Rock
The Dream on the
Rock
visions of prehistory
Fulvio Gosso
and
Peter Webster
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
Gosso, Fulvio,
[Il sogno sulla roccia English]
The dream on the rock : visions of prehistory / Fulvio Gosso and Peter
Webster.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Summary: Examines the relationship between rock art, shamanism, and the
origins of human existenceProvided by publisher.
ISBN 978-1-4384-4875-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Petroglyphs. 2. Rock paintings. 3. Art, Prehistoric. 4. Shamanism in
art. I. Title.
GN799.P4G6645 2013
709.01'13dc23 2013000109
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
If it were clear that madness is evil, that would suffice.
Yet mankind receives the greatest of good things
Precisely as a result of that state of delirium given as a divine
gift.
Thus the Delphic prophetess and the priestesses at Dodona,
When they are seized by mania do Greece many good things,
Both for the public and for individuals.
But when they are possessed of normal sanity, they do little or
nothing.
Plato, Phaedrus 224ab
Contents
Acknowledgments / xi
Introduction / 1
1
Foundations of the Research / 11
2
Sites of the Research / 41
3
The Significance of the Research / 67
4
Origins of Psychedelia (Peter Webster) / 83
Notes / 113
Index / 125
List of Tables and Illustrations
ix
Acknowledgments
xi
Introduction
1
2/ THE DREAM ON THE RO CK
wood, the leather and its tanning, the methods of assembly.. .noth
ing is left to chance. The percussion is simple, monotonous, smooth
and steady, prolonged, often accompanied by a song with no true
melody, story, or the invocation of a song. Dance is not a require
ment but often accompanies the sound, even as an almost involuntary
rhythmic movement, or as postures that may imitate hunting or the
movements of the hunted animal.
The relationship with all of nature, with both plants and ani
mals, is fundamental. One never hears or reads of urban shamans.
Instead, the context is universally the vast wilderness, and as Ger
man ethnologist Hans Peter Duerr explains,3 the vastness is not only
a physical dimension but also an existential category. Of particular
interest is the relationshipalmost fusionwith the animalguide
with which the shaman identifies himself. The identification is com
plete: the shaman becomes a bear, a wolf, a bird.
To take upon himself an animal consciousness can be under
stood only with reference to the deep and irremediable diversity of
the metacommunicative context of the shaman of another age, an
age when proximity to the model animal was much more significant
than in modern times. It was a closeness both on the behavioral and
biological plan, a closeness of imitation and competition in the activ
ity of hunting, in nutritional similarities, in the aural and kinaesthetic
domains, in reproductive activity and in group movements.
A final aspect typical of shamanism concerns the real magic, in
particular the techniques of healing that involve recovering the soul
of the sick from the spirit world in which he is lost. The ecstatic
trance of the shaman takes him along the line of the Axis Mundi, a
perfect pathway that rises from the depths of the earth to the sky and
the stars, and whose abstract and concrete correlates are represented
by the tree or sacred mountain, gorges, caves, and grottos. Unlike the
common man who lingers between the earth and the sky, in a trance
the shaman learns how to move along the sacred route by working as
a healer, psychopomp, or as a priest, to deify, to communicate with
spirit allies, even to change the climate or strike enemies.
Universally diffused in shamanic techniques is the use of natural
psychedelics, most often single plants or extracts thereof, but some
times mixtures of psychoactive substances, including the devices and
techniques that can deliver the active ingredients. The ethnobotanist
Richard Evans Schultes remains the undisputed authority in this field.
In 1992 Terence McKenna, ethnobotanist and anthropologist,
assembled an interesting historical and political evaluation on the role
4/ THE DREAM ON THE RO CK
CHRONOLOGY
NATURAL SUBSTANCES
(psychoactive, psychedelic, hallucinogenic, etc., plants and fungi)
CONTEMPLATIVE MEDITATION
(fixing perception, concentration on particular . . .)
continued on next page
6/ THE DREAM ON THE RO CK
MODIFIED RESPIRATION
(spontaneous hyperventilation and hypoventilation, didgeridoo, ritual
suffocating, Pranayama . . .)
11
12 / THE DREAM ON THE RO CK
is simply another way to signify the same concept that has nothing
religious about it, even if it introduces as magical a vision of things
prescientific:
We may note also that the alleged cult of the dead is very far
from a merely religious vision of the phenomenon. On the contrary,
it seems consequent upon a quite material logic. The body with
out life is for a certain period persistent to the individual who has
inhabited it. As such, it has to be preserved by burial, protecting it
from carnivores forays. It has to be nourished with foods, herbs, and
14 / THE DREAM ON THE RO CK
supplied with tools that are stored in the tomb in order to allow the
deceased a continuation. And finally, affection for the dead requires
the preservation of the bones, nothing more and nothing less.
It is quite normal that in the first closeknit communities spe
cialization of family and multifamily tasks were begun, the sturdier,
braver, faster, healthier, the ones better endowed with a sharper sight
and manual skills, became hunters and warriors. The women devoted
themselves to bringing up the children, gathering and selecting herbs,
tubers, roots, mushrooms, fruits. Early experimentation in this field
must have been dramatic, especially in lean times, with the significant
risk of ingesting poisonous and toxic substances, some with the deceit
of pleasant tastes. And it is surely through such trial and error that
the existence and use of psychoactive and hallucinogenic substances
entered into our ancestors store of knowledge and experiences.
Very probably the first discoveries and revelations about the
other vegetal properties dealt with pain reduction and curative uses,
but also other lessexplored hypotheses are possible. For example, at
low doses the Psilocybe mushrooms seem to enhance ones attention
and concentration level and sharpen visual perception and discrimi
nating abilities, a useful result for hunting. Other substances such as
coca leaves, but also the flyagaric, enhance resistance to fatigue and
hunger, augmenting performance abilities for any tasks at hand.
Evolution generates new occupations and stores of knowledge
that could be socialized and exchanged. The shamanhealer, man or
woman, is one such agent or employee, whose natural habitat was
a specific metacommunicative context, the wild nature dimension3
propaedeutic for entry into other dimensions inaccessible in the ordi
nary state of consciousness of daily routine.
To find today a wild nature, a forest, taiga, or desert, we have
to make long and expensive journeys and the charm of the place can
be quickly extinguished by a passing aircraft or the untimely trill of
a mobile phone. The same safetyensuring conditions with which we
travel, (weapons, food, medicines, various suitable technologies) make
doubtful even the possibility of this particular relationship with nature.
During the prehistoric epoch it was sufficient merely to exit
ones cave or hut to be plunged into this certainly dangerous but also
undoubtedly exciting and imaginative dimension. It was in this not
only geographical but also mystical place that the senses resounded,
expandedthe emotions, discoveries, and curiosities fed not only the
body but also the spirit.
FOUNDATIONS OF THE RESEARCH / 15
1.
archaic, entirely instinctive (before Neanderthal);
2.
magical, preego, intuitive, acting in the form of ana
logical thought, prerational (first cave paintings);
3.
mythical, privileging symbols, creativity, feelings, irra
tional thought (birth of the great religions);
4.
mental, based on reflective abilities, rational thought
(Greek philosophers, but the existence of the mythical
dimension remains).
Figure 1.2. Carved rock before the entrance at Newgranges mound (Boyne
Valley, Ireland)
22 / THE DREAM ON THE RO CK
Origins of Shamanism
The presence of men with bird and deer masks in the cave of
Lascaux in Dordogne, typical of the shamanism of Northern Siberia,
is one of the best examples of the archaic shamanic presence. The
Sorcerer of Les Trois Frres is another.
Evidence of shamanic practices becomes more frequent begin
ning with the Late Neolithic period, and the first ethnographic docu
mentation of the phenomenon comes from the UralicSiberian area,
compiled by the rare European travelers who ventured, for different
reasons, into those areas beginning in about the year 1700.
The anthropomorphic figures located in the Tamgaly Valley in
Southeast Kazakhstan, about 170 km from AlmaAta, 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 identification with a representation of a
horses mane corresponding with the most recent ethnographic data,
just as there is a correspondence for the curious crosiershaped arms,
in the form of a pastoral staff, in the religious sense of the term.
The subject of transformation seems to find references in the
presence of parallel broken lines between two adjoining images which
in the subsequent panel show elements of magical change between
man and animal or a corresponding metaphysical entity. The breakage
is also a metaphor for the difficulties of the shift from one state of
consciousness to another and finds parallels in the phenomenology of
Grofs perinatal matrices. The experience brought about by Amanita
muscaria consumption provides a further example, as Rozwadowski
writes:
Evolutionary Models
Lewis H. Morgan was one of the first to deal with possible evolu
tionary models of human existence since prehistoric times. He was
a versatile man, along with his contemporary Marx a proponent of
Historical Materialism, and was also well known for his ethnography
of the Iroquois native Americans and cofounding of The Order of
the Iroquois. He was also a politician in the Republican Party in the
state of New York.
According to Morgan, human history developed over three peri
ods: savagery, barbarism, and then civilization. He further divides these
three into seven stages, from lower savagery (men feed on fruits and
berries) through to civilization (use of the phonetic alphabet and
writing). In this scenario, the family has evolved through five stages:
(1) The consanguineous family, in which weddings occurred among
brothers and sisters; (2) The punalua family, in which the wedding
FOUNDATIONS OF THE RESEARCH / 37
nomadic tribes coming from the Volga basin between 4300 and 2800
BC. These tribes, called Kurgans (tumuli or mounds), centred on
horse breeding, were well armed and highly patriarchal, and would
have gradually put an end to the Goddess cult and to matrilineal
organization.
The Goddess, also found in the animal forms of the bird and
snake, guardian of the family and the clan, dispensed life and death.
Gimbutas found traces of her presence in large quantities of arti
facts, pottery, and objects, but mostly in a great number of female
statuettes, often depicting maternity or the birthing process. Almost
always depicted with large breasts and buttocks,36 the quintessence
of these statuettes is the socalled Venus of Hohle Fels, which dates
back between 35,000 and 40,000 BP and was discovered in 2008 by
the archaeologist Nicholas Conard in Southern Germany.
It should be said that not all of the entire anthropoarchaeolog
ical mainstream has accepted Gimbutass theories, which do in fact
have some limitations. Various stylized and geometric representations
are more likely the result of entoptic phenomena not necessarily tied
to a female deity and, in general, the statuettes dont necessarily rep
resent a goddess. Moreover, the Kurgan invasions appear to have been
a phenomenon that was limited to the Balkans and occurred later
than what the author states. The deification of the archetype of the
Mother and its organized religious cult seems to be a later phenomena
(Greece, Egypt, etc.), or elsewhere located. Its more likely, however,
that in early Neolithic Europe, the mystery of conception, pregnancy,
and childbirth (issues clarified only in modern times!) provided more
than one reason to sanctify, respect, and hold in high consideration
the role of the female.
The English poet and writer Robert Graves arrived at con
clusions similar to Gimbutas but by way of a different route, and
much sooner, in 1948, through glottological analysis and considerable
knowledge of Gaelic and Greek myths. Something that his biogra
phies usually dont mention, however, is that Graves himself was a
discerning psychonaut with extensive knowledge of the use of psilo
cybin mushrooms (on which he wrote). These experiences certainly
influenced his life and his work. His was a White Goddess:
Preface
41
42 / THE DREAM ON THE RO CK
Latin America
FarEastern Siberia
Many peoples and cultures are involved: the Khanty, Nganasan, Ket,
Chukchi, Koryak, Itelmen, the Eskimos, and Russians living in Koly
ma, Chuvanians, and Yukagir. Saar has identified four broad sectors
of use: sacred and magical activities, epic recitation, the effect upon
physical stamina and work abilities, and narcotic use.
The first sector involves communication with the souls of the
dead, with the spirits, for healing and for guidance on how to escape
from dangerous situations, for the interpretation of dreams, the divina
tion of the past and future, and for visits to other worlds. Clairvoyance
and other information are received through anthropomorphic spir
its of the flyagaric known as manikins or mushroom spirits, which
depict, often in incomplete or approximate form, a mushroomman
who communicates with the shaman or with the person who has
consumed the Amanita in that context. The manikins anthropomor
phic but indeterminate form well represents the second hallucinatory
stage iconic forms described by LewisWilliams and Dowson in their
famous article.27
In cases that require physical performance such as hunting, run
ning, or long hikes Amanita seems to increase stamina and strength,
similar in its effects to amphetamines. There are also reports of
increased affability and good humor, euphoria, visual and auditory
hallucinations, and oneiric activity. Naturally, considerable variation
of effect occurs according to the amount and quality of the flyagaric
consumed and the predisposition of the user. Before the trance and
prior to the actual ceremony, for example, the shaman focuses his
mental powers in a solitary ritual preparation during which there
is an exchange between the mental realm and the cognitive maps.
According to Krippner, the shaman lives in a context of selfgenerated
interior imagery and an exterior world in which the symbolic mate
rial is constantly present. Moreover, his audience plays an important
part in how long the trance lasts and how profound it is. Thus, with
out imposing contemporary historicalethnographic elements on the
archaeological data, it can legitimately be supposed that the meanings
of the petroglyphs are quite in line with such a shamaniccultural
interpretation.
Anthropoids armed with a bow and with what is probably a
medicine pouch at the waist have been identified in the first28 of
the two relevant sites along the Yenisei river, between the Sajanskij
ravine and the OrtaaSargol hill. Dating to the Bronze Age, these
hominids have a large hat instead of a head, sometimes with warts,
supported by what looks more like a stem than a neck. This, as well
as their relative similarity to the figures of the second site along the
Pegtymel river, a few meters from the water and circa 60 km from the
outlet to the sea, led to their being called mushroom men. Dikov29
identified about thirtyfour human figures at the latter site. They are
prevalently female, one with long earrings, and each with an explicit
and unmistakable mushroom, unquestionably an Amanita muscaria,
over, but almost never in direct contact with their heads. Probably
dating to Neolithic times, Dikov believes that they were made by
protoEskimo populations prior to the arrival of the Chukchi. The
figures seem to be moving forward while the presence of the mush
room in relation to the head once more brings to mind, as with the
Tassili figures, the psychoactive effects of the mindaltering substance.
From the beautiful short film by Andrei Golovnev, Russian
director and archaeologist, it can be inferred that in Chukotka, where
the Chukchi generically call the flyagaric wapak, consumption of the
substance is now limited to initiates except for the ritual feast day of
Mnegyrgyn, when anyone may consume it. Moreover, the inhabitants
of these places have no doubts as to the significance of the petro
glyphs, considered intimately connected to their origins. A. muscaria
is of such importance to these peoples that three different names are
used to describe its stages of growth. When the mushroom is still a
S ites of the research / 51
button it is called kylik, when completely mature with the cap begin
ning to flatten it is ryrytylyn, when the first cracks appear it becomes
kakynton. There also seems to be an archaic bond between the Ama
nita and the whale, represented frequently near the human figures at
this site. An ancient myth30 recounts that Big Raven, a cultural hero
among these populations, captured a whale that he then wanted to
return to the sea. Unable to do so, he asked Vahiyinin (Existence)
for help and was told to eat the wapak, and the mushroom would
give him the strength he needed to take the whale back to the sea.
This hints at a connection to the physical stamina provided by the
substance in relation to hunting activities.
Figure 2.2. Swedish ships and Danish shaver with fungal images
52 / THE DREAM ON THE RO CK
Until the end of the 1980s scholars of the psychedelic field prac
tically ignored Europe almost as if it there were a complete lack
of documentation of shamanic activities of any type, historical or
prehistorical.
While the solanacea31 such as Datura stramonium, Atropa bella
donna, Mandragora, del Giusquiamo, and Amanita muscaria were known
to exist widely in Europe, there are also at least thirty or more spe
cies of Psilocybe mushrooms, including the widespread P. semilanceata.
The first reference to the relationship between rock art and
manmade objects and Amanita muscaria was in the Scandinavian
area32 with two ships engraved on two rocks in bi, Bohusln, in
Sweden. There are numerous engravings of this type in the area.
Three mushroomlike images interpreted by Kaplan as Amanitas are
on each of these two ships. Together with other symbolic motifs they
referred to an ancient Sun cult. Ships associated with the mushroom
motif also appear on seven bronze razors found in Denmark (Hon
unSkanderborg and NustrupfeldNorschleswig). They all belong to
the period between 1100 and 700 BC.33 It was pointed out by Fagg34
that four of the six mushrooms on stone may have been depicted in
crosssection in a technique known in rock art as Xray drawing.
This observation was accepted by Kaplan. While this Xray technique
is particularly widespread in Australia, every so often it appears more
or less everywhere and consists in depicting principally zoomorphic
figures with their internal organs or parts of them showing as if they
had been Xrayed or dissected. More will be said later concerning
this curious phenomenon.
There are no reasons to deny the validity of Kaplans interpreta
tion, but pending new finds of similar type this hypothesis will remain
intrinsically weak. In this case too there are, however, contemporary
ethnographic references to the shamanic use (noaidi) of A. muscaria
among the Inari population in Finnish Lapland, near Lake Inari.
muscaria were ritually dehydrated to preserve them for later use. If this
hypothesis is confirmed might there not then have existed an ancient
Neolithic cult connected to the use of Amanita in an area of Europe
for which there are no ethnographic or paleontological data on the
resident populations?41 The numerous similar sites in the Alpine arc
include Rocio Veglio near La Ruata di Pramollo (TO), Pera Crevol
and Roca dle Faie in Val di Susa, Roch Malgn di Riviera and boulder
n. 14 in Zubiena (Biella), and an enormous number of lesser rocks and
with fewer cup marks. It should be noted that the cup marks continue
up to the Iron Age and also appear in other European areas,42 Scan
dinavia, the Baltic republics, and to a lesser extent in other locations.
Still to be considered is the question of the sacred stones.
There is no scarcity of apparent references in such sculpture to A.
area between Liguria and Tuscany. The first was found in 1827 in the
locality of Nov, in Zignago, in the province of La Spezia. The most
recent finds date to 2001 in the municipality of Mulazzo. Altogether
there are around seventyfive statuesstelae, most of which are from
Pontremoli and La Spezia.
The heads on the ten statues found in Filetto I and VIII,
Taponecco, Malgrate II and IV, Minucciano III, Verrucola, Sorano II,
Groppoli I and III are unusual and have often been described as half
moon, Napoleons hat, carabinieres hat, etc., but oddly enough no one
has seen them as mushrooms. Originally there must have been many
more statues with heads of this type but various outbreaks of icono
clasm before and during the Christian era destroyed what was consid
ered their most significant part, since many were found decapitated.
In 1997 I visited these sites with my friend Gilberto Camilla,
also a researcher in the psychoanthropologic discipline. We agreed
that the statuestelae could be considered anthropomorphic mushroom
statues. One of the reasons why this had never been taken into con
sideration might have been the fact that figuratively they are exclu
sively twodimensional. The threedimensional element, the thickness
of the statue, is simply a technical artifice so that the figure can stand
upright but has no artistic significance. Seen frontally, either in a
photo or in real life, an Amanita type mushroom does look strikingly
like the Napoleonic hat mentioned above.
In some examples a melancholy face is summarily sketched out
on the hathead. Generally, the body is more or less rectangular and
legless. The arms, when present, are shown in low relief on the rect
angle, at times with a dagger and/or a digging tool. These squat
compact figures once again are reminiscent of the Siberian mushroom
manikins. Many other sculptures, earlier than the ten listed, bring
to mind the newborn Amanita, when the head and the stem or
stalk are a single unit. See in particular the eight statuestelae of the
Pontevecchio group found in 1905. The oldest of these statue-stelae
date to around 3200 BC and they continued to be manufactured into
Etruscan times. The latest ones, however, have different character
istics, more like realistic statues with rounder heads, probably a sign
of a change in meaning.
Anati writes as follows:
figures. Experts believe this is one of the oldest European sites con
nected with agricultural populations, probably inspired by the use of
psychoactive substances,51 of which there are, however, no conjectures
as to the identity of the inductor.
The style of these motifs and others in the area is known as
macroschematic and is thought to be connected to fertility cults, female
divinities, and the Mother Goddess Nature, pregnant52 with ger
minating seeds. The slender flamelike dynamic and hieratic nature
of the anthropomorphs and above all the thorns on the body recall
the anthropomorphic figures of the American Pecos River. This, as
well as the general context, seems to substantiate the psychoactive
hypothesis of the rituals connected to the depictions. If we wish to
broach possible hypotheses regarding the specific inductor, I would
suggest mushrooms or even (thorny) Datura stramonium, substances
known and cited53 in historical times in Europe as early as the begin
ning of the Middle Ages (Hildegard of Bingen), above all with regard
to medicinal uses. The archaeologist Juan Ruiz and other research
ers54 report a wall painting dating to around 4000 BC in Spain in
the Selva Pasquala site (Villar del Humo, Cuenca) where a dozen
mushrooms, probably Psilocybe hispanica, are depicted on a panel more
than a meter long.
Most of the relevant literature deals with the discovery, survey, and
technical analysis of the sites. Articles devoted preferentially to their
In various parts of this study we have noted the role currently played
by psychology in the attempt to understand the often obscure signifi
cance of rock art. The psychoanalyst Nicola Peluffos comments on
this interdisciplinary collaboration are particularly pertinent:
One cannot help but share this line of reasoning, without, however,
reducing the two aspects of the phenomenon into simplistic com
parisons. More than ever the parallelisms involve cognitive aspects
or those relative to a subdevelopment. Indeed, everything points
to the fact that prehistorical technological man may have been more
intelligent, on average, than contemporary man. How else can his
survival be explained?
This does not mean that such a comparison will immediately
resolve the problem of the interpretation of rock art. Rather than
focusing on the collected data of the nature of the representations, we
would do better to turn our attention to what the primitive and the
infantile categories have in common. To begin with, there are the
quantitative data regarding the great number of human and animal
67
68 / THE DREAM ON THE RO CK
depictions that appear in both types. On the other hand house and
tree, typically found in childrens drawings, are almost completely
absent from rock art, while the sun is infrequently present, and
not in all locations, in petroglyphs and pictograms. But perhaps what
they have in common more than the subject matter are formal and
structural aspects, such as transparency and superposition in order
to show subjectively important aspects that cannot be seen at one
and the same time, the overturning and flattening of the image. The
war chariots of Bohusln, for example, have flat attached wheels,
round and with visible spokes. Relative sizes no longer correspond
to reality and objects seen as more important are privileged in their
spatial collocation; perspective and a ground line are absent, and the
representation is predominantly narrative.
It hardly needs to be said that what interests us here are the
more complex representations, images, and pictograms in relation to
the immaterial manifestations of the psyche of a visionary or sym
bolicvisionary nature. Of less importance to us are the general aspects
of rock art, often consisting merely of lines, diagrams, ideograms, and
more or less schematic or geometric signs.
The functions of rock art could be thought of essentially as
a secondary language: after the words have given expression to the
thought, the art provides a memory of the activity depicted and a way
of recording the emotions stimulated by the mental depiction.2 As for
the mnemonic aspects, the first representations could be considered
as the beginning of the existence of an ESSS (External Symbolic
Storage System), a useful source of information for the internal, bio
logical memory.
Foundation Myths
And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every
tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the
tree of life also in the midst of the garden and the tree of
knowledge of good and evil. (Genesis 2:9)
And the Lord God commanded the man, saying,
Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But
of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt
not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou
shalt surely die. (Genesis 2:1617)
And when the woman saw that the tree was good for
food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to
be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof,
and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her, and
he did eat. And the eyes of them both were opened, and
they knew that they were naked. (Genesis 3:67)
The eating of the mythical Fruit here is seen not as sin but as the
original attainment of awareness of the self. Adam and Eve were
naked in respect to the gnosis, that is, they discovered that they
now knew what they had not known [before], and this is what they
were ashamed of.
Reference to consciousnessaltering substances here is almost
explicit and could support the hypothesis, as we will see in the next
chapter, that such substances contributed to the phylogenesis, the
formation of the characteristic selfawareness exclusive to the human
species. Once more, psychology can come to our aid. A crucial phase
in the evolution of the individual has been identified in what Lacan
calls the Mirror Stage, when the child at around nine months clearly
demonstrates a recognition of the Self.
The year 391 that marked the end of Eleusis also symbolically decreed
the eclipse in Europe of every initiatory ceremony, public and official,
based on the highly probable use of psychoactive substances. Only
seventynine years had passed since the battle on Ponte Milvio had
witnessed the triumph of the Emperor Constantine over Maxentius.
It constituted the beginning of the politicalreligious expansion of an
aggressive and sectarian cult that had caught on in Rome some years
earlier. Originating in Palestine and grafted onto Hebrew Judaism,
the cult was centered on the exaltation of suffering and on a human
sacrifice, on the expiation, including physical atonement, of sins, some
of which, regarding sexuality, were completely unknown as such to the
peoples who lived in Rome and under the Empire. There were various
reasons why this cult propagated, a cult that referred to Chrestus and
for which there is no documentation11 with the exception of the acts
of the religion itself. The cult privileged the interests of the group and
its rigid organization to the detriment of the individual; it rationalized
and simplified the religious vision of the world; its many gods were
replaced by a single god, promising paradise and eternal life to those
who accepted its rules. Women, excluded from the Mithraic rites, also
participated, even though in a position of submission. It was tolerant
with regard to slavery, the real motor behind the economy of those
times, and therefore it did not undermine the established order and
even became its champion.
The sig nificance of the research / 77
tor to invest broad social strata. But where does this need of trance
come from:
Marc Blochs core idea that improving our knowledge of the past
will help us better solve the problems of the present can also easily
be extended to the History of Prehistory. There is great wisdom in
the words of the previously cited Piero Coppo:
Origins of Psychedelia
Peter Webster
The search for evidence that human tribes and societies throughout
global history have used psychoactive plants for religious, shamanic,
philosophical, and medical purposes has met with great success. Pub
lications citing such evidence come from an entire spectrum, from
druguse oriented screeds to the most conservative of scientific jour
nals. The ultrarespectable Scientific American Library Series counts
among its handsome and lavishly illustrated volumes its Plants, People,
and CultureThe Science of Ethnobotany, and devotes an entire chap
ter to plants that have been used for Entering the Other World. A
world map shows clearly just how universal psychoactive plant use
has been, the historical locations of use of a dozen of the major plant
species being shown across the globe.1
The science of anthropology has not always been at the forefront
of such research, however, and still today some of the reigning para
digms of the discipline reveal a willful ignorance of the importance of
psychoactive use in the evolution of human societies. Many examples
could be cited, but one especially concerns us here: the stillongoing
nature versus nurture debate, which, as we will see, has allowed
anthropologists to ignore psychoactive plant use as a mere curios
ity, or worse, as a perversion or degeneration of a supposed original
drugfree shamanism.
83
84 / THE DREAM ON THE RO CK
perhaps assisted human emergence, and (3) was necessary for the evo
lution of humankind. The first hypothesis seems highly unlikely given
the available evidence, and will probably only be adopted by those
harboring a prejudicial antidrug bias. It need not be considered here.
There exists an important precedent for thinking that the seek
ing of NOSCs is a human universal, and that is the intentional psy
choactive drug use of a wide range of animals. Georgio Samorini, in
his book Animals and Psychedelics, presents evidence that
transition to early man did not take place. Then suddenly, one sum
mer...or perhaps it was winter, as I shall explain.
It has long been the accepted wisdom among many scientists, as well
as the common mythology of public perception, that the rise of tool
makingtechnologywas an important, if not defining characteristic
of the evolutionary process connecting advanced apes to Early Man.
Specifically, it has long been hypothesized that Darwinian selection
for increasingly intelligent hominids came about through selection
for the best abilities to make and use tools. In the extreme, at least
before recent studies of tool use and especially tool making in some
animal species, the technology of tools was thought to be a primary
defining characteristic separating Homo sapiens from the animal king
dom. Also among extremities of interpretation has been the idea that
tool making and early technology might even have been the force
driving the extraordinarily rapid increase in the size of the primate
brain, from the first hominids of two or three million years ago with
a brain volume of about four hundred cubic centimeters, to modern
man with a brain volume more than three times this figure.
It is understandably important to science to explain this evolu
tion in brain size, for it has often been noted that, on an evolutionary
timescale, the rapidity of the change was practically unprecedented.
Since the middle Pleistocene, about a halfmillion years ago, the rate
of increase was particularly rapid, so much so that it has even been
suggested that the enlargement might actually have been somewhat
pathological, leading to a being whose irrationality and capability
for wanton destructiveness equals or excels his creativity. Certainly,
recent history has featured a wealth of both capabilities, but blam
ing our present situation on purported faults of evolution is neither
productive nor scientifically logical.
It now appears that the toolmaking hypotheses also have
resulted less from a careful analysis of the data than from superficial
concurrence of two tendencies. Recent work now shows it extremely
likely that the ability to produce technologyit has been called
objectintelligence, for want of a better termhas been a development
that has piggybacked upon a much more important development
88 / THE DREAM ON THE RO CK
Evolutionary Scenario
however, nor had the genetic research that showed the ancestry of the
entire human race to be very recent, and it was these two develop
ments which provided me with a time frame and psychological mecha
nism to support my own psychedelic awakening scenario. It remains
now to show at what period an intervention of psychedelic influence
is most likely in consideration of several areas of knowledge about
fossils, human genetics, climate changes and catastrophic events, and
other sources of information. The necessity for a psychedelic interven
tion has been discussed elsewhere,9 and will be summarized below.
Before presenting a possible evolutionary scenario, however,
let me explore further the idea of social complexity and its relation
to the habit routine model of normal cognitive operation I have
proposed.10 I state that the power of the habit routine cognitive sys
tem would have increased with the increasing complexity of animal
species, and would have reached its summit in protoman. In our
protohuman ancestor we have a being whose potential intellectual
capability extends to inventing mathematics and hypothesizing phi
losophy, yet for at least one hundred thousand years, with the identi
cal equipment we possess today, we did no such thing. Our mental
powers for original, creative, analytical thinking which are a natural
product of that same intelligence that evolved for social transaction,
were held in check by powerful instinctive forcesexcept perhaps
for use in extreme emergencies, after which we would immediately
revert to our habitroutine governed existence. The very requirements
that brought our highpowered brain into existencethose necessary
for complex social interactionneeded to be radically channeled to
exclusive, habitroutine governed social use in normal times so that
social coherence would be maintained, so that individuals in a social
group used their powers in the established interests of the group,
and so that group selection would further advance the evolution of
advanced hominids. According to authors Elliot Sober and David
Sloan Wilson, this was the essential situation for the evolution of
unselfish or altruistic behavior.11
The Machiavellian Intelligence hypothesis, and its proposed
increasing social complexity, fits perfectly with my surmise. Increased
social complexity and the evolution of a large, expensive to sup
port nervous system go hand in hand with extreme reliance on habit
routine generation as the primary cognitive mechanism controlling
behavior. One major consideration is that a large brain requires an
excellent and copious diet, a requirement that would be fulfilled best
orgins of ps ychedelia / 91
the very fragmentary evidence in the fossil record, and the indirect
nature of other modern evidence to be described below, the chance
for error in proposing the story of how Early Man made his way
out of Eden is humbling. As we have seen above, the first theory
of psychedelic evolution, that of McKenna, has suffered terminally
from a dose of counterargument all too easily supplied by the critics.
Much of McKennas book remains admirable, however; for instance,
his presentation of evidence indicating the probable importance of
psychedelic plants for the very early tribal societies that lived on
the Tassili Plateau of southern Algeria, or atal Hyk in central
Anatolia. These are examples, along with ancient Greece and the
Eleusinian Mysteries, which illustrate the rapid flowering of culture
possible in societies in which there is strong, if not incontrovertible
evidence of psychedelic use. The importance of psychedelics for early
man certainly suggests an important evolutionary influence as well.
The trick is to deduce, using a wide variety of ancient and mod
ern evidence, when and where, and why, that evolutionary influence
might have taken place. Let me start by considering some modern
reinterpretations of the fossil evidence which have recently received
overwhelming support from one of sciences most recent and fascinat
ing developments, molecular genetics.
Chris Stringer, who is today the head of the Human Origins
Group of the Natural History Museum in London, recounts a most
interesting tale of scientific discovery in his recent book, African Exo
dus, coauthored by the science writer Robin McKie. It is the kind
of story that has epitomized the romance and excitement of scientific
discovery and revolution as perceived by the lay public, stories such
as the Curies discovery of radium or Galileos road to revolutionary
views of the heavens. But not only is the story of these recent dis
coveries concerning human origins of interest to the general public,
it represents a Kuhnian scientific revolution21 of important scope,
comparable to the recent revolution in geology with the advent of
the discovery of plate tectonics, or even the revolution in physics
earlier in the twentieth century.
The first chapters of African Exodus are concerned with a close
examination of the archaeological bones and stones, in which Dr.
Stringer shows how the Multiregional Hypothesis22 of human evolu
tion, the predominant model for most of the last century, has just
recently been discredited in favor of an OutofAfrica (actually, an
OutofAfrica II)23 model. A new mathematical technique, multivari
orgins of ps ychedelia / 97
ate analysis, used by Dr. Stringer during his several years of work on
the fossils, led him to doubt the validity of the multiregional theory
early on in his career. But only a small minority of paleoanthropolo
gists were ready to listen to new analyses of fossil characteristics that
called into question the status quo of their profession, for many great
scientists of the past decades had analyzed these same fossils and there
was wide consensus that a multiregional scenario was the correct one.
The upheavals and conflicts typical of a newly born scientific revo
lution ensued. A revolutionary new idea proposed by a small group
of scientists, at first rejected as absurd by the establishment, soon
began to topple that establishment. Chris Stringer and Robin McKie
introduce the book:
For the past few years, a small group of scientists has been
accumulating evidence that has revolutionised our awareness
of ourselves, and our animal origins. They have shown that
we belong to a young species, which rose like a phoenix
from a crisis which threatened its very survival, and then
conquered the world in a few millennia. The story is an
intriguing and mysterious one, and it challenges many basic
assumptions we have about ourselves....It is a remark
able, and highly controversial narrative that has generated
headlines round the world and which has been the subject
of a sustained programme of vilification by scientists who
have spent their lives committed to the opposing view that
we have an ancient, millionyearold ancestry. The debate,
which reverberates in museums, universities and learned
institutions across the world, is one of the most bitter in
the history of science.24
What finally broke the dam of resistance to the new ideas was
the entry upon the scene of revolutionary new techniques from a field
that had previously played no role whatever in paleoanthropology,
molecular genetics. Until very recently, the possibility that we might
learn something about the evolution of our distant ancestors by study
ing the genetic makeup of living humans was hardly even suspected,
and of course the techniques for doing so completely unknown. But
all this changed rapidly as the science of molecular genetics grew from
its infancy in the 1960s to the powerful tool it is today. The use of
genetic analysis for understanding evolution, the science of molecular
98 / THE DREAM ON THE RO CK
anthropology, also had its beginning the 1960s, with the pioneering
work of Allan Wilson (later to be a key player in the confirmation
of the OutofAfrica scenario) and Vincent Sarich. It was their early
work that began to topple many sacred cows of paleoanthropology, the
first to fall being the idea that apes and humans had diverged very
early, between fifteen and thirty Ma. By comparing protein structures
of modern apes and man, Wilson and Sarich concluded that the
separation could have been no earlier than 5 Ma. We were variously
ignored, abused and scorned, recalls Sarich. But it was the first of
many venerable precepts of paleoanthropology that was to fall to the
new techniques of genetic analysis. The research of Wilson and the
many others who followed came along at precisely the right time to
resoundingly confirm the early work of Stringer.
Stringer and McKie mention in their introduction above that
our species rose like a phoenix from a crisis which threatened its
very survival, and propose later on in the book the occurrence of a
population bottleneck sometime about 100 to 150 Ka. The possibility
of such a bottleneck has also drawn criticism from defenders of the
orthodoxy, yet again the genetic evidence has come to the forefront
to support the proposal.
The genetic evidence in question was not at first concerned
with the DNA of the cell nuclei, which are found in every cell of
the body and are responsible for control of the growing embryo and
inheritance of physical traits, but DNA contained the mitochondria
of these same cells. These small structures within animal cells act
like metabolic powerpacks, enabling the biochemical reactions which
provide the cell with energy. That these structures contain their own
DNA, entirely different from nuclear DNA, is something of a curi
osity, and has led to speculation that very early on in evolution,
mitochondria might have been a separate organism that developed a
symbiotic relationship with primitive singlecelled life forms to enable
the evolution of the first true singlecelled animals. Whatever their
evolutionary story, the mitochondria and their independently orga
nized DNA strands have provided an important key for the under
standing of hominid evolution. Two specific characteristics of mtDNA
(mitochondrial DNA) figure importantly: Firstly, mtDNA is trans
mitted only through the female lineage, since the mitochondria of
sperm reside in the cells extranuclear protoplasm, and do not enter
the egg at fertilization. Thus, mtDNA provides a powerful tool for
orgins of ps ychedelia / 99
Since mtDNA is passed on only through the female lineage, the exis
tence of a mitochondrial Eve does not imply that our nuclear DNA
is also descended from a single individual, nor that at one point the
human lineage was reduced to a single, or mere handful of individu
als (the Biblical Eve scenario!) Recent estimates of the number of
individuals existing at the time of the bottleneck, including that of
Chris Stringer, puts the number at perhaps ten thousand.26 It may be
argued that a population of ten thousand individuals is not what one
could call a genetic bottleneck, yet the sum of the genetic evidence
indicates that there were at least 100,000 adult archaic forebears of
our Africa ancestors about 200,000 years ago.27 Thus, a decrease to
ten thousand individuals is certainly a population crash indicative
of important events in the early evolution of modern man.
As for the date of the lifetime of mitochondrial Eve, there
have been various estimates between the extremes of about 60 to 400
Ka based on several different methods of mtDNA analysis. Some best
estimates put the life of mitochondrial Eve at about 130 to 140 Ka,
the date of origin of modern humans.28 The uncertainties in these
several estimates may be narrowed by considering data from other
fields of study, and from a view of the overall evolutionary scenario
that emerges upon consideration of all the information at our disposal,
including my own hypotheses of the influence of psychedelics on
the overall process. Using all these sources, a reasonably constrained
sequence of events with fairly accurate dates becomes possible.
central and important question for which they have not yet formu
lated an answer. Stringer and McKie write:
nids to outcompete all former races of archaic man, the secret of the
birth of the human race, may all be intimately related to one and
the same phenomenon: the advent of socially relevant psychoactive
plant use by a regionally isolated group of protohumans somewhere
in Africa. Such use might then have spread with the spread of the
descendants of this core group of individuals, mimicking a population
bottleneck in that psychoactive use and the advantages it provided
were closely guarded secrets not evident or available to competing
tribes. As I stated previously, if a member of a competing tribe were
to use the new medicine, it would only serve to isolate him from
his own group. Psychoactive use could then have been at once the
reason for an apparent but not necessarily absolute bottleneck, and
also the trigger, the key that enabled this original group to expand
and prosper by virtue of the cognitive advantages provided by the
cumulative effects of psychoactive use. These advantages, I remind
the reader, concern a new and powerful ability to suspend a mode of
existence entirely governed by habit routine. The advanced ape that
was our predecessor necessarily had, as I have stated above, the most
complete, one might say irrevocable dependence on habit routine of
any animal yet evolved, a dependence entirely precluding the use of
the most advanced nervous system ever evolved for creative purposes.
Climate Change
hearths and structured living spaces, open site religious burials, stor
age pits and social storage, quarries, the long distance exchange of raw
materials, longterm occupation of harsh environments, and signs of
complex forward planning made a wide appearance as evidenced in
the archaeological record.37 This apparently sudden appearance of the
roots of the modern age, in which the beginnings of modern tech
nology can be seen, is the phenomenon that has challenged anthro
pologists the most. If anatomically and cognitively modern humans
began their specieshood in Africa 130 Ka, why did it take so long
for the modern trend to get underway? And importantly, what was
the catalyst that precipitated this event so suddenly? Like all history,
the answers to such questions, even if they could be known, must
necessarily be very complex, a story that can be told in a multitude
of ways that might seem contradictory. Consider the myriad ways that
even recent history can be written.
But some scholars have proposed that the sudden flowering of
the modern age beginning about 40 Ka might actually have been more
gradual, and sporadic. Such ideas fit in with the above observations
on the likely characteristics of psychedelically enlightened societies.
The appearance of the previously mentioned bone harpoons in Zaire,
and other scattered evidence may well indicate that local tribes made
advances in technology in fits and starts, in response to novel chal
lenges, and then returned to long periods of stability. The appearance
of cave art seems today from modern discoveries to be rather abrupt,
yet the quality of such art would indicate a long tradition of artistic
endeavor. Certainly, the artists of the Lascaux and Cosquer caves were
no amateurs; thousands of years of tradition no doubt led up to their
remarkable artistic abilities. New discoveries of even more ancient
sites are bound to indicate that the first artists did not suddenly
appear around forty thousand years ago, but that artistic expression
was a slowly maturing phenomenon of very long duration indeed,
going back to the Eemian perhaps.
The psychedelic model of evolution of culture therefore agrees
that some recent interpretations of evidence indicating a sudden
flowering of culture beginning about 40 Ka is too drastic. Alison
Brooks, an archeologist who with John Yellen made the important
finds in Zaire, states:
One final surmise about the trigger events that may have contin
ued to push Early Man along the road to modern civilization will bring
this chapter to a close. If, according to my theory, there was a gradual
evolution of culture during the seventy thousand years between the
Eemian and the period in which the beginnings of modern culture are
deemed to have begun forty thousand years ago, then we might look
for the rapid, yet sporadic and geographically independent advances
in culture and technology to coincide with known instances of rapid
climatic change, with instances of severe volcanic activity or other
known or tobediscovered radical environmental influences during
the period. It will certainly be interesting to compare further detailed
analyses of the new Greenland ice cores to known and future archeo
logical discoveries in an attempt to correlate cultural change with
environmental disruption. Perhaps there will never be enough evi
dence to write history about such prehistoric times, but intriguing
clues and parallel developments may well appear that will at least
allow the writing of a probable scenario.
The question of how geographically isolated groups of modern
men all developed astounding cultural and technological advances,
and how at least two dozen different regional societies of men expe
rienced along with such changes a dramatic increase in population,
has been a puzzle for many archaeologists, linguists, anthropologists,
and other workers. In the words of Chris Stringer and Robin McKie,
Ethiopia
Introduction
113
114 / Notes to chapter 1
1.AA, VV, Prehistoric and Tribal Art: New Discoveries, New Interpre-
tations, New Research Methods (DarfoBoario Terme [BS]: Centro Camuno
Studi Preistorici, 2004), 384.
2. A. Argenton, Arte preistorica e psicologia dellarte, Boll. Camuno
St. Preist. 30 (1997): 722.
3.M. Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution
of Culture and Cognition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993 [original
publication 1991]), 312.
4. J. PittRivers, Il potere spirituale nellAmerica centrale. I Nagual
del Chiapas, in Mary Douglas, La stregoneria (Torino: Einaudi, 1980), 23560.
5. G. Camilla and F. Gosso, Hanno visto migliaia di Dei..., in
Laicit e religiosit dellesperienza visionaria (Paderno Dugnano [MI]: Colibr,
2011), 5355.
6.J. D. LewisWilliams, Agency, Art, and Altered Consciousness:
A Motif in French (Quercy) Upper Palaeolithic Parietal Art, Antiquity 71,
no. 274 (1997): 81030.
7.E. Anati, Delirio e allucinazione collettiva: considerazioni per
unanalisi antropologica. 2006. http://www.psicoanalisi.it/psicoanalisi/osser
vatorio/articoli/osserva1111.html.
Notes to chapter 4 / 121
8.The Bible.
9. L. Moraldi, (a cura di), Testi gnostici (Torino: UTET, 1982), 240.
A translation also to be found at http://www.nag-hammadi.com/.
10.F. Gosso, Coscienza e cartografie, I Fogli di ORISS 23 (2005):
8292; or see J. Lacan, Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English New York:
W. W. Norton, 2007).
11. Per ci che riguarda levoluzione del cristianesimo vedi: K. Deschner,
Storia criminale del Cristianesimo, 9 Vol. (Milano: Ariele, 2003 e seg.).
12.F. Gosso and G. Camilla, Allucinogeni e Cristianesimo. Evidenze
nellarte sacra (Paderno Dugnano [MI]: Colibr, 2007. See also Carl A. P.
Ruck and Mark Alwin Hoffman, The Effluents of Deity: Alchemy and Psy-
choactive Sacraments in Medieval and Renaissance Art (Durham, NC: Carolina
Academic Press, 2012).
13.G. Filoramo, Il problema delle pietre sacre: alcuni itinerari sim
bolici, Benaco 85, in La cultura figurativa rupestre dalla protostoria ai nostri
giorni (Torino: Antropologia Alpina, 1986), 2536.
14. R. Gremmo, Le grandi pietre magiche (Biella: ELF, 1995).
15. A. M. Mercuri, C. A. Accorsi, and M. Bandini, The Long History
of Cannabis and Its Cultivation by the Romans in Central Italy, Shown by
Polle: Records from Lago Albano and Lago di Nemi, Vegetation History and
Archaeobotany 11, no. 4 (2002): 26376.
16. P. M. Furlan and R. L. Picci, Alcol, alcolici, alcolismo (Torino: Bol
lati Boringhieri, 1990).
17. E. Bourguignon, Religion, Altered States of Consciousness, and Social
Change (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1973).
18. G. Lapassade, Dallo sciamano al raver (Milano: Urra/Apogeo, 1997),
35.
19. Prefazione,Hanno visto migliaia di Dei..., op.cit.
20. P. Webster, Thomas Kuhn e la rivoluzione psichedelica, Altrove
13 (2007):12337.
21. Prefazione,Hanno visto migliaia di Dei... op.cit.
125
126 / INDEX