By David Maritz

Even the walk to the Inanke cave is for me a spiritual journey--remote, wild, eerie when alone, in amongst the huge bare granite inselbergs of the Matobos hills in Central Africa. It has not changed since the first people dwelt here some 30,000 years ago.

For thousands of years the Shamans came to Inanke to contact the spirit world and intercede on behalf of their people to make rain, heal the sick, or bring animals to hunt. It was in these rock shelters and caves that they entered their trances. These were the vehicles of entry into the vividly real, strange, and sometimes horrifying world of the spirits.

Returning from their tranced journey, the Shamans would depict what they saw by painting on the rock walls of the cave: not as a form of decoration but as a continuity of the contact with the other world. The rock for the Shamans was not a canvas but a veil to the underworld that only they had the power to pierce.

Images of the Shamans appear dancing semi-transformed into hooved and animal headed figures. Some of the images depict Shamans in such deeply tranced states that blood is hemorrhaging from their noses. In others the sickness they have sucked from the real world is being expelled from the special spot at the back of their necks. Images of the large Eland antelope, which held such significance in their spiritual beliefs wander over the faces and at times disappear into the cracks in the rock. The Eland held enormous power and the image itself imbued the Shaman with the strength to break through the veil to the spirit world.

The artist's journey
It is about a 7km walk along an ill-defined route to get to Inanke. On my last visit I walked alone. I watched two pairs of Black Eagles circle overhead. I lost the path once and near a bush-covered cleft in the rock I heard the cough of a leopard and backtracked fast. Later I was threatened by a troop of baboons. Even before I approached the main cave I had noticed the faint outlines of paintings on some of the boulders.

But the main cave is spectacular. The granite bulge rolls over like the frozen lip of a breaking wave. The bush and creepers have grown in the shade of the lip. One has to press to the rock to move along the breaking face of the wave until it suddenly opens in a huge domed cavern and the spectacular scale of the paintings appear - giraffe and people and rounded rectangular shapes and lines.

As a child growing up in Central Africa I was familiar with the faint brown ochre images of people and animals running and wandering over the rock faces of shelters in the remote hills and mountains. I used to wonder at them.

It was common knowledge that these were 'Bushman paintings' -- paintings made by a hunter/gatherer people now extinct in most of Africa. Today the last remnants of the San Bushmen exist only in the Kalahari desert of Namibia - they too have lost the techniques of the painting.

Like much that was indigenous, Bushman art was not understood and thus belittled by the colonial invaders of Africa. They put the finishing exterminating touches to the San people, a process started with the influx of Black Bantu patoralists into Central and Southern Africa about 2000 years ago.

Uncovering the spiritual origins
It is only in the last decade that the true spiritual origins of San rock art, and thus mankind's first steps into art in general, have become apparent. Stone age art is not primitive decorative representions of the surrounding world. Rather it is an art form as complex, metaphoric, and mythical as any modern day art work. Probably even more so, as it was so real to the problems that needed solutions at the time. Rock art was not a luxury but rather a matter of life or death.

This realization is due largely to one man - David Lewis-Williams. He has revolutionized the study of rock art worldwide and has moved the focus of this study from its traditional epicenter around the Paleolithic cave art of Southern Europe to the Southern African highveld.

Today, David is the Professor of Cognitive Archaeology at Witwatersrand University in South Africa. However in the late 1960's, David was my English literature teacher and housemaster at the boarding school I attended. He held a certain fascination amongst us boys as he was the president of the South African magicians circle. At a performance at the school I once watched him do a levitation act. Even then he was becoming interested in San art and would take parties of boys up into the Drakensberg to hike and look for paintings in the caves of the high mountains.

However the key to the current understanding of rock art was actually prepared in the 1870's by a German ethnologist named Wilhelm Bleek. He had come to Africa to prepare a Zulu grammar. Bleek became more and more interested in the San and the tales of their raids on settlers' cattle. After moving to Cape Town, he noticed that there were a few San prisoners in the town jail. Bleek convinced the governor of the Cape to allow him to house these prisoners at his home, where he set about compiling the 12,000-page verbatim recording of the language, beliefs, and habits of the San people. He devised his own script and was aided by his sister-in-law, Lucy Lloyd, who would transcribe what Bleek had written down.

It was to these scripts that David Lewis-Williams and associates turned. After more than a hundred years in the Cape Town University library, the ghostly phonetic sounds of an extinct language and people have started to come alive. These scripts describe the real meaning and significance of the art. On the rock faces of the most magnificent museums on earth, the spirit of the Shaman once again comes alive in the remote and at times breathtakingly beautiful mountains and hills of Africa.

The images of a trance
What Bleek's now long-dead informants told him was an account of the San spiritual world and belief system - how the Shamans operated and entered trances by rhythmic dancing for hours and hyperventilating, as they still do in the Kalahari. About the Shamans making rain and bringing animals. About healing the sick and the various dances and rituals in the images. Images that were part of their beliefs and part of the spirit world.

Lewis-Williams took these accounts and placed them in the context of modern psychological laboratory experiments of induced trance states. He realized that Bleek's scripts held the explanation to some of the little understood geometric patterns in the rock art. The first stage of a trance is always dominated with geometric patterns - these then become animated in the second stage and finally the trancer enters, often via a tunnel, into the final fully-tranced third stage. The laboratory trancer often recalls sensations of flying and traveling great distances in this absolutely real and frightening strange tranced world.

Once the San art was understood it was compared to the fabulous art in the caves of Europe - Lascaux, Les Trois Freres, Altamira and others. It was found that these caves have the same elements of the trancing Shamans and animal mediums: not just any animal, but the ones that indulge the Shaman with great power.

Searching for answers through art
Since time immemorial our ancestors have painted as a spiritual medium. The Paleolithic art of Europe has been dated as far back as 30,000 years. In Africa the shavings used to paint a cave in Namibia have been dated to about 27,000 years ago. This was concurrent with the dawn of modern man. A time when our ancesors were just starting to compete with the Neanderthals for domination in Europe. These first human artists were using the animal icons of their time, the Eland in Africa or the Bison or Aurochs in Europe, to empower themselves into the spirit world to seek the answers to the everyday problems of life. Their art was a real part of the solutions to these problems.

So also today we find that we still face many of the same problems.. health, weather, environment, conflict... We are starting to once again uses some animals as icons and indicators to our future. For us it is the Eagle or the Wolf or the Whale or Tiger. Like the canary in the cage, their metaphoric message is - when they go we too will not be long in following.

Maybe technology has allowed our art to go too far from its roots to the point that it is only decorative or used as status symbols of wealth and power. Or maybe we have drifted so far from our natural position in nature that we no longer see ourselves as part of a natural world and needing of intercession..