Shamanic Consciousness Embodied in Shamanic Figures Created During the Paleolithic Period in Caves in Southern Europe: Part 5

• Published in: The Journal of transpersonal psychology Vol. 54; no. 1; pp. 31 - 55
• Main Authors: Maier, Gary J, Musholt, Edmond A, Stava, Lawrence J
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Stanford Journal of Transpersonal Psychology 01-01-2022
• Subjects: Animals; Artists; Candidates; Cave art; Caves; Consciousness; Conventions; Paleolithic; Spirituality; Lascaux Cave
• ISSN: 0022-524X

The authors identify the ritual each shaman is performing and suggest, as a convention, that the shamans-artists put a bird head on shamans performing rituals associated with the spirit world and a bison head when performing rituals associated with the natural world. Six glossary notes, placed at the end of the article, are offered for places in the text where the discussion should be understood within a larger context, and which serve to deepen the reader's understanding Keywords: Paleolithic Artwork, Shamanism, Lascaux Cave, Stages of Consciousness Development The intent of this article is to describe and interpret seven shamanic figures that were discovered in four of the more than 150 caves in southern Europe that have cave art from the Paleolithic period, 35,000-11,000 BC. (2019, p. 257) we considered the shamans-artists in the artwork in the Lascaux Cave depicted the moment our Sapiens ancestors became aware of their individual mortal existence and their immortal spiritual existence through the gaze between the large legless head-only bull, by convention the soul of a bull, connecting with the gaze of the large full-bodied bull, by convention a mortal bull. (See Note Three.) We also suggested that the shamans-artists developed a number of conventions to hold the meaning of their artwork constant. [...]even though the total number of shaman figures in the artwork are small, we now suggest that the artists codified a convention whereby they put a bison head on a shamanic human figure if the ritual the shaman was performing accented events in the natural world and a bird head on a human figure if the ritual accented events in the spirit world.