James David Lewis-Williams > Quotes

“Scientists do not collect data randomly and utterly comprehensively. The data they collect are only those that they consider *relevant* to some hypothesis or theory.”
― David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“If researchers seek only the kinds of order with which Westerners are today familiar, they will miss, or reject as disorder, all other orders.”
― David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“The economic base of a social formation, the infrastructure, includes the social relations of production the produce the material necessities of life. In doing so, it produces the superstructure, that is, ideology, belief, religion, and juridical controls.”
― David Lewis-Williams

“A shaman’s activities as a sorcerer, or his own conscious act of entry into the supernatural world, were a kind of “killing”.”
― James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“It is the task of San shamans to activate their supernatural potency, to cause it to ‘boil’ up their spines until it explodes in their heads and takes them off to the spirit realms – that is, they enter a state of trance at the far end of the intensified trajectory.”
― James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“The Upper Palaeolithic figures known as ‘wounded men’ occur at Cougnac and Pech Merle, two sites in the Quercy district of France.”
― James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“The first two-dimensional images were thus not two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional things in the material world, as researchers have always assumed. Rather, they were ‘fixed’ mental images.”
― James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“I believe it is reasonable to assume that higher-order consciousness developed neurologically in Africa before the second wave of emigration to the Middle East and Europe.”
― James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“For the makers, the paintings and engravings were visions, not representations of visions.”
― James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“Once human beings had developed higher-order consciousness, they had the ability to see mental images projected onto surfaces and to experience afterimages.”
― James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“Sexual arousal and penal erections are associated with both altered states of consciousness and sleep.”
― James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“A lack of methodology in Upper Palaeolithic art research has led to confusion of priorities.”
― James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“Primary consciousness is a state of being aware of things in the world – of having mental images in the present.But it is not accompanied by any sense of a person with a past and future…”
― James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“San religion is built around belief in a tiered universe. As do other shamanistic peoples throughout the world, the San believe in a realm above and another below the surface of the world on which they live.”
― James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“Around 30,000 years ago, in the Aurignacian, at the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic, someone or some group in the Eyzies region invented drawing, the representation in two dimensions on the flat of the stone of what appeared in the environment in three dimensions.”
― James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“Certainly, the sensory deprivation afforded by the remote, silent and totally dark chambers, such as the Diverticule of the Felines in Lascaux and the Horse’s Tail in Altamira, induces altered states of consciousness.”
― James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“Shamans submit to death in order to serve their communities.”
― James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“Rock art sites were symbolic vaginas, and entry into the wall of a rock art site was thus akin to intercourse.”
― James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“I suggest that the type of consciousness – not merely the degree of intelligence – that Neanderthals possessed was different in important respects from that of Upper Palaeolithic people, and that this distinction precluded, for the Neanderthals, both image-making and elaborate burial.”
― James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“Seeing’ two-dimensional images is therefore something that we learn to do; it is not an inevitable part of being human.”
― James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“Shamanism is not simply a component of society: on the contrary, shamanism, together with its tiered cosmos, can be said to be the overall framework of society.”
― James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“The San spirit world is never vague or blurred: it was precisely constituted and stabilised on the walls of rock shelters.”
― David Lewis-Williams

“I argue that the first image-makers were acting rationally in the specific social circumstances ... they were not driven by ‘aesthetics’.”
― James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“Consciousness has evolved biologically and can therefore be explained biologically.”
― James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“According to Martindale’s view, as we drift into sleep we pass through: – waking, problem-oriented thought, – realistic fantasy, – autistic fantasy, – reverie, – hypnagogic (falling asleep) states, and – dreaming.”
― James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“Improved memory made possible the long-term recollection of dreams and visions and the construction of those recollections into a spirit world.”
― James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“There was thus a reciprocal relationship: guarded neurologically based experiences were a foundation from which seers commanded labour that led to the building of the massive tombs, which, in turn, presented exploitative material relations as eternal and immutable (though, of course, they were not in the long run).”
― James David Lewis-Williams, Inside the Neolithic Mind: Consciousness, Cosmos, and the Realm of the Gods

“Art was not simply a foregone conclusion, the final link in a causal chain. It was not the inevitable outcome of an evolving ‘aesthetic sense’, as some writers suggest.”
― James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“The first point to notice is that the Transition cannot be explained by climatic change alone: human change was not the direct result of marked environmental change. The crucial period did see a colder climate peaking at about 35,000 years ago, but Neanderthals had survived previous climatic instability.”
― James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“The cerebral cortex, the outer ‘skin’ of the brain, contains as many as ten billion neurons. This complexity is daunting. Yet it is out of complex interactions between the billions of neurons that consciousness arises.”
― James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art