WHAT SOUTHERN AFRICAN WISDOMS HAVE TO OFFER THE WEST #8

Just an aside for those who have an interest in rock art and altered states. Their importance also applies to Out of Body States of consciousness and Astral Projection seen in indigenous peoples.

David Lewis Williams was the first rock art expert who applied the three phases of the trance state to rock art. 

These three stages occur in advanced trance states and were depicted on the rock faces by many indigenous tribes. In the Americas the visions were often associated with the use of entheogens -  mind-altering plants used in sacred rituals. Similar images can be seen in the rock art of the San Bushmen in Southern Africa who did not use entheogens.

Entoptics: The first stage; dots, simple lines - wavy or straight, chevrons and lattices. 

Construals: In the second phase the entoptics take on more complex shapes that can resemble mandalas.

Both of these phases can be seen in this Chumash rock art in Santa Barbara county California below as well as elsewhere. 

 

Therianthropes: The third phase of trance showing shape shifting can be seen in the San Bushman rock paintings below as well as in Native American rock art.

The Music of the Spheres

The Zulu people refer to themselves as ‘the people of the heavens' - Star People and that they came from the stars.

 

"ˆWhen the stars of the morning sang together." Job

 

Pythagoras was said to be able to hear the music or singing of the spheres or the stars as did the ancient Chaldeans'. It is also described in the Zohar. 

 

We should thank the stars for their song. Their light emanates from their singing and when they sing they glow. That is how they reveal themselves.

The Zohar teaches when we pray in the morning it is a continuation of the singing of the stars.

 

The Druids called it the Oran Mo'r, the Great Song or the sacred tune of the universe. The Druids believed that the whole of creation arose out of this song (as did some other beliefs.) In other words there was the song and the word (intention) from the Infinite One during the Big Bang.

“Because we are stars we must walk the sky.” Song of the San Bushmen Lion Shamans

The San too talked about the singing of the stars. To hear the music or sounds of the spheres requires an exquisite purity (as was recognized by Pythagoras' peers who said that he alone could hear it.) It also requires an absence of ambient noise.

The Silence of the Stars
 
“When Laurens van der Post one night - in the Kalahari Desert told the Bushmen he couldn't hear the stars singing they didn't believe him. They looked at him, half-smiling. They examined his face to see whether he was joking or deceiving them…  
Then they led him away from the crackling thorn-scrub fire and stood with him under the night sky and listened. One of them whispered; Do you not hear them now? And van der Post listened, not wanting to disbelieve, but had to answer - No. They walked him slowly like a sick man to the small dim circle of firelight and told him they were terribly sorry.
And he felt even sorrier for himself and blamed his ancestors for their strange loss of hearing…” David Wagoner

Aldo Leopold - a wilderness adept also seemed to have heard something similar.

 

The sound of waters is audible to every ear, but there is other music in these hills, by no means audible to all.  To hear even a few notes of it you must first live here for a long time, and you must know the speech of hills and rivers.  Then on a still night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over rimrocks, sit quietly and listen for a wolf to howl, and think hard of everything you have seen and tried to understand.  Then you may hear it—a vast pulsing harmony—its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries. Aldo Leopold

 

The chants and music of both Bantu and San were also no doubt influenced by the cacophony of nature’s sounds and the amazing animal and bird songs around them.

This blog is a bit shorter because I have a question to ask. 

Who among you readers would be interested in hearing some talks on Zoom around these topics? Typically it would be about an hour with time for questions in the chat box. There would be no charge, only a donation to our non profit Inward Bound, if one desired.