Future Forum: Guilt, Innocence, and the Death Penalty 
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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Zintgraff doesn’t take kindly to intruders in these parts. Since finding and recording the White Shaman site more than thirty years ago, he has taken up its protection with true missionary zeal. (White Shaman is on the Pecos, half a mile above the confluence with the Rio Grande. The site belongs to the Rock Art Foundation, a San Antonio—based group dedicated to the preservation of the paintings.) Persuading a local businessman to purchase the property for the Rock Art Foundation, he has succeeded admirably. As we reach the painted overhang without so much as glimpsing a rattler, Zintgraff strides up to the panels with quiet reverence. In front of him, the white shaman shimmers, headless and ascendant, against the golden rock. Nearby, a huge painted larval monster wriggles up the back wall, while a flock of elongated humans wafts in the cosmic breeze.
As I stand back staring, trying to take in its meaning, I wonder about the state of mind that conceived such unearthly images. Among some North American cultures, shamans regularly sought union with the spirit world by methods as diverse as dancing, fasting, and bloodletting. But here in the Lower Pecos, they took a more direct route. According to Carolyn Boyd, a graduate student at Texas A&M University, the mystic artists of these canyons likely conceived many of their visions after consuming potent hallucinogenic plants. “I do think that what they painted are experiences they had under the influence of these plants,” says Boyd.
An artist, muralist, and archaeologist, Boyd began looking into the subject five years ago while analyzing the Pecos River style of art and reading published studies of tribal groups in northern Mexico and the American Southwest. As she was sketching the mural at the White Shaman site one day, her attention was suddenly transfixed by the small reddened figure of a human with deerlike antlers tipped by black dots. The image resonated strongly with something she’d read. “I said wait a minute—the black dots on the antler tines, where have I heard about that before?” Turning it over in her mind, she remembered reading of an ancient divinity, part human and part deer, revered by the Huichol people of Mexico. Often called the peyote tribe, the Huichol had long resisted Christianity, holding true to their shamanic traditions. Living on small ranches along the slopes of the Sierra Madre Occidental, the Huichol still spoke of an ancestral homeland in the Chihuahuan Desert. Even today, Huichol shamans lead a pilgrimage there in the fall to collect a small, carrot-shaped cactus: the powerful hallucinogen peyote. According to tribal tradition, peyote is a sacred plant that was first carried to earth on the tines of a deergod. To honor this divinity, pilgrims fasten some of the cacti to deer antlers carried along on the quest.
Had the people of the Lower Pecos subscribed to similar beliefs nearly 4,200 years ago? Certainly the artists had painted antlered human forms repeatedly on their rock shelter walls. And archaeological evidence suggested they knew peyote well. While excavating a series of high painted caves overlooking the Rio Grande in 1933, researchers from the Witte Museum had unearthed paraphernalia similar to that employed in modern peyote rituals. More intriguing still, along the sandy floors they had also found remnants of buttons of peyote, which grows only in isolated spots in the region. When radiocarbon-dated recently, two of these specimens proved to be 7,000 years old—the oldest peyote associated with human use in the world.
“I said, ‘Okay, that’s interesting, but it’s still not enough proof,’” Boyd recalls. Digging further into published accounts of today’s peyote pilgrimages, she began turning up a remarkable series of parallels to the images recorded at the White Shaman site. For example, to symbolize a spirit of unity before they set out, Huichol shamans instruct the pilgrims to grasp part of a long cactus-fiber cord; the cord is then scorched by fire. With ritual purification complete, the pilgrims then depart their village in single file, each carrying a lighted candle. On the White Shaman mural, five large, equally spaced humans hold fiery torches in both hands—each linked by a serpentine white cord darkened at one end. “It was just incredible,” Boyd says, “because it was one thing after another that started revealing itself.”
In considering the evidence she now suggests that specific physiological effects of peyote may have profoundly shaped both religious belief and art. Those consuming peyote, she notes, are often seized by an initial sense of physical and mental exhilaration. Among some native cultures in Mexico, runners eat peyote to increase their speed and boost their endurance during footraces. On occasion, witnesses of some modern rites have described participants’ “jumping like deer” after swallowing the plant. Such athleticism on the part of an ancient shaman, says Boyd, could have inspired belief in a divinity half-deer and half-human. As intoxication from the plant deepens, subjects report their first swirling hallucinations. The plant, laced with alkaloids, including mescaline, triggers visions both nightmarish and beautiful and fosters a strong sense of disembodiment. Among the mystics of the Lower Pecos, such powerful visions were likely painted hours or days after the trances had ended, when hand-eye coordination had returned.
In Boyd’s view the peyote murals of the region stand as the world’s oldest known record of hallucinogen-inspired altered states. “It’s the first evidence we have visually, it’s in the sediments and pulled together through ethnography, to say, yes, four thousand years ago, people were using hallucinogenic plants,” she notes. But as her research proceeds, she is rapidly amassing evidence of other equally potent plants. “I think we’re going to find a great many more through the rock art—not just hallucinogens, but medicinal plants that were very much a part of ritual.” Painted long before the invention of paper in the New World, these enigmatic panels serve much like the later hand-painted codices of Mesoamerica, recording tribal mythology, sacred ritual, and spiritual vision.
IN THE SILENCE OF THE MORNING, about twenty miles west of the White Shaman site, I pick my way down the rubble-littered wall of Rattlesnake Canyon, trying not to think about the heat. (Rattlesnake Canyon is west of Langtry on the Rio Grande. It is on private property owned by Texas Tech University and accessible by arrangement through the Rock Art Foundation.) The sun has already developed a hard, steely gleam; the air hardly moves. “It’s the worst kind of sky,” Zintgraff says, mopping his forehead as he rests at the side of the trail. Sweat trickles down my back. In the canyon below, Turpin and two others disappear into a towering thicket of desert willow, crashing against trunks and snapping slender branches. I follow, welcoming the shade. Along the muddy ground, javelina skulls whiten in the cool quiet.
Rising twenty feet or so in the air, the willows wall out the world, reducing our vision to a green tunnel. Emerging at last, I straighten and stare in amazement. Along the canyon floor lie small pools of clear green water, like something from a classical Chinese garden. High along the rim, slender canes of ocotillo, each tipped with a brilliant crimson bloom, bend in greeting. Below, on scattered ledges, prickly pear cacti cascade like giant green water drops, and claret-cup cacti brim with ruby flowers. “They’re like little hanging gardens,” Turpin says, gazing up at them with a smile.
Turning, she leads the way to a shady painted wall, and as I stand before scenes of soaring humans aloft in rapture, I feel a sudden, unexpected kinship to these ancient artists. Once they walked this narrow canyon, reveling in its secret harmonies of water and shade. Alive to its beauty, they returned here time and again, choosing this rugged wall for their unearthly visions. In the shady cool of the morning, I am reluctant to leave this corner of paradise. Caught in the same spell, Turpin leads us to a small alcove farther up the canyon. Along a broad shelf of white rock, we stretch out in silence along the cool rock, staring up at the sky. In the far distance, a canyon wren sings, its sweetness echoing along the towering walls. Turpin looks over and says, “Maybe this is what they mean by ‘the unbearable lightness of being.’”
For more information, call Seminole Canyon State Historical Park (915-292-4464) or the Rock Art Foundation (888-525-9907).
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