The First Mystics?

Some Recent Accounts of Neolithic Shamanism–Part 1

by Barry Cooper

Professor Cooper has edited three volumes of the Collected Works. He has authored numerous essays and books relating to Voegelin,  most recently, Beginning the Quest: Law and Politics in the Early Work of Eric Voegelin. This essay was delivered by Professor Cooper at the 2010 meeting of the Eric Voegelin Society and will be included in a forthcoming volume on the subject. This is the first of six parts and appears with permission.

Remember that it is not you who sustain the root;

the root sustains you. —Rom. 11:18

Introduction: Voegelin, Mysticism and the Stone Age

Before discussing the evidence for shamanism in the late or Upper Paleolithic period (50,000 to 10,000 years B.C.) and its significance for political science, I would like to make two preliminary points.

The first concerns the meaning of Voegelin’s use of the term “mysticism” and why it can, with caution, be applied to shamanism. The second concerns the issue of why political scientists might be interested in prehistoric–or as we now say, "early historic"–periods, which include both the late Paleolithic (the focus of this paper) and the Neolithic (10,000 to 5,000 years B.C.).

Voegelin became interested in prehistory during the late 1960s, though arguably his concern with human symbolism and ­ consciousness, which would include prehistoric consciousness, began forty years earlier.

In any event, we conclude this first section with a discussion of a few of his relevant remarks prior to his encounter with Marie König in the fall of 1968. The next section deals with her arguments and why Voegelin found them attractive.

In the final section we examine some of the recent discussions of Shamanism, chiefly by David Lewis-Williams and his colleagues (and criticism of their views) in the context of the late Paleolithic.

An Open-ended Approach

I might add that this paper is intended to be even more exploratory and suggestive than is usual even for the EVS. Given the existing controversies among specialists and the enormous amount of material still to be digested, in no way is it intended to be conclusive.

The short but superficial answer to the implicit question of my title, “were shamans the first mystics?” is: "no."

Quite apart from specialized arguments among anthropologists regarding the meaning of the term “shamanism,” to which we advert below, the commonsensical reason for answering this way is obvious enough: “mysticism” is a term apparently coined by Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagitica (fl. ca. 500 A.D.) to symbolize an experience of reality that transcended the noetic and pneumatic experiences and symbolizations of divine presence.

As Voegelin remarked in a letter to his friend Gregor Sebba, the term “mysticism” refers to “the awareness that the symbols concerning the gods, and the relations of gods and men, whether myth or Revelation, are secondary or derivative to the primary experience of divine presence as that of a reality beyond any world-contents and beyond adequate symbolization by an analogical language that must take its meaning from the world-content.” In this sense, he went on, Plato and Thomas were mystics: “It may horrify you: But when somebody says that I am a mystic, I am afraid that I cannot deny it” (CW, 30:751).

Whether Sebba was horrified or not, the first thing to note about the term “mysticism” and about the experience to which it refers is that they are comparatively recent, at least relative to the enormous 50,000-year span that concerns us at present. To speak of “Stone Age mysticism” is clearly anachronistic, even if we assume that shamanism existed at that time.

Moreover, mysticism is (to use a Voegelinian term), a highly differentiated symbol, referring, as he said, to the inadequacy of world-immanent analogies to convey the experience of world-transcendent divine presence. Shamanic symbols, as we shall see, are by comparison highly compact.

Voegelinian Concepts

On the other hand –and leaving aside for the moment the question of evidence regarding the spiritual life of the Upper Paleolithic—that Pseudo-Dionysius was the first to give this experience a name does not mean that this particular stratum of reality had not been experienced previously even if humans had not developed the language symbols to refer to it explicitly. That is, we would argue (but not on this occasion) that the experience indicated by the term “mysticism” can also be expressed in the more compact symbolism of the shamans.

Central to that longer argument is a justification of the validity of Voegelin’s concepts of compactness and differentiation and an analysis of his discussion of the equivalences of experiences and symbolizations (cf. CW 12: 115ff). These hints will have to suffice at present as an indication that, for purposes of this paper, we accept without analysis Voegelin’s arguments and distinctions as valid.

Mysticism vs. Dogma

However necessary such simplifications and assumptions may be –and we must make some additional ones below-- they indicate another problem. By naming an experience “mystical” we need be aware as well of a temptation, as it were, that seems endemic to naming in the first place, namely that the name will be understood as the reality.

In the high middle ages, for example, in the generation after St. Thomas, this particular problem was highlighted in the split between the dogmatic theology of nominalism associated with Ockham and the mystical theology of Eckhart. By dogma is meant the separation of symbols, usually words, from the experiences of reality to which they give articulate linguistic form.

When this separation takes place, symbols can be treated as truths independent of their originary experience. The opposition of dogmatic truths sometimes expands to what Voegelin called a dogmatomachy, leading spiritually sensitive observers to recall, time and again, the derivative status of dogma. They invariably do so on the grounds of mystic experience or mystic insight into the fundamental reality experienced in sufficient profoundness to indicate the derivative and so comparatively superficial character of dogma.

Voegelin mentioned this pattern several times, often in connection with Bodin and Bergson (e.g., CW, 6: 393-8), but it may also be detected in Ficino and Pico during the Renaissance as well as in Pseudo-Dionysius in antiquity, or Hugh of St. Victor in the twelfth century (CW, 21: 47ff).

The outcome, so to speak, of the rejection of dogma on the grounds of mystical experience, as with Bodin or Bergson, for example, is toleration (CW, 23:196-204; 239-40).

Finally, on this point, it should be mentioned that Voegelin did not simply refuse to deny his own mystic inclinations, which in the context of the Sebba letter looks like a methodological rather than a spiritual precept, but he considered his own work to be a continuation of “classical mysticism” by means of a restoration of “the problem of the Metaxy for society and history” (Voegelin to Sandoz, 30/12/1971. HI, 27:10).

In their introduction to The History of Political Ideas , Hollweck and Sandoz distinguished between “good and bad mysticism” (CW, 19:35). ¹ Apart from Bodin, Bergson and Pseudo-Dionysius, the “good mystics” included Hugh, Eckhart, Tauler, and the Anonymous of Frankfurt, each of whom the Church categorized as being a heretic (CW, 22:136; see also Voegelin’s remarks on heresy, CW 29:541-2; 33:338). Voegelin also borrowed Jaeger’s term “mystic philosophers” to refer to the generation of Parmenides and Heraclitus (CW, 15: 274 ff). Indeed, in a letter to Aaron Gurwitsch, Voegelin spoke of the “origins of philosophy in mysticism” (CW, 29:645).

The "Bad" Mystics

Among the “bad” mystics are ranged a mixed group distinguished from one another in Voegelin’s writings by the application of different adjectives.

The mysticism of More and Causanus, for example, was vague and indeterminate (CW, 21: 257, 265; 22: 117, 125); Siger de Brabant was described as an “intellectual” mystic (CW, 20: 195; see also 185ff and Peter von Sivers’ note, p. 188): the Amaurians and Ortliebians were “pantheistic” mystics (CW, 22: 155-7; 180-82); Spinoza was a “cabalistic” mystic (CW, 25: 126ff); Schelling and Hegel were “epigonal” (CW, 25: 214); Nietzsche was a “defective” or an “immanentist” mystic (CW, 25: 257-61; 264-5; 296); and finally the “People of God,” Bakunin, Comte, and Marx were all “chiliastic” or “activist” mystics (CW, 22: 169-78; 188-90; 26: 294ff; 304ff).

It might be observed that Voegelin several times mentioned Rudolf Otto’s splendid study Mysticism East and West (1932). ² The modest conclusion towards which this brief survey directs us is that, for Voegelin, mysticism was a useful analytic category.

So far as the other questions implied in my title are concerned, there is but one indexed reference to shamans in the Collected Works and it refers to William of Rubruck’s report of a famous debate at the court of the Mongol Khan in Karakorum at which Nestorians, Latin Christians, Buddhists and shamans disputed the superiority of their respective religions. It was a kind of precursor in everyday reality to Bodin’s literary production in the Colloquium Heptaplomeres (see CW, 20: 79-80).

New Approaches in Archaelogy

Turning to the second preliminary question: why are political scientists, especially those familiar with the modern political science established by Voegelin, concerned with what is conventionally referred to as prehistoric humanity? The adjective “prehistoric” is not the best. To begin with, it is a nineteenth-century French barbarism, like sociology.

Even so, and ignoring its status as a linguistic mongrel, the term “prehistory” does seem to be a necessary starting point. Prehistory is distinguished from history by the existence or nonexistence of documentation and literacy. Given that literacy has been absent from some societies until quite recently, we have an obvious problem that prehistory ends at different times in different places. ³ We will simplify matters by ignoring the problem.

Political scientists usually deal with texts. The absence of texts from the Paleolithic means we must rely on the evidence unearthed (sometimes literally) by archeologists. But what is it that archeologists do that might be relevant to political science?

According to one contemporary school called “postprocessural” (discussed below in section three) the goal of archeology “is to resuscitate deceased culture” by interpreting their material remains and artifacts.⁴ At the very least this approach seems promising because it allows contemporary human beings to say something meaningful about the extensive phenomena connected to preliterate human existence.

Of course, matters are never so simple: Historians of archeology usually distinguish between classical archeologists concerned with the material remains of Greece and Rome and archeologists interested in prehistory –in German Archäologie refers to the former only; the subject-matter of prehistoric archeology is usually referred to as Urgeschichte or Frühgeschichte .

Prehistorical archeology developed from early modern antiquarianism and was initially mixed up with speculation on such matters as dating the Great Flood and the origins of specific national and ethnic groups. Thus the subject-matter relevant to political science will have to be distinguished from what is of concern to archeologists, the several “schools” of which have different approaches and priorities anyway.

Chronology and Radio Carbon Dating

One of the inevitable consequences of the Enlightenment was to separate questions of religious doctrine from those of what, to use a later term, came to be known as natural history. In France and the English-speaking world, Paleolithic archeology grew out of geology, not nationalist or ethnic antiquarianism. The speculations of Lyell and Darwin are a well known part of this story.

Less well known, but equally important, is the development, particularly in Scandinavia, of principles of chronology. Specifically, Danish and Swedish nationalist antiquarians developed a “three-age theory” that postulated the succession: Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age.⁵

More finely calibrated chronologies soon enough were developed: the Old Stone Age was distinguished form the New; within the Paleolithic, the Lower, Middle, and Upper were distinguished from one another as well as from the Neolithic.⁶ Here we would note only that these eras were distinguished chiefly in terms of the predominant tool-making technologies, since stone tools are mostly what is left from these early times for archeologists to study easily.

It might also be worth noting that chronology and dating still pose significant problems, despite enormous improvements in calibration. ⁷

Leaving aside another complex question regarding the emergence or differentiation of Homo sapiens and stability of the species, it is probably fair to say that most of the nineteenth-century accounts of the origins of stone-age humans relied either on a Darwinian model based on Malthusian liberalism or on the approach of Marx and Engels, neatly fitting new archeological evidence into the argument developed in Engels’ Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884).

During the 1920s Gordon Childe advanced a kind of modified Marxist approach based on “diffusionism,” a view that Renfrew later mocked as “the diffusion of European barbarism with Oriental civilization.” ⁸ Renfrew could do so because of the invention of radiocarbon dating in 1947, a technique that made possible the relatively accurate dating of ancient civilizations and societies independent of any postulated Darwinian, Marxist, or diffusionist “theory.”

Whatever their shortcomings, the great advantage of such theories was to provide an intelligible and relatively simple story that was, in principle, a single story of human development.

Non-linear Human Development

As an aside, I would note that, about the same time as prehistorians ⁹ were coming to terms with the problem of the disjointedness or discontinuity of early human history, and by implication the discontinuity of all human history, Voegelin was working on a number of problems that he discussed in “Historiogenesis,” the first version of which appeared in 1960.

Of particular interest in this context was his eventual rejection of a single line of historical meaning along which various events, societies, civilizations, and so on, can be strung, which was rather similar to Renfrew’s criticism of Childe (Cf. HI, 30:2). Only a brief gesture towards the problem can be made here. Those familiar with Voegelin’s argument can, one hopes, see its bearing on the present problem.

During the 1950s and 1960s archeologists and prehistorians discovered another problem: dating the appearance of Homo sapiens and charting the spread of anatomically or morphologically modern human beings across the globe. There have been plenty of revisions during the past half century: today there is a general agreement that genetic and anatomical evidence suggests the appearance of Homo sapiens in Africa between 100,000 to 200,000 years B.C. The margin of uncertainty is impressive.

Evidence suggestive of what archeologists call symbolic behaviour –the use of pigment, for example—can be dated to around 164,000 years B.C. (± 12,000 years), a more modest margin of uncertainty.

The Mystery of the Mussel Shell

The interesting point for political science concerning the sites from which the evidence has been collected to make these early estimates, seaside caves in South Africa at Bolombos and Pinnacle Point, is not just that the inhabitants used red ochre for symbolic purposes, but that they ate shellfish, mostly brown mussels that South Africans still consume.

Gastronomic continuity is always interesting to contemplate, but the real significance of these early mussel-eaters lies elsewhere. As the team leader, Curtis Marean, explained to his boss at the Institute of Human Origins, Don Johanson, people think shellfish are an easy food source to exploit because they don’t bite or run away.

Not so. They live underwater most of the time and even at normal low tides there is a danger of being washed off the rocks by waves. The only time brown mussels are fully exposed is during low spring tides caused (we would say) by the combined gravitational pull of the sun and the moon. From earth, such tides occur during the appearance of a full and a new moon.

The significance of the mussel shells in cave 13B at Pinnacle Point dating from 164,000  years ago (± 12,000 years ) is that it is highly likely that the fisherman would have developed a tide chart based on the lunar cycle to time their visits to the shore.¹⁰

The conclusion of importance to political science is this: about the same time as the genotype Homo sapiens was more or less stabilized, which, as noted sometime between 100,000 to 200,000 years B.C.(or to use the site 13B date, around 164,000 years B.C.), this type of human began to engage in “symbolic behaviour” and began to develop a calendar.

The calendar in question linked what happened in the sky, namely changes in the appearance of the moon, to changes on earth, namely the appearance of spring tides that made it relatively safe to collect brown mussels from the intertidal area. The first person to make this connection in the remote past (and obviously somebody did) had a great imagination or, to sound more scientific, he or she had a rare cognitive ability.

The Range of Unknowns

There are many other exciting problems to consider in a thorough account or these issues, including the implicit question of “more-or-less” genotype stability, before we can consider the phenomena of late Paleolithic shamanism. Consider the following questions.

Given widespread agreement that the initial out-of-Africa dispersal (as it is called in homage to Isak Dinesen) took place around 160,000 years B.C., why did it take so long after that date–somewhere between 40,000 to 140,000 years–to develop the great variety of artifacts that occur in the archeological record: “bone, antler, and ivory technologies, the creation of personal ornaments and art, a greater degree of form imposed onto stone tools, a more rapid turnover in artifact types, greater degrees of hunting specialization and the colonization of arid regions” ¹¹ 

Did these changes in the tempo of change as well as in extent signal a change in human cognitive capacities? And if so, what? What happened when Homo sapiens encountered Homo neanderthalis? Why, as early as 30,000 years B.C., were caves and grottoes decorated with images?¹² And why only in Northwestern Europe?

Does this mean that the familiar sequence noted above, from Stone to Bronze to Iron ages really applies only to this area and that elsewhere the anthropological succession from band to tribe, chiefdom, village, city, empire, etc. may prove more useful?

Many of these questions have been addressed by the relatively new subfield of cognitive archeology, and we shall consider some of their findings in the third section.

Voegelin on Early Consciousness

To conclude this section, let me remind you of a few of the opening remarks to major studies made by Voegelin that bear upon the problem of early human consciousness and political science. The first is from 1940:

To set up a government is an essay in world creation. Out of a shapeless vastness of conflicting human desires rises a little world of order, a cosmic analogy, a cosmion, leading a precarious life under the pressure of destructive forces from within and without, and maintaining its existence by the ultimate threat and application of violence against the internal breaker of its law as well as the external aggressor.

 

The application of violence, though, is the ultimate means only of creating and preserving a political order; it is not the ultimate reason: the function proper of order is the creation of a shelter in which man may give to his life a semblance of meaning. It is for a genetic theory of political institutions, and for a philosophy of history, to trace the steps by which organized political society evolves from early ahistoric phases to the power units whose rise and decline constitute the drama of history.

 

For the present purpose we may, without further questions, accept the fact that as far back as the history of our Western world is recorded more or less continuously, back to the Assyrian and Egyptian empires, we can trace also in continuity the attempts to rationalize the shelter function of the cosmion, the little world of order, by what are commonly called political ideas. The scope and the details of these ideas vary widely, but their general structure remains the same throughout history, just as the shelter function that they are [destined] to rationalize remains the same (CW, 19:225-6).

The second is from 1952:

The existence of man in political society is historical existence; and a theory of politics, if it penetrates to principles, must at the same time be a theory of history (CW, 5:88).

The third is from 1956:

God and man, world and society form a primordial community of being. The community with its quaternarian structure is, and is not, a datum of human experience. It is a datum of experience insofar as it is known to man by virtue of his participation in the mystery of its being. It is not a datum of experience insofar as it is not given in the manner of an object of the external world but is knowable only from the perspective of participation in it (CW, 14:39).

The last is from 1966:

The problems of human order in society and history originate in the order of consciousness. Hence the philosophy of consciousness is the centerpiece of a philosophy of politics (CW, 6: 33).              

 

 

^{This is part 1 of a six part article.  Part 2 will appear next week.}

NOTES