Shamans in Coso Rock Art

I have posted about the spectacular rock art at Little Petroglyph Canyon up in Inyo County several times now but have so many interesting images from my visit there last year you'll be seeing more. This shot shows petroglyphs of several shamans from high on the canyon wall. I had to use a telephoto lens to get this level of detail.

The rock art expert who has written the most about shamanism as represented in the rock art of the California desert is David Whitley. His best compendium of this is in his book Art of the Shaman. Whitley's work is fairly controversial, some of it I disagree with, but I have to give Dave credit for some good ideas. I'll present some of those here.

Whitley believes these images were made by shamans, healers or religious leaders who were believed to enter the supernatural world by entering a trance. The shaman would go on a vision quest: isolating himself and going through a period of fasting and meditation (and drug use?)until he entered the trance and had a hallucinogenic vision. The shaman would acquire power to accomplish things - heal the sick, make rain, bring game animals, find lost objects - usually as he took the form of an animal spirit helper.

Often during the trances, the shaman would see glowing geometric patterns "in the mind's eye" in the form of zig-zags, spirals, dots, grids, or nested curves. These shapes are apparently due to the neuropsychology of trances - are hard-wired into all humans - and are seen in the same general forms in all cultures that practiced shamanism. They are called entoptic visions and could be mixed and matched in a bewildering variety. These were seen by the shaman as symbols of power and images he would want to record. Whitley believes that shamans would want to record in rock art the things experienced during trances immediately at the end of the vision quest, so they would not forget the powerful visions they had seen.

The images of shamans above are believed by Whitley to show the shaman portraying himself as he thought he appeared during his trance. The figures are all wearing ritual shirts believed to be skin shirts painted with the patterns of the entoptic visions that the shamans saw during their trances. The largest shaman in the middle has so taken on the characteristics of his spirit familar that he has bird feet instead of human feet. His face is a swirl, and the hook shapes projecting from his head are most likely emblematic of quail topknots used in a headdress. Hard to tell what the implements in his hands are: maybe a bow and some arrows?

This fellow with the quail topknot headdress is so interesting looking that he has taken on a sort of iconic status. The Maturango Museum in the nearby town of Ridgecrest has taken him on as their logo. They have a bronze statue of him just outside the door. It is a nice museum for its small size, and they conduct tours at Little Petroglyph Canyon. Also, I saw this shaman used as part of the decoration of a brass wall clock for sale in a schlocky "Southwestern Art" store in Sedona. I'm sure the copyright ran out long ago.