In search of the Palaeo shaman

[john]

Hmmm - unless I read wrong, the earliest dates I saw were around 5500, which is still old, but still not in the range of what it appears everyone is looking for to prove oceanic travels. Need older schtuffs!!!
Would be great to find something like that oar but dated waaaayyy earlier -
Or even just a cave scribble showing a boat dating back to around 11000 - 15000.

Rich -

http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4388 ... 20boat.gif

Australian rock art from 17k-50k BP.

Discovered by Grahame Bradshaw.

http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/


Looks like a boat to me...........


john

[rich]

Definitely looks like a boat. Has the club seen that??

[john]

Definitely looks like a boat. Has the club seen that??

If they have, they have assumed the foetal position

With their eyes closed

And each forefinger stuffed into the appropriate ear.

I'm trying to find an actual photo.............

john

[rich]

Yeah - so am I - all I could find was it appears to be from the 1996 expedition.

[rich]

Even tried http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/bradshaws/images/ but only got to the same outline type pic.

[Ishtar]

You guys crack me up. Gotta love you though!

It didn't take long for this thread to default to the board's main obsession -stone age boats.

To paraphrase your last few posts:

Could a shamanic drawing show a boat, thus proving that there were stone age boats?

My view?

I thought this thread was about showing that the artefacts are shamanic? Although it would be great to also discover stone age boats!

So, moving on .....

I have already posted this in the Rock Art thread, but it also belongs in here:

The artefacts at our friend Alan Day's site are dated to the upper Palaeolithic.

If you haven't seen them already, click on the link to see examples of the carved rock artefacts at his site in Ohio which he considers to be pre-Clovis.

http://www.daysknob.com/

A bird facing forward on top of the head, often suggesting shaman headgear.

One or more birds or quasi-human faces emerging from the mouth, an apparent theme of regeneration, like the figure-emerging-egg-like and figure-from-the-belly imagery also shown below. Sometimes there is a succession of figures, each emerging from the one preceding it.

A bird or Bird Spirit emerging from the posterior in the manner of an egg, when the figure appears in full-length bird form.

The head of a bird or Bird Spirit emerging beneath the primary figure (when in full length form), as if from the belly.

The idea of a human merging with an animal is taken one step further here. The human seems to have been swallowed by the bird, and is being passed through its belly or its posterior.

Shamans have reported that their animal spirit helper can sometimes swallow them while they are in the altered state, and they consider this to be an initiation of sorts. As part of the initiation, the shaman will pass through the body of the animal or bird and then exit through its posterior or belly.

I have wondered if the story of Jonah and the whale is later version of that.

Eggs are also common shamanic motifs – the symbolism being obvious.

I think, as does Alan and several others, that he has a very good case for his artefacts being inspired by the shamanic.

[Ishtar]

Is that - unless Shamanism suffered from Multiple Simultaneous
Independent Invention -

Whoever that Paleolithic Band was who made the first journey

To Japan, rode on Boats,

Carried Hematite,

And practised the Shamanic.

john

John, there is a third, even more controversial option.

It wasn't spread (like a religion) because the consciousness was already there. It was second nature to be in contact with these other dimensions. Just like for us it is appears to be 'already not there' - if you see what I mean. Nobody had to spread non-bicameralness (for want of a better word) to us because our separation from it is not a belief system.

We are in a state of being, just as these ancients were in another state of being. You either have it, or you don't. It can't be 'spread' - as only ideas can be spread.

[Ishtar]

Also, would a boat journey be represented in Shamanic drawings? After all, wouldn't it be classified as a journey to another shore?

Rich, you are right about that - the boat has survived as a religious motif (e.g. Isis who is depicted riding in a barque, and there are many others).

http://photostoryworld.com/article1/inda4.html

The Bajau practice Sunni Islam but, as elsewhere in much of Indonesia, adat or local custom signifies the continued existence of pre-Islamic pieties. If there has been a particularly successful haul of the sea's riches then the Bajau will offer sincere thanks to Omboh Dilaut, the Lord of the Sea. Shamans live in some communities. If illness strikes a village or family, they may summon the spirit world to intercede. The shaman accomplishes this by allowing a special "spirit boat" to drift past the settlement.

Eliade also writes about the 'spirit boats' of his 19th century shamans - I'll try and dig it out when I get back home later.

[rich]

Hmmm - now if we could find some from an earlier age like the one John found. I figure that a tool as important as a boat would have found it's way to the rock figures or painting pretty early on - at least somewhere. Maybe its there but not recognized as such.

[Ishtar]

Although we can’t get back very far with this particular article, it does show us how the boat has been used for some time as a symbol in shamanism. It also shows the importance of the boat to the Saami (Lapland reindeer herders), whose shamanic traditions go back thousands of years, which is highlighted by the fact that their drums are illustrated with boats “resembling prehistoric rock paintings”.

University of Helsinki Institute of Cultural Affairs

http://216.239.59.104/search?q=cache:US ... helm2/boat.
pdf+shamanic+boats&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=6&gl=uk

As Vastokas & Vastokas (1978: 126) point out in a discussion of the boat images of Peterborough petroglyphs in Canada, boat imagery has deep roots in both Eurasian and North American shamanism. Probably the best known example of this is the ‘spirit canoe’ of the coastal Salish of Washington State. In the rite, several Salish shamans join together in an imaginary canoe to travel to the underworld, with each shaman holding a pole or a paddle to steer the ‘canoe’ (Vitebsky 2001:44).

A similar visionary experience is recounted in a song performed by the Chukchi shaman Nuwat, in which the vehicle of the shamanic journey is described as a boat with a fish-bone rudder (Bogoras 1904-1909: 438). The Chukchi also refer to the shaman drum as a boat, as do the Siberian Evenk, who think of the drum variously as a wild reindeer, a weapon and a boat (Anisimov 1963:117-8).

Perhaps more relevant to the interpretation of Finnish rock paintings, evidence of the boat as a shaman’s vehicle to the otherworld can also be found in Saami ethnography. Boats greatly resembling those of prehistoric rock paintings are often depicted on the membranes of Saami shaman drums (Manker 1938). Although it is not always clear how these images should be interpreted, a clue is offered by the ethnographically accurate account of a shamanistic séance found in the 12th century Historia Norvegiae (Tolley 1994). The Saami shaman in Historia Norvegiae is described as having a drum on which water-beasts, reindeer, snow-shoes and a boat are depicted.

These are all said to be vehicles for the soul of the shaman. In later Saami shamanism, fish, snakes,birds or reindeer typically act as the vehicles of the shaman. That a boat could fulfil the same function is, however, suggested by the fact that the Saami of Lake Kemijärvi in Finland used boat-shaped shaman drums, called lodde-karbes or ‘bird-boat’ (Itkonen 1946: 121). Stories of journeying to the Land of Death in a boat are found also in Finnish Kalevala poetry, the shamanistic character and ancient roots of which are widely recognised (Siikala 2002).

Finally, it should be noted that this complex of beliefs regarding boats and the otherworld is intimately associated with the ancient and widely spread practice of boat burial, for which archaeological evidence is found already in the Danish Mesolithic finds (Skaarup 1995) and which is still today practiced by some of the Khanty, who bury their dead in boat-shaped coffins (Siikala 2002: 139).

[rich]

Interesting. Clicked the link for the original doc in pdf format cause I couldn't see the pics in the first one.

[rich]

Interesting to note also that in the above document they mention North America too:

Schematic boat figures can be found in the rock arts of various parts of the world, but occur
particularly frequently in the circumpolar region, with a distribution of almost identical images
extending from Scandinavia to Northern Russia, Siberia and North America. Although the image of
a boat as such can potentially symbolise an almost anything, there is a recurring religious aspect
cross-culturally associated with boats and canoes in this vast region. This is the association of boats
with shamanism and shamanic journeys to the otherworld.

Gotta see if I can find more on it - especially if there are some really old ones - prior to 10,000 years ago.

[rich]

I knows its a real long shot but seeing that pic of the cave painting you showed earlier ("the Sorcerer"), I wonder if it connects with the statement in that doc :

The interpretation presented above is in line with what I have written elsewhere concerning
the interpretation of the paintings (Lahelma in press). Moreover, it gives a possible explanation to
the ‘strange’ and ‘ambiguous’ imagery of the composite elk-boat images. They can be seen to arise
from a ‘shamanistic-animistic’ system of beliefs, in which 1) anything (including boats) can
potentially be alive; 2) in which both elks and boats are invested with a capacity to move from one
zone of the cosmos to another, and 3) in which both elks and boats may function as the shaman's
vehicle in this passage. In such a system of beliefs, boats and elks can have been thought of as, in a
sense, interchangeable. A possible expression of these ideas appears to be found in the rock painting
of Pyhänpää on Lake Päijänne, where an elk, a human (shaman?) merging with its rear leg, and a
boat attached to its forehead form a single image (fig. e).

If so I wonder if that's a representation of a boat in that context. Kinda don't think so, but hey - like I said - a long shot. It would add age to the idea of boats.

[Ishtar]

Yes, I noticed that stuff about elk boats and wondered whether that's why the boats haven't been recognised as boats when they appear in cave art ...maybe anyway.....

[Ishtar]

Here's Eliade quoting one of his turn of the 20th century anthropologists on the Tungus (now Evenks of northern Russia) who also saw their drums as boats:

Shirikogoroff thus describes the representations that he saw on the drums of the Tranbaikal Tungus: the symbol of terra firma (for the shaman uses his drum to cross the sea, hence he indicates the shores.)

Rich, I'm beginning to think you're psychic, because didn't you mention earlier that we should be looking for art that shows the shores?

Or even a map carving showing another shore.

Or maybe you're just a genius!