Let’s play pretend. Start off by imagining yourself living in some kind of tribal setting in the early part of human history. They could be hunter-gatherers, or any other configuration that you like. Imagine that your tribe has a complex mythology based around on the animals you interact with in your ecosystem. It’s strictly an oral tradition though; writing has not been invented yet. And the only artwork you’ve ever seen consists merely of marks and patterns on objects like headresses, harnesses and weapons. It is strictly non-representational, but you don’t have any idea what representational even means, so that doesn’t matter to you.
Your life has been pretty simple (and by that I guess I mean direct) up until now, the life of a child. You’ve participated in the activities and rituals of the tribe. The day arrives though where you are to be made a full member of the tribe, with the accompanying status and privileges of adulthood. As preparation for your initiation, you are taken to a secluded hut in the forest, and made to fast for many days to purify yourself. At the appointed hour, men from your village dressed as spirits come and kidnap you, binding your hands behind your back and blindfolding you. They walk you deeper and deeper into the forest and you lose track of your location. Suddenly they stop and remove your blindfold and unbind your hands. Before you yawns the entrance to a cave you’ve never seen before. The spirit-men tell you it is the entrance to the underworld, and that you must go and meet the gods who live within in order to become a man. You try to turn back and refuse, but the spirit-men brandish their spears at you menacingly. You have no choice but to stumble down into the darkness of the cave.
Your hands moving carefully along the cave walls ahead of you, you venture downward for what seems like an infinity. Until all at once, you smell smoke wafting up to you from below. You turn a corner and firelight flickers, beckoning you forward. You step out into a wide chamber which is filled with… animals! Underground? Impossible! But they cover every inch of what should be the walls and ceiling. They seem to be caught in the very motion of running, throbbing with life.
Now, what the fucking hell would be going through your mind if you’d never before seen representation artwork? Nevermind the ritual fasting and other spiritual preparation you were put through to get to this place. I wonder in some sense if this is how the spark of consciousness was kindled and passed along generations. The idea being that you were suddenly confronted with the idea of analogs. A thing which stood for another thing. You were then presented with some kind of secret teachings to further pry open your mind and force in this almost psychotic split between reality and this other layer of meaning on top of reality in which a rock can be both a rock and an animal. Where the spirirtual essence of an animal can be captured into a fixed form and manipulated. And by manipulating these forms, essences and representations, you’re taught to manipulate the things they stand for as well.
I imagine something similar to this might have protected the magickal art of writing in the early days. Something must have been needed to prepare the psyche for the drastic shift from oral to written communication. Granted this is purely speculative, but it seems to ring with a certain truth for me. I’ve not undergone any mystical initiation ceremonies myself, but the literature seems to be filled with reversals of reality like this. Accepted systems of understanding are flipped upside-down, then again and again in subsequent stages of initiation. At each point, both your consciousness and your reality are indelibly transformed. Might also be interesting to look at how modern initiation rituals have a different focus from these speculative old ones which might have instilled self-consciousness of some kind. Nowadays we’re maybe too self-conscious. So much so that we get stuck in all the analogs and images and language that we need to transcend it. Anyway, just some speculative food for thought. Who knows how accurate it really is as far as the “dawn of consciousness” is really concerned.
- END -
ASSOCIATED CONTENT @TMBCHR (Auto-Generated)
- Cave dweller booted
- Coming out of my cave
- Plato’s Allegory of the Cave
- Raising Consciousness
- Representation & Reality
13 Comments
This friend of mine was living in Long Beach and he went into this metaphysical bookstore. Anyway my buddy is more the atheistic argumentative drunk type but also kind of a greek scholar so when he told the other owner that she was like “Oh! My neo-pagan group is going to have a reenactment of the Eleusian mysteries you should drop by and let us know if its historically accurate or not!”
So anyway he probably just figured this might be a good opportunity to meet chicks so he went. And lo and behold he said the “ritual” they were doing had NOTHING to do with the Eleusian mysteries, instead they had props (smoke, braziers, gongs) etc. and what really blew his mind was this one woman was looking into a mirror going “I love you I love you I love” [CF. Narcissus] and then they were all taking terms praising the,selves in the mirror. And I mean the goal should be to BREAK THE MIRROR!
Just fucking BREAK IT!
Anyway, I was telling him about a group ritual I had experienced that was a bit different (ie. disorienting and frightening and chaotic - I wound up feeling like “WHO AM I? IS THERE EVEN A ME?) ) and my buddy said
“EXACTLY! The mysteries are supposed to be TRANSPERSONAL they are supposed to fill you with TERROR and AWE not boost your self-esteem.”
The mysteries are supposed to fiill you with terror and awe not boost your self-esteem - anyway I liked that.
That is hilarious is exactly the type of stereotypical nonsense I would expect from a group of neo-pagans. The mere thought of their ritual fills me with giddy laughter.
I tend to agree with the transpersonal nature of ritual. Campbell said something about how it’s supposed to cast you out and be utterly alien to you, not this friendly fuzzy thing you can hug and be happy about the next day.
Did you friend report back to them on their historical accuracy?
this is idea seems more important a minute later than the thread i initially picked up and started following. Also a lot more elusive and paradoxical. How did we learn to use symbols? Aren’t they in themselves a mystery and also a form of madness?
Reminds me of manson saying your body is a symbol.
Also of McKenna saying the mushrooms used themselves to implant consciousness in the apes by setting up this reflexive cycle of symbolic self-reflection
ALso of Baurdillard’s ideas about the levels of simulation, eg:
”These would be the successive phases of the image:
1 It is the refleciton of a basic reality.
2 It masks and perverts a basic reality.
3 It masks the absence of a basic reality.
4 It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrucm.
In the first case, the image is a good appearance: the represenation is of the order of sacrament. In the seond, it is an evil appearance: of the order of malefice. In the third, it plays at beaing an appearance: it is of the order of sorcery. In the fourth, it is no longer in the order of appearance at all, but of simulation. “(170)
This is exactly where I was going to go with this, but got sidetracked… like what if the ritual I described above actually occurred. And then the initiate learned to manipulate symbols and representation, and then somehow they showed them that they too were merely representation, that their body was nothing more than a painting on a cave wall. Maybe this is where Plato’s allegory of the cave comes from.
I like those 4 stages of the Baudrillard simulacrum thing too. I’ll have to think about that some more. I guess this speculative ritual would be the one designed to spark the 1st stage awareness
awesome post. after reading this and the other post about your dream, it made my head want to explode. That scenario that you illustrate about the “origin of consciousness” reminded me that I always used to wonder what dreams were like for other people. Especially people from other time periods. I always thought that it would be fucking mindblowing, y’know?
Never before had I really thought about dreams and symbols in themselves as being some kind of spiritual currency. Which is something I’ve been trying to slog through in my “Power” series.
I can’t really put it into words right now, but it feels like that revelation completes some kind of loop for me. so uhh… thanks dood.
John, I was thinking about that in relation to dreams too. Let me try to jot down what I was thinking so far. Before you had representational/analog forms, you had no concept of “real/unreal”. You only had things that you experienced. A dream was as real as something that happened to you while you were awake. It might have a different flavor or style, but you had no means by which to judge it as “unreal”. Also, this pulls in the possibility that when we say things are “unreal” what we really mean is that they are representations - painting on the cave wall, as opposed to the actual animals. I’m gonna write about this more. Crazy, right?
OK, another thought .. .
the whole thing about symbol manipulation and “spiritual currency” of course isn’t limited to the the spiritual realm … in fact, part of the reason it seems to resonate for me (ithink) is that it makes such a solid connection to physical manipulations and forms of currency. i dunno, i’ll have to think some more about it.
I was agonizing and wondering about how magic related to religion related to art and realized that they all represent the manipulation of and by archetypes. But to even have an archetype at all wouldn’t you have to have some sort of mode of symbolic interpretation or even just recognition?
How did the primitive mind first grok something like in this hypothetical Lascaux ritual? I think you’re probably right - there would come the terror and the awe -
Anyone who can do this is arrogating to themselves the creative power of the gods, consciously or no. That may be the “knowledge of good and evil”
My understanding is that many of these cave-wall paintings would be too far in the realm of the abstract for one to understand what the image is. It could have been explained after the initiation, but I’ve heard that indigenous peoples being shown a photo of members of their tribe had no idea what it was representative of. Another was of a native american tribe that their perception did not allow for their realization that there was a spanish galley approaching land for a number of days, or something of the sort (from What the Bleep [take it as you will]).
On the note of the development of symbol (and hence language), I suggest reading Language: Origin and Meaning by John Zerzan. He has another writing titled The Failure of Symbolic Thought, which may have a bit of info on the development of said item. I cannot help but recommend anything Zerzan.
I love your page, by the way.
this
this
are helpful, and are discussed in various posts here
it is interesting that the pyramids at giza are thousands of years old yet contain no drawing or depictions or symbols.the builders had high math but no need for depictions or embellishments.more puzzles.
it may be a little bit off topic, but whats been bothering me the most recently is perspective drawing….
i mean, its hard to even fathom the profound change in conciousness that the first drawings & painting represent…
but…. whats been really getting to me is what the fuck happened recently that people started painting/drawing in perspective????
i mean, i understood the vanishing point concept when i was taught it in elementary school.. but until very recently people didnt use (know?) this method… and that, is fucking insane to me.. what happened???? and since its a relatively recent phenomena, i havent really read or heard a good explanation for such a drastic change in “perspective”
one
human?
I think it started in or just before the Renaissance but I’ve never thought about it before. You’re right, it is really bizarre…