(excerpt from The Rock Paintings Of The Chumash, written and illustrated by Grant Campbell, Univ. of California Press, 1965)

Religion and Shamanism

We know almost nothing of the Chumash religion. Of their traditions, beliefs, and ceremonies we get only the faintest, most provocative glimpses in the diaries of the explorers and the reports of the missionaries. In 1542, Cabrillo's diarist (see Bolton, 1925, p. 30) wrote:

They have in their pueblos large plazas, and have an enclosure like a fence; and around the enclosure they have many blocks of stone set in the ground, and projecting three palms above it. Within the enclosures they have many timbers set up like thick masts. On these poles they have many paintings, and we thought that they worshipped them, because when they go dancing, they go dancing around in the enclosure.

Crespi says that he saw two such enclosures in a village, one for games and the other a ceremonial temple. On the same expedition, Fages (1937, pp. 32-33) wrote:

Their idols are placed near the village, with some here and there about the fields, to protect they say, the seeds and crops. The idols are nothing but sticks, or stone figurines painted with colors and surmounted with plumage. Their ordinary height is three hands, and they place them in the cleanest, most highly embellished place they can find whither they go frequently to worship them...

The paintings (circa 1000 ad)
The Chumash, according to the explorers, made lavish use of color. They painted their faces and their bodies, their spears and bows and arrows. The women stained their buckskin skirts red. The planked canoes were painted red, and painted boards and poles marked their cemeteries and ceremonial enclosures. Of their color work, nothing remains but the mysterious rock paintings on cliffs and in caverns hidden from the sight of the Spanish in the remote and rugged mountains. Such painted rocks are called pictographs to distinguish them from petroglyphs, which are designs pecked, incised, or abraded in rock.

There is an almost universal reaction to semi-abstract Indian paintings. The viewer tries to identify some of the design motifs with something within his experience. Some people think that the paintings tell a story that could be read if one only knew the key; others see Egyptian and Masonic symbols! The average person tries to see realistic things like suns, snakes, and insects in the pictures. Such speculations are intriguing but fruitless. The Chumash neither thought as we do, nor did they interpret their ideas as we would. To them the supernatural was as real and as readily visual as the natural. It seems likely that most of the abstract paintings in the Chumash country are visualizations of supernatural beings or forces to be used ceremonially in much the same manner as the Navajo sand figures. Many of their pictures certainly represented things that existed only in the mind of the painter. Others were regional and stylistic formulas to represent objects, creatures, and phenomena known to the shamans of the area. In the western states, there are doubtless some rock pictures that record events, but this does not seem to be true of the southern California abstract pictographs.

There are a number of basic symbols that occur in primitive art throughout the world. Fertility, water, and rain symbols are among the most common, and these appear in the Chumash pictures. The similarity of some of the simplest figures in widely separated continents indicates nothing more than that certain combinations of straight and curved lines suggest the same thing to men everywhere.