> [[gosso]]; [[webster]]. *The Dream On The Rock*. Suny Press, 2013. [pdf](a/f-gosso-p-webster2013.pdf) --- # Notes on Sunday, April 14, 2019 9:59 PM The Dream On The Rock: Visions of Prehistory Fulvio Gosso & Peter Webster © 2013, State University of New York ——————————————————————————————————————— 5-7 Potential Sources of Archaic Visionary Consciousness Natural Substances (psychoactive, psychedelic, hallucinogenic; plants and fungi) Perceptual Disorders and Modifications (daydreams, light/shade, ambiguous figures, mimicry, clouds, fog, dark) Entopic phenomena, Phosphene and Elementary Hallucinations (plot, color fields, geometric shapes, pressure on the eyeball, fix a light source, sun, fire) Contemplative Meditation (fixing perception, concentration on particular) Atmospheric and Physical Phenomena (lightning, volcanic eruptions, northern lights, shooting stars, comets, earthquakes, eclipses) Dreams, Lucid Dreams, Eidetic Images (hypnagogic and hypnopompic stages) Modified Respiration (spontaneous hyperventilation and hypoventilation, digeridoo, ritual suffocating, Pranayama) Hypnotic Trance of Dissociation (dance, chants, mantras, prayers, litanies, rhythmic music, sufi techniques) Long Term Sensory Isolation (Christian mysticism, shamanism) Fast, Physical Pain self-inflicted (Christian mysticism, Sun Dance) Accidental Poisoning, Food Poisoning (visions of ergotism) Neurological Diseases, Psychosis, Acute Febrile States (epilepsy of the temporal lobes) States of Post-Traumatic Shock (panic, fainting, accidents, electrocution, acute pain) Spontaneous Extrasensory Phenomena (NDE, mystical appearances, demonic, phantasmic, astral travel, Kundalini) Psychoactive Substances of Archaic Use Amanita Muscaria Anadenanthera, Peregrina E Columbrina—Yopo—Cohoba—Cebil Cannabis Indica Psilocybin Lophophora Williamsil—Peyote Trichocereus Pachanoi—San Pedro—Aguacolla Sophora Secundiflora—Mescal—Red Beans Ungnadia Speciosa—Monilla ——————————————————————————————————————— 13 “Mauss and Hubert wrote…General Theory of Magic…p.139…“Magic is essentially an art of doing and the magicians have carefully used their know-how, their tour de main, their manual skill. It was the future of pure production; it does with words and gestures what technicians do with work…”…The same magical attitude towards nature, acting upon it according to its laws, and even violating or modifying them as well, is generally a predisposition to scientific acting and technological inventiveness. This, in antithesis to the religious attitude of submission to the “sacred”, of dependences “as creatures,” subjects to the divine…” [G. Grana, L’invenzione di Dio (Vol. I) (Roma: Setup, 2000).] ——————————————————————————————————————— 15 From an ethnological point of view [Note: K. E. Müller, Sciamanismo. Guaritori, Spirit, Rituali (Torino: Boringhieri, 2001.)], we identify three kinds of shamanism: (1) an elemental or primary one aimed at ensuring a positive outcome in hunting, good health, fertility (2) a secondary complex shamanism dealing with home, familiar, and community rituals, with a greater formal complexity and employing plenty of paraphernalia (3) a syncretic shamanism acting in parallel with complex religious systems (Lamaism, Hinduism, Shintoism, etc.), predominately female. The clients of the first two typologies are restricted to family clans and the village, while the shaman’s common features seem to be typically individualistic concerning both the power exercised and the knowledge transmitted. He seems to operate in relative solitude, and there isn’t in fact a shamanic coterie, a group of specialists who consult and collaborate. …mythical deification, see Dionysus, Morpheus, Odin… ——————————————————————————————————————— 16-17 As time passes, the visionary élite sets itself up as a caste, obtains temporal power, generates affiliations and social structures, deepens and codifies its knowledge, and with the advent of writing historicizes the resulting religious edifice to make it temporally enduring. The result is that it becomes even more “true,” increasing the consent of the masses, and also becoming productive from a material, economic, and political point of view. It aids the occupation of new territories, the management of the masses, the control of sexuality and male-female relationships, it invents prayers, sacraments, and apotropaic gestures, which replace the old magic with a new one, it purports to open a preferential channel with the divinity, drives away previous beliefs, and creates cult locations: The Age of Religions has arrived. The use of psychoactives now becomes “sacramental” and continues as before, even more so and openly in, for example the pre-Colombian civilization. It becomes masked by new denominations, the Moly in mythical Kabiria, the Kykeon in Eleusis, the Bablyonian Aradea, the Vedic Soma, the Persian Haoma…The suspicion is strong of the presence of such a feature in the Egyptian cults as well as in Buddhism, Mithraism, even Christianity, whose iconography is studded with hallucinogenic mushrooms from as early as AD 500 [Note: F. Gosso, and G. Camilla, Allucinogeni e Christianesimo. Evidenze nell’arte sacra (Paderno Dugnano [MI]: Colibrì, 2007).]. ——————————————————————————————————————— 18-19 Gebser [Note: J. Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin (Athens, OH: Ohio Univeristy Press, 1985). Original edition 1949)] be-lives consciousness to have undergone restructurings during human history, with each phase marked by a different kind of awareness corresponding to four sequential mental sets: 1. Archaic: entirely instinctive (before Neanderthal) 2. Magical: pre-ego, intuitive, analogical thought, pre-rational (first cave paintings) 3. Mythical: privileging symbols, creativity, feelings, irrational thought (birth of great religions) 4. Mental: based on reflective abilities, rational thought (Greek philosophers) Each mental structure conditions the interpretative context of reality of the period. According to Gebser, a fifth consciousness structure should be about to appear, defined as integral, incorporating the four previous ones yet at the same time transcending them ——————————————————————————————————————— 33 Caves are the material passages leading to the lower stages of the shamanic cosmos. The representations (art) signify the shamanic “power” of transformation and control over Nature. The bovines and horses, the more frequently represented creatures, later domesticated, the human details (female sexual organs and more rarely the male ones, hands, sometimes heads, and indefinite “silhouettes”) represent projected “partial objects” in a psychoanalytical sense, perhaps as an incomplete attempt on control of sexuality. The hand symbology is linked to power and perhaps to a kind of connection with Mother Earth, aimed at establishing a principle of control to magically get hold of what in reality slips through the fingers. The hands depicted on a horse in Cosquer and around two other horses in Pech-Merle could express a magical desire to “touch”, to be physically in touch with the living animal, in everyday life a difficult feat. The magical operation of the exercise of control is probably the mental forerunner of the ability to domesticate bovines and horses, which established evidence shows would be achieved only in the Neolithic. On an interpretive and probabilistic level, however, nothing forbids the idea that some measure of domestication took place much earlier. … Th experience brought about by Amanita muscaria consumption…as Rozwadowski writes…“the impression of making a great effort to squeeze ones way into a small crack, which appeared to one as a door….a narrow opening” The anthropomorphic figures located in Tamgaly Valley in Southeast Kazakhstan, about 170 km from Alma-Ata, date back to the second millennium BC. Petroglyphs with a “solar” head are numerous, as are others linked to the horse. Their shamanic nature is first of all defined by the figures’ physical characteristics, curiously dressed sometimes with a kind of idetification with a representation of a horse’s mane…the curious crosier-shaped “arms” in the form of a pastoral staff, in the religious sense of the term…Association of the “solar heads” with the horse and sometimes the bull seems to establish a connection with the Indo-Iranian populations who inhabited these regions during the same period. ———————————————————————————————————————35-36 A Neolithic depiction of an eight-legged equine in Valcamonica (Foppe di Nadro R27), that along with the “Cernunnos” (deer-man—Naquane R70, Middle Iron Age) and other praying figures linked to the deer, well represent the ancient shamanism of this extensive Italian site. [Note: Sansoni & Gavaldo in Vari, Prehistoric and Tribal Art: Shamanism and Myth] The bronze masks of western Siberia found in Rybinskye and Kulay in the Tomask region date back to the Iron Age, between 600 and 800 BC (Fedorova in Price, 2001) and seem to refer to warrior-shamans, since the human features are mixed with those of aggressive animals such as the bear and predatory birds. Around the seventh century BC [Notes], the Greeks too came into contact with shamanic elements from Scythia and Thrace, and some associated quasi-mythical personages: Abaris dispelled plagues and predicted earthquakes, Aristea practiced trance and ubiquity, Ermotimus ventured upon long travels of the soul to distant places, Epimenides the Cretan was able to fast for long periods and so achieve psychic translations, on his death his body covered itself with tattooed inscriptions. The myth of Orpheus is also clearly of shamanic origin: he was of Thracian descent, charmed animals and birds with music, traveled in the underworld in order to recover abducted souls, etc. Eliade postulated that the cult of Odin…also has many features in common with shamanism. Odin’s steed, an eight-legged horse named Sleipnir, leads his master to Hel, the underworld, and is a parallel to typical Siberian shamanism. Odin is also able to change shape at will and transform himself into a bird or wild animal, reach ecstasy by separating body from soul, and Odin’s two ravens, Thought and Memory, are very similar to bird-shaped auxiliary spirits. Odin knew and practiced seiðr sorcery with which he could for-see the future and cause death and disease. The seiðr, a primarily female practice, provides for the use of a ritual costume, music, and singing to reach ecstasy. ——————————————————————————————————————— 52 “…the custom of the Siberian shamans of eating muscaria to achieve ecstasy has been noted; in the Ob-Ugric ritual three or seven mushrooms are eaten each time. It is interesting to note that in the tradition of the Reindeer Lapps of Inari the story is told of the Lapp magic in which the muscaria (with seven spots) was eaten. [Note: T. I. Itkonen, Heidnische Religion und späterer Aberglaube bei den finnischen Lappen, Vol. LXXXVII (Helsinki: Suomalais-ugrilainen seura, 1946), 149.] ——————————————————————————————————————— 53 A decidedly speculative hypothesis concerns a text by Samuel Ødman [Note: L. S. Ødman in D. H. “On Going Berserk: A Neurochemical Inquiry” American Journal of Psychiarty 113 (1956): 411-12.] of 1784 regarding the possible use of the Amanita by the Berserk Viking warriors, around AD950 (hypothesis refuted by Wasson). ——————————————————————————————————————— 57: 5- 59 my friend Gilberto Camilla…we agreed that the statue-stelae could be considered anthropomorphic mushroom statues…Anati writes as follows: “It is not to be excluded that what we have here is a phenomenon of a “universal” religion that spread like wildfire throughout Europe in the late fourth millennium BC. It can be compared to what happened in the late first millennium AD with Islam…The statue stealae movement really got underway and developed in the classic phase at the end of the fourth and during the third millennium BC subsequent expansions were immense. Perhaps as early as the third millennium BC and certainly in the early second millennium BC the iconography and ideology connected with the statue stealae spread into Siberia, up to the shores of the Pacific. Thousands of the famous kamenyia babouschka are scattered throughout the valley of the Jenisei river. [Note: E. Anati, Le statue-stele della Lunigiana (Milano: Jaca Book, 1981), 65].” The kamenyia babouschka, known as Kamennaya Baba are also found here and there throughout the Urals, and some really resemble the Lunigiana stelae, except for the head, which is not mushroom-shaped but in some cases decidedly phallic.” ——————————————————————————————————————— 63-66 CUP MARKS Bednarik’s summary of explanations: [G. R. Bednarik, “Reply: On cupule interpretation,” Rock Art Research 25, no. 2 (2008): 214-21] 1. magic-cult rituals 2. use in the preparation of substances (spices, pigments, medicines) 3. devices for mnemonic recording 4. elements in systems of belief 5. depictions of heavenly bodies 6. depictions of topographical elements 7. used in “table” games 8. symbols now lost 9. receiving of offerings 10. specific symbols 11. other practical uses “I believe that the cup-shaped cavity can easily be seen as the “negative” imprint, in size and characteristics, that a mushroom cap, specifically Amanita muscaria, would leave on a soft surface.” [See On The Potential Use of Cup Marks by Gosso] The presence of A. muscaria in these areas, even now, can readily be verified. …the drying process takes only a few hours when the sun is right, and often the ricks are oriented so as to have the maximum exposure to the sun…ritual drying cavities connected to fertility cults…with a symbolic penetration into the rock (Mother Earth) of the phallic mushroom that stands there erect, upside down, until it is dry. An “aphrodisiac” use…cannot be excluded…references are found in old German folklore [C. Rätsch and C. Müller-Ebeling Lexikon der Liebesmittel. Pflanzliche, mineralische, tierische und synthetische. Aphrodisiaka (Aarau: AT-Verlag, 2003)] The mycologist Bernard Lowy [B. Lowy, “New Records of Mushroom Stones from Guatemala” Mycologia 63, no. 5 (1971): 983-93.] believes that some of the mushroom stones of Guatemala, with pregnant female figures depicted on the stem, are connected to a fertility cult, and Fabing [D. H. fabing “On Going Berserk: A neurochemical Inquiry” American Journal of Psychiatry 113 (1956)] refers to a possible “orgiastic” use in Kamtchatka….dried or in a fertmented beverage based on Kiprei…More generally, the shape itself lens itself to sexual allusions in terms of human genital organs…Schwegler [U. Schwegler Schalen-und Zeichensteine der Schweiz (Basel: Schweizerische Gesellschaft fur Ur-und Frühgeschichte, 1992] affirms “The cup marks may be sexual symbols (an abstract representation of the maternal womb or vulva).”