Author inside Shadow Cave on the Washington side of the Columbia River Gorge

The scalloped edges of the cave’s opening frame a fuzzy, slivered moon in the dusk sky. The membrane of an emerging bat’s wings shines gold against the blue, reflecting the last of the vernal equinox sunset. The Columbia River, the railroad tracks on the Washington side, and Interstate 84 on the Oregon shore make up my view outside the cave, but dark nooks and crannies, cracks snaking up the walls to the ceiling, and many, many faded red and white images are the spooky interior view. I sit inside Shadow Cave with its walls covered in Wishram Indian pictographs, journaling by headlamp, ready to spend the night asking, “Who lives in the rock?” I am on a liquid fast, as a sacrifice and offering to the experience and also as a means to enter an alternate state of consciousness (ASC), as a Wishram shaman or vision quester would seek.

Given the opportunity to explore any aspect of Native American myth for my paper, I felt immediately drawn toward the Columbia Plateau Indians of my home for the past fourteen years, the land around the Columbia River Gorge bordering Oregon and Washington. I studied the Chinookan-speaking Wishram and Wasco tribes: their myths, the ethnography and archaeology, and especially their rock art. But after two months of study, including an extra two-day class with the Oregon Archaeological Society and a personal field trip to locate non-public rock art in Wishram, Washington, I felt that my mind had taken me as far as it could go. I heard a call to hold a night vigil in Shadow Cave, one of the non-public rock art sites I had visited (Figs. 4-7). Patrick O’Brien, in his article “Petroglyphs and Perception,” touched on my rationale for entering into an experience like this as a way of seeking to understand, “Perhaps the understanding of rock art is more an internal affair than an external exercise. Petroglyphs are mirrors of perception” (189). O’Brien goes on to quote E. A. Hammel, who wrote that understanding is “when the researcher feels that knowledge of the phenomena is truly a part of himself. . . understanding is private” (191). I wanted to go deeper, much deeper than ordinary scholarship. Like the hero’s journey cycle, I heard the call, initially refused, accepted, gathered support, and then crossed the threshold into the adventure. Now I return and mine the gifts, making more offerings, including this paper.

Inside the cave, I sing to the seven directions (east, south, west, north, sky, earth, and heart-center), asking protection and guidance. I realize that the North, the place of the ancestors, called me here and they will be the ones to offer answers, should they come. I feel open and small and crazy for coming here and sneaking into this secret cave to make friends with the dark. I received a chant on the walk to the cave, with the refrain, “Come what may.” I question my company—Will I meet beings from the spirit world? Is it just me and my psyche out here, alone in the dark? I am afraid of what may come. But I want to know, I want to seek. If I’m crazy, then I’m crazy like millions of humans over millennia who have held vigils and sought whatever is out there or in here. I know that I’m not a Wishram Indian and that this vigil is a small attempt and offering, but I feel the ghosts of Wishram who painted the pictographs and spent nights in this sacred space. I want immersion, though I know I can’t have it. I want vision, I want to enter the rock like the shamans describe and journey to the spirit world, but that doesn’t happen. Instead I spend the night in a hypnagogic state, similar to a trance, in and out of sleep, wakened by rocks poking my back and train brakes screeching. I pay attention to my dreams, messages, and songs, and always, always ask my question, “Who lives in the rock?”

The Time before time, the time called “ancientness” by Donald Bahr and “pre-human flux” by Paul Zolbrod, calls to the human soul. The poetry of spirits moving over water, before the solid earth and mortal creatures emerged, inspires curiosity and intrigue, whether it is God moving over the surface of the waters in Genesis or the Mayan Popul Vuh’s description,

Whatever there is that might be is simply not there: only the pooled water, only the calm sea, only it alone is pooled. Whatever might be is simply not there: only murmurs, ripples, in the dark, in the night. Only the Maker, Modeler alone, Sovereign Plumed Serpent, the Bearers, Begetters are in the water, a glittering light. (Tedlock 72-73)

This is the “soft world,” populated only by spirit beings, before humanity. The Columbia Plateau Indians, along with many other cultures that make rock art, indicate that somewhere in the transition between “soft” and human-occupied time, the spirits entered into the rocks of the earth. The soft (spirits) went into what seems to be hard (rock), certainly a tricky thing. Multiple myths tell stories of spirit beings who were transformed into rock, or emerged from and then retreated back into the rock. Several examples will be discussed below.

Paul Zolbrod cites Jan Vansina and Donald Bahr’s article “Temptation and Glory in one Pima and two Aztec Mythologies” regarding their concept of the “floating gap,” which they define as a “gap or discontinuity . . . between the period of origins or ‘ancientness’ (prehistory) and living or verifiable memory (protohistory) followed closely by recorded history” (Vansina and Bahr 706-707 qtd. in Zolbrod 3). In other words, the floating gap is when the ancient past merges with the recorded past. One could argue that the “recorded” past begins with history books and written language, but rock art can also serve as a record. It is my contention that, for the Columbia Plateau Indians and perhaps many other cultures, rock art, in conjunction with the culture’s myths, serves as a bridge over the floating gap of ancientness and historical time as well as between the spirit world and physical reality.

*Tsagiglal* "She Who Watches" pictograph, Columbia Hills State Park, WA (author’s photo)

The Columbia Plateau Indians have a concept of “witnessing” that merges with my idea of the bridge across the floating gap. Phillip Cash Cash and James Selam are two Indian tribal traditionalists who have worked extensively with James Keyser on his rock art archaeology and ethnography research in the Columbia Gorge. In his numerous publications, Keyser quotes several of his conversations with them on the topic of rocks and rock art as witness. Selam, after telling the myth of Swallowing Monster, discussed below, answers a question from Keyser about a rock art site at the myth’s locale on the Columbia River: “Of course a lot of markings identify something that happened or something that was here, or somebody who got something [note indicates he means a vision] that was outstanding. They put that record on the rock” (Keyser et al., Talking 20). Later in the conversation, Selam says, “Everything has an explanation. The place you are talking about was a probably [sic] witness to what happened. Probably became a witness. [. . .] That place [the rock art site] was probably a witness to that time” (23). The note for that section says, “Here [. . .] James Selam is referring to mythic time, when the Swallowing Monster episode took place” (27). Selam, a Wishram tribal elder, explicitly refers to rock art as a witness to ancient time. Witnessing seems to be an important part of the bridge over the floating gap.

Phillip Cash Cash, a medicine man, offers a clear elaboration of Selam’s description of the witness, one that is worth quoting in full:

Just to follow up on Jimmy’s [Selam] statement, he said a word that was really crucial to understanding the role of rock art. He said the image may be a witness. In our way of life a witness was a really important figure in the life history of an individual, in the history of a people, and in the time of myths. When the laws were made on the earth [in mythic time] [. . .] a witness was always proclaimed as being a witness to an event that occurred in the creation or in the formation of the world as we know it now. These witnesses then stood for all time and some were actual land formations or rocks. In the creation of the world when everything was put in order, what we call the natural law, these markers then stood witness for all time, as to how the world was brought into being. They were a reminder to the people that those times have ended and now we are in the world of the human being. They stood as a marker, a reminder to the people that the law will always be, to stand for all time. (23-24, italics mine)

Willie Selam adds even more clarification to the discussion:

He [Cash Cash] spoke of the witness. The witness stands as the recognizer. He knows the truth. And our people are told the truth is always there for us to see. [. . .] [regarding the petroglyph She Who Watches, Fig. 1, as a witness] It’s probably a portion of its teaching. That it was a witness to the gorge and the falls. Even Mount Adams, Mount Hood, Mount Jefferson are one who watch over. They look over us and we recognize that. They are the spires, the temples of our world. (25)

The witnesses seem to be spirit figures, often solidified into rock in today’s time, but still alive and active and in relationship with the people. The witness concept is closely connected to vision and perception, something that must shift in order to “enter the rock.”

The witness is a symbol, pointing beyond itself. It is important to look both at the symbol and through it. James Hillman’s concept of “seeing through” applies here with respect to rock features in Indian myth and rock art. In this way, the symbol bridges one’s understanding. In addition, a witness is a watcher, a seer. It watches us and we watch it. The bridge connects through reciprocal vision. Tsagiglal, or She Who Watches, Figure 1, is a classic example of such watching. Perception must shift to see beyond the veil; the focus must soften and relax in order to peer into the hard rock and enter the soft world. Shamans and vision questers enter trances to commune with the spirit world. Dreams and visions happen in a kind of soft world state.

The rock face acts as a portal or doorway into the spirit world, along with the ASC trance state. Columbia Plateau ethnography provides evidence that Chinookan Indians, such as the Wishram and Wasco tribes, believe this to be true. Plateau rock art, located at important mythological sites, “may act as an ‘axis mundi’ or portal between our world and the spirit world” (Hann et al. 15). Jim Keyser describes the function of Columbia Plateau rock art, “Rock art is made as an ‘open sesame’ for a door into this other world” (personal interview). He reminisces about Phillip Cash Cash touching the rock art with his hand when they were working at a site together; Cash Cash, an initiated Native American tribe member, is allowed to touch the paint as a way to connect with it and what may lie behind it. The paint of the pictographic rock art is often faded because so many native people have touched it. Shadow Cave, the site of my vigil, is a location of such a portal: “This metaphor of cave or rockshelter as supernatural entrance occurs widely in western North American ethnography, including among the Chinookan-speaking Wishram people who inhabited this exact area. Shadow Cave is relatively strong archaeological verification of the importance of this ethnographically documented metaphor” (Keyser et al., Visions 79).

Boulder in relation to Columbia River and land (author’s photo)

This idea of the rock face as portal is not confined to the Columbia Plateau. For example, in an article about nearby Klamath Basin rock art (southern Oregon Willamette Valley), Don Hann and Gordon Bettles mention the use of rock portals by shamans: “Caves and hills were often considered the homes of mythological beings. The use of caves and rock art sites by shamans as portals between the physical and spirit worlds is well documented” (186). In the same article’s conclusion, referring to the Klamath figure Gmokam’c with his sun disk and a cave called “House of the Rising Sun,” the authors speculate, “Might these all be portals between the corporeal and spirit worlds? Places where spirits can turn into physical beings in order to enter this world, such as lizards darting from a crack in the rock, and where people can become spirits able to travel in the solid ‘ether’ of the spirit world” (189).

Another example comes from the Kalahari San in southern Africa, “The walls of the rock shelters were rather the gateway to the spirit world and interacted with the ritual paint in ways we do not fully understand” (Lewis-Williams 115). Lewis-Williams goes on to describe the shamanic journey: “The route of shamans on out-of-body travel was through the rock face to the spiritual realm beyond. Rock shelters were, in this sense, portals to power and eternity” (117). The rock face with its art acts as the axis mundi between the worlds, and the shaman is the traveler along this axis. The threshold is easy to find because it is intuitive—it is at the edge of light and dark, hard and soft—cracks in the rock, cave entrances, and also waterholes. These are the ways into the rock, at the axis of opposites. One is reminded of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s binary oppositions and Carl Jung’s quaternary mandalas, as well as the Native American medicine wheel, the encircled cross. Points of intersection imply crossroads, which imply travel.

Same boulder with sunlight outlining possible facial profile shape, west side (author’s photo)

Many of the witnesses in Columbia Plateau myths are spirit beings who have been transformed into rocks. For example, Coyote changed Tsagiglal into stone so that she would stay and watch over her people (Fig. 1). Keyser et al. comment that “Here the petroglyph has become an integral part of the myth. The rock art is the actual character, turned to stone by the usual Plateau trickster/changer, coyote” (“Window” 17). Similarly, At!at!at’łiya or “Cannibal Woman” was an ugly ogress who ate children. When she was outsmarted by a boy and girl and drowned in the Columbia River, she turned into a rock. “She floated down until she stood upright as a big rock. She has breasts and her basket on her back. That is why there are no more cannibal women about. All the children are shown that rock” (Spier and Sapir 274).

Hann et al. quote Teit 1918 in their article “Columbia Plateau Rock Art: A Window to the Spirit World,” “Indians also frequently painted pictures on rocks which were thought to be metamorphosis beings (originally human, or semi-human, or semi-animal or semi-god-like in character) concerning which there are stories in their ancient mythological tales or traditions. These rocks are generally boulders corresponding roughly to human and animal forms [. . .] suiting in some way the story that is told of them” (15). When I took my field trip to the Wishram area, I located a perched glacial erratic boulder described by Keyser in Visions in the Mist at site 45KL1196 that “shows classic shamanic images that seem likely to have been done to witness this place as one important in mythology” (79). My photographs of this rock are Figures 8-11. Notice the facial profile that I may have captured in Figure 11, as the sun hits the edge of what could be the rock’s “mouth.” Even the suggestion of an anthromorphic or theriomorphic shape is enough to spark my imagination, leading me to speculate about power in the rock. Imagine the Indian’s psyche who lives outside, steeped in nature, and sees this rock on a daily basis. When I spend extended periods of time outside, the landscape assumes numinous shapes and meanings.

In a particularly relevant story from the Wasco of Oregon about “Why the Columbia Sparkles,” five stars visit the Wishram who live across the river on the Washington side. Four stars take four young women away with them, but the fifth star stays and is turned into a rock that brings the Wishram luck with the salmon, status, and even a name, the “Star People.” The Wasco are jealous and steal the star rock twice, the second time breaking it and scattering it in the Columbia, where it sparkles in the water (Clark 107-108). In the story, this rock was such a powerful resource that it brought war between the two tribes, and when the Wishram lost it, they lost their power and became ordinary again. It makes sense that rocks would play a prominent role in Columbia Plateau myth, considering the basalt cliffs of their natural surroundings (Figs. 2-3). And these myths are also didactic, teaching good moral behavior through lessons. But beneath these obvious observations lies a deeper meaning for the people, the witness of the natural world, infused with sacredness. The cosmology is everywhere, a constant reminder of the spirit world.

Pictograph of lizard emerging and retreating into rock (Keyser and Poetschat 126)

Certain examples of Columbia Plateau rock art make the portal between worlds quite obvious. A lizard pictograph at Horsethief Butte in Washington, for example, shows the creature half in and half out of a crack in the rock (Fig. 12). “In many western North American Indian cultures, lizards are shaman’s spirit helper ‘go-betweens’ for contacting the supernatural world precisely because they come and go into and out of the cracks in the cliffs—often cliffs on which rock-art is carved or painted” (Keyser and Poetschat, “The Canvas as Art” 126). Keyser and Poetschat conclude that this image of the lizard simultaneously entering and leaving the rock “may well be a visual metaphor for the lizard moving back and forth from this world to the supernatural as a spirit helper to only the most powerful of shamans” (126). Paul S. C. Taçon and Sven Ouzman, in studying Australian Aboriginal rock art, contend that figures emerging from and entering cracks offer compelling proof that supernatural beings were thought to be present in the outer world (51). Not only the shamans travel; spirit beings cross the boundary as well.

Half and Half Man pictograph (Keyser et al., *Echoes* 12)

A second intriguing example symbolizing the spirit world threshold is known as “Half and Half Man” (Fig. 13). The figure is drawn on a rock face that already had a white wash running down it; the figure was drawn so that it intentionally bisected the two colors on the rock. “A common metaphor is that shamans live in two worlds—the everyday one and the supernatural. We can envision no more striking visual metaphor than this figure for portraying a shaman (in the guise of his spirit helper) in two worlds; one clear and natural, the other misty-white and slightly murky where shapes and lines are blurred and indistinct” (Keyser and Poetschat, “The Canvas as Art” 128). Both the lizard and Half and Half Man live in between the worlds, in a liminal space, with body parts straddling the threshold. One is reminded of Eshu-Legba, the Yoruba African trickster god of the crossroads with legs of different lengths because he simultaneously walks in both worlds. Shamans emulate spirits when they mediate between hard and soft worlds.

In Talking with the Past, James Selam tells the entire story of Coyote and Naisla, the Swallowing Monster. Naisla lures the animal people (e. g. deer, grizzlies, rattlesnakes) to a deep hole in the river, more than a hundred feet below sea level. The animals come to the whirlpool and Naisla swallows them up. Coyote rescues them by taunting and tricking Naisla into swallowing him; he then lights a fire inside the monster, burning up his heart. Naisla spits everyone out, and life continues. The rock art near Hell’s Gate on the Columbia serves as a witness to that story, as mentioned before. But what about the meaning of this myth? Coyote can symbolize the shaman who travels the axis and enters the mouth of the spirit world. The shaman is metaphorically swallowed by the rock he or she enters. And what does Coyote find within? All of life! The animals are the life of the people, and they must be saved. This myth can represent the shamanic journey as the shaman also enters into the spirit world to interact with the spirit beings, who are Life itself, the energy activating powers. The shaman also gains some mastery over these powers as well as the infusion of some of the power into him or herself.

This image of Life inside the Rock universally recurs. For example, in Australian Aboriginal culture, the Mimi spirit beings “reside in a rocky inner world where landscapes are much like those outside,” with plants, animals, water, and supernatural creatures (Taçon and Ouzman 44). Another story from the Navajo elaborates the image in a numinous way. In Karl Luckert’s translation of “Version of Curly Toaxedlini,” Sloppy tricks Black God into revealing his hiding place for all of the animals—inside a rock. When Sloppy opens the rock and sees the animals inside, the description is rich and charged with energy, much like an archetype:

The rock mentioned turned on its edge. [. . .] When it opened, the place presented quite a sight. It was covered with horns. Antelope were spread out, and elk were there in any number. Those former mountain sheep and white-tailed deer were there in great numbers, prairie dogs and rabbits [of the past] were there in great numbers, some white in color; and moving beings of every color and kind were there in great numbers. You should have seen them like a hanging black cloud in there! Rainbows were hanging among them, sun rays were hanging among them, reflected red spots of the sun were moving there and here among them. Little birds were twittering among them. The beautiful flowers in there were spread out as in a place of flowers of every color, they say. (91-92)

This fantastic image is paradisal, abundant, powerful, the climax of the story, delivered with a thrilling tone. This image is a gorgeous display of the spirit world behind the veil. At this point, if I were to see such a vision, I would not care about my questions: Is all of this only a product of my own psyche? Does the spirit world really exist? In the face of such numinosity, who cares? Beauty has a way of knocking us over, as Laughing Boy in Oliver LaFarge’s novel discovers in his climactic vision:

Let all be beautiful before me as I wander,

All beautiful behind me as I wander,

All beautiful above me as I wander,

All beautiful below me as I wander.

Let my eyes see only beauty

This day as I wander.

In beauty,

In beauty! (294)

In January 2008, on my three-week vision quest in the Sahara Desert, I cried a question to the universe: What is the beauty in me, in my human nature? The “answer,” in the form of an image, came on the third of four days of solo and fasting. In a vision, I entered the inner cavern that I had been repeatedly visiting over the weeks. The troll guardian led me deeper into the dark, colorless place, into the center. I asked, “Where is the treasure?” My squat little guide scoffed at me, “Sing your song (dummy, it felt like he said)!” I sang my Heartsong that I had received that day, and the inner cave transformed into a pulsing red, blood-filled chamber, my own heart center. I felt overcome with joy and it all seemed so obvious, like a trick. Of course that cave that I at first was afraid to enter, then was turned away by the threshold guardian troll, then finally convinced him that I would not take too many treasures away—of course it was my own heart. This moment was one of the climaxes of my vision quest, and I think it is relevant to tell here in that it was a rocky place that transformed into pulsing Life by way of shamanic journeying.

The vision quest and the shamanic journey are opportunities to “see through” to the world behind the world. Myth and rock art are in relationship with each other, as the shaman travels through the rock art portal that bridges the floating gap and interacts with the spirit world, as described by the myths of his or her cultural context. But David Abram describes another shift in perception: perhaps it is not only about inner and outer vision. Abram reminds us that the most important direction to seek the spirit world may be lateral, “outward into the depths of the landscape at once both sensuous and psychological, the living dream that we share with the soaring hawk, the spider, and the stone silently sprouting lichens on its course surface” (10). When I remember my Shadow Cave journey, the most numinous visions that pop out against the dark backdrop do not come from my mind or dreams. It is the silhouetted bat zooming in and out of the cave, the red-tailed hawk with a mouse in its talons that flew over my car on I-84, and the bald eagle that soared over the Columbia River when I left in the morning. No wonder the visions inside the rock reflect Life. The energy is unmistakable.

Works Cited

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Clark, Ella E. Indian Legends of the Pacific Northwest. Berkeley: U of CA P, 1953. Print.

Hann, Don, and Gordon Bettles. “House of the Rising Sun: Using the Ethnographic Record to Illuminate Aspects of Klamath Basin Rock Art.” Talking with the Past: The Ethnography of Rock Art. Eds. James D. Keyser, George Poetschat, and Michael W. Taylor. Portland, OR: OR Archaeological Society, 2006. 176-199. Print.

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Keyser, James K., and George R. Poetschat. “The Canvas as Art: Landscape Analysis of the Rock Art Panel.” Pictures in Place: The Figured Landscapes of Rock-Art. Eds. Christopher Chippindale and George Nash. New York: Cambridge UP, 2004. 118-130. Print.

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Taçon, Paul S. and Sven Ouzman. “Worlds within Stone: The Inner and Outer Rock-Art Landscapes of Northern Australia and Southern Africa.” Pictures in Place: The Figured Landscapes of Rock-Art. Eds. Christopher Chippindale and George Nash. New York: Cambridge UP, 2004. 43-67. Print.

Tedlock, Dennis, trans. Popul Vuh: The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985. Print.

Zolbrod, Paul. Lecture Notes. “Native Mythologies of the Americas, Session 2.” 15 Feb. 2010. Pacifica Graduate Institute. Carpinteria, CA. Print.

Life Inside the Rock: A Hybrid Experiential-Scholarly Approach to Native American Pictographs