).

The authors have assembled three pages of such texts from ethnographic accounts collected from all parts of the world attesting to the power and significance of the shaman’s eyes (Ibid., 69-72).

          The eyes of the living were also important to the citizens of ‘Ain Ghazal, for the shrines all had a focal point. The earliest ones had an apse and a screen-wall to direct the gaze of participants in ritual. Later, when the shrines were built as round buildings, orthostats (“standing stones [to] emphasize the vertical dimension of the three-tiered cosmos”) were used to focus attention. The theme of shamanic transformation appears as well. For there is evidence of human and animal sacrifice; and under the floor human skulls, their flesh replaced by carefully molded plaster to make them resemble living people, are buried with the bones of gazelles, a juxtaposition that suggests both translation between cosmic planes and the transmutation of entranced human souls into animals (Ibid., 100).

          ‘Ain Ghazal lasted about a millennium and ended in ecological disaster around 8300, b.p. The soil had been exhausted through over use, and lost through erosion; fuel had become scarce; the river had become polluted with human waste; and infant mortality had reached catastrophic proportions. The same fate befell all of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic-B towns of the Jordan Valley. Surviving citizens were required to return to nomadic pastoralism (Mithen, 2003: 87). It appears that the Neolithic farmers quickly lost the trust in the natural world that had served their hunter-gatherer ancestors so well only a few generations earlier. Neolithic efforts to control nature seem to have ended in the people coming “to fear and despise the wild” (Ibid., 96).

The model cosmos of Çatalhöyük. Contemporary with ‘Ain Ghazal and Nea Nikomedeia is the most famous and spectacular of all the early Near East Neolithic towns, Çatalhöyük, in south-central Turkey (9,0008,000, b.p.). It was a wealthy and elaborately built town surrounded by fertile land and abundant game, and engaged in a lucrative trade in high-quality obsidian acquired from the nearby Taurus Mountains. Again there were burials under the floors (Hayden, 2003: 188). A layout of the town shows forty or fifty more-or-less rectangular rooms and four or five courtyards, all built as a single structure, without hallways or windows, and accessible only by ladders leading down from openings in the roof (Lewis-Williams & Pearce, 2005: 103, fig. 22).

          In the view of Lewis-Williams and Pearce, the town of Çatalhöyük represented a deliberate recreation of the three-tiered cosmos that the inhabitants’ ancestors had discovered in the Ice Age caves with the help of their human nervous system. The roof represented a “new land surface,” the middle plane of the cosmos under the sun and the rain, where the crops grew and the animals roamed, the sphere of empirical consciousness. But to enter the roof openings and climb down the ladders was to enter a “built underworld,” a maze of structures in which homes were not distinct from shrines, and traveling through them was equivalent to moving through the chambers of limestone caves. Indeed, there were limestone caves nearby in the Taurus mountains, and the people had brought home stalactites from the natural underworld of the caves to place in the artificial underworld they had created (Ibid., 102-12). Also reminiscent of the caves are small unpainted chambers behind the walls of richly decorated rooms, as though for the isolation of vision questers. The authors believe it likely that as people moved through and between the rooms of the town, they “made statements about their social statuses, in the same way that a Christian priest makes a statement about his status when he moves into the sanctuary of a cathedral” (Ibid., 112). [2] Furthermore, the walls of those rooms bear some of the characteristic decorations of the Paleolithic caves, especially geometrical (“entoptic”) imagery and hand prints — both “positive,” that is made by pressing a paint-covered hand against the wall, and “negative,” caused by blowing paint over an unpainted hand held against the wall (Ibid., 119-22).

          Jutting out from the walls disturbingly are large plastered heads of rams and bulls and the breasts of human women — some with their nipples split open and the skulls of vultures, foxes and weasels looking out. One thinks again of the native art of the Northwest coast of North America (Kwakiutl, Haida, etc.) , with its fierce, teeth-bared, nostrils-flaring, eyes-wide-open depictions of animals and humans inside one another. Through anthropological study with living practitioners, we know that the Pacific coast Indians meant their art to portray a cosmic process of hunting, devouring and renewal in which humans cooperated with the sacred cycles of Nature by eating animals appropriate to the season and recycling their remains so as to maintain the world order (Lévi-Strauss, 1982). In contrast, the art of Çatalhöyük remains enigmatic and mute.

          Çatalhöyük wall paintings, which were periodically plastered over and renewed, depict a mélange of dancing and hunting, with human figures in leopard skins or naked or headless. A repeating theme of vultures — some with human legs — appears to refer to the town’s practice of excarnation, that is, of exposing corpses to have their flesh devoured by vultures before their bones were buried under the floors of the houses (Ibid., 110-19; Mithen, 2003: 92-6). The practice of excarnation — which may be seen as a form of “serial interment,” a repeating theme throughout the Neolithic — has occurred here and there throughout the world, most famously by the Parsees in ancient Persia (now in India); and it is usually believed to free the soul, which may fly like a bird, from the flesh that has held it earth-bound in life. Çatalhöyük is the earliest clearly documented site where excarnation was practiced. Later it became central to the megalithic tombs of the Neolithic Age in Western Europe (Hayden, 2003: 191). In addition, it may also be associated with the death/trance analogy that occurs widely in shamanism (Lewis-Williams & Pearce, 2005: 119).

The Neolithic in Western Europe

          The argument for a history of consciousness that shows distinct “ages” through which our ancestors progressed is powerfully supported by the fact that we can see great similarities from one Neolithic society to another — even when they are separated by thousands of miles and several millennia. By the time the Western Europeans had undergone the domestication revolution and begun building their mounds, megalithic tombs, passage graves, and henges, Çatalhöyük and ‘Ain Ghazal had been abandoned and buried under the sand for perhaps 3,000 years. No one from Western Europe had visited those places or been taught their rituals and mythic narratives. The monuments they left behind were quite different, yet there is deep similarity. Again there is a fundamental tension between economic and political forces on the one hand and a neurologically based shamanism on the other; again their enduring structures are where the powerful elite are buried; and again each monument is a model cosmos, a sort of artificial underworld that repeats many of the themes already encountered in the Ice Age caves.

Bryn Celli Ddu. The oldest of the Western European megaliths date from about 6800, b.p. There is a progression of architectural styles of monument construction that generally holds true. The West European Neolithic began with huge burial mounds that covered a stone chamber at the center containing the bones of the ancestors. Later such mounds were built as “passage graves” so they could be entered for seasonal rituals. In a final stage, the monuments were built as henges, arrangements of huge standing stones. One of the most interesting examples, however, the one we have chosen to illustrate many of the themes involved in megalith constructions, Bryn Celli Ddu, on the Welsh island of Anglesey, was built first as a henge which was later buried and incorporated into a passage grave. It dates from perhaps 5000, b.p.

          The name Bryn Celli Ddu means “The Mound in the Dark Grove” in Welsh, and although it is now a famous megalithic monument, it passed unnoticed for millennia. As is true of nearly all the monuments of the European Neolithic, it is surrounded by a ditch and earthen bank. In this case the ditch is sixty-nine feet in diameter, six feet deep, and seventeen feet across. The bank was built up inside the ditch, which is opposite to what would be expected of a defensive earthen work. Inside the ditch and bank fourteen huge standing stones were erected in a circle, without any identifiable celestial alignment. There is also evidence of holes for wooden posts on the line of the circle. At the base of some of the stones are deposits of burnt human bones and shattered quartz crystals. One contains the nearly compete cremation of a fifteen-year-old girl. At the center of the henge was a ritual pit.

          These details suggest that from the beginning the henge was conceived as sacred ground, set apart for ritual purposes. Cremation, possibly sacrifice, and quartz crystals all belong to the shamanic death/trance complex for acquiring extraordinary powers through altered states of consciousness. Anthropologists believe that the henge served social functions of a wide variety, including trade and the cementing of alliances. “As in the Near East, economic and religious activities were probably not clearly differentiated. Religion was an integral component of daily life, not a gloss on it. Neolithic people could not imagine life without religion” (Lewis-Williams & Pearce, 2005: 175).

          Before the henge was buried in the soil that makes it a mound, an inner chamber was first created directly to the east of the ritual pit, employing broad standing stones placed side-by-side to form walls, and roofed by similar stones resting on their tops. A passageway some twenty-five feet long was formed with similar, somewhat smaller stones functioning as walls and ceiling, and running out to the bank and ditch on the eastern side of the henge. Once a mound of earth was heaped up to nearly twice the height of the standing stones, it was ringed about with curbstones whose arc bends inward at the eastern side to emphasize the entrance to the passage. Outside the ditch, directly across from the entrance, most passage graves have been sanctified by the burial of a cremated human being and an animal. At Bryn Celli Ddu, an ox is buried there. All of these details suggest that the passage grave is a transition zone, a place where ritual is performed, where the dead are transmuted by fire, where the dead and those in trance make the transit between cosmic planes.

          Additional characteristic details inside the monument include the fact that the passageway from the outer world to the inner chamber is divided into two portions by standing stones that do not reach to the ceiling. Their function was evidently to mark off the passage and to focus the attention of the ritual participants. A single standing stone marks the northern wall of the inner chamber, reminiscent of the orthostats at ‘Ain Ghazal. There is a low shelf or bench along the northern side of the passageway which resembles similar benches in the rooms of Çatalhöyük, where human bones were interred (Ibid., 181-5).

The role and function of megalithic monuments. Brian Hayden states what may seem to be obvious when he says that the megaliths “were megalomanic monuments to the dead” (Hayden, 2003: 230). They surely had to do with the honoring of ancestors, but only the founders and guiding lights of wealthy and powerful families, that is, the only ones who could afford to pay for the immense planning and labor that was required. In the British Isles, that wealth came primarily from owning cattle; and herding cattle from one grazing ground to another kept those who worked directly with the animals on the move and may be the reason there are so few Neolithic houses near the megaliths. Furthermore, “societies that depend on herding tend to have hierarchical political organizations” (Ibid., 237).

          Hayden’s attention to political and economic realities, however, does not prevent his recognizing the religious role the megaliths filled. He notes there is plenty of evidence that the tombs — especially if they were passage graves — were “constructed to induce or enhance altered states of consciousness.” There are entoptic forms inside and at the entrances of the passageways, and evidence for the use of psychotropic substances such as Amanita mushrooms and opium has been found (Ibid., 235). Hayden backs up his interpretation by describing an amazingly similar treatment of the death of the elite, including the erection of megaliths and extensive feasting that he observed as an anthropologist doing field work in the Torajan highlands of Sulawesi, Indonesia (Ibid., 238-45).

          Acoustic tests done inside the passage graves have found a resonance capacity somewhat like that of the painted galleries of the Paleolithic caves. The mounds were therefore ideally constructed for conducting rituals designed to alter consciousness. The passage graves were “far more than symbolic or metaphysical gateways to other dimensions. Rather, their structures permitted the creation of extraordinary experiences that could have been understood as the physical manifestation of those powers — venues where other worlds were actually brought into being” (Watson, 2001: 189).

          Although no celestial orientation has been discovered for Bryn Celli Ddu, most of the passage graves and henges do have such a connection, which makes it appear that they were deliberately built to send the souls of the elite ancestors on their journey toward the sun (as Hayden found among the Indonesians). It has recently been discovered, for example, in the passage grave at Newgrange in Ireland, that a “fake lintel” was constructed over the entrance. A lintel is the horizontal crosspiece that forms the top of a doorway. In the case of Newgrange, quartz blocks were made to be removed from the lintel, and scratch marks indicate that they had been. At sunrise on the shortest day of the year, direct sunlight enters Newgrange through the slit that is opened by removing the blocks; and for seventeen minutes a shaft of light illuminates carved triple spirals in the cruciform chamber at the end of the passage (Lewis-Williams & Pearce, 2005: 229-31). Thus, spirals and ancestors were conceptually connected with the cycles of the sun (Hayden, 2003: 245).

          Hayden points out that the same spiral design is carved into Indonesian monoliths. The design was usually carved as a single line, and if you follow it from the center of one whorl, it turns counter-clockwise all the way out to the outermost ring and then bends the other way as it spirals clockwise in toward the center of the next whorl. The design was not only a common feature of the megalithic tombs but has also been found decorating a mace head uncovered in the grave at Knowth. In all probability it was a ceremonial mace, not a tool but a symbol of its owner’s power. “The owner . . . exercised political power over other people, and that power was posited in a particular cosmology and the continuing influence of the dead. There was, the Neolithic maces tell us, a close relationship between access to spiritual realms and control of people. Politics and religion went hand in hand” (Lewis-Williams & Pearce, 2005: 221).

          The agreement between Hayden, Lewis-Williams and Pearce over the importance of the spiral motif suggests another feature of passage graves — that they were designed to “send off” the souls of the departed. The ritual route followed by the body of the deceased as it is carried in for its final disposition goes first one way and then the other — just like the spirals drawn with a single line. One passage grave where this route is most evident is found at Knowth, also in Ireland, where the central chamber has been built as a large dome, suggesting that “after the ‘descent’ into a ‘cave’ there is a view upwards to a realm above.” Lewis-Williams and Pearce find this to be an architectural replica of “the mental vortex that leads from the second stage of our neuropsychological model into the third stage of hallucinations as another existential realm . . . The ‘cave’ in the tomb replicated the cave in the mind” (Ibid., 218). The authors believe that the passage taken by the deceased, first underground and then up through the corbelled cone of the central chamber imitates the sun’s nightly journey through the dark underworld before it rises again in the East at dawn (Ibid., 243f). If so, they have discovered the myth of the soul which Jung has identified as the foundation for individuation, what he calls the sun’s night-sea-journey. It stands as the primary interpretive model in Symbols of Transformation (CW5), Psychology and Alchemy (CW12) and his seminar on Kundalini (Sem32).

Consciousness and Altered States in the Neolithic

          Whether we talk about the residences and shrines of the earliest agricultural villages in the Near East, or the mounds and henges that were built when the same revolution reached the British Isles, the central characteristic of Neolithic consciousness appears to be the active involvement and creative control they exercised over the relationship between the empirical world of survival and the greater three-tiered cosmos they visited in their altered states. In the Old Stone Age, people followed nature’s layout of the chambers and passageways of the caves. Imagination was guided by Nature. By contrast in the Neolithic Age, consciousness shaped elements in the empirical world to bring them into line with the visionary world. Nature was shaped by imagination. “Neolithic people eliminated the variable labyrinth [of the caves] and replaced it with more predictable and simpler structures of their own design. In doing so they gained greater control over the cosmos and were able to ‘adjust’ beliefs about it to suit social and personal needs” (Lewis-Williams & Pearce, 2005: 85).

          The transcendent ideas that Neolithic people mapped onto the landscape were cultural adaptations of the neurologically generated three-tiered cosmos we have inherited with our brain structure. From the beginning to the end of the age of domestication, they found symbols to unite the two realms that appear to us today to be quite contradictory: the inner, imaginal realm which gives humans the ability to fly to invisible planes of the greater cosmos; and the outer, empirical realm where economic and political realities hold sway.

The intangible relationship [Neolithic people had] to the natural environment and the spiritual world can be felt in seeing burial mounds for the first time. As I climbed the path to the ridge, the [West Kennet] tomb suddenly rose before me, as if ascending from the underworld. More than 5,000 years later, West Kennet still has an effect on the imagination (Fagan, 1998: 124).

Lewis-Williams and Pearce agree. They walked along the avenue of standing stones that forms a processional entrance to the henge at Avebury and found that they could “appreciate, though perhaps not understand, the vastness and subtlety, ingenuity and technical brilliance, socio-political labyrinth and conceptual intricacy of the Neolithic world” (Lewis-Williams & Pearce, 2005: 202).

Shamanism and domestication. In discussing the developments of the Mesolithic Age, we noted that the people of Abu Hureya on the upper Euphrates struggled with climate change for a full millennium while keeping gardens of wild grasses that they never learned to domesticate. At the end of that time, persistent drought forced them to abandon the site, which remained uninhabited for three centuries. When the people returned, they brought with them domesticated wheat, rye and barley. For 1,000 years they had learned nothing of real agriculture. Then they disappeared for a mere 300 years and returned as farmers. We wondered what had happened to change their conscious behavior from (a) frustrating the domestication process by harvesting their grain before it became ripe and brittle to (b) domesticating the grain by manipulating the natural evolutionary process of selection.

          David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce believe they have an answer to this question. The practice of shamanism and the cultivation of altered states of consciousness served as the source of inspiration for the first domesticators. Just as the buildings at Çatalhöyük and the passage graves in the British Isles were attempts to build a model cosmos whose landscape was first visited in visions, so also those big-eyed statues buried beneath the floors or displayed in shrines in Neolithic towns of the Near East. They represent one of the first uses of molded, hardened clay, and belong to the period known as the Pre-Pottery Neolithic. Only later did it dawn on people that they could use clay to make pottery vessels, useful items for everyday chores. Clearly, therefore, it was spiritual inspiration that came first, ideas and images gathered in altered states of consciousness and woven into new mythic narratives. Practical applications followed (Lewis-Williams & Pearce, 2005: 77).

          Mithen found another instance of religion coming first and practical invention following. At Göbekli Tepe in southeast Turkey seven-ton limestone pillars with “shoulders” were erected on a hill around 11,500, b.p. — all carved with male animals plus one human figure with an erect penis — the sort of imagery associated with hunter-gatherers. 11,500 was the turning point between the Mesolithic and the Neolithic in the Near East. As Mithen stood there on that hilltop, knowing that genetic analysis has shown the earliest strain of domesticated wheat came from the very region that had produced the carved pillars, he realized that gathering the vast amounts of wild grain that would have been required to feed the workers had to have taught the people the principle of domestication.

Knowing the heavy yields that the Göbekli Tepe wheat provides, some may have carried bags of grain to sow in their own wild gardens. As they did so, they were spreading not just the new seed but also a new way of life to the hunter-gatherer-cultivator villages of Jerf el Ahmar, Mureybet and perhaps even to Jericho itself (Mithen, 2003: 67).

In the next chapter, we will see that contemporary shamans claim to have learned the nature and uses of specific plants through what they have been taught in their altered states. They have returned to ordinary consciousness and put the information to work in the real world to heal their patients.

          Lewis-Williams and Pearce pursue this idea into the question of how animals became domesticated and find the secret to lie in the “shifting relationships between spirit-animals and real animals, an important part of the way in which shamans build up their status” (2005: 144). The authors mean that the principle behind the domestication of animals “was already conceptually embedded in the worldview and socio-ritual complex” of a shamanistic society (Ibid., 141). Shamans the world over have spirit familiars who teach them, aid them in their work, and carry out their wishes. Shamans become familiar with spirit-animals, transform themselves into spirit-animals, and learn to control spirit-animals in their altered states of consciousness. In the Neolithic, therefore, it seems they started out by domesticating spirit-animals, later on found spirit-aurochs were indistinguishable from fleshly aurochs, and finally learned that real aurochs could be controlled like their spirit doubles.

          There is no literature from the Neolithic to prove these hypotheses, so Lewis-Williams and Pearce rely on the same two pillars of inference that Jean Clottes and others have used in making sense of cave art: (a) the fact that the human neuro-psychological apparatus is everywhere the same and (b) the testimony of contemporary shamans in traditional societies who are engaged in related activities. Thus, the Barsana Indians of the Vaupés region of Colombia are a shamanic society that models its malocas, or longhouses, after the structure of the greater cosmos, thereby uniting religion, social structure, and cosmology, much as the Neolithic people did. Barsana shamans are said to “become” jaguars, eagles and anacondas. Each of these animals is the primary predator of one of the three tiers of the cosmos (land, sky, and water/underworld). By transforming into one after the other of these predators, a shaman can move between the cosmic planes (Ibid., 88-94). Other anthropologists (e.g., Reichel-Dolmatoff, 1971; 1975) have found that many native South American shamans have a special relationship with jaguars and eagles and are particularly feared for their ability to become jaguars. Lévi-Strauss has shown that it is a universal characteristic of South American mythology that jaguars are wild people and people domesticated jaguars (Lévi-Strauss, 1969). Therefore, “As Barsana shamans are jaguars, Çatalhöyük shamans may have been bulls” (Lewis-Williams & Pearce, 2005: 137).

          The Barsana even “say their shamans . . . ‘domesticate’ spiritual jaguars” (Ibid., 139). Although the Barsana do not have corrals full of jaguars, it is certainly plausible that the shamans of Çatalhöyük were responsible for corralling the aurochs. For a suggestive example to support this hypothesis, Lewis-Williams falls back on his lifetime of work on the rock art of the San (“Bushmen”) of southern Africa. These are the hunter-gatherers who confirmed suspicions that there is a symbolic equivalence between death, trance and enhanced sight, and emboldened our authors to say about the Neolithic that, “People might have ‘died’ when they entered ‘deep’ and highly decorated rooms at Çatalhöyük” (Ibid., 124-6). The /Xam San [3] use a single word, /ki, “to mean both supernatural possession of a spirit animal and ownership of real flocks and herds.” “Wild animals became akin to domesticated animals through the notion of shamanic /ki in a way comparable to that in which South American Desana shamans kept spiritual jaguars” (Ibid., 143).

          The /Xam San had several overlapping categories of shaman, one of which was “the shaman of the game.” The most important game animals for them were springbucks, much as the most important game for Çatalhöyük were aurochs and for ‘Ain Ghazal were gazelles. The shamans of the game wore caps made from the scalps of springbucks; and it was believed that real springbucks would follow anyone who wore such a cap. One such shaman, a woman named Tãnõ-!Khauken, said that, “She kept a castrated springbuck ‘tied up’ . . . so that it did not wander about. She said she could untie the springbuck and send it among wild springbucks so that it would lead the herd to the place where her people were camped.” She called it her “heart’s springbuck,” which the authors interpret to mean that it was her animal helper, her spirit familiar (Ibid., 142).

          The whole shamanism/domestication complex is contained in the shaman’s story: shamans get their power, in part, from spirit-animals; spirit-animals give the shaman some control over game animals; spirit-animals sometimes mingle with and are indistinguishable from real animals; and the appearance of incarnated spirit-animals seemed to prove the shaman’s power (Ibid., 144). It is a very plausible theory and suggests something significant about the history of consciousness. The Paleolithic seems to have employed shamanism, in part, as a way to find the animals and induce them to come closer to the hunters, perhaps to offer themselves for a death that was also a trance, a welcome experience that would introduce the game animals to the spirit world. But something new had occurred to human consciousness by the Neolithic. People were learning to apply this non-ordinary experience to everyday life. If spirit-animals could be domesticated, then perhaps game animals could, as well. The imaginal world of altered states of consciousness was becoming more useful and employable, and the experts in this department, the shamans, were showing the way.

Dangerous Souls and Neolithic Funeral Rites

          Over at least seven millennia, from the Mesolithic inhabitants of ‘Ain Mallaha to the passage graves of the British Isles — and even much further into more recent times that our survey has not yet reached — we find a variety of funeral practices, all of which involve at least two ceremonies for the disposal of the deceased’s remains. In the late stage of ‘Ain Mallaha, dual interment seemed to make both practical and mythic good sense. Having been driven some 700 miles north of their original home by the severe drought of the Younger Dryas, the Natufian people remembered the site of their glorious beginnings with special reverence, and wanted the bones of their relatives to reside there permanently. Consequently, they buried their bodies temporarily near their new home but made periodic pilgrimages to ‘Ain Mallaha to place the bones where they rightly belonged. Since they had little sense of individuality, they made no attempt to keep the skeletons separate but jumbled them all together in baskets.

          By the time of Çatalhöyük, serial funerals had become a necessity for a different reason. Bones were buried beneath the floors of their homes, and this required that the soft tissues first be removed by a prior burial or exposure to allow vultures and other animals to first clean the bones — and perhaps (as among the Parsees of much later times) to free the soul from its fleshly prison.

Progress of the deceased’s soul. It seems clear today that throughout the Neolithic Age and well beyond, over a period of ten or eleven millennia, our ancestors found it necessary to practice dual funerals, usually with a year or more between them to allow time for the corpse to completely decompose. But not all the dead were so treated. Evidence shows that certain powerful people, the wealthy and influential, decided which corpses should be selected to be honored by ceremonies that articulated the mythic foundations and cosmology of their societies. Shrines like the elaborately decorated rooms of Çatalhöyük and the passage graves of the British Isles were built at great effort and expense to make such rites possible. Clearly, there were several stages of post-mortem existence, and the rites were designed for the living to help the dead get safely through them (Lewis-Williams & Pearce, 2005: 79).

          The biogenetic structuralists articulate a three-stage process that evidently lies behind all of these multiple funeral ceremonies, a point of view that is widely accepted. In stage one, the deceased is separated from the living and all normal interactions with members of the community. This would correspond to a first funeral, when the body is prepared and removed from the village to a place of burial or an excarnation platform. In stage two, the living members of the community (and in his isolation, the deceased, as well) go through a transition period, where they learn to carry on in the new circumstances brought on by the death. The behaviors and cognitions of both the living and the dead are altered to accept the new reality. Then, in a third stage — when the bones are buried under the floor, the skull plastered with artificial flesh, or the passage grave entered for the final rites — the dead are reintegrated into the life of the community with new identities and new roles as ancestors, and the living adopt a new reverence for them (McManus, 1979a: 195).

          Pascal Boyer finds this same structure manifested in two examples of double funerals he observed in the Philippines. Such dual funerals have essentially the same structure as any rite of passage. Like puberty rituals, they involve removal from the community, seclusion for a time, and reentry into the community with a new status. Therefore, at the time of the first disposal, the dead body is dangerous and must be removed. After a period of seclusion, a second disposal deals with the skeleton or skull, which is a more proper, stable, and less dangerous entity (Boyer, 2001: 208f).

          Religion is always centrally concerned with death; for death, the ultimate limit situation, presents us with the inevitable absurdity of being alive and opens up the most uncanny zone of uncertainty. Thus the central image in Christianity is the dead Jesus hanging on the cross; the holiest day in the Jewish calendar is the Day of Atonement, when the gates of heaven are closed and every Jew’s fate is sealed; and the shock that spurred the Buddha to seek Nirvana was the triple reality of sickness, old age, and death.

          Corpses, Boyer reminds us, induce dissociation! They present all of our inference systems with contradictions they cannot handle. We cannot get used to the fact that everything we know about this person has ceased, all our familiar expectations frustrated. The body looks recognizably the same, but everything has changed. We wonder “How she would have wanted” things to be taken care of. Does she still “want” in her new condition of being; does she listen in on our conversations; is she jealous of our vitality; does she bear resentments over the slights she bore while she was alive due to our actions? The time between the funeral of separation and the funeral of incorporation allows our anxiety and dissociation to subside (Ibid., 224).

Dangers of the disembodied soul. Archaeologist Timothy Taylor — whose youthful cutting ritual (described above in Chapter 8) brought him face-to-face with his own death, induced a transformative altered state of consciousness, and gave him a sense of professional purpose — wants us to stop romanticizing the past and our ancestors. Altered states may surely be transformative and potentially wonderful, but they also shake us to our foundations, expose us to existential dread, and can be abused for selfish and destructive purposes. The uncanny shock of a relative’s death — when we are not sheltered from its naked reality by the impersonal structure of hospitals and their sterilized machinery — has been universally disruptive to our personal and social stability. It gives rise to the idea that the deceased are still with us in the form of a soul that moves about invisibly, has preternatural capabilities, is “omnipercipient” like the reed-and-plaster statues of ‘Ain Ghazal, and must be defended against with rituals powerful enough to reorient the thinking of both the living and the dead.

          Taylor believes that as the Ice Age ended the idea became common that people buried at the back of caves “were still somehow there” in the form of souls, permanent haunting beings. “It became important that this disembodied soul should find a place to live, and the idea of this place being a new body, magically constituted on some other plane of existence, took shape.” In Europe, around 15,000, b.p., fetal burials began, suggesting the idea of the earth as a great womb for some sort of resurrection (Taylor, 2002: 225).

          Jung encountered the idea of the souls of the departed as dangerous entities during his trip to Africa. He tells fragments of the story in several different places. Putting some of the details together, it seems that one of his safari bearers was a pregnant woman who one morning had a miscarriage that led to a severe infection that threatened her life. A shaman was called for, and he determined that the cause of her illness lay with the souls of the woman’s parents, who had died young and wanted to draw the soul of their daughter into the other world to be with them. The shaman then built a tiny hut of stones, complete with a bed and other amenities to give the souls of the parents a comfortable place to stay so that they would leave their daughter alone. Jung says that “to everyone’s surprise,” the young woman recovered in two or three days (CW8: ¶575n; Sem28: 320f).

          Jung described the little hut as a “ghost trap”: “Occasionally the souls of the natives wander off and the medicine man catches them in cages as if they were birds” (CW10: 128). Clearly the great danger is that the souls of the dead can snare those of the living and draw them, too, into the other world. Jung apprehended the sinister power exerted by the souls of the dead, as understood by the natives. The biographer of his Africa journey seems to miss the point, however; for he takes Jung to task for speaking of a “ghost trap,” when a more accurate translation of the native expression would be “ancestral shrine” (Burleson, 2005: 157). Perhaps so, but it is a well known phenomenon that the most dangerous realities are typically given euphemistic names.

          Lévy-Bruhl tells several such stories, most interestingly perhaps, an account from the same Mr. W. B. Grubb who was once accused of stealing a Native American’s pumpkins on the strength of someone’s dream. Grubb’s “ghost trap” story recounts an incident from Chaco Canyon in which “witch doctors” were planning to kill him, but first took the precaution of setting up little huts at suitable distances along the route he was used to traveling, so that his soul would be attracted by them after his death and his killers would be safe from his restless, vengeful ghost (Lévy-Bruhl, 1927: 262f).

          “The desire of the disembodied soul [to repossess its property including its spouse] is viewed as dangerous by the living, who had by all means to enchant, cajole, fight off, sedate, or otherwise distract and disable it, . . . only as long as the flesh lay on the bones” (Taylor, 2002: 27). Funeral rites during the Neolithic, therefore, had a double purpose: (a) “to keep the unquiet soul zoned off” from the living, which was generally the goal of the first stage of a double funeral, and (b) “firmly and finally to incorporate the deceased into the realm of the ancestors” (Ibid., 27).

Efforts to manage the dangerous soul. Taylor advances four analogies to back up his interpretation of the souls of the dead as dangerous agents. The earliest of these comes from the Greek historian Herodotus (ca. 2484-2425, b.p.), [4] reporting on events in Iron Age Scythia, on a tributary of the Dniepr River, east of Kiev, around 2600, b.p. At a first burial, the Scythian king was interred with servants, food and horses. All the bodies, including those of the horses were given a temporary embalming, their bodies cleaned out and filled with herbs. The purpose of this action was to preserve the body in a form that would be attractive to the soul, “encouraging it to remain close to its own corpse” (Ibid., 126). Doubts about the historical accuracy of Herodotus’ account were put to rest in the 1950’s when a Siberian burial was discovered. Grave robbers had allowed freeze-drying Arctic air into the grave preserving everything in perfect parallel to what Herodotus had described.

          After the first burial, a dangerous transition period began, when normal rules were suspended and the king’s closest servants could be strangled in preparation for the final burial, the rite of incorporation of the king and his retinue into the world of the dead. In that final burial, the king was provided with a mounted army. Fifty young men were strangled, cleaned out, stuffed with herbs and sewn up again. Then they were set astride similarly stuffed horses, all held up with stakes and horizontal rods running through the bodies. Thus, at the final rite, the king enters the world of the dead at the head of an army, manifesting all his earthly glory (Ibid., 124-35).

          An amazing parallel to the Scythian example, and from the same area of the world, is the multiple burial of Vladimir Ilich Lenin. After a first embalming, his body was displayed for a week in the center of Moscow and then buried in the permafrost for a three-year long transition period. At the end of that time, he was permanently embalmed by immersion in a chemical bath, and given a “secondary burial,” with viewing platform, that constituted a “ritual of incorporation.” He was moved again six years later, in 1930, to a black granite mausoleum. Only then, after the apparently final disposition of Lenin’s body and soul, did Stalin begin the reign of terror to establish his own hold on power (Ibid., 136-43).

          But there is a great ambiguity in this unburied body that still requires constant work to make it appear natural — including a laboratory with 100 scientists, each with a human body on which to experiment. As recently as 1998, the Patriarch of Moscow, Alexis II, “stated that, if Lenin’s body was not buried, ‘his malign soul would go on hovering over the country to its great detriment’” (Ibid., 143). Thus the Neolithic fear of the dangerous soul remaining in this world persists in the human psyche as a compelling pattern of thought.

          Taylor’s third story comes from 10^th Century Russia via the Arab writer, Ibn Fadlan, who claimed to have been an eye witness. A Viking king was buried first for ten days in a wood-lined chamber and covered with earth. At this point, “He has died physically but not socially.” A great funeral pyre was prepared for the “social death and social resurrection in the world of the ancestors,” i.e., the “incorporation” (Ibid., 117). For this, the king’s dangerous soul is kept near his corpse by the presence of his favorite concubine who is sacrificed immediately before the incorporation ceremony so that she can become his bride in death. Her freshly killed body is designed to persuade the king’s soul to reenter his body for his last journey (Ibid., 178).

          Taylor’s fourth argument has to do with European bog bodies, corpses buried in peat bogs to preserve them from decay between about 2600 and 1600, b.p. All bog bodies that have been found bear evidence of execution or torture. In Taylor’s plausible interpretation, these individuals were designed to be permanently kept in an unresolved liminal period, their souls never allowed to rest. Assuming the bog bodies all had transgressed social and religious rules — the reason for torture and execution — they could not be sacrificed for fear of offending the gods; they could not be properly buried without offending the ancestors; and they could not remain unburied, for then their souls would wander the earth doing harm to the living. The only solution was to keep them permanently marginal (Ibid., 165). Their bodies had to remain recognizable to keep their souls nearby; and the bogs, themselves, were liminal places, for they were watery, and yet raised above dry land, as such bogs always swell up to be. The decomposition process was arrested and time effectively stopped (Ibid., 163).

          Taylor has exploited the structure that all of our authors accept, namely that the multi-funeral phenomenon has to do with separation, isolation, and incorporation; and he has used it to interpret a wide range of mysterious reports. By the end of his book, which includes much that we have ignored, it becomes impossible to believe that the souls of the dead have not been seen as uncanny and dangerous.

Neolithic Elites and the Decline of Shamanism

          The single most characteristic development of the Neolithic Age is the emergence of controlling elites, generally described by archaeologists as families or coalitions of families. Surely such developments had already begun in the Upper Paleolithic and are held to be responsible for the elaborately planned and executed caves. The abandonment of hunting and gathering as primary means of survival together with increasing dependence on agriculture, however, provided extraordinary opportunities for the individuals Hayden calls “aggrandizers.”

          Aggrandizers are part of every primate society. Rhesus males who try to gain exclusive control over as many as possible of the highest ranking females or alpha chimpanzees who establish coalitions with other aggressive males to gain control of a troop are well-known examples. Similarly, strong-men had to have played controlling roles in simple hunter-gatherer groups. But as humans in the Upper Paleolithic moved toward complex hunter-gatherer societies, there were more opportunities for those seeking personal power. Talents at inducing and gaining mastery over altered states of consciousness, for example, gave some the prestige of being respected shamans, while prowess with weapons gave others hunting prestige. Eventually, a new type of power emerged as agriculture made possible the accumulation of huge and fairly stable resources.

          Hayden, whose anthropological fieldwork has required him to live in a variety of tribal societies, says that he has found self-promoting aggrandizers in every one of them — individuals who will leave no stone unturned to promote their own self-interest. Aggrandizers’ ambitions are effectively limited during times of scarcity, for the stockpiling of food cannot be tolerated when others are starving. But when everyone has enough, stockpiling is no longer a threat, and aggrandizers will be largely ignored as they indulge their ambitions and use every technique imaginable to draw others into their schemes. Thus, when resources became bountiful after the domestication revolution, aggrandizers were delighted to find themselves at a significant advantage (Hayden, 2003: 222).

Control of spiritual resources. As soon as the ancient world entered the historical period, for which there are written records, there is clear evidence that the sanctuaries of the public cults have always been under the control of the highest elites. It was true in ancient Egypt as well as in the Inca and Aztec empires of the New World (Ibid., 210). And there is plenty of evidence that it was also true in the Neolithic Age.

          By contrast, among simple hunter-gatherers, like the San (“Bushmen”) of southern Africa, everyone is free to dance and enter ecstatic states of mind for the purpose of contacting the invisible planes of the cosmos, renewing mythic consciousness and healing one another’s ailments. When self-aggrandizing groups gain control of a society, however, they need to control the sources of spiritual power as well as the material wealth. Thus, the success of the “Big Men” of Oceania, in Hayden’s report, is viewed as essential for the group’s success; and the Big Men take advantage of this society-wide perception. They grab exclusive control of the ancestral spirits and take over the role of the shaman (Ibid., 223). Indeed, it frequently appears that only the elite “have” souls, for they are the only ones buried with elaborate dual ceremonies. Taylor notes, for instance, that the Neolithic burial mounds in Scotland’s Orkney Islands were large enough to have held the bones of every individual who had lived and died on those islands during the Neolithic — “if the bones had been neatly packed, charnel-house wise.” Instead, those mounds were treated more like cathedrals than graves, with only a few selected skulls displayed in niches (Taylor, 2003: 25).

          Mastery of spiritual — that is to say “mythic” — resources was essential if an elite were to have sufficient influence to persuade the majority of a society’s members to work for common goals that would also enhance the aggrandizers’ own ambitions. They needed to manipulate emotionally compelling symbols which had the power to “penetrate” to the unconscious neural networks of common citizens and move them to join with their neighbors. For it is unlikely they appealed to logic or “the issues” any more than modern politicians do. They needed to generate intense personal experiences that would link the individual’s social identity with the society’s power structure, which was in their hands (Hayden, 2003: 191). Lewis-Williams and Pearce agree. Social discriminations and the hierarchical organization of society led to the emergence of elites who manipulated not only a society’s surplus wealth but also its sacred images. They “controlled what could and could not be seen . . . within the tiered cosmology” (Lewis-Williams & Pearce, 2005: 2005: 81).

          Very likely, in the first place, they took on the role of the head shamans themselves, as we know was the case among the Maya. But eventually shamans, whose power was based on direct personal experience of the invisible planes of the cosmos, became too unpredictable for those who held political power. What they wanted was priests, representatives of the sacred who could be counted upon to enact a scripted set of rituals that would have well-known results. The role of altered states of consciousness was reduced. There was no longer a place for spontaneous encounters with the sacred (Hayden, 2003: 210). The turn from a society organized around polyphasic principles and wide-open to the sacred toward a monophasic, control-oriented society was well under way.

Struggles to control Neolithic symbols. What seems most likely to those who have closely examined the megalithic monuments of the British Isles is that they were built in the context of religious dissent. Stones from dismantled tombs were reused in new ones built at Knowth and Newgrange. In the process, rectilinear carvings that had been on display in the dismantled tombs were turned to the back and hidden in the new tombs, while curvilinear carvings were made on the newly exposed surfaces to express new cosmological doctrines (Lewis-Williams & Pearce, 2005: 198).

          We have evidence of similar struggles from largely the same time period in Egypt, where “hundreds of Monopoly ‘games’ unfolded in prehistoric times.” As the centuries passed, fewer and fewer players remained in the game, while formerly separate domains were acquired and merged. “Players changed — some acquired great influence, then lost it as charismatic individuals died or trading opportunities ended.” Successful players were able to combine distinctive ideologies, symbols and rituals to grip the minds of the occupants of newly acquired lands and the workers who produced the surpluses. “These ideologies became an underlying factor in promoting the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt, starting with at least three predynastic chiefdoms that flourished in Upper Egypt around [5500, b.p.] [5]: Hierakonopolis, Nagada, and This, near Abydos” (Fagan, 1998: 292).

          A millennium later, in England, a 2,000-year-long process began of building stone circles, ditches and earthworks, abandoning them, and building others. “Avebury’s sacred monuments . . . tell a story of changing religious beliefs and rituals, but also of spiritual continuity” (Ibid., 141). That continuity expresses what was common to Neolithic consciousness, while the changes, abandoned sites, stolen dolmens and orthostats that were recarved for new monuments all reflect the way this myth, common to an entire civilization, was manipulated for secondary, local purposes.

          Stonehenge was rebuilt three times. The first version was erected shortly before 4900, b.p., and had only two standing stones and a wooden structure. Over the next 500 years, the site was rebuilt with a new orientation to the midsummer solstice and “a double circle of bluestones set up in the center, but soon removed.” The third version was built in three phases between 4550 and 3600, b.p. Stones were set up, moved to new locations, and more holes dug that were never occupied with stones. Finally, around 3600, b.p., the “avenue” was extended nearly two miles to the Avon River (Ibid., 156).

Over a period of 50 to 70 generations, Stonehenge was preeminent on the landscape, a focus of activity for kilometers around. After [3600, b.p.], Stonehenge lay in the midst of an intensely farmed landscape. Wessex’s leaders devoted their energies to commemorating individual leaders with burial mounds. The stone circles fell into disuse, a symbol of authority that had endured for more than 1,500 years (Ibid., 157).

          Hayden makes a similar argument about the “bucrania” (bull skulls) that decorate the walls of Çatalhöyük shrines. Their display was meant to be a constant reminder of the power and wealth of the family whose funerals were held there. He finds a supporting tradition, again among the hill tribes of Southeast Asia. There, the most solemn funeral requires the sacrifice of nine cattle, while most families possess none at all, or at most three head of cattle. Thus, memorable funeral feasts were sponsored by families whose wealth exceeded that of their contemporaries by a factor of at least ten (Hayden, 2003: 192f). Furthermore, rivalries between elites must have grown with time, for throughout the Near East and Western Europe armed conflict increased as time passed. By the time the Neolithic ended, there were mass graves and major fortifications. Thus, a militaristic ideology must have gradually entered their symbolic universe (Ibid., 196).

A shamanic underground. As societies become more hierarchically organized, a uniformity of social expectations is imposed. Altered states of consciousness are more and more likely to be considered suspicious. Winkelman observes that as social complexity grows, altered states of consciousness become limited to the elite, and the use of hallucinogens declines with increasing political integration (Winkelman, 2000: 126). Conversely, when the elites struggle with one another, periods of social instability result. At these times people tend to return to the shamans, who derive personal power from their familiarity with the greater cosmos and not from any political entity. Piers Vitebsky, one of the better recent surveyors of the shamanistic phenomenon, for instance, reports that the Achuar of Amazonia and the Baruya of New Guinea, who are governed by so-called ‘Big Men,’ or prominent warriors, suffer under “the instability of this kind of ‘chieftainship’ which fuels their chronic warfare and gives the shaman’s magical powers of aggression such prominence’ (Vitebsky, 1995: 117). By the shaman’s powers of aggression, Vitebsky refers to what elsewhere might be called “bewitching” the enemy, casting a curse or a magic dart that may result in the illness or death of an individual who is the object of envy or revenge.

          Lewis-Williams and Pearce address this issue by distinguishing two sorts of shamanism, which they call “vertical” and “horizontal.” When shamans are themselves the respected elite of a society and when they are closely integrated with a stable ruling elite, their primary orientation is “vertical.” Vertical shamans are primarily concerned with journeying through and explicating the mythscape of the cosmos. They are familiar with its invisible tiers and know how to draw conclusions from what they find there. They function in a ceremonial way at public rituals, and are respected — not feared.

          The situation is quite different for “horizontal shamans.” These are individuals who have a talent for altered states of consciousness and trust their own personal experience. If they articulate the myth of their society, they do not do so in an official way. The myth may go unnarrated. Everybody knows fragments of it, but nobody has the authority or the interest to spell it all out. Horizontal shamans journey for specific limited goals: to locate the game, to observe the movement of enemy bands, to restore the health of individuals. Because horizontal shamans act on their own authority and are not integrated into a stable political structure, they are more feared than respected. They may use their powers for selfish ends. They may attack other shamans with their magical powers or hire out their powers to serve the vengeful wishes of others. They may be as dangerous as the souls of the dead during that intermediate period before they have been formally incorporated into the realm of the ancestors. Horizontal shamans are more common in small hunter-gatherer groups, while vertical shamans require the stable hierarchical structure of a more complex society (Lewis-Williams & Pearce, 2005: 86f).

          When the stability of a complex society breaks down, however, the opportunity for horizontal shamanism grows, and it may be as murderous as struggles between competing elites. Indeed, it may be used by those elites against their opponents. Winkelman points out that even when political and economic hierarchies take over the control of religion and thereby limit the average individual’s autonomy, shamans can function as “mediums,” that is as spokespeople for the invisible spirits.

          Winkelman finds that the neurobiology of possession trance is very similar to that of shamanic altered states; but the phenomenology is different insofar as shamans remain in control of their spirits, while mediums relinquish control and are powerless vehicles for spirits who wish to communicate through them (Winkelman, 2000: 159). I. M. Lewis, Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics, published a classic overview of possession trance religions, showing that they are the religions of the dispossessed. Those whom the social structure renders powerless are drawn to religions that reinterpret their symptoms of not belonging as evidence of election by the spirits. An alternate rival mythology results (Lewis, 1971). Although Lewis’ work was done in our contemporary world, it is hard to imagine that such dissident movements claiming mythic justification did not have their beginnings in the instabilities of the Neolithic Age, for struggles between competing elites were launching similar alternate versions of their civilization’s myth. The Neolithic, evidently, was the age in which our ancestors began to be aware that alternate mythic narratives might vie for adoption.

Summary: Consciousness in the Neolithic. The ability to act upon and derive pragmatic benefit from the realm of myth was a major accomplishment of the Neolithic Age. Inspired by alternate worlds visited in non-ordinary states of awareness, our Neolithic ancestors learned to manipulate their environment as no species had ever done before. To find such practical applications, they had to take possession of their visions in new ways. Agriculture and architecture may have been their most outstanding visible achievements, but they are symptoms of the new stage they reached in their mastery of consciousness.

          Such mastery opened the door to manipulation; and the aggrandizers marched right in and seized the new conscious tool in order to reshape mythic forms in ways that would redound to their own enrichment. The aggrandizers could not challenge the tiered universe — nor were they able to imagine doing so — for it was hard-wired. Nevertheless, myth, like every narrative, is composed of subsidiary episodes, and those episodes could be shaped and rearranged like the orthostats in a Çatalhöyük shrine or an English henge. Furthermore, every one of those building-block episodes was symbolically effective. Each one penetrated to deep neural networks and evoked profound emotion. The aggrandizers discovered a wonderful tool to manipulate the minds of others; and this, too, marked a major development in the history of consciousness.

          They all lived in the mythic world, manipulating aggrandizers as well as laborers, but the fact that they could struggle over which version of the myth was more accurate or effective tells us, too, that the beginnings of skepticism must also be a legacy of the Neolithic. Brian Hayden’s observation that a tenth to a quarter of contemporary hunter-gatherer societies are comprised of people to have no interest in religion and ritual is supported by Peter Lamborn Wilson’s observations gathered while wandering Central Asia with Sufi-oriented Qalandars:

A few were con-men and drug salesmen. The majority were amiable lazy wanderers of slight spiritual pretensions, very much like some of the young Westerners on the road in the Sixties. One might accuse them of living off the credulous, of posing as mystics, of social parasitism . . . [but] the bohemian life of the Qalandar is a valuable pressure-valve in a world so rigid and formal.

A small but impressive minority of the Qalandars are — by any fair standard — genuine mystics (P.L. Wilson, 1988: 202).

          Thus the roots of indifference and dissent can be found even in very small, simply organized societies; and they must have been present much earlier, surely in the Upper Paleolithic and very likely as far back as Australopithecus. What was new to the Neolithic was the formation of large factions of shifting identity that were openly competing for hegemony. Dissent and politics had become institutionalized. Shamanism as an egalitarian pursuit of self-transcendence had been overshadowed by a sort of priesthood that strengthened the hand of the economically mighty. The power of the individual had been circumscribed. Only the elite were treated as though they had souls.

          Surely our Neolithic ancestors were not individuals in the sense that Jung had in mind when he lamented the fact that there were too few of them in the Europe of the twentieth century. But in a world where one could think, “I don’t have to be part of the rectilinear-carvings group, I’d rather belong to the curvilinears,” a sense of individuality has to have increased over that of the Mesolithic Age, when the graves were not orderly and the bones of the ancestors were mixed randomly together. Furthermore, the use of horizontal shamanism as a source of power for the dispossessed surely served a budding sense of individual integrity, even as it increased the forces of social dissent and undermined the symbolic manipulations of the wealthy.

          Meanwhile, the strongest evidence for the vulnerability of the individual in the Neolithic is probably the fear of restless souls that had not yet been incorporated into the society of the ancestors. For the dangers they were thought to be capable of amounted to an immense “shadow projection.” Every threat, cruelty and unfair treatment that humans were capable of committing and that might be restrained by the fear of being caught and having to suffer retaliation exceeded all human limits for the unburied souls, since they were invisible and unanswerable before any court of justice. Furthermore, in the Neolithic they were the souls of the powerful, who had already been formidable and imperious in life. In death they became magnets for all the insecurities and everyday terrors that people lived with. The apparently consuming fear of restless souls is a testimony to the forces that worked against individuality and suggests how much each person must have been swallowed up in the forces of group identity.

          The fear of restless souls closely resembles that of the horizontal shaman, and for the same reason. The issue has been eloquently summarized by Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff in regard to the Tukano Indians of Columbia’s Upper Amazon, whose shamans are believed able to turn themselves into jaguars:

The question is: How like a jaguar does a man become? A [shaman]-turned-jaguar is, for all exterior purposes, a true jaguar: He has the voice of a jaguar, he devours raw meat, he sleeps on the ground, and he has the highly developed vision and olfactory sense of the feline. . . . But in one aspect he is not a jaguar at all: In his attitude toward human beings. In this, he does not behave like a jaguar, but like a man — a man devoid of all cultural restrictions, but still a man. The motivation of revenge and the acts of sexual assault, of attacking from behind and in a pack, and of severing the victim's head are not jaguar but human traits. What turns into a jaguar, then, is that other part of man's personality that resists and rejects cultural conventions. The jaguar of the hallucinatory sphere, the jaguar-monster of Tukano tales, is a man's alter ego, now roaming free and untrammeled, and acting out his deepest desires and fears (Reichel-Dolmatoff, 1975: 132).

From the Neolithic to History

          Many of the issues that rose first in the Neolithic Age continue with some exaggeration into the Bronze and Iron Ages. The dates for these ages differ by location. Bronze casting was well established in the Near East by 5500, b.p., while the British Isles were still building megaliths. For the most part, it seems that the technology changed more than human consciousness did — surely the gods did not change much. Brian Hayden notes that the warrior sun- and bull-gods of the Near East and the Mediterranean very likely had their origins in the earliest Neolithic pre-pottery cults. He mentions of the Bull of Ugarit, the ancient city on Syria’s Mediterranean coast (ca. 35403200, b.p.); the Phoenician Baal; and the Roman Mithras, who was allied with Helios, the sun-god, and whose ritual killing of the bull formed the central mystery of his cult (Hayden, 2003: 203).

          The Bronze Age, itself, largely coincides with Proto-Indo-European culture and language, which spread out from its origins on the steppes north of the Black Sea, the region known as Scythia, beginning around 6000, b.p. and lasted about 1500 years. The economy of the movement largely depended on pastoralism; but now a “secondary products revolution” had found tradable value in wool, hides, milk, and cheese. These required transportation to take them from the grazing lands to the markets, and for that domesticated horses were hitched to wagons (Ibid., 271-3).

          As societies increased from towns the size of Çatalhöyük to great cities, religious practices diversified, too — more radically than in the Neolithic, but along similar lines. While official religion revered gods proclaimed by elites to support their versions of socio-political hierarchy, the vast majority of laborers revered nature deities and fertility gods of the woods (Ibid., 291f). Such divisions were exacerbated by the fact that the elite, who derived their wealth from trade and the sale of grazing rights, lived in the towns and cities while many of the laborers were pastoral nomads, moving about with the herds, close to the land and folk beliefs of older millennia. Their mobility favored their independence from the central authorities. Meanwhile, the elites were running risky businesses, where disease and cattle raids could mean sudden losses that might have to be settled by their becoming slaves themselves. They fought one another and needed a class of warriors as well as priests (Ibid., 278-84).

          Thus, by 6,000 years ago, the classical four-tier social structure — royalty, clergy, warriors and laborers — had been established and would remain fairly stable for more than five millennia, until the industrial revolution. Shepherds and cattle men, were not the only class to wander far from the seat of public religion and develop their own allegiances with invisible dimensions of the cosmos. The warrior class, probably taught by altered states of consciousness they induced in themselves naturally by engaging in hand-to-hand combat that released hormones, endorphins and adrenaline, also used herbal drugs to alter their consciousness further. The notion of a drink of immortality that enabled one to partake in the consciousness of the gods was prominent in the Vedic soma, the Persian haoma, and in the later Roman ambrosia and Irish madhu. Symbols of the cup and the bowl (later the Grail) belonged to the Proto-Indo-European tradition. Warriors drank to feed an inner fire of divine possession and magical energy that helped them on the battle field, while shamans drank to engage in warrior combat on invisible planes (Ibid., 288).

          Lewis-Williams and Pearce agree with Hayden regarding the symbolic continuity between the simpler Neolithic and the more complex Bronze Age. They cite The Epic of Gilgamesh, which dates from the fifth millennium, b.p., and describes a three-tiered Sumerian cosmos in which the beneficent Shamash rules in the heavens and the souls of the dead and other frightening spirits inhabit the underworld. The shamanic theme continues in the equivalence ascribed to seeing and wisdom — reminiscent of the big-eyed statues buried under Neolithic floors. The divine/human Gilgamesh, like the divine/human Mithras, kills the Bull of Heaven and takes its horns back to the palace, where he hangs them on the wall, as at Çatalhöyük. Gilgamesh’s friend and foil, the primitive Enkidu, whom the gods placed in Gilgamesh’s way to limit his power, represents the evolution of human society from its hunter-gatherer origins to pastoralism — that is to say, the process of the Neolithic. The urbanity of Gilgamesh, by contrast, represents the further concentration of the social hierarchy, the mixing of ethnic populations and the systematic management of resources that made Sumerian civilization far more complicated than what we have been looking at in Neolithic villages and towns. Enkidu’s death, the great crisis for Gilgamesh, is celebrated with serial funeral rites, as in the Neolithic. Finally, transformations described in the epic allude to an interchangeability of people and animals, that is to the invisible shamanic planes accessible through altered states of consciousness (Lewis-Williams & Pearce, 2005: 153-60).

Consciousness becomes more individual. The origin of real individuality through a growing dependence on directed thinking is the theme of Julian Jaynes’ famous and very intriguing book, The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976). He argues that prior to the great city-states of the Near East, humans knew what to do, where to hunt, how to avoid their enemies, etc., by listening to a voice that emanated from their non-dominant cerebral hemisphere. Why it should have been a voice has often been questioned. But we now know the non-dominant hemisphere has been mined for its wisdom at least since the Upper Paleolithic. No doubt a voice was sometimes heard by those who tuned their nervous systems, but that was not all that entered consciousness. Therefore, if we expand Jaynes’ concept of the “voice” to include any sort of ecstatic shamanistic knowledge, we are on familiar ground; for we have already seen that architecture, pottery and domestication have all been derived from altered states of consciousness.

          According to Jaynes, a change took place in human consciousness around the middle of the fourth millennium, b.p. Before that, carvings and inscriptions from Mesopotamia show the god as the king’s confidant, an indication that access to non-ordinary consciousness was wide open and easy to achieve. Afterwards, however, carvings and inscriptions show the king begging the god — or, more frequently, the goddess — for counsel. Jaynes concludes the channel through the non-dominant hemisphere had narrowed and life-guiding inspirations had become more difficult as a result of two circumstances introduced by the new city-states in the Near East. The first is that the new urban environment had become almost unmanageably complex and dangerous. People could not afford to live much of the time in an “open” state of consciousness in which alpha-frequency brain waves predominated. They had to be in the alert, ever-shifting beta-state that we call ordinary consciousness. Secondly, with the invention of writing, people began to rely more and more upon language and, therefore, the dominant hemisphere. Our ancestors had begun to set their linguistic hemispheres as the “default” position of their brains. They began to use directed thinking more the way we use it today, and that lay the foundation for developing an ego that more closely resembles ours.

          Jaynes finds evidence for this new sort of ego around a millennium later, sometime before 2700, b.p., in the Iliad and the Odyssey. He distinguishes four stages in the use of Greek terms that suggest “mind” to us today: such as a stirring in the bowels, a pounding heart and a panting breath. In the second stage, the stirring and pounding belongs to what we have described in Chapter 7 as a complex reaction: “I know I am scared, not just because the other guy is big and carries a club, but mainly because my heart is pounding and my knees unsteady.” This describes the effect of the relatively primitive limbic system, Damasio’s rapid-response “low road,” that protects us from threats in our environment before we have a chance to think about them. The fact that the characters Homer presents in the Odyssey interpret their bodily sensations as evidence of an emotional reaction shows growing reflective consciousness on the part of both the poet and his audience.

          In Jaynes’ third stage, the mind-expressions become truly “mental” in the sense that they refer “to internal spaces where metaphored actions may occur.” Now the heart does not merely pound in the hero’s chest but cherishes tender thoughts. The cerebral cortex is involved. Finally, in the fourth stage, these several “mind pieces” come together “into one conscious self capable of introspection” (Jaynes, 1976: 260). The product of this Homeric development is the wily Odysseus who negotiates the world’s dangers and his own emotions by keeping his own counsel and outsmarting his opponents with trickery.

          We have seen tricksters before — as far back as the monkeys and as well organized as the aggrandizers of the Neolithic. If Jaynes has it right, it cannot be that no one had an “ego” capable of trickery before Odysseus. On the contrary, the situation must have resembled the cultural explosion of the Upper Paleolithic. Then, it was not making art objects that was new, for occasional carvings have been found dating tens and even hundreds of millennia earlier. Rather, what was new in the Upper Paleolithic was that artistic conventions and the narratives they illustrated had finally become so much a part of general human consciousness that (a) painted walls and ceilings could be imagined by their creators as a sort of cultural statement and (b) the general public could be expected to understand the statement sufficiently. In the Upper Paleolithic, the history of consciousness had gotten as far as philosophizing in narratives that asked how did we get here, and what are we doing? These Old Stone Age developments were carried forward into the Neolithic, when people discovered they had some control over how the tale was told. They learned to shape the mythic narrative to benefit themselves, although the story remained a collective one.

          By contrast, when the linguistic hemisphere has assumed its dominance, Odysseus is fully an individual from start to finish. Real egohood had become far less exceptional by 2700, b.p. All hearers of the story identify with the noble Odysseus; all have some inkling of what it means to be constantly “other” than everyone else, and following a different path. For Odysseus, the hero’s “shamanic journey” occurs on the three-dimensional stage of earth, and it has become a moral contest. It asks who we are by telling a story about who a single individual is, a lone but imposing figure who is guided by a moral compass that brings him into conflict with both the heavenly gods and most of the humans he encounters.

The Greeks and Romans. Somewhat more than a century after Homer, Western philosophy got its start with Thales (ca. 624-546, b.c.). Now that we have entered familiar historical territory, we shall use the conventional dating system, which is no less based in mythic reality than anything that has gone before. Anno Domine (a.d.), “Year of the Lord,” the Christian way of counting the years, is predicated on the belief that the world has become a new place, metaphysically speaking, since the birth of Jesus, requiring the counting of the years to begin again from the beginning. Although in recent decades it has become politically correct to avoid reference to this mythic reality by disguising “Year of the Lord” and “Before Christ” with the phrases “Common Era” (c.e.) and “Before the Common Era” (b.c.e.), we shall follow the earlier notation to emphasize the fact that our worldviews retain their connection with a greater cosmos accessible through myth. There is no intention of claiming the Christian view to be superior to any other, only to be sure to remember that even the modern, secular West is deeply saturated with perspectives gained through altered states of consciousness.

          Thales and the philosophers who followed him, including Plato and Aristotle, used their wily Odyssean egos to liberate their directed thinking from mythic assumptions and establish an understanding of the world and of themselves that rested upon empirical observation and rational deduction. In the next two or three centuries, mathematics and history were established; and after Alexander the Great, by 300, b.c., the most ambitious economic and social organization of the ancient world, Hellenistic Civilization, had encircled the Mediterranean, crossed the Near East, and reached into Asia. Later the Roman Empire simply absorbed it and continued expanding northwestward into Europe.

          The elites of the empire were well served, the slaves abundant, and the conquered people required to profess formal allegiance to the imperial cult. That the rulers largely had a cynical attitude toward the official divinities of the state is strongly suggested by the case of the god, Serapis, who was deliberately created by Ptolemy I Soter, who reigned from 305 to 284, b.c., to amalgamate indigenous Egyptian symbolism with Hellenistic ideology. Imperial success at tapping into a symbolism that penetrated to the unconscious neural networks of native Egyptians and strongly motivated them is revealed in the fact that the Serapeum (Serapis Temple) at Alexandria became extremely popular as a place to worship the sun-god, Zeus-Serapis, who was also the lord of healing and fertility. Destruction of the Serapeum in a.d. 391 by the Patriarch Theophilus marked the final triumph of Christianity as the new official religion of the Roman Empire (Doniger, 1999).

          By and large, however, the imposition of imperial hegemony — with managed surpluses extensive enough to support a huge and far-flung administrative staff and an army — undermined local identities, local gods and familiar rituals. A secular Greek language and philosophy held the empire together but left the cities in confusion, where mixtures of ethnic groups from all across the empire were bereft of their ancestral ways and had no rapport with the imperial cult. To cope with their resulting demoralized condition, the people began to resort again to ecstatic cults that had their origins in the rich shamanic heritage they had left behind in their homelands (Price, 2001b: 7). These often involved wine, animal sacrifice and the handling of snakes; and they emphasized individual transformation and spiritual fulfillment through personal encounters with the sacred. Religious life in such “mystery cults” involved secrecy, initiations, and private revelations. Well known examples include the Mithraic, Eleusinian, and Orphic religions, the last of which “invented” the idea of divine retribution after death. And this idea really took hold, completely reinterpreting the notion of the restless-soul that had dominated the world for millennia. Religion was linked with morality for the first time (Hayden, 2003: 366-77). “The emergence of the mystery cults represents a revolution in the nature of religious life for the general populace because of their focus on morality and because they restored the participatory ritual ecstatic aspects to the religious life of everyone who wished to be initiated into the cults” (Ibid., 370).

          Other movements managed to achieve a more universal appeal, while rejecting the impersonality and secularism of the empire. Gnosticism was an extremely varied category of religious movement, some sects influenced by Judaism, some by Christianity, and others by mystery cults. Central to all strains of Gnosticism was the doctrine that a saving mystical knowledge (gnosis) was available to everyone. Gnostic imagery and theologies were highly syncretic, that is, they drew indiscriminately from other religions and philosophies whatever seemed to best articulate the authors’ experience. Improbable myths were constructed describing the greater cosmos and the human soul in such a way as to outline a course of spiritual development together with a catalogue of potential pitfalls that lay before earnest practitioners.