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But, how could this help to solve the mystery of the haunting rock paintings created by their ancestors?
Having read the Blake papers and found out about altered state of consciousness or trance on the one hand, and then, knowing the rock paintings on the other hand, the real crunch is putting those two together: How do they dovetail? How do the San beliefs explain the paintings? And that was a real puzzle that kept me in the dark for a long, long time.
When the answer finally came, he realized it'd been literally staring him in the face.
In those days, I used to have copies of the rock paintings that we had made and I take them home and put them on the mantelpiece, have a couple of ornaments holding them in place, and sit and contemplate them. And there is one painting that was particularly important to me from one of the sites in the Drakensberg.
It was a copy of the same rock painting Lewis Williams had shown me in the mountains.
And then one day, looking at this particular painting, it just clicked what was going on here. On the left hand side of the painting, there is an eland, and it suddenly occurred to me that this eland was dying. We could tell that by the crossed legs, it was stumbling, its head was lowered, its hair was standing on end. This is what an eland does when it's dying, particularly from the poison or from a poisoned arrow.
Next to it and holding its tail was a man and his legs were also crossed, and he had hoofs beautifully painted--cloven eland hoofs, and he had hair standing on end. And it's... and it was obvious: he was dying; the eland was dying. And so it became clear that the paintings were not pictures of everyday life. They were about spiritual experience in trance.
This was the true meaning behind the San paintings. The eland is the largest antelope in Africa. Its grace and power had captured the imaginations of the San and given the animal a magical potency. It was what they saw in their trances. The paintings that the San had made weren't about hunting. Instead, they were recreating their hallucinatory encounters with the animal by painting them onto the rock surface.
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words and usages to remember:
1.dovetail:to connect or combine precisely or harmoniously 很融洽地吻合
2.eland: Either of two large African antelopes (Taurotragus oryx or T. derbianus) having a light brown or grayish coat and spirally twisted horns.大角斑羚
3.cloven: split, devided 裂开的
4.stare sb. in the face: quite near to sb. 迫近某人,明显地表现出
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