From Atlantis to the Sphinx (33 page)

The porpoise caller disappeared into a hut screened with newly-plaited coconut leaves. ‘I go on my journey,’ he said as he took his leave. Grimble was installed in his house next door.

Four o’clock came—the hour at which the magician had promised results; nothing happened. Yet women were plaiting garlands, as if for a feast, and friends and relations were arriving from neighbouring villages. In spite of the festive atmosphere, it was hot and oppressive.

My faith was beginning to sag under the strain when a strangled howl burst from the dreamer’s hut. I jumped round to see his cumbrous body come hurtling head first through the torn screens. He sprawled on his face, struggled up, and staggered into the open, a slobber of saliva shining on his chin. He stood a while clawing at the air and whining on a queer high note like a puppy’s. Then words came gulping out of him: ‘
Teirake! Teirake!
(Arise! Arise!) ... They come, they come! ... Let us go down and greet them.’ He started at a lumbering pace down the beach.
A roar went up from the village, ‘They come, they come!’ I found myself rushing helter-skelter with a thousand others into the shallows, bawling at the top of my voice that our friends from the west were coming. I ran behind the dreamer; the rest converged on him from north and south. We strung ourselves out, line abreast, as we stormed through the shallows...
I had just dipped my head to cool it when a man near me yelped and stood pointing; others took up his cry, but I could make out nothing for myself at first in the splintering glare of the sun on the water. When at last I did see them, everyone was screaming hard; they were pretty near by then, gambolling towards us at a fine clip. When they came to the edge of the blue water by the reef, they slackened speed, spread themselves out and started cruising back and forth in front of our line. Then suddenly, there was no more of them.
In the strained silence that followed, I thought they were gone. The disappointment was so sharp, I did not stop to think that, even so, I had seen a very strange thing. I was in the act of touching the dreamer’s shoulder to take my leave when he turned his still face to me: ‘The king out of the west comes to meet me,’ he murmured, pointing downwards. My eyes followed his hand. There, not ten yards away, was the great shape of a porpoise poised like a glimmering shadow in the glass-green water. Behind it there followed a whole dusky flotilla of them.
They were moving towards us in extended order with spaces of two or three yards between them, as far as my eye could reach. So slowly they came, they seemed to be hung in a trance. Their leader drifted in hard by the dreamer’s legs. He turned without a word to walk beside it as it idled towards the shadows. I followed a foot or two behind its almost motionless tail. I saw other groups to right and left of us turn shoreward one by one, arms lifted, faces bent upon the water.
A babble of quiet talk sprang up; I dropped behind to take in the whole scene. The villagers were welcoming their guests ashore with crooning words. Only men were walking beside them; the women and children followed in their wake, clapping their hands softly in the rhythms of a dance. As we approached the emerald shallows, the keels of the creatures began to take the sand; they flapped gently as if asking for help. The men leaned down to throw their arms around the great barrels and ease them over the ridges. They showed no least sign of alarm. It was as if their single wish was to get to the beach.
When the water stood only thigh deep, the dreamer flung his arms high and called. Men from either flank came crowding in to surround the visitors, ten or more to each beast. Then, ‘Lift!’ shouted the dreamer, and the ponderous black shapes were halfdragged, half-carried, unresisting, to the lip of the tide. There they settled down, those beautiful, dignified shapes, utterly at peace, while all hell broke loose around them. Men, women and children, leaping and posturing with shrieks that tore the sky, stripped off their garlands and flung them around the still bodies, in a sudden dreadful fury of boastfulness and derision. My mind still shrinks from that last scene—the raving humans, the beasts so triumphantly at rest.
We left them garlanded where they lay, and returned to our houses. Later, when the falling tide had stranded them high and dry, men went down with knives to cut them up. There was feasting and dancing in Kuma that night. A chief’s portion of the meat was set aside for me. I was expected to have it cured, as a diet for my thinness. It was duly salted, but I could not bring myself to eat it...

It seems clear that there is no great difference between the ‘magic’ learned by Cordova in the Upper Amazon and the magic of the porpoise callers of the South Pacific. Both seem to be based on some peculiar telepathic ability—or what Weil calls the collective unconscious.

It may seem that, in venturing into this realm of primitive ‘magic’, we have left all common sense behind. Yet, surprisingly, there is a certain amount of scientific backing for the suggestion that dreaming can induce ‘paranormal’ powers—or rather, tap powers that we all possess.

In the early 1980s, Dr Andreas Mavromatis, of London’s Brunei University, led a group of students in exploring ‘hypnagogic states’, the states of consciousness between sleeping and waking.

In a book called
Mental Radio
(1930), the American novelist Upton Sinclair discussed the telepathic abilities of his wife May—she had been telepathic ever since childhood. May Sinclair explained that, in order to achieve a telepathic state of mind, she had first of all to place herself in a state of concentration—not concentration
on
anything, but simply a high state of
alertness
. Then she had to induce deep relaxation,
until
she was hovering on the verge of sleep.
Once she was in this state, she became capable of telepathy.

Mavromatis taught himself to do the same thing—to induce states that were simultaneously concentrated and deeply relaxed. What happens in these states—as everyone knows (for we have all experienced them on the verge of falling asleep or waking up)—is that we
see
certain images or situations with extreme clarity.

In a book called
Beyond the Occult
, I described my own experience:

I myself achieved it by accident after reading Mavromatis’s book
Hypnogogia.
Towards dawn I half woke up, still drifting in a pleasantly sleepy condition, and found myself looking at a mountain landscape inside my head. I was aware of being awake and of lying in bed, but also of looking at the mountains and the white-coloured landscape, exactly as if watching something on a television screen. Soon after this I drifted off to sleep again. The most interesting part of the experience was the sense of looking
at
the scenery, being able to focus it and shift my attention, exactly as when I was awake.

One day, when Mavromatis was half-dozing in a circle of students, listening as one of them ‘psychometrised’ some object he was holding in his hand (trying to ‘sense’ its history) he began to ‘see’ the scenes the student was describing. He then began to
alter
his hypnagogic visions—an ability he had acquired by practice—and discovered that the student was beginning to describe his altered visions.

Now convinced that hypnagogic states encourage telepathy, he tried asking students to ‘pick up’ scenes that he envisaged, and found that they were often able to do this. He concludes that ‘some seemingly “irrelevant” hypnogogic images might... be meaningful phenomena belonging to another mind’. In other words, that T. S. Eliot might be wrong in thinking that ‘we each think of the key, each in his prison’. Perhaps, as Blake suggested, man can pass out of his inner prison ‘what time he will’.

Telepathy is, in fact, perhaps the best authenticated of ‘paranormal’ faculties; the evidence for it is generally agreed, by those in paranormal research, to be overwhelming. Mavromatis’s book goes a step further, and suggests a link between telepathy and dream states.

It would seem, then, that what Mavromatis has duplicated under control conditions with his students is what the Amahuaca Indians were able to do, using mind-altering drugs, under the guidance of their shaman: to achieve ‘group consciousness’.

It becomes possible to envisage what took place when the porpoise caller went into his hut. Like Mavromatis, he had taught himself the art of controlled dreaming—of sinking into a hypnagogic trance which he is able to control. We have to suppose that he was then able to direct his dreams to the realm of the porpoises, and communicate direct with them. (Experiments with porpoises suggest that they are highly telepathic.) Somehow, the porpoises were ‘hypnotised’ into swimming ashore and allowing themselves to be beached.

In
Man
,
God and Magic
, Ivar Lissner points out that about 20,000 years ago, on the threshold between the Aurignacian and Magdalenian, portrayals and statuettes of the human figure suddenly ceased. ‘It seems obvious that artists no longer dared to portray the human form in effigy.’ What he is suggesting is clear. Our ancestors firmly believed that hunting magic—with the use of portrayals of the prey—was effective and deadly, and that on no account should humans be portrayed.

Let us return once again to the question: why has man evolved so swiftly in the past half-million years—and particularly in the past 50,000—when his evolution was virtually stagnant for millions of years before that?

In Darwinian terms, there is no obvious answer. Nothing, as far as we know, ‘happened’ that suddenly forced man to adapt by developing increased intelligence.

What the present chapter is suggesting is that the answer may not be obviously ‘Darwinian’. Darwin himself was not a rigid Darwinian; he accepted Lamarck’s view that creatures can evolve by
wanting
to. But he did not accept that this was the
major
mechanism of evolution. More recently, Sir Julian Huxley—who was certainly a Darwinian—suggested that, in his present stage, man has become the ‘managing director of evolution’—that is to say, he now has the intelligence to take charge of his own evolution.
¹

What Huxley is suggesting is that man is now in the position to recognise what changes are needed—to the environment, to the human species—and is prepared to engineer these changes. But he feels that this is a fairly recent development.

Yet what Huxley is also recognising is man’s capacity to be inspired by a sense of purpose. He actually takes pleasure in change. It is true

that he tends to remain static when he can see no reason for change. I live in a small village in Cornwall, where life has been much the same for centuries. If an Elizabethan fisherman was transported to our village in the 1990s, he would certainly be surprised at the television aerials and the asphalt road, but otherwise he would feel perfectly at home. And if society itself had not changed—through inventions like the steam engine and radio—it is perfectly conceivable that our village would not have changed at all since 1595, The average man takes life as he finds it and adapts to it. This is why
Australopithecus
remained
Australopithecus
for two million years or more.

At the same time, however, what man loves most of all is change. He will work determinedly to move from a one-room cottage to a semidetached house, to exchange his bicycle for a motor car, his radio for a television. He merely needs to be
shown
the possibility. He only remains static as long as he sees no possibility of change.

Now I would suggest that religion itself introduces the possibility of change. Instead of taking trees and mountains and lakes for granted, he saw them as the abode of gods or nature spirits—and, moreover, spirits who could be appeased if he approached them in the right way. So when he sets out to hunt an animal, he no longer relies completely on his spear and stone axe; he also prays for success, and perhaps performs certain rituals and makes certain offerings. In this sense, his attitude towards his own life has become active rather than passive. It is the beginning of a sense of control.

In 1950, Dr Ralph Solecki, of the Smithsonian Institute, agreed to join an expedition to Iraqi Kurdistan, to excavate caves where bones of Neanderthal man had been found. In a book called
Shanidar
;
The Humanity of Neanderthal Man
(1971) he describes his finds in the Shanidar cave.

Here he discovered skeletons of several Neanderthals who had died from a roof-fall, and been buried ritualistically. Ashes and food remains over the graves suggested a funeral feast, while eight different types of pollen of brightly coloured wildflowers seemed to indicate that the flowers were woven into a quilt to cover the dead, or into a shrub to form a screen. The skeleton of an old and disabled man who had obviously been unable to work for years revealed that they cared for their elderly. These people clearly held some kind of religious beliefs.

Again, in a cave at La Quina, in the Dordogne, no less than 76 perfect spheres were recovered from among the tools. There was also a delicately worked flat disc of flint, 20 centimetres in diameter, with no conceivable purpose—except as a sun disc.

Neanderthal man buried his dead with a coating of the pigment called red ochre—a habit Cro-Magnon man seems to have borrowed. In South Africa, many Neanderthal red ochre mines have been found, the oldest a hundred thousand years old. From one of the largest sites, a
million
kilos of ore had been removed; then the hole had been carefully filled in again, presumably to placate the earth spirits.

All this explains Solecki’s subtitle,
The Humanity of Neanderthal Man:
these creatures may have had ape-like faces, but they were emphatically human. And they were clearly religious. Yet in no Neanderthal site in the world has there been found the slightest trace of cave art. It seems odd that Neanderthal man possessed red ochre, and even ‘crayons’ of the black manganese dioxide (which were found at Pech-de-l’Aze), yet never used them to make an image on a flat surface. It would seem that Neanderthal man may have been religious, but—as far as we know—he did not practise ‘magic’, like the Cro-Magnons who supplanted him.