Rock Art of The Chumash People - Religious Aspects of Art

Religious Aspects of Art

Chumash traditional narratives in oral history says that religious specialists, known as 'alchuklash created the rock art. Non-Chumash people call these practitioners medicine men or shamans. According to David Whitley, shamanism is "a form of worship based on direct, personal interaction between a shaman (or medicine man) and the supernatural (or sacred realm and its spirits)." In Chumash territory, the sites for the vision quests were usually located near the shaman's village. The Chumash considered caves, rocks, and water sources quite powerful, and the shamans saw them as a "portal to the sacred realm...where they could enter the supernatural." The way a shaman interacted with the supernatural was by entering a hallucinogenic trance, or altered state of consciousness. In this altered state, brought on either by surprisingly potent native tobacco or jimsonweed, shamans received visions and supernatural power from spirit helpers often in the forms of dangerous and powerful animals like rattlesnakes and grizzly bears. Spirit helpers almost never took the form of an animal that was an important source of food, because it was 'taboo for a shaman to eat meat from the species of his helper.'