S5004025

m

Coins and potoer iti Late Iron Age Britain    44

represented at female puberty rites, boy to manhood initiations, and marriage ceremonies. It was the king of animals, to which all others were servants. With an animal so central to a community^łs belief system, it is no wonder that it featurcs strongly in the mind of an individual in a trance:

Bushman see an analogy between shamans entering trance and antelopc -especially eland - dying from the eflects of a poisoned arrow. Both the shaman and the antelope tremble violently, stagger about, lower their heads, bleed from the nose, sweat profusely and finally collapse unconscious. An antelope’s hair stands on end, and Bushmen speak of hair growing on the back of a man in trance. Because of these parallels, Bushmen use ‘death’ as a metaphor for trance experience: shamans are said to ‘die’ in a trance. This metaphor is graphically expressed in the art by juxtaposing dying antelope with shamans in trance. In some instances the shaman is depicted as a dying antelope whose potency he possesses. The transformation is, however, not complete in all instances, and these half-shaman/half-animal figures are called therianthropes.

(Dowson 1992:67)

These phenomena have been replicated under laboratory conditions, with obser-vations such as ⁽I thought of a fox, and instantly I was transformed into that animal. I could distinctly feel myself a fox, could see my long ears and bushy taił . . .’ (quotation in Dowson 1992:67). In a whole senes of shamanic art forms, images of man/animal therianthropes are common.

A second recurring theme is a change in perception of how the world feels, variously described as flying or drowning, because of an imagined weightlessness and a change in aural perception. The ability to fly in trances is certainly a common motif. The shamans amongst the Lapps of northem Eurasia often used to imagine them-selves flying on sledges drawn by their most significant animal, the reindeer - an image from which we derive our popular notion of Father Christmas flying through the sky.

A finał theme in fuli trances is the concept of the out-of-body experience. Here subjects describe floating away from their actual body, but still being attached to it by a thin cord connected to the back of their head. Often there is a fear that if this cord is broken then return to their actual body will be impossible. Precisely where this concept comes from is difficult to tell, but it may result from a physical sensation experienced in the head at the height of the trance. Cross-culturally, this experience results in visual representations such as lines emanating out of human forms and therianthropes (cf. Dowson 1992:74).

There is a series of suggestive images on British and northern European coinage (Fig. 2.1) which might indicate that experiences derived from trances were being fed back into the temporal visual language. The gold coinage had to represent the man/horse image, sińce sacral kingship or something like it was an important prop to legitimatc authority. But within the constraints of the serial imagery it is vcry

diverse ways, but each way represented a motif common to trance imagery. In Armorica the head developed to indude subsidiary faces cmanating from the Principal portrait and attached by cords connected to the back of their heads (Fig. 2.1, BN6541 and BN6879). These have been interpreted as representing the classical Medusa, with her snake-headed hair, but there is no concession to make these very human subsidiary heads look like snakes. Allen (1980:135) thought that the image might represent an heroic figurę, sutTounded by trophies of severed heads. An altemadve reading would be that the image simply shows an individual (mythical or real) invested with the ability to leave his or her own body and enter the spirit world -to be, in effect, omnipotent. The coin illustrated is a Bilion stater of the Veneti, but there are many others which are very similar. The serial tradition took hołd in a big way in Armorica, and there is perhaps less generał variation in their Iron Age coinage than almost anywhere else.

On the reverse side of the same coins, the serial tradition has similarly restrained the development of the Philippus charioteer, but nonetheless there have been signifi-cant changes. On both coins the horse has a decidedly human face. This therian-thrope (human/horse) is relatively common on northem Gallic coinage. But added to this image are a variety of devices. Sometimes a bird hovers above, but on these coins one (BN6541) has developed spirit heads, just as the human head on the other side has done (which counts against the Medusa hypothesis), whilst the other (BN6879) depicts a flying man lying undemeath the horse. In this region, whilst the Philippus clearly restrains developments in imagery, all the deviations from the original relate to phenomena which occur in altered States of consciousness. What about elsewhere?

In north-east Gaul and Britain a few coins also cxplorcd therianthropic, flying and drowning motifs; however, most took a rather different course. A naturalistic coin worth mentioning is a gold coin attributed to the Ambiani (Fig. 2.6: Sch.4 AV classe I). It is one of the earliest gold issues in north-east Gaul and might be of later third or early second cen tury in datę. Here the horse was certainly on the mind of the individual represented, as it is shown as climbing in one ear and coming out the other. One of these was found in the tempie deposit from Waltham St Lawrence. Other different forms of man/horse combinarions exist. Allen (1980:122) noted the intriguing practice in Britain of combining letters from inscriptions with part of the coin type, where the ears and legs of horses can be read as letters in individuals’ names (Fig. 2.6: VA7ii:EA8). This combination of ruler and horse is reminiscent of elements of British and Irish mythology which gave March ab Manannan (King Mark from the Tristan romance) horse’s ears (0’Rahilly 1946:290).

Finally, another image which might be relevant is the prevalence of flying horses in northem Europę. Pegasus occurrcd on the coinage of Emporion on the Mediterra-nean coast in Spain, but from I relatively early stage flying horses spora di cally appeared on Iron Age coinage, and whilst somc are similar to the coinage of Emporion, many arc not. In Britain such images do occur; sometimes the horses have wings, other times they do not (Fig. 2.6; VAi5o:SE6 and VAi65:SE7). Given the above discussion both the flying horse and the swimming horse (hippocamp)