CHAPTER 8

Into the Unknown

[T]hen they churned and produced multitudes of elands, and the earth was covered with them.¹

When we were deciphering San myths in the previous chapter, we were also learning about the mountains and valleys in which Qing, Qwanciqutshaa and the other mythical people of whom Qing spoke lived (Pls 1, 26, 27). We made our way beneath towering cliffs and through ‘one pass [that] was constantly filled with a freezingly cold mist’. In Qing’s myth, this mist was a barrier ‘that none could pass through’.² It was ‘the rain’s breath’. Above the mist, modern climbers emerge from the narrow passes and come out onto the high, capping basalt rock of the Drakensberg summit, and then, behind the peaks, and almost lost, are broad, high-altitude valleys.

From a modern conservationist perspective, this dramatic scenery is breathtaking – the unpopulated expanses are today no different from what they were 140 years ago when Qing guided Orpen to rock shelters filled with images of another realm. But, taken together, those paintings and the myths that Qing recounted show us that the San saw and experienced far more in the landscape than we do. For them, the mountains and valleys were alive with beings and animals from another realm. They were where Cagn and Qwanciqutshaa lived with their families and foes.

It was also in that mountainous landscape that the first eland was created. The myth is significant.³ Coti, Cagn’s wife, took her husband’s knife and sharpened her digging stick with it. He was angry and scolded her. Then she ‘conceived and brought forth a little eland’s calf’. She did not know what the creature was. On Cagn’s orders she ground ‘charms’ (buchu) and he sprinkled them on the animal as he asked it whether it was this or that animal. When he asked it whether it was an eland (Tsha), it said, ‘Aaaa’. Cagn took the young eland ‘and folded it in his arms, and went and got a gourd, in which he put it, and took it to a secluded kloof enclosed by hills and precipices, and left it to grow there’.⁴ While Cagn was away getting arrow poison from his nephew, his sons Gcwi and Cogaz together with other young men found the eland. They did not know what the new creature was. They tried to encircle it, but it broke through the circle. At last Gcwi killed it while it was asleep in the hidden place where Cagn had put it. They cut it up and took the meat and blood home. When Cagn returned and saw what had happened, he was angry. He pulled off Gcwi’s nose and hurled it into the fire. Then he changed his mind and put his nose back on again and said: ‘Now begin to try to undo the mischief you have done, for you have spoilt the elands when I was making them fit for use.’ He told Gcwi to churn the eland’s blood in a pot, but the blood that sprayed out turned into snakes. The next time he churned the blood he produced hartebeests, but they ran away. So Cagn called his wife Coti and told her to clean the pot and fill it with fresh eland blood and a new ingredient, fat from the eland’s heart. He then sprinkled the mixture and the drops became eland bulls that ‘pushed them with their horns’. Cagn drove these elands away. Finally, Cagn and Coti produced eland cows and ‘multitudes of elands, and the earth was covered with them’.⁵

This myth is dense with meaning, but here we focus on some San beliefs about the spectacular landscape in which Cagn created the eland herds. In Qing’s myths, we find that the mountains and the cliffs were where the San interacted with the spirit world. The peaks and precipices rose to meet unseen beings and animals – Cagn and Coti, their sons Gcwi and Cogaz, Qwanciqutshaa and their great eland herds. As in Chapter 7, we find that the minds whose thinking we are trying to decipher articulated with their surroundings. In a sense, the landscape was a projection of the mind.

While we could be satisfied with an understanding of the San experience of mystical landscapes, it is illuminating to compare their view of the Drakensberg with the way in which some Native Americans thought about the land in which they lived. Despite the enormous spatial and cultural differences between the landscape and history of the Americans and the San, we encounter intriguing similarities between them, as we shall see on pp. 181–186, that take us beyond specific world views to parallels buried in our common humanity.

The San and mountains

Archaeological excavations conducted in rock shelters both above and below the Drakensberg escarpment have suggested that the San followed a seasonal lifestyle,⁶ as indeed did the eland, their special antelope.

In the winter the high, upper reaches beyond the escarpment are dry and very cold: often snow blankets the land (Pl. 15).⁷ At the beginning of winter, the San therefore left the heights and moved down into the valleys of the lowlands, where it is less cold, if rather dry. They spent the winters there in what are today known as the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands (Fig. 50). Some may even have travelled as far as the coast.⁸ They lived in small scattered bands of about 20 people that were scattered across the Midlands. During the winter the eland, too, moved to the lower ground and lived in small groups, a couple of males together, and small groups of females with their young.

Then, with the first spring rains, the land is transformed. The thunderstorm clouds that the San thought of as rain-animals can be seen making their way along the summits of the mountain chain: the first storms are eagerly awaited. At this time, the eland move back up the slopes and through the passes. The new, sweet grass brought to life by the rains attracts them. The scattered eland unite to form large summer herds of sometimes well over 50 animals. The San followed these amalgamating eland: the people’s small winter bands came together to form sizeable aggregations as they moved up to occupy the large rock shelters beneath the sandstone precipices. Transhumance was their way of life.

Patricia Vinnicombe and her archaeologist husband Patrick Carter studied these parallel human and animal movements.⁹ They concluded that summer in the high mountains was not only a time of plenty: for the San, it was also a time for meeting people from whom they had been separated during the winter. Marriage brokering, large trance dances and rock painting were the order of the day. There are comparatively few painted rock shelters in the lower-lying land below the Drakensberg. It was with the higher reaches of the mountains that the San associated the complex ritual of painting. There, they felt close to Cagn and his eland herds.

50 A cross-section of the Drakensberg and Maloti mountains.

That is a broad picture of what happened. In practice, there was probably a good deal of variation from year to year.¹⁰ One probable exception deserves closer attention because it ties in with something we find in the myths. It will be remembered that, when Joseph Millerd Orpen asked Qing where Cagn could be found, the young hunter replied:

 

We don’t know, but the elands do. Have you not hunted and heard his cry, when the elands suddenly start and run to his call? Where he is, elands are in droves like cattle.¹¹

 

Qing implied that the summer eland herds in the high mountains betokened the presence of Cagn. He protected them and, with ‘his cry’, warned them of approaching hunters. But there is more to it. At the beginning of August 1971, when she and her husband were excavating in the Sehonghong shelter (the one in which Qing showed Orpen the dual rain-animal capturing scene), Vinnicombe met two ‘old patriarchs’, Mosotho men who could remember San people living in the shelter. Both men had been born around 1880–81. One of them, Sello Mokoallo, said that when he was young, game was plentiful and eland were like cattle. As the Oxford archaeologist Peter Mitchell says, the similarity between Mokoallo’s and Qing’s statements about the eland being ‘like cattle’ is ‘uncanny’.¹² In both Mokoallo’s and Qing’s words, we have a glimpse of a now long-gone world full of eland that the coming of the rifle and the horse destroyed.

Then Mokoallo added an interesting observation. He said that, when he was young, the eland herds of those high valleys were not seasonal: they stayed in that area all through the year. ‘They grazed far away but always returned to their young.’¹³ The other old man, Liselo Rankoli, explained:

 

There were many eland in those days. The eland used to choose warm places in the valleys during the winter. When it was warm, they grazed on the mountains and browsed on the many trees that were in the valleys.’¹⁴

 

We should remember that the valleys of which he spoke are the high ones over the crest of the Drakensberg. On the coastal side of the escarpment, on and above the Midlands, the eland were almost certainly seasonal – as they still are today in the nature reserve that stretches the entire length of the KwaZulu-Natal Drakensberg.

The eland herds did not supply only meat. As we saw in the myth about Qwanciqutshaa (Chapter 7), an eland kill was also a reason for people to congregate and dance – which is still the case for the Kalahari San. Beyond highly desirable, plentiful food and the potency that the San could harness in a trance dance, eland also supplied blood, a key ingredient (along with fat) that Cagn used to make the first eland herds. The San also used eland blood in the making of paint. Mokoallo never saw San people actually painting, but ‘the paintings were new at the time he was a young man’.¹⁵ He added that ‘they used the blood of killed animals for paint’.¹⁶

This important piece of information about blood and paint was corro-borated and made more specific by another Mosotho man, Mapote. He had grown up with San people and had learned to paint with them in rock shelters. In the 1930s, he told Marion How, wife of the British district commissioner at the small Lesotho town of Qacha’s Nek, that, if he was to make a painting in the traditional San manner, as she requested, he would require ‘the blood of a freshly killed eland’.¹⁷ In the event, Mapote had to be satisfied with ox blood obtained from the local butcher, the eland having been long since shot out of that area.

Then in the 1980s, Maqhoqha, a woman of mixed San descent whose father had been a shaman-artist, said that the old San had driven eland back to a sandbank in a stream opposite the rock shelter where she and her family lived. They killed the eland there. They then used their blood and fat to make paint, the same two substances that Cagn used to create the first eland herds. Standing in that shelter, she pointed to the sandbank and then danced before the paintings that her father had made 80 and more years earlier.¹⁸

Eland blood was one of the media, probably the most desired, that the San used to mix their paint. What of the pigment? Mapote offered information that again ties in with beliefs about the high mountains. He said that, in addition to eland blood, he required genuine San pigment that was known as qhang qhang. Unlike ordinary ochre, such as Marion How was able to buy at the local shop, qhang qhang ‘glistened and sparkled’.¹⁹ Sparkling has a long history. As long as 60,000 to 70,000 years ago, people collected ‘strong-red’ or glittering specularite ochres. This preference suggests that, even at that remote time, people were interested in the visual qualities of special ochres.²⁰ Significantly, Mopote added that qhang qhang could be obtained only in the high basalt summits of the Drakensberg mountains, where it was dug out of the rock.²¹ Then he said that eland blood, and eland blood only, was mixed with qhang qhang to make the paint even more special. Farther to the west, the /Xam San spoke of red haematite (ttò) being obtained from a ‘mine’ that was guarded by mystical ‘sorcerers’. When the /Xam approached these ‘mines’, they threw stones at them to warn the ‘sorcerers’ to hide themselves. If the ‘sorcerers’ looked at them, they believed that they would become ill.²²

There is thus a remarkable coming together of information. When the eland were in droves like cattle and could be easily hunted, not only was the presence of Cagn readily felt: people could also frequently perform large trance dances and, moreover, obtain qhang qhang and eland blood to make special paintings. Once made, the images fed back into the highly charged ambience of that time and place. Maqhoqha said that when people who were dancing felt the need for more potency, they turned to face the images in the rock shelters. As they raised their hands before the images, potency flowed into them. Because the potency of eland was in their blood, the images became reservoirs of potency. No wonder, then, that in the 1870s George Stow routinely found dancing ruts in the floors of rock shelters and nearby (Chapter 2).

Dancing infiltrates Qing’s creation myth in another subtle way that escapes most readers and was certainly missed by Orpen. When Cagn saw that Gcwi had killed the first eland, he told his son that he would punish him. It was then that he ‘pulled his nose off and flung it into the fire’. The text demands close attention at this point:

 

But he said ‘No! I shall not do that’, so he put his nose on again, and he said, ‘Now begin to try to undo the mischief you have done, for you have spoilt the elands when I was making them fit for use.’²³

 

We have seen on many occasions that the nose played a significant role in /Xam healing. Nasal bleeding was experienced by shamans in trance,²⁴ and they used their noses for sniffing sickness out of people, the practice known as sũ.²⁵ Moreover, a certain /Xam shaman of the rain was known as !Haunu, a word that means nasal mucus.²⁶ But a more precise clue to understanding what was meant by Cagn’s pulling off Gcwi’s nose is to be found in the Bleek and Lloyd manuscripts. A female shaman who was having no success in curing was told that other !gi:ten would take away her dangerous ‘snoring power’ because it was killing people. The /Xam word used here is /nũnu.²⁷ It means ‘nose’.²⁸ At first, Lloyd translated the word thus, but, no doubt after consultation with the informant (Diä!kwain), she crossed out this translation and inserted instead ‘snoring power’, that is, the ability to heal people. At another point the informant said: ‘And this is why her snoring-power [/nũnu] had become weak.’²⁹ The /Xam word for ‘nose’ was used to mean ‘healing power’.

Although we do not have a phonetic transcription of Qing’s San words, we can see that taking away Gcwi’s nose was depriving him of his ability to heal. Cagn restored his son’s status as a shaman so that he could ‘undo the mischief’ he had done. What was a puzzling incident thus turns out to be a ‘building block’, a ‘coded’ message about a person’s ability to be a shaman.

In sum, there seems to be little doubt that, as the San moved up the passes to the summit of the Drakensberg (Pls 26, 27), their minds filled with richer thoughts than ours do. Beyond the freezing mist was the dwelling of Cagn and his vast herds of eland, herds that betokened massive stores of potency. Climbing up to their large summer aggregation rock shelters, San people were getting closer to Cagn and the healing potency that they desired. There, in the mountains, the San could – as did Qwanciqutshaa himself – kill an eland and ‘purify’ themselves in a place redolent with the scent of meat.

High and lifted up

A key concept that ran through the lives and landscape of the Drakensberg San was altitude. Even though, at any time, Cagn can, as //Kabbo put it, ‘be by you, without your seeing him’,³⁰ his presence was especially associated with summer in the high mountains. The divine, to put it broadly, was conceived as being up and above. The landscape itself, with its towering peaks and precipices, provided a ready-made template that human thought could transform into spiritual dimensions. Worldwide, beliefs about supernatural things are projected onto landscapes to give the various features meanings that are not readily apparent to outsiders.

Not all San live in such a dramatic landscape as the Drakensberg. Those whom the Bleek family interviewed in the 1870s came from the central parts of the subcontinent. As we have seen, this is a semi-arid plain dotted with comparatively low hills, most of which can be easily scaled in half an hour or less (Pl. 28). There is nothing here comparable to the altitudinal scale of the Drakensberg. There are no towering mountains in the land from which the Bleek family’s /Xam San informants came. Nevertheless, from the summits of these hills the climber is able to gaze out across the vast flat terrain below.

Farther to the north there is even less in the way of altitudinal variation. In the sandy flat Kalahari Desert there are virtually no hills (the Tsodilo Hills in the north-west are an exception), no valleys, no rivers, except at unusual times of flood. The average rainfall is 200 mm (7.8 in), and protracted droughts are common.³¹ Water is obtained from ephemeral pans in the rainy season and from melons, roots and tubers at other times of the year.

Did the San of these comparatively waterless plains hold beliefs in any way comparable to those of the Drakensberg San?

The Brinkkop

On the semi-arid plains where the /Xam San lived the small hills that are today known as ‘koppies’ assumed an importance beyond their size. The Afrikaans word kop means ‘head’ or ‘hill’; the diminutive is koppie. (Afrikaans is the present-day form of Cape Dutch.) These hills are usually flat-topped, being capped with a stratum of dolerite. The /Xam used three words, //xau:, !kaugen and /ka§o, to mean a ‘hill’, that is, one of these koppies.³² Interestingly, the word !kaugen is the plural of !kau, which means a ‘stone’. The plural form probably derives from the abundance of dolerite boulders and stones scattered across the summits of these hills (Pl. 28).

In addition to ‘hill’, Lloyd also translated //xau: as ‘Brinkkop’, another Cape Dutch word. Janette Deacon, who has extensively studied the land from which the /Xam people came, has persuasively argued that ‘Brinkkop’ is a corruption of the Afrikaans word ‘Bruinkop’.³³ Bruin means ‘brown’. The first syllable of the Afrikaans word thus refers to the colour of the dolerite capping, the stones implied by !kaugen. In using the word ‘Brinkkop’, it seems that the informants were speaking of dolerite hills to which they went to make rain.³⁴

When a thunderstorm was brewing, dark clouds gathered on the summit of Brinkkop hills, as they still do. Bleek and Lloyd’s informant //Kabbo said: ‘For the darkness is very dark on the Brinkkop’s summit. The rain’s darkness is black because the clouds are black…. Therefore the people do first, they fear; because they think that the houses will blow away.’³⁵ Again and again, /Xam people spoke of fearing the dark male rain, the thunderstorm. On another occasion, //Kabbo, himself a rain shaman, was able to reassure them: ‘People think that the time of death must be come. Then the mountain tops are covered, but it is a shadow, it is not danger.’³⁶ He could control the rain and protect people from its wrath.

The tops of the hills were also more directly associated with water. A /Xam rain-maker’s grandson remembered his grandfather saying: ‘I will milk a she-rain, I will cut her, by cutting her I will let the rain’s blood flow out, so that it runs along the ground.’³⁷ The grandson replied: ‘I understand, for the she-rain is drawing her breath which resembles mist; you must please go and cut the rain at the great waterpits which are on the mountain.’³⁸ Thinking of how he would capture and control a rain-animal, the grandfather replied: ‘I will really ride the rain up the mountain on top of which I always cut the rain. It is high, so the rain’s blood flows down.’³⁹ As Deacon rightly points out, it is clear that /Xam rain-makers often went to hilltops to make rain.⁴⁰

Another account is more oracle consultation than rain-making. An old woman climbed a ‘small hill’ and thrust her digging stick into the ground. Then she asked a chameleon for rain.⁴¹ The chameleon was one of the rain’s creatures: it changes colour, as do rain clouds.⁴² ‘And the chameleon looked at the ground, and when it had looked at the ground, it looked up to the sky, it knew that rain would fall.’⁴³ The swivelling of its eyes was believed to indicate whether rain would fall.

The statement that the ‘great waterpits’ are ‘on the mountain’ is significant. In this part of the subcontinent, waterholes, or springs, are found on the plains, not (at any rate in any significant size) on hilltops (Pl. 28). On the plains, the San camped near, but not at, waterholes in order not to frighten away animals that came to drink there.⁴⁴ //Kabbo stayed near a waterhole still today known as the Bitterpits, because the water there is brackish.⁴⁵ The normal location of waterholes on the plain leads us to suspect that the ‘great waterholes’ said to be on top of a hill are, principally if not exclusively, mystical entrances to the nether world where the rain-animal lived. If the rain-animal (a storm cloud) was observed to be frequently on top of the Brinkkop, it was reasonable for the San to believe that it must have emerged from a significant waterhole. Speaking of the ‘great waterpits’, the man used the /Xam word !kerri, the same word that another informant used to describe the ‘great sorcerer’ who led the dance and taught others how to ‘learn sorcery’ (Chapter 2). Not surprisingly, engravings of rain-animals are found on the rocky summits of some of these hills.⁴⁶

That waterholes were thought of as entrances to the spirit world, in addition to being the place where shamans captured rain-animals, is explicitly seen in an account in which the angered rain sends lightning: ‘they all disappeared in the waterpit, for the rain lightened putting them underground’.⁴⁷ The importance of verticality for the San is clearly evident here: the hills reach up to the sky, but on them are ‘great waterholes’ that are entrances to the underworld.

The elevation of the hills that the /Xam San knew, small as they are compared with the Drakensberg, was significant. It seems that we have a deeply embedded belief that associates height with spirituality. Even when the terrain does not dramatically lend itself to the development of ideas about altitude, people still think in those terms.

51 The Dinwoody tradition of rock art is situated in the American state Wyoming. It has certain elements in common with southern African San rock art.

Animals, puha and place: an American landscape

Before we hazard a suggestion as to why, even in comparatively flat landscapes, people think of verticality as a route to spirituality, we consider a case far from southern Africa. The Dinwoody rock art tradition is found in a fairly restricted region of Wyoming in the United States of America (Fig. 51). The images, or petroglyphs, as they are known in America, were made by pecking, or hammering, through the outer crust of rocks to leave the lighter-coloured inner rock. They have a counterpart in the San rock engravings that are found in the central parts of southern Africa.⁴⁸

The Dinwoody images are intricate and highly varied. We describe only some of the principal forms. Prominent among them are anthropomorphs that have rectangular bodies with rounded corners.⁴⁹ The torsos are filled with designs, such as sets of dots and undulating or zigzagging parallel lines. Sometimes the torsos have upper limbs that resemble wings; often the figures have large hands and feet with five or three digits; the frequent depiction of only three digits suggests avian associations (Fig. 52). Extra lines often encase the human figures or connect them one to another. There are also images of quadrupeds shown in profile; some are connected to scenes of other images by a pecked line. Some resemble dogs; more commonly, they are images of bison. Fewer depict bears, the larger ones having internal decoration resembling that of the human figures.

52 Many Dinwoody figures have three digits, and wings that suggest avian creatures.

The makers of these distinctive images were the Mountain Shoshone. They were a hunter-gatherer people who, like the Drakensberg San, practised seasonal transhumance. In the summer, they followed herds of bighorn sheep as they grazed in the high mountains; in the winter they moved down to lower pastures. The identity of the Mountain Shoshone as the makers of the Dinwoody petroglyphs is established by a large body of ethnographic material that records their way of life, rituals and beliefs.⁵⁰

One of the Shoshone ritual practices was vision questing. Young men seeking an empowering vision went to petroglyph sites, bathed in a stream or lake, and then sat fasting for several days waiting for the supernatural power they called puha. It is in many ways comparable to the !gi:, //ke:n or /ko:öde of which the San spoke. The Shoshone vision-quest sites are often isolated, well away from living areas.⁵¹ Fasting in isolation is one of the common ways of inducing an altered state of consciousness among North American shamans.

When the overpowering vision came, the shaman experienced visions of a fusion of animals and human beings:

 

There is the frightening trial, the manifestation of the spirit who tends to change forms – now a man, now an animal – the imparting of supernatural power, the conditions for the ownership of this power, and the regulations concerning ritual paraphernalia.⁵²

 

Power also came from less fantastic creatures, such as eagles, rattlesnakes and bears, or even from natural forms, like strangely shaped rocks.

Julie Francis and Larry Loendorf, two archaeologists who have studied this art in detail, explain the relationship between visions induced by fasting or hallucinogens and the fantastic Dinwoody imagery:

 

Engravings and paintings were created the morning after a vision was received in order to preserve it, as forgetting the details of a vision could result in death or illness. Previously created panels were consulted to refresh the shaman’s memory and to renew the connection to the supernatural.⁵³

 

As with the San, the Shoshone rock art images were not simply pictures or decorations. They were made to be used by the visionary and by other people as well. They were intimately associated with supernatural potency and the acquisition of potency.

The Shoshone categorized the creatures they depicted into sky people, ground people and water people.⁵⁴ Even though they are animals, they are spoken of as people because the Shoshone routinely anthropomorphize animals: in their view, animals can speak and communicate with human beings. As is the case in many indigenous taxonomies, these three categories are not rigid, and creatures cross over from one to another. For example, water birds can fly and also walk on the land. Myths are attached to these various creatures.

We can now turn to the terrain in which the Shoshone made these images. The Dinwoody region is dominated by the Wind river, the upper reaches of which are at elevations of some 10,000 feet (3,048 m). The large petroglyph sites in this section are at about 7,000 feet (2,133 m). The middle course of the Wind river ranges at elevations of 6,000 to 5,500 feet (1,828 to 1,676 m). There are several sites in this section of the river. The lower Wind river and its tributaries are at elevations of 5,000 to 4,000 feet (1,524 to 1,219 m). There are numerous sites in this area, many clustered around the hot springs near the town Thermopolis.

Throughout the entire area, the petroglyphs were executed on sandstone with very uneven surfaces. Many images seem to enter natural cavities. Indeed, Francis and Loendorf believe that the more eroded surfaces were deliberately chosen above smoother surfaces. Dinwoody images were thus intentionally closely integrated with the rock on which they were made, as were so many southern African San images with the rock walls of rock shelters.

This American example may therefore be usefully compared with the Drakensberg San beliefs about landscape that we have discussed in this and the previous chapter. In both cases, we are able to consult ethnographic records of the peoples’ beliefs. We do not have to imagine, or guess, how they may have conceived of the landscapes in which they lived. Indeed, Loendorf makes the point that the ethnographic record ‘was extremely helpful in understanding the meaning and distribution of Dinwoody petroglyphs’⁵⁵ – as we found San ethnography to be in southern Africa.

We are therefore in a position to ask: Do the three broad taxonomic categories (sky people, ground people, water people) relate to the three levels of the landscape through which the Wind river runs? We will consider the three levels and their imagery in turn.

At the highest mountain sites, petroglyphs include many human-like figures and flying figures (see Fig. 52). There are few quadrupeds. Some of the flying figures are recognizable as Shoshone power birds that are associated with vision questing.⁵⁶ The one shown here (Fig. 53) is probably a transformed hummingbird. Other petroglyphs depict owls with prominent eyes. Some images with outstretched wings seem to be eagles. Both hummingbirds and eagles are associated with the thunderbird that is believed to gather water in clouds and cause thunder. The Shoshone consider lightning and the hummingbird to be at the top of their hierarchy of spirit powers. The eagle is immediately below them. In the rock art, zigzag lines around these flying creatures represent lightning.⁵⁷

53 A Dinwoody engraving of a hummingbird. The Mountain Shoshone people equated the small hummingbird with eagles and the thunderbird as sources of power.

Sites in the middle reaches of the Wind river have significantly fewer anthropomorphic images with three digits than those in the upper reaches, but there is an increase in anthropomorphs with four or five digits. Humans with three-digit birdlike feet are more common at the higher altitudes. Likewise, clear depictions of birds decrease in frequency in the middle reaches of the Wind river. At the same time, horned figures and quadrupeds increase in frequency. So-called ground people are found at these sites. They include bears, beavers and buffalo. Loendorf sums up the significance of these differences in imagery between the upper and middle Wind river sites: ‘The increase in quadrupedal animals and the decrease in birds suggest that the power found in the mountains and that found on the plains is represented differently in the petroglyphs.’⁵⁸

Sites in the lower levels of the Wind river have images of so-called water-ghosts of different kinds that are surrounded by wavy lines that represent water (Fig. 54).⁵⁹ Water spirits were considered to be shamans’ helpers. The theme of water is developed by images of frogs and turtles. All these supernatural creatures are associated with hot springs, which the Shoshone believed to be sources of puha. Flying creatures and three-digit anthropomorphs are less common in lower-level sites than in the upper-level sites. The only images of snakes in the entire region occur at lower-level sites.

54 A Dinwoody water-ghost being whose head appears to emerge from the rock. A projectile point hangs from the figure’s left hand.

There is thus a distinct correlation between categories of engraved creatures and altitudinal levels (Fig. 55). Shamans desiring a particular kind of power went to fast and conduct their vision quests at the appropriate levels. For instance, a person who desired sky power would climb to the upper reaches of the landscape, experience the desired vision and then make an image of it.

The Shoshone, then, think of the world as divided into three parts and these parts structure much of their thought, myths and visionary experiences. In previous chapters we saw that the San inscribed their conception of the landscape into their myths and that their visionary journeys traversed the three levels of their cosmos. The same applies to the Shoshone. In 1881 the missionary Reverend John Roberts was given an account of a visionary experience that both parallels and differs from the accounts that Orpen and the Bleek family recorded in southern Africa. A Shoshone shaman had gone into the mountains to pray:

 

At the end of some days three animals appeared to him: an eagle, a bear and a badger. The eagle addressed him and, taking off one of his claws, gave it to him that by means of it he could command all the powers of the air. Then the bear addressed him and, taking off one of his claws, gave it to him and told him that by means of it he could command all the powers of the earth. Finally the badger addressed him and, taking off one of his claws, gave it to him and told him that by means of it he could command all that was under the earth.⁶⁰

 

55 The Dinwoody images arranged according to their elevation in the Wyoming landscape. This pattern reflects the Shoshone world view with sky people at the top, ground people in the middle and water people in the lower reaches.

Francis and Loendorf point out that the shaman supported his account by showing Roberts the three claws; he wore them around his neck. Significantly, Roberts added that the Indians visited ‘pictured rocks’ to obtain their power. The link between vision questing and Dinwoody rock art images can hardly be doubted.

The altitudinal pattern and the distinctive type of imagery seems to have endured for thousands of years,⁶¹ though Francis and Loendorf point out that this does not mean that Dinwoody shamanism was monolithic and unchanging. There is in fact evidence to show clear changes in the relative frequencies of image types over time. Changes of this kind probably reflect the ‘increasing importance of the shamans in the social and political areas of Shoshonean life’.⁶² But, as in southern Africa, the arrival of new people, animals and artefacts did not have the impact we may have expected: ‘[T]he symbolism and beliefs expressed in the imagery were seemingly uninfluenced by the introduction of new forms.’⁶³ People can adopt new forms without fundamentally changing the overall structure of their beliefs and rituals.

People and the land

We emphasize that the parallel division of images and power by altitude in Dinwoody rock art is controlled by the people’s culture. The Shoshone established the system of equivalences between images and landscape within the parameters of their own terrain and the creatures that live there. In other regions the distribution of imagery may be different, even inverted.⁶⁴ Landscape is therefore not deterministic in that it imposes beliefs on people. On the contrary, people transform the given mountains and valleys of their terrain into landscapes pregnant with meaning and inhabited by spirit beings and animals. There is an interaction between the human mind and landscape.

Yet, despite all the good intentions of researchers who quite rightly emphasize differences between belief systems, it seems clear that people all over the world and in markedly differing cultures have ideas about altitude. They imagine a vertical axis that runs from a spirit realm in the sky, through the level on which people live, down to a subterranean spirit realm. This is the so-called axis mundi, a phrase that researchers worldwide use to denote the vertical axis of the cosmos that shamans in a variety of different cultures scale to reach the spirit realm that they believe lies in, or beyond, the sky. In different cultures the axis mundi is conceived differently: sometimes it may be a tree, at other times it may be a mountain or simply an invisible ‘ladder’. The axis mundi is one part of a broad cosmological framework. The traditional Christian (though now contested) notion of Heaven above and Hell below is but one example. In Old Testament times the ‘children of transgression’ went up ‘a lofty and high mountain … to offer sacrifice’,⁶⁵ and Moses met God ‘in a thick cloud’ on Mount Sinai. The people themselves were forbidden to go up the mountain ‘or to touch the border of it’: anyone who did so ‘shall surely be stoned, or shot through’.⁶⁶ Within each culture, the vertical divisions are given their own significances and even subdivisions.

One way of explaining the near universality of the importance of the vertical axis is to point to two experiences that, because they are wired into the human brain, are widely experienced.⁶⁷ One is the liberating sensation of flying; the other is the constricting sensation of entering a tunnel or passing under water.

Flight is a common metaphor for altered states of consciousness. In the Dinwoody rock art, it is represented by the avian images we have described.⁶⁸ In San rock art, flying creatures similarly represent !gi:ten on out-of-body journeys (Pls 12, 13). Diä!kwain spoke of a shaman who ‘turns into a little bird, he comes to see us where we live and flies about our heads. Sometimes he sits on our heads.’⁶⁹

Similarly, but moving down rather than up, a San !gi:xa told Megan Biesele how the giraffe, his spirit helper, took him to a ‘wide body of water’ and how he travelled under water. He expressed the restricting tunnel sensation by saying: ‘My sides were pressed by pieces of metal. Metal things fastened to my sides.’⁷⁰ Then his ‘protector’ told him that he ‘would travel far through the earth and then emerge at another place’. Having emerged, he began ‘to climb the thread – it was the thread of the sky’; it took him up to the realm where god was believed to live.⁷¹ The Shoshone also regarded lakes and springs as entrances to the underworld. Francis and Loendorf persuasively argue that figures surrounded by wavy lines probably depict beings under water.⁷² Vertical movement was thus part of both Shoshone and San experience in altered states of consciousness, and these two peoples are by no means alone in this.

Probably, the functioning of the human brain in altered states contributed to the worldwide belief in spiritual realms above and below daily life. No matter what their cultural background, people who enter certain altered states of consciousness report two significant experiences. They speak of flying and of entering holes in the ground or tunnels. These experiences are wired into the brain.⁷³ But they form only the foundation for rich elaborations in each separate culture. Intense experiences are probably not part of everyone’s lives; many people simply accept what they are taught about the cosmos, feeling that what they experience in their dreams guarantees the existence of spiritual realms. The details of those realms vary greatly.

Certainly, in deciphering accounts of religious experience projected onto landscapes we should bear in mind that our own perceptions of mountains and valleys are probably different from those that were entertained in the distant past. Nothing that we have said in this and the previous chapter about San and Shoshone beliefs could be recovered by a Westerner simply by contemplating the landscape.⁷⁴

Parallels between widely separated peoples lead us to reconsider Lévy-Bruhl’s notion of a ‘primitive mentality’. In our final chapter, we therefore ask: How ‘simple’ were these ‘primitive people’ whose cosmos was multidimensional?