The Power of the Herd (71 page)

The plot thickens ten thousand years after Chauvet, when, it becomes clear, the Lascaux Cave artists were even more obsessed with horses. Out of 915 images at Lascaux, over
60 percent
of the recognizable animals are horses, followed by stags, at a mere 15 percent; aurochs and bison, each at under 5 percent; and felines, appearing 1.2 percent of the time. Wolves, generally considered to be the first animal willing to be domesticated, don't even appear in
these paintings. And here again, only one human figure abides in a bestiary that scientists now conclude had nothing to do with “hunting magic.” According to Whitley,
“Animal bones excavated from living areas
at the mouths of the caves” revealed that “there was little if any correlation between animals painted and animals eaten.” Since then, he and a few other scientists have promoted the idea that the paintings were evidence of ritual trance states, that shamanism led to the birth of human creativity.

But what if the explanation was a bit more obvious than that? What if the most detailed paintings were ancient portraits of the artists' favorite animals — and by that I mean individual animals with whom these people were forming increasingly trusting, intensely inspiring, transformational relationships? After all, while archeological evidence of people riding horses doesn't show up for a good eighteen thousand years after Lascaux's artists closed up shop, who's to say that these people weren't being called out by the animals themselves, following
their
lead, moving in harmony with ancient herds thousands of years before human beings developed the technology to confine and restrain the horse?

Ice Age individuals moving with these animals would not have left an archeological imprint, but that doesn't mean theorists should dismiss the possibility, especially considering the detail and vibrancy of this artwork.

“We cannot know what the cave painters were thinking,” Olmert commented after I presented this theory to her in 2012. “What we can know is
what they painted — and it was always, overwhelmingly, animals.
This overwhelming depiction of animals is clear evidence of the preoccupation of the Ice Age mind. And what we now know is that this degree of focused, long-term attention to anything will trigger the activation of oxytocin in the watcher. Since these animals were watchers of us as well, we can say with complete confidence that oxytocin was flowing between the species, creating the powerful bonds that would change the world.” Olmert went on to confirm that this line of reasoning “supports your idea that we were painting the animals we felt most bonded to.”

“In the middle of the Ice Age, the human heart was melting,”
Olmert writes. “Cave artists felt it first. The beast had become more than dinner; it had become Muse. Over and over, tens of thousands of times, cave painters made horses and lions and aurochs, and they made them do whatever they wanted. Cave artists were the first humans to gain control over wild beasts. They alone could decide where an animal would be and what it would do. Perhaps in these
caves, in this art, humans first toyed with the notion of finding another way with animals.”

Cave-art scientists have yet to entertain this compelling theory about the emergence of human creativity, one backed by recent research into the evolution of the human-animal bond and suggested by my clients' experiences with horses as agents of inspiration and transformation, not to mention a host of cross-cultural myths about the role of horses in expanding human consciousness and creativity.

Greek, Indian, Celtic, Siberian, Middle Eastern, and Native American legends all agree that horses have the ability to carry people back and forth between this world and the “other,” the premiere shamanic and creative act. Pegasus, the winged horse of the ancient Greeks, spirited heroes to the stars after death and brought magic from the gods to these same innovators during their earthly trials. He was also a companion to the Muses. Even more telling, however, are his antics on Mount Helicon. Flying to the highest point of this sacred peak, he emphatically struck his hoof on the ground, creating a massive earthquake and releasing an underground spring, whose waters cascaded down the mountain forever after, nourishing artists, poets, and musicians.

Muhammad received one of his holy visions astride Al-Buraq, sometimes spelled Alborak, a white winged horse who took Islam's revered prophet to heaven — and brought him safely back to earth again, where he struggled to share the immensity of his insights with the world.

In the book of Revelation, Christ returns riding a white horse. Hindu prophecies also speak of a white horse ushering in a future era of peace on earth. The final manifestation of Vishnu, Kalki is sometimes depicted carrying or accompanying the blue-skinned god. But some statues portray him with a horse's head and a human body, harkening back to an earlier manifestation of Vishnu, Hayagriva, worshipped as the god of wisdom. Sitting on a white lotus, this brilliant horse-headed avatar rescued the holy text of the Vedas from demons, representing thereafter the triumph of divine knowledge over the dark forces of ignorance and misguided passion.

Yet what if these and other fanciful stories point back to an even more ancient truth, one that civilized men aren't quite willing to entertain? What if ancient paintings at Chauvet and Lascaux weren't so much evidence of trance hallucination, a desire to dominate other beings, or a sudden leap in wholly symbolic thinking? What if they were literally capturing the power and spirit of the times, an era when the animals themselves were luring early humans into a journey of mutual empowerment, mutual evolution, and eventually, mutual domestication?

This in itself, of course, mirrors the role of modern shamans, who are considered specialists in bridging the visible and invisible worlds, as well as the human and animal realms. I first explored this notion in
The Tao of Equus,
gaining considerable inspiration from Mircea Eliade's 1951 book
Shamanism
and Larry Dossey's influential
Recovering the Soul.

Among the qualities that made the shaman a cross-cultural phenomenon was
the belief that “a kind of collective consciousness
bound them together with the animal kingdom,” Dossey writes. “So intimate was the sharing of the mind with the animals that shamans believed it possible to actually
become
an animal,” a notion exemplified by the human-animal hybrids depicted in early art at Chauvet, Lascaux, and other prehistoric sites.

Dossey goes on to observe that
“in the nonlocal, collective consciousness
that wrapped man and animal together, it was not always the man who took the initiative in actualizing it. Sometimes the first overture was made by the animal. This is most obvious in the
call
of the shaman...and in his initiation.... In the tradition of the Buryat shamans the tutelary animal is called the khubligan, a term that can be interpreted as ‘metamorphosis.' ”

The art at Chauvet and Lascaux represents an intense metamorphosis of human consciousness. As David Whitley muses in
Cave Paintings and the Human Spirit,
“I cannot help but wonder about the centrality of the horse
in this apparently shamanic art: Why? And, of course, what does the horse mean?”

There are several relatively simple, straightforward reasons why horses would have been receptive to forming associations with humans, and why our ancestors might have trusted them: First of all, horses are not predators. They don't stalk other species or attack unless cornered and provoked, and even then they rarely put forth the extra effort to kill. At the same time, they are powerful and seem to be aware of that power on some level. Consequently, they tend to be braver and more gregarious than most other prey-animal species. Yet unlike cattle and deer, they do not have horns and, as a result, are much less dangerous to engage with.

What if, deep in those ancient caverns, prehistoric artists were documenting the very first call of the shaman, creating intricate monuments to the very first khubligans? And what if, through our recent rediscovery of these caves, the spirits of those four-legged initiators are calling modern men and women to
remember,
to open our jaded civilized hearts and feel, once again, the collective consciousness that still binds us to the animal kingdom? In tempering our uniquely human, self-possessed view that we are the most intelligent, evolved species on the planet, would we be able to change our destructive habits and reclaim the power of the herd?

I've recently had the opportunity to contribute to some cutting-edge research on the emotional and physiological effects of equine-facilitated learning activities, most notably with Ann Linda Baldwin, an award-winning researcher at the University of Arizona. Along with Barbara Rector, one of the founders of the Equine Facilitated Mental Health Association, and Lisa Walters, head of the EquuSatori Center in Northern California, we've done some pilot experiments, and have subsequently designed larger studies, to understand why and how horses help humans become better at being, well, human. Ann's orientation as a physiologist has led us to explore how horses are attracted to, and help boost, heart-rate coherence, an optimal state for physical, mental, and emotional health. As Ann explains:

It is well known that emotions acutely affect heart rate.
When you are fearful or excited, heart rate goes up; and when you are quietly content, heart rate goes down. Emotions act on the heart by stimulating two branches of nerves in the heart, sympathetic and parasympathetic. Increased stimulation of sympathetic nerves increases heart rate, whereas increased stimulation of parasympathetic nerves decreases heart rate.

What most people don't know is that emotions also affect the pattern with which the heart rate changes with time (heart-rate variability) in very distinct ways. Negative emotions, such as anger and frustration, cause the heart rate to change erratically, without any real pattern to it. On the other hand, sustained positive emotions such as appreciation, care, compassion, and love generate a smooth, sine-wave-like pattern in the heart's rhythms. The heart sends this information to the brain, and this leads to increased synchronization between the two branches of nerves in the heart and a general shift in balance toward increased parasympathetic activity. Under these conditions, the two branches of nerves are stimulated in turn, in time with your breathing, and that is why the heart rate goes up and down with a regular rhythm like a sine wave. As you breathe in, your heart rate goes up; and as you breathe out, your heart rate goes down. Heart rhythm is coherent with breathing.

By contrast, as research has shown, negative emotions such as frustration, anger, anxiety, and worry lead to heart rhythm patterns that appear incoherent — highly variable and erratic. If a person is feeling negative emotions, there is less synchronization in the reciprocal action of the parasympathetic and sympathetic branches of the nervous system. This de-synchronization, if sustained, taxes the nervous system, impeding the efficient synchronization and flow of information throughout the brain,
making it difficult to remember things and to make rational decisions. Lack of coordination between the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous branches also leads to imbalanced emotions, reinforcing the existing negative emotions that first triggered the imbalance.

To gain funding for a significant study exploring which equine-facilitated activities promote this desirable coherent state, Ann and I wanted to see how horse enthusiasts' emotions were affected by informal interactions with these animals. With the help of author-researcher Gary Schwartz and researcher Sherry Daugherty, we created a survey that gleaned some fascinating data.

“The results show unequivocally that horses make us feel
great,”
Ann concluded upon analyzing the results, “noticeably better in fact than most other activities in which we regularly engage, lending support to equine-facilitated programs that have already shown anecdotally that working with horses, on the ground or in the saddle, decreases stress, increases self-esteem, and over time, helps people excel in the human world.”

For this baseline survey, we asked people interested in horses how often they feel, or felt, particular emotions (positive, negative, and neutral) under six different circumstances (at school, at home, at work, with a pet, in nature, with a horse). Positive emotions were awe, wonder, joy, appreciation, affection, and pride. Negative emotions were sadness, disgust, frustration, fear, despair, anger, and shame. Survey participants could choose from the following options for each emotion: Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Often, Very Often, Almost Always, or Always, and we rated these choices from 1 to 7: the higher the number, the more frequently the person felt the emotion. The results are depicted in the graphs on
pages 410–11
. As Ann explains:

Positive emotions are defined as feelings that reflect pleasurable engagement with the environment. If our instincts are true, that being with horses triggers positive emotions and improves your mood, then it is likely that your physical health will improve too. Studies by Sheldon Cohen at Carnegie Mellon University show that people whose behavior is usually described by words like
lively, energetic, happy, cheerful, at ease,
or
calm,
rather than
sad, depressed, nervous,
or
hostile,
are less likely to develop a cold when exposed to a cold virus. Not only are they less likely to get colds, they are more likely to sleep well, be less stressed, socialize, and maintain more and higher quality social ties, leading to greater success and enjoyment at work and at home. Those seem like good reasons for wanting to know what circumstances will make you more likely to feel positive emotions.

We sent our survey to the worldwide email list of Eponaquest, the now-international organization I founded in 1997 with a group of Tucson-based horse trainers. We also placed the survey on Google Docs, directing potential participants using the Horse Conscious website, a site developed by the organization that formed in response to the film
Path of the Horse
by Stormy May. Horse Conscious continues to bring together people who want to engage with horses in more humane and inspiring ways.