Customer Reviews
Bringing the gods home - By: Stephen A. Haines, 01 Mar 2007 
If anything jars your sensitivities, it's the claim that your brain is driving you instead of the other way around. Yet, many cognitive studies suggest that's often precisely the case. If David Lewis-Williams & David Pearce are correct, then mentally-driven activities have contributed to the making of many social conditions. One of those conditions, a universal which provides support for their thesis, is religion. The definition of "religion" has been subjected to some drastic changes lately. It's been broadened to encompass many "spiritual" themes. Today's spiritual movements tend to hark back to earlier, simpler modes. The authors assert that some of these can be traced to the Neolithic periodin Europe & Western Asia.
Using the recent finds of archaeology & the cognitive sciences, the authors postulate that Neolithic society developed the foundations of religion. Moreover, religion pre-dated the adoption of agriculture & husbandry. Archaeology has revealed sitesin Asia Minor suggesting that hunter-gatherer groups built shrines, seasonally visited for ritual purposes. Communities grew around these shrines & agriculture was developed to support them. The shrines marked a departure from earlier practices of dealing with the spirit realmin caves, represented by such sites as Lascaux & Chauvet as describedin Lewis-William's previous book, "The Mind In the Cave" [2002]. The above-ground shrines allowed greater community participation & a new social structure. One aspect of that change was the burial of heads beneath the floors of houses. Some of the corpses may indicate more than just ancestral burial, & represent sacrifices. Was spiritual power derived from those buried heads, the authors query?
In moving communication with spirits out of caves & involving more of the community, religious figures - shamans - assumed a different rolein society. The authors note that all religions possess an ecstatic component, & nearly every individual has experienced various forms of altered consciousness. From this, the authors postulate "the consciousness contract"in which those who could experience & interpret the results of altered consciousness rose to become religious & community leaders. Instead of waiting for visions to occur, the shamans came to prompt them through physical exertion or psychotropic drugs. Thus supercharged, the visions seemed more intense, hence, more meaningful. Even if the community shared but a lower-level version of the visions, they were sufficiently aware of them to understand what the shamans described. What was already lodgedin the mind emerged with greater force & wider acceptance.
Group activities reached peaks of drama & expression with the establishment of burial sites & stone shrinesin Western Europe & the British Isles. Although the best known today, Stonehenge is but a small facet of what belief producedin shrines & burial places. Lewis-Williams & Pearce provide an impressive guided tour of the sites, their structure & arrangement. There is a good deal here to indicate how altered states of consciousness can be transformed into the physical world. Spirals, for example, often seen by thosein trance or other altered states, are a fundamental component of many burial & shrine sites. The illustrations, including colour plates, depict these & other manifestations to greatly enhance an already vivid text. Although, the reader's preconceptions about religion or early societies may be challenged, but they will have no difficultyin understanding the evidence or conclusions the authors provide. A truly stimulating & provocative book, well worth the time & investment to understand thoroughly. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]
Ancient monuments in a new context - By: A reader, 04 Jan 2007 This text is a folow on from The Mindin the Cave where Lewis Wiliams showed how neuorological elementsin the human brain, combined with different levels of consciousness, give rise to religious experiences & belief systems. Taking this model on to the neolithic sites of Catal Huyukin Turkey & the Boyne Bend monumentsin northern Ireland, the authors attempt to explain the structuresin terms of belief systems that may have been held by the builders. The great strenght of this thesis is that it has flexibility built around a core of basic ideas. This does allow different interpretations to be made, but based upon a relatively simple model. The interpretative powers are of course limited - we cannot replay the past - but we now have the best window found yet into the minds of those ancient builders & their belief systems. No extravagant claims are made by the authors (though that wil not stop others), but it does offer an opportunity to think constructively about an area of archaeology & ancient history that has been far too neglected until now. Religion simply cannot be ignored when attempting to understand ancient societies - this is an invaluable contribution to our attempts to understand the people & the contextsin which they built their structures & the waysin which their societies may have functioned.
A bold undertaking, but poor execution - By: Jonathon Smith, 22 Oct 2006 
Inside the Neolithic Mind sets out on a bold premise: that similaritiesin ethnographic religions can be explained by the physical neurological wiring of the human mind. It presents a clear & well articulated explanation of the fundamental structure of religion & quite a compelling argument for the art of megalithic Europe being derived from altered states of consciousness.
However, Inside the Neolithic Mind ultimately fails to deliver. It unflinchingly attempts the most unfashionable of things; to create a framework that can be applied to the broadest range of human cultures. But with this it necessarily attempts to accommodate the concept of social variability &in doing so it looses almost all of its interpretative power.
Inside the Neolithic Mind: Consciousness, Cosmos and the Rea - By: , 31 Mar 2006 Lucid & convincingin it's arguments. In particular presents a clear framework for analysing the relationship between religious experience, religious belief & religious practice.
