Trance and transfiguration in rock art and literature

Abstract

What can San rock art research reveal about certain kinds of imaginative literature written in English? What do depictions of altered states of consciousness in literature reveal about human needs? In this lecture I explore depictions of altered states of consciousness in literature using the ideas of Aldous Huxley, based on his own experience of taking psychoactive drugs, the work of the German ethnobotanist Christian Rätsch on psychoactive plants, and the archaeologist David Lewis-Williams, whose work explains some aspects of some prehistoric rock art traditions using cognitive neuropsychology. Huxley was concerned with expanded consciousness and spirituality for much of his life, seeing in religion and art some form of salvation from what he saw as the meaninglessness of mass consumer capitalist culture that he critiques in his dystopian novel Brave New World (1932). Indeed, in this novel and in Island (1962), its follow-up and the final novel he wrote, he promotes the use of psychoactive drugs to achieve individual bliss and social cohesion. In The Doors of Perception (1954) and Heaven and Hell (1956) he documents his own experience of the effects of his consumption of mescalin and his reflections on this experience. Although his primary interest is in prehistoric rock art, Lewis-Williams (2002, 2005) also applies his theories of altered states of consciousness to The Epic of Gilgamesh and Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” helping to illuminate the poems in new ways. In this lecture, I compare Huxley and Lewis-Williams’s theories and use them to illuminate aspects of various works of literature in English. The lecture investigates the significance of traces of shamanism and altered states of consciousness in literature, re-reading modernity in the terms of plant studies and indigenous belief systems.