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19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Bringing the gods home, 1 Mar 2007
If anything jars your sensitivities, it's the claim that your brain is driving you instead of the other way around. Yet, many cognitive studies suggest that's often precisely the case. If David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce are correct, then mentally-driven activities have contributed to the making of many social conditions. One of those conditions, a universal which provides support for their thesis, is religion. The definition of "religion" has been subjected to some drastic changes lately. It's been broadened to encompass many "spiritual" themes. Today's spiritual movements tend to hark back to earlier, simpler modes. The authors assert that some of these can be traced to the Neolithic period in Europe and Western Asia.
Using the recent finds of archaeology and the cognitive sciences, the authors postulate that Neolithic society developed the foundations of religion. Moreover, religion pre-dated the adoption of agriculture and husbandry. Archaeology has revealed sites in Asia Minor suggesting that hunter-gatherer groups built shrines, seasonally visited for ritual purposes. Communities grew around these shrines and agriculture was developed to support them. The shrines marked a departure from earlier practices of dealing with the spirit realm in caves, represented by such sites as Lascaux and Chauvet as described in Lewis-William's previous book, "The Mind In the Cave" [2002]. The above-ground shrines allowed greater community participation and a new social structure. One aspect of that change was the burial of heads beneath the floors of houses. Some of the corpses may indicate more than just ancestral burial, and represent sacrifices. Was spiritual power derived from those buried heads, the authors query?
In moving communication with spirits out of caves and involving more of the community, religious figures - shamans - assumed a different role in society. The authors note that all religions possess an ecstatic component, and nearly every individual has experienced various forms of altered consciousness. From this, the authors postulate "the consciousness contract" in which those who could experience and interpret the results of altered consciousness rose to become religious and community leaders. Instead of waiting for visions to occur, the shamans came to prompt them through physical exertion or psychotropic drugs. Thus supercharged, the visions seemed more intense, hence, more meaningful. Even if the community shared but a lower-level version of the visions, they were sufficiently aware of them to understand what the shamans described. What was already lodged in the mind emerged with greater force and wider acceptance.
Group activities reached peaks of drama and expression with the establishment of burial sites and stone shrines in Western Europe and the British Isles. Although the best known today, Stonehenge is but a small facet of what belief produced in shrines and burial places. Lewis-Williams and Pearce provide an impressive guided tour of the sites, their structure and arrangement. There is a good deal here to indicate how altered states of consciousness can be transformed into the physical world. Spirals, for example, often seen by those in trance or other altered states, are a fundamental component of many burial and shrine sites. The illustrations, including colour plates, depict these and other manifestations to greatly enhance an already vivid text. Although, the reader's preconceptions about religion or early societies may be challenged, but they will have no difficulty in understanding the evidence or conclusions the authors provide. A truly stimulating and provocative book, well worth the time and investment to understand thoroughly. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Ancient monuments in a new context, 4 Jan 2007
This text is a folow on from The Mind in the Cave where Lewis Wiliams showed how neuorological elements in the human brain, combined with different levels of consciousness, give rise to religious experiences and belief systems. Taking this model on to the neolithic sites of Catal Huyuk in Turkey and the Boyne Bend monuments in northern Ireland, the authors attempt to explain the structures in terms of belief systems that may have been held by the builders. The great strenght of this thesis is that it has flexibility built around a core of basic ideas. This does allow different interpretations to be made, but based upon a relatively simple model. The interpretative powers are of course limited - we cannot replay the past - but we now have the best window found yet into the minds of those ancient builders and their belief systems. No extravagant claims are made by the authors (though that wil not stop others), but it does offer an opportunity to think constructively about an area of archaeology and ancient history that has been far too neglected until now. Religion simply cannot be ignored when attempting to understand ancient societies - this is an invaluable contribution to our attempts to understand the people and the contexts in which they built their structures and the ways in which their societies may have functioned.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Enjoyable Neolithic Jaunt, 31 Jan 2009
I enjoyed reading this book. It seems to focus mainly upon Neolithic sites in Turkey and Ireland (and some in Angelsey), but also interjected some interesting comments from various research into indigenous shamanism from all over the world. The most interesting part of the book I thought was the link between the neolithic artwork and symbols seen in altered status of consciousness. I thought it gave a good insight into Neolithic religion, society and the cultural heritage of the Europeans.
Whilst it is well worth the read if you are an archeaologist or a neo-pagan or just interested - what I would say is, I wish the scope of the book had been larger to include more of the neolithic monuments. It makes some passing comments on Avebury complex and Stonehenge, but really could have been more encompassing, perhaps the authors will expand on this in a later work. I found the insights into Bryn Celli Ddu very interesting indeed concerning the stew. The authors also made interesting references to western art and philosophy - particularly in the beginning with the philosophy of Rosseau 'The Noble Savage', which I felt was a kind of tongue in cheek jibe at the seventeen century Druidic revival, which the book seems to comment on in rather a negative fashion, which it later descibes as a mixture 'mumbo-jumbo, socialism, politics etc'. That aside, whether you feel the jibes are justified or not - it is still and excellent read.
What I liked is that it gave a realistic view of religion and society in neolithic times that it wasnt 'A pastoral golden age' as some might paint it, but had competing groups of people and more importantly a religion based around altered states of consciousness. The reader could not but help feel sad that in modern times there is not such a thing. Although the book states 'there was no difference between social and spiritual power' in neolithic times - I think there are some who might dispute this.
I think it will stand however as a landmark in its field, with ideas and concepts which should be further built upon - that perhaps one day we might get close to understanding the Neolithic mind - without modern lunatic cults or the narrow minds of modern archaeologists.
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