The Mind in the Cave

"This book has been my constant companion as I have tried to understand Ireland’s prehistory. Lewis-Williams offers a bold new framework for interpreting Stone Age concepts of the universe. He describes very convincingly how these were heavily influenced and defined by the trance experiences of shamans, which seemed to show that there were many levels of spirits which could be contacted and which had to be appeased or appealed to for the sake of the tribe’s prosperity. Caves played a vital role in this story, as people would go into them to hallucinate, believing that they were passing through the cave walls into other spirit worlds and dimensions, and could then return to describe what they had seen. Such phenomena as the cave paintings in France and Spain resulted from these, and it is fascinating to see that the same things were believed to be happening in Ireland. Ritual and legend was centred around natural caves like Oweynagat, where the ancients believed they had an access point for Other World spirits, and also in artificial structures like Newgrange, which is older than Stonehenge or the Great Pyramid of Giza. By building Newgrange to align with the passage of the sun at the winter solstice, Neolithic farmers kept the sky goddess Boinn trapped, and allowed her to be penetrated by their very male sun god once a year. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Yes, and also about how our spiritual rites may be, to some extent, determined by the structure of the brain, hence the persistence and resilience of common threads in rituals across continents and through layers of history."