Traveling to Other Worlds: Visitation to the Heavens as Transpersonal Experience in Rock Art

Abstract

This chapter examines the transpersonal experience of traveling to the heavens as expressed in world rock art. Relying on a model now favored by many anthropologists, a “complex geometric motif” in perhaps the oldest rock art can be explained as a facet of the psyche in the transpersonal experience of the creators of such art. The most common direction of a shaman’s passage to other worlds is to the “upper” world. Representations of this passage are sometimes representational (a human figure connected by a line to an object in the sky) but more often metaphoric expression (lines arched around a human figure’s head). Issues discussed will include: internal and external realities; bodily orientation; the heavens; dreams and heightened states; and union with the heavens. These states recorded as rock art in part reflect social meaning, including religious meaning, such as “spiritualized” animals, and are brought back to society, such as geometric design. Yet in our dreams and shamanic trances, what is flying in the heavens?