Signs of the Seers
Thousands of years ago wandering tribes left mysterious and beautiful paintings on rocks in the Lower Pecos, and only now are we beginning to learn what they mean.
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Scrambling up the path, I follow Turpin as she darts through a small door in the wire fence that protects the paintings from vandals. Under the tawny overhang of rock, we crane our necks as we stare up at the wild profusion of figures sprawling over more than five hundred square feet of the wall. Giant black, rust-red, and orangy-yellow human forms loom high above our heads, following the sweeping curve of rock like living things. Painted one on top of another, they rise, collide, and evaporate into their neighbors—the arm of one blends into the staff of another. Lighter than air, one small human figure levitates up the wall, his long hair standing on end. Nearby, a grotesque crablike creature scuttles through the ether, while a herd of deer succumbs to hunters’ spears. Like other murals painted in what has come to be known as the Pecos River style, this faded wall of color resists snap interpretations. With its competing flocks of figures, its alien shapes and bizarre radiating lines, it overwhelms the eye. And as researchers have long known, there are no local oral traditions to help unlock the meaning: By the end of the sixteenth century, all the native residents of the Lower Pecos had been wiped out by disease and warfare.
By examining the figures carefully, however, Turpin and others have detected clear rules governing their portrayal. As she studies the wall, she explains that the giant elongated human figures always occupy the most prominent positions in the panels, their arms extended wide and their faces blank and featureless. Waving weapons such as spears and clubs, they dangle strange prickly ornaments from their arms and wrists. “You know that it’s a pattern that has some meaning because it’s so repetitive,” says Turpin, “repetition being the mode of communication and ritual.”
But what kind of ritual was it? During the late sixties, Texan anthropologist William Newcomb theorized that the central human figures were shamans engaged in ritual dances of an ancient mescal-bean cult. Commonly known as mescal beans, the scarlet-colored seeds from Texas mountain laurel contained a poison that rendered the cultists unconscious. Upon awakening, they told of powerful visions. Perhaps, Newcomb suggested, the panels depicted sacred dances of the mescal-bean shamans. The seeds seem to have been well known to the people of the Lower Pecos: Excavators unearthed dozens of samples in painted caves of the region.
Turpin was intrigued by Newcomb’s theory. For years researchers believed that shamanism had arrived in North America with the first migrants, but little was known about its early practice on the continent. To test the idea, she began immersing herself in the scientific literature on the religion. Among modern shamanistic cultures from Siberia to Chile, she discovered, people told of a time long ago when the earthly and the spirit worlds had been one. At some point, however, the two realms had splintered apart, and humankind had lost its ability to commune with gods and supernatural beings. Only a chosen few, the shamans, were still capable of crossing the great divide between the worlds: Their method of transport was the trance. Forsaking their earthbound bodies in an induced state of rapture, they called on the help of certain guardian animals and embarked on the perilous voyage to the otherworld. There they confronted deities and waged supernatural battles in order to see into the past, divine the future, cure illness, and escort the souls of the dead to their final home. “I like to call them supramen,” says Turpin, “because they were over everything, by the very fact they could die and be reborn.”
Had the Lower Pecos artists represented these beliefs in their art? Turpin began poring over the patterns of painted figures for clues. Throughout the region, she noticed, only one form ever approached the human figures in size or prominence—the cougar. At Panther Cave and elsewhere, Lower Pecos artists had endowed certain human figures with distinctive cougar attributes—claws, alert cat-ears, and striped underbellies. Perhaps the artists were portraying shamans in the act of shape-shifting—assuming the protective form of a guardian animal for the dangerous passage to the otherworld. “This is the shaman who transforms into the largest and most powerful animal here,” says Turpin, pointing up at the tall, rust-red figure of the panther shaman.
Such beliefs, she adds, were common among shamanistic cultures. In Europe, the ancient notion of shape-shifting had given birth to legends of werewolves; in Africa, it spawned tales of were-crocodiles. Throughout most of Central and South America, however, it had nurtured beliefs in were-jaguars. Among the Campa of Peru, people described the stealth of human jaguars who prowled the forests at night in search of prey. In the Mexican highlands, people talked of similar creatures who stalked the darkness in feline form. And among certain Mayan groups, these beliefs became so deeply engrained that the word “balam” served for both “jaguar” and “sorcerer.”
Dodging hostile forces, which were often represented in the rock art by a rain of spears, the shamans described their entrance to the sacred realm through a small circular portal. “See that hole over there?” Turpin asks, walking to the back wall of Panther Cave and pointing at a large painted red dot. “See the circle with the lines coming out and the bird rising out of that? That’s what I think is the hole of the universe, the portal to the divine.” Recent psychological studies, moreover, suggest that such an image stems directly from human neural wiring. When entering deep drug-induced trances, subjects of experiments consistently report the sensation of being drawn through a deep hole.
Indeed, a belief in sacred portals may help explain why ancient artists chose these cave walls as their canvases. More than places of shelter, these dark grottoes may have become entrances to the spirit world. To illustrate the point, Turpin tells a story as we climb into the boat and head back up the Rio Grande. Some years ago, she and a small team began excavations in a dark, bell jar-shaped sinkhole near the rim of Seminole Canyon. Descending the narrow vertical shaft by ladder, the team reached a large subterranean chamber whose floor was littered with splinters of human bone. As the excavations proceeded, many of Turpin’s colleagues concluded that the hole had been used as a hasty dumping ground for the dead. “Everybody went, ‘Oh, look, they just threw ’em away down the hole,’” she says.
But Turpin saw another interpretation of the sinkhole. With its vertical shaft belling into a large subterranean chamber, the sinkhole may have come to symbolize both the earthen birth canal and the passage to the otherworld. Four thousand years ago and more, grieving relatives had carried their infant and elderly dead to the underground chamber, sliding them gently down the chute to return them to the darkened realm from which they had come. “It was just a perfect symbolic rebirth,” Turpin says finally, shaking her head at the memory. “It’s that same old mythical portal to the earth.”
TUCKING AWAY PIPE AND TOBACCO, rock art photographer Jim Zintgraff leads the way down the snaking path to the White Shaman site, alert to the slightest sound. A small, wiry man in suspenders, a neatly pressed white shirt, and canvas pants, the white-haired photographer looks more like a kindly pastor leading a church picnic than a man packing a pistol. But Zintgraff is nothing if not full of surprises. The grandson of a Texas Ranger, the courtly San Antonio resident has come well prepared to blast the trail’s resident rattlesnakes to kingdom come.
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