Читать книгу Art History For Dummies - Jesse Bryant Wilder - Страница 73

Later researchers discovered that the animals that appeared on Old Stone Age dinner menus showed up least in cave art. Many paintings depict predators like panthers, lions, and hyenas — not typical dinner fare and not easy to hunt with primitive weapons. These researchers offered a new theory based on the fact that hunter-gatherer societies from Africa to Siberia and North America practiced shaman magic. Prehistoric hunter-gatherers may have done the same thing.

Hollywood portrays shamans as witch doctors, but tribal shamans are more than spell-casting, dancing doctors in Halloween costumes — they are visionaries and sometimes artists. Here are some interesting thoughts about the role and methods of shamans:

 Primitive peoples believed that the shaman could “beam up” into the spirit world to talk to the souls of beasts. They even thought a shaman could learn from animal spirits how to fix imbalances in nature.

 Some shamans appear to have used natural hallucinogens to give them a boost into the sixth dimension. Primitive peoples throughout the world have often depicted shaman journeys with hallucinogenic images of humans and animals entwining and even merging. Cave art might depict these journeys, too.

 Trainee shamans had to undergo ceremonial, fake deaths, as well as food and sleep deprivation. Perhaps a prone figure that appears in a cave painting is a trainee shaman, faking death after a long fast and a couple of all-nighters.

 In 19th-century Siberia, shamans used a so-called “world pole” topped by a bird to launch their voyages into the underworld.

Are cave paintings the world’s first psychedelic art? The half-human, half-animal cave paintings, such as the Bird-Headed Man with Bison and Rhinoceros on the wall at Lascaux suggest they are. At first glance, Bird-Headed Man with Bison looks like a typical hunting scene. A hunter spears a bison in the belly. The beast’s entrails spill out of him. But why does the prone man beside the animal have a bird’s head? And why is a bird perched on a nearby pole like a totem? The Lascaux bird-headed man and bird-topped pole may have been meant to give a prehistoric shaman a successful send-off into the spirit world.