Here's my line of reasoning...The shapes our anscestors left must make sense somehow, but we seem unable to come up with any consensus. Now the paradox of prehistory is that we have to work out what people were thinking based on the objects they left behind; we try to imagine what would prompt people to act in that way, and the only clues we have is what would prompt US to act in that way. Unfortunately, we aren't really entitled to the assumption that the minds of our anscestors worked in the same way as ours, and this assumption is necessarily fruitless anyway. It can never give us any new insights. It just repeats what we already know. So...we have to look at the evidence with open minds and use our imagination. But a little help might go a long way...Does anyone have any anecdotes they would like to relate regarding viewing ancient places while experiencing altered mental states, eg. meditation, hallucinogenic drugs?
Yeah... These people would surely have used shrooms!
Try a biggish hit and then go and sit in the West Kennet Long Barrow in the early hours of the morning! Cuz it don't get more primal than that.
(((charrr)))
Hi Nick,
I think you raise an interesting point and it is one that isn't discussed here often. I suspect that meditation/ altered states of reality and hallucinogenic drugs all must have played a part in our human evolution and belief systems. Julian Cope touches on the subject of rock art patterns and hallucinogens in TME (the similarity of some swirling, spiral patterns to closed eye hallucinations).
Maybe such experiences are as close as we can get to understanding the ancient mind as they can enable us to sublimate our modern-thinking ego and be immersed in the place and moment?
Don't be disappointed if folk seem a bit reticent on this subject round here. I think people are wary of being branded nutter of the month!
I don't have any earth shattering personal anecdotes regarding ancient sites I am afraid, although I do find being stoned sometimes enhances the feel and experience of some sites.
But being stoned enhances Emmerdale as well, so......
Do you have any such anecdotes yourself?
Drugs are a short cut, with dangerous consequences, lasting consequences that too many of our youth are suffering from.
The people who have achieved an elevated state of consience, such as buddhists etc, I consider see ourselves as we really are, part of nature , made of basic materials that everything is made of, they have cleared their minds and thought out the truth, I believe on here, are people better versed in this than I.
For myself, I can find a spot, by dowsing, sit quietly and think, when these spots are adjacent to old sites , I think of the people who made them , and I watch them.
Am I seeing things, making things up in my head, I dont know, but I live on the lines, more than probabaly anyone alive.
If they are affecting Me, well, its for the good, I now look at this world in a new light, a light that is not visable, everywhere I look , is the power and wonder of nature, and I know, yes know , that all is one.
"Unfortunately, we aren't really entitled to the assumption that the minds of our anscestors worked in the same way as ours"
Why not?
That wonderful chap, Gyrus, has written a few really superb,thought provoking essays on this subject using both his own experiences and those of others.
Unfortunately his dreamflesh.com website is currently down as apparently he is shifting servers.
It would be worth your while to check out his website when it is back up and running.
Not an anecdote… but the papers by Jeremy Dronfield may interest you, regarding shapes (entoptics and subjective visual experiences; cf. most stuff by Paul Bahn) and cognitive approaches to archaeology.
Buck xxx
Hiya Mr Tasker,
Have you read
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140195408/qid=1132869286/sr=1-17/ref=sr_1_0_17/203-9952094-2410367
It sounds relevant.
Also take into account, you don't have to conciously imbibe psychedelics. Ergot mould can grow on crops, and some of the pigments and colours used in cave art are known to be poisonous, but the neurological by product of the poisoning can be hallucinations.
I'd like to think that Ergot infected crops would have been discarded..but i guess if the year was tough, or the crop poor or failing, then you'd have no choice other than to use the food or starve. I think i'm right in saying that cases of 'St Anthony's Fire' from the Middle Ages was attributed to ergot poisoning. For which another by-product can be blood posining and gangreen with prolonged exposure.
I used to take psychedelics many years ago as a kid, and remember one trip out in the country very vividly...i was fascinated by the wind blowing through a field of wheat, the visual hallucinations appeared to slow time down..leaving 'vapour trails' in the crop that were almost like waves on the ocean, or ripples in a pond. Also the geomtry of nature comes to the fore and is more apparent in altered states too.
Hello to you all...
First of all, my apologies for starting this thread and then disappearing; this is the first chance I've had to get back on the computer, and it has been a real pleasure to read all your contributions. I have printed them off and will reflect on them over the next few days. How wonderful to be able to share our thoughts in this way!
Danielspaniel expresses a thought which is similar to my own interests: "Maybe such experiences are as close as we can get to understanding the ancient mind as they can enable us to sublimate our modern-thinking ego and be immersed in the place and moment?"
I have heard it said that were we to take a newborn neolithic baby and bring the child up in our own society, he would grow up to be an integrated and indistinguishable citizen. But the fact that there are no significant biological differences between us and our ancestors does not establish that our minds work in a similar way to theirs. What the thesis brings out very forcefully, is exactly the notion that the character of a human being is a product of the conditioning they receive from the environment in which they grow up. And of course, the conditioning we receive, in our frenzied money-thirsty, media-governed world, is very different to the environment in which our anscestors developed.
But this brings me to the very reason I asked for your views on this subject. For me, the stone shapes in our landscape are pictures; they are complex propositions created by minds which are every bit as advanced as our own, and yet those minds were never exposed to the kind of conditioning that we get blasted with. I go to stone circles because I am seeking "to sublimate [my] modern thinking ego." If stone circles are in some sense 'propositions', then if we are able, through careful study, to read and understand those propositions, then our efforts will put us in direct contact with the minds of our anscestors (in just the same way that you get inside the mind of an author by reading their book). My idea is that if we could attain the perspective of people so far removed from our own society, we would greatly increase the resources we have with which to analyse and perhaps reject the conditioning which previously blinded us.
I now see that it may be a confusion to introduce talk of drugs in the same breath as talk of stone circles. Drugs may offer one way of transcending the grid imposed on our modern brains. Contemplation of stone circles may be another and there is no reason to suppose that drugs are necessary in order to engage with the meaning of ancient stone shapes. There are many other ways in which we might seek a new perspective on our own minds: every word, image or sound which one perceives, if it exposes us to a new thought, may offer a new perspective. But here is one distinction we ought to draw if we want to talk about drugs. Drugs are independent of ANY society. To take the perspective of some foreign culture, and from there to criticise our own culture, is all very well, but this presupposes a value judgement whereby we decide that the foreign perspective is better than our own. Reflecting on another culture can only tell us what other human beings thought - what their assumptions were - and will not necessarily reveal what is most fundamental. I'm certainly not saying that drugs offer the path to fundamental understanding; I am merely wondering...perhaps certain drugs offer a method of sublimation which is entirely derived from nature, and which does not contain the assumptions of other fallible human beings.
Thanks again for all your contributions. I promise you I will be reading them again very carefully, and I'll get back to you if I have anything to add. And please, criticisms or suggestions regarding what I have written will really be appreciated.
Nick
I know a gentleman in the autumn of his life who got drunk in Avebury and arrived home black and blue with cuts and grazes ... he spent two hours or so walking into stones, falling over, getting up again and walking into more stones ...
I have no idea who daubed the stones at Avebury a few years ago, but I remember meeting some old guy called Alan who was clearly tripped out beyond the beyond ... and he told me he saw 'glyphs' on the stones ... so if you're going to get wasted ... maybe doing it away from henges is a good idea ... and lock up yer paint first to avaoid temptation ... then there was the German guy who got swallowed by Silbury Hill ... all hooched up again ... and the *****rs I threw out of W.Kennet Longbarrow some years ago who were trying to light a fire inside! Unbelievable ... I bet the stone-pit burners were piss heads too .... of the most amazing experiences I've had at Neolithic sites, 99.9% were clear headed and sober!
During my short time following the earths energy , one little thing has stood out, fungi, they are always bang on the lines and circles.
It doesnt take a genious to realise that some of these little chaps, well lets say make you look at the world in a different way, not only that, perhaps they let you see the world as it actually is.
As the woodland areas would have been free from farming etc,etc, and the peoples senses would have been sharper to the reality as it is, not as now, when we are shielded against nearly all, surely they would have recreated what they percieved, there was no one telling them anything was wrong with eating the little happy chappies.
Not like now ,when you are declared a troll, just for having a different point of view.
Think I might start collecting the happy chappies, feel like I need them after a couple of months on here.
This is very interesting.
What strikes me is sometimes having a deep sense of timelessness - that is (for myself) having some non-cerebral comprehension of an enduring quality of human yearning. This can be so powerful as to become an altered state. I have absolutely no idea of how much of my mind I share with my pre-historic forbears but I completely understand the desire to create something enduring, to mark the passing of one's life and of those that mattered to you.
I have had three or four intensely wierd (drug free) experiences at prehistoric places - two of which were in the Cambrians where the sites concerned are very small. But they were also at times when I was feeling intensely wierd so it's difficult to tell where the causal line lies between person and place.....then add in drugs..