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Uncovering a 27,000 Year Old Insight by William Whitecloud
This is a story about how, when the Universe wants to teach you something, it knows exactly how to make you get the message. I begin the story, however, with an amazing piece of seemingly unrelated trivia. Between 1910 and 1930, a Russian artist, Kazimir Malevich, painted four black squares on white canvas backgrounds. They have famously come to be known as Black Square 1, 2, 3 and 4. While Malevich is celebrated as the father of “Suprematism”, the method of presenting geometric forms as art, he died in poverty and obscurity in 1935.
A couple of years back, I read in Time Magazine that three of the Black Squares had sold at auction, each for a multi-million dollar sum of money. That a little black square painted on a piece of white canvas could be worth that much is incredible! Call me a Philistine, but how good could they possibly be?
But hang on, there’s more. One of the Black Squares fetched seventeen million U.S. dollars, while the cheapest Square was picked up for the bargain basement price of two million dollars. Not only are these really good black squares, apparently one of them is way better than the others. I wish I had the ability to know a brilliant black square from a merely great one, because I have friends who say they know.
If I had this super sophisticated talent I would scour the world for ridiculously overlooked and underappreciated treasures and then elevate them to their true worth and recognition in society. I’d most probably start with the rock art of the now extinct Xan tribe. When I was a kid growing up in Africa we’d see these “Bushman” paintings in caves around the place. We didn’t appreciate them much back then, naively assuming that these were merely crude etchings depicting primitive hunting experiences. It didn’t bother us to find these pictograms of antiquity defaced by mindless graffiti.
I sadly confess that African rock art made little more sense to me than black squares painted on white canvas. Only recently have I come to realize what priceless treasures they truly are. For our Christmas holiday I took my family to Africa, back to where it all began for me, and it was there that I had the great fortune and privilege of meeting Victor Biggs, one of South Africa’s foremost rock art experts. So passionate is Vic about his subject that it was no bother for him to take a whole day out of his busy life to initiate my wife and I in the wondrous mystery of “Bushman Painting”.
The Xan people, colloquially known as Bushmen, were a race of hunter-gatherers who historically ranged as far north as Europe and as far south as the southern most tip of Africa. The cartoon impression non- Africans have of them, gleaned from sources such as the comedy The Gods Must Be Crazy, is a little people who talk in a cute clicking tongue and live a utopian stone-age lifestyle. Hunted like crocodiles and hounded out of their traditional way of life, all that remains of the Xan culture is the legacy of art they have left on sheltered rock faces across Europe and Africa.
What a legacy, though! Xan rock art dates back twenty seven thousand years. Really, take a deep breath. In the seventeenth century the Christian Church taught that the world began four thousand years ago. Interestingly, the length of time that this art has been around indicates that this was not a common past time handed down from one generation to the next. In fact, the scarce quantity of rock art known to exist demonstrates that if there had been just one artist at work anywhere in the world every generation, there would be tons more of it about.
Each Xan artist, therefore, was self taught. Divinely inspired, to be precise. Virtually every work of rock art is an account of a spiritual journey undertaken by a tribal shaman in aid of either healing or rain making. Far from being a record of tribal wars or hunts, the paintings depict the odyssey of the shaman: first going into trance and connecting with the sacred animals that will support them on their mission in the astral world, then finding a crack in the rock wall that becomes a portal to the astral dimension, and finally locating and subjugating the evil entities causing the illness or capturing the creatures that control the rain. Not a job for the faint hearted by the look of it!
The paintings are remarkable for a number of reasons. Firstly, they’re damn good. One of the sites we visited with Vic is estimated to be six thousand years old. There is no evidence that whoever painted it had ever had any training or practice. No other paintings are to be found in the vicinity to suggest some artist evolving their craft over time. Yet the artistic merit of the painting is fantastic. Far from being crude stick like figures, some of the images are almost photographic in quality. Anyone familiar with the animals depicted will be haunted by how well the painter has captured their defining attitudes and characteristics. A standout for me was a portrait of an Eland in the classical antelope pose of looking back over its shoulder with a mixture of curiosity and alarm.
Most remarkable of all, though, for me, is that these paintings appear to be some kind of conscious creative affirmation. Going into a trance induced by clapping, chanting, and, as some evidence suggests, the aid of hallucinogenic medicines, the shaman ventures into a metaphysical dimension of causality where they bring the forces at play in a given dynamic into some kind of favorable order. Then, when she or he comes out of the trance, they anchor that new order in the physical world by reproducing it on a rock wall. So alive are these scenes in the shaman’s consciousness that, just as Michelangelo said of his own works, they paint themselves.
And this is where the teaching style of the Universe comes in. The day after my rock art experience I took my kids to see the movie Narnia, which just happens to be a spectacular version of the same story Xan medicine people have been telling for twenty seven thousand years. But there is no co-incidence. C.S. Lewis is acknowledged as a master alchemist who consciously set out to write the quintessential alchemical myth: a family of disturbed children find a crack (via a magical wardrobe) into a fantasy realm of weird characters and creatures where they help order the forces at play and by so doing are able to heal their real world personalities and circumstances.
Shamanism and alchemy are united in pointing out to us that the power to heal and construct our lives according to our highest potential lies in another dimension – our imagination. If you think about it, your dreams are simply the result of your subconscious mind working to sort out the forces at play in your consciousness. What an anonymous Xan artist and C.S. Lewis emphasized to me over two consecutive days is that it remains up to us to consciously venture into the dimensions that control our fate and lend our energy to the forces that serve our highest good.
As if the lesson wasn’t clear enough, the day after I saw Narnia I began Richard Harpur’s The Philosophers’ Secret Fire (easily one of the best non-fiction books I have ever read), and learned that the early alchemists used to memorize favorable astrological aspects as a way of subconsciously re-enforcing the qualities of life they wished to manifest, much the same as a Xan shaman would paint the positive outcomes of their astral adventures. Perhaps this is the ultimate lesson, that at the end of all the battles what the hero has won is a vision of the person they want to be, the kind of life they want to live, and the world they want to live in.
Getting back to the Black Square business, the case made for Malevich is that his simple geometric forms fulfill the rules of pure creativity in that they are subject to no purpose at all and represent nothing in existence – they are Some Thing born of No Thing. You won’t hear any argument about that from me. For myself, though, I’d rather use my imagination to build an image of something wonderful to manifest in my world. And I thank the Universe for reminding me of that.
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