ABSTRACT
The decorated caves of the Palaeolithic era indicate that caves were magical or sacred places, entrances to other worlds and places of transformation. Many images could be interpreted as depicting entrance and exit through cracks and steps in the rock surface. Images found in some Franco-Cantabrian Upper Palaeolithic cave art were most likely closely associated with various shamanic practices and were probably a location for vision quests. The flickering of firelight on the uneven surfaces of cave walls would have provided a third-dimensional effect and moving shadows would have increased the vividness of the images. Mental imagery cultivation as a tool to move an individual into a transcendent experience is employed in the Western esoteric tradition as well. The batin is a world of Idea-Images, of subtle substances and ‘immaterial matter’; it is the scene on which visionary events and symbolic histories appear in their ‘true reality’.
