Nothing ever starts or ends, but it has roots before and casts a shadow ahead.
We know of more than 200 European caves with Paleolithic paintings and carvings. Of these, 85% are in Southern France and Northern Spain, a striking concentration. Only a dozen in Italy and only one has been found in eastern Europe - the Kapova Cave in the Urals.
This concentration has much to do with the Ice Age, but here is the bottom line: Food was plentiful, and life was much more pleasant than has sometimes been imagined by their descendants. We know that 20,000 years ago at Les Eyzies on the Veyzere, 400 to 600 people lived side by side under the protection of a half-dozen rock shelters known as "abri". Some demographic evidence indicates the population was even much larger when mega-fauna were ranging in the neighborhood. We have evidence of mass kill-offs. For example, at a kill-site in Solutre, the remains of 100,000 horses. In addition, Salmon filled the streams--and are depicted on the caves, dried and stored. A rich and varied way of life is depicted, and which we are only beginning to understand.
What is the significance of Lascaux ("Sistine Ceiling of the Cave"), Altamira, Chauvet (oldest, at 30,000), Les Tres Freres (6-part shaman), the riparian region of Dordogne and Vezere, the coast of what is now Basque country in the Franco-Cantabrian heartland, the dotted horse and dance prints of Peche-Merle, the 500 footprints of children deep in the dark passages of the Niaux, the underwater Mediterranean gallery of Cosquer Cave?
1. Ritual - evidence of use other than for subsistence function. No one needs to paint a great auk (flightless relative of razorbill) to catch one or eat its eggs. No painting of a bison or mammoth helped bring one to ground. However, the symbols helped recall the Memory, wove the Dream, and told the Story. The Story passed to the children attempts to intervene in the future, attempts to create a future, insure prosperity in an environment of change and surprise.
2. Dance - flat rock spaces and seating areas with fire posts and fat lamps. The mud prints. Footprints in dance lines.
3. Acoustics - some chambers perdured the echoing, for example, of clapping. The staccato thunder perhaps emulating the stampeding herds depicted of aurochs, reindeer and bison; Pictures of big growling cats and bears in acoustically "dead" ends that resonate low sounds without echoing interference.
4. Fertility - again the tie to the future. More female parts. The earliest are all female, vulvular. Rising again, rebirth images, pregnant. All. Female. In fact, there is a dearth of "weapons", of depictions of killing other people. It is all about nurturing and beauty. All.
5. Totemism - system of clan organization distinguished by objects or animals with special relationships. There is an alphabet of relationships. A Story telling.
6. Mythology - many of the creatures are indeterminate or mixed, half-man, half woolly rhinoceros and feathered creature, the dominance of sexual symbolism (and gravid) and the relative scarcity of the game animals.
7. Dreams. Walk-about in the darkness, following the guide-string, with the fire-flickered shadows telling the story. Direct invocation of memory, hopes, visions. The re-emergence as awakening.
8. Eye-lid visions. The color and shape-shifting seen on the closed eye-lid after exposure to the high contrast black bison on the white rock.
9. Pharmacology. In the last two years, scientists have re-appraised the sites in terms of What to look for in light of the discovery of a high-level technology in pharmacological preparations among hunter/gatherers in Sur America (the Ayahuasca experience), and our own measuring and detecting technologies. Now we are looking for drugs in all the cave places, and finding them in spades, or more specifically, in mushrooms and vegetation. Of the 38,000 mushrooms, some 20 are seriously hallucinogenic as well as poisonous -- requiring a "technology" to ingest safely and a culture to want to, or to find some purpose in doing so. The abundant paintings of unidentifiable creatures, the half-man creatures (for example, the famous 6-part "shaman" at Les Tres Freres), may be readily recognizable portraits of things encountered as a result of ingesting amanita muscaria, or a muscarin or psylocibin compound. There is no question that hemp was in abundance and was actually used in the caves -- in the making of a "guideline" to hold onto in the dark.
10. Absences. Note the complete absence of ANY indication of wars, or gangs bent upon attack or annihilation of other humans. Very few depictions of men. No caudillo or personality worship. No gods. No virginity. No gross inequality -- pharoah and serf. No Big Man.
Some people, our people, were squatting around a fire, waving skin-reflector-shields, echoing drums and hunting calls, bringing their sons and daughters to the Story, to their senses, and hoping for a bountiful future for their children...and here we are.
Add: ANTHROPOLOGY OF DREAMS. Dreams are real. They probably have a practical utility even if we do not recognize exactly what it is. Like fire or electricity, there they are. A Cave Man would probably-- certainly --be "in tune" or attentive to these images, wondering about them. In the last year, scientists have documented the fact that dreams are produced in the same part of the brain which is the seat of motivation, goals, and desires. {Attention Futurists.} Dreams are tied to survival and are central to evolutionary adaptation to changing circumstances. Perhaps the Paintings were not intended to control the game animals, or the predators, or even the "spirits". The intention may have been to control our own Dreams -- to "walk through" the sleep-state awake, and like the dreams themselves, to take from the walk the warnings, the rehearsals, the opening up of The Way. To re-emerge from the Cave Experience, as an Awakening from the sleep of our lives.
ReplyDeleteI have just recovered from a bout of spelunking in books about Lescaux and the Paleolithic Arts. Two things lit me up:
ReplyDeleteFirst, I happened to read that people are "speculating" about Cave Paintings. Apparently depictions of auroch, Przewalski Horse, auks and such ilk, open up wild and wooly musings by the soir disant experts. Unfettered by science, I felt the urge to join the chuntering herd.
Secondly, the Ayahuasca spoke to me. Now let me be clear: I have never drunk the actual potion. Just the smell of the cup sent me into heaves of projectile diarrhea and core vomit, neither of which were dry. But I do remember detailed discussions about the remarkable hallucinogenic effects. And the fact that considerable “technology”, or technical understanding of the botanicals, was implemented in the experience. Ayahuasca is ingested by people whose “civilization” was pre-scientific method as we know it. Yet they valued, and were able to survive a brain-lit pharmacology that was not only hidden behind repellent, but was deadly. Ingested without the right palliative ingredients, the hallucinogen is a poison. Thus, apparently “primitive” people turn out to be conducting a brain exercise that can only be described as highly evolved.
I realize these two points of ignition do not obviously “relate”. The Golden Age of paleolithic painting goes back 20,000 years, give or take a few centuries and sites –clearly the Chauvet site sets the dawn of the craft as far back as 30,000 years – but these caves are all located in Europe. Specifically France and Spain.
Ayahuasca is found no where in Europe. Nor is an hallucinogen associated with caves or depictions of wooly mega-fauna.
But this is where it suddenly hit me: The Cave Paintings are NOT about hunting, or fertility, or coming of age, or protection from evil spirits, or all those “theories”.
No one who has ever hunted would ever imagine that climbing down into a cave to see sketches would have some kind of “draw” for game.
No one who has ever bred babies would ever imagine crawling through cave mud and guano-droppings to increase fertility.
And the fire-lit images of bulls, even if accompanied by an echo-chambering drum beat of stampeding special effects, is not a Coming of Age ritual to welcome young people into the clan. Who dances unseen in the dark? Who paints extinct prey to honor sons? Who would imagine that being led into a cave with big cat-shaped pigmentation on the wall is going to impress a warrior, who really does encounter Real Big Cats and Bears in his daily life?
The depictions are remarkably free of “human” reference. There are no deifications. Nothing is “worshipped” or venerated or shown to be inferior. Nothing is framed with either villlification (rock or mud-throwing symbols) or glorification (altars). Half the “creatures” are indefinable – unrecognizable, unreal.
What these depictions ARE all about is The Brain. It is the “imagining” itself that is the subject.
And that leads me to the pharmacology. Perhaps, like the Ayahuasca societies, these people who “appear” to be primitive, are quite sophisticated with certain technologies. Perhaps the paintings had little to do with the “real” world, but everything to do with the “virtual” world inside our own heads. Just as we are imagining a Coming of Age ritual, SO WERE THEY. They were imagining.
Amanita Muscaria was everywhere near the caves. Muscarin is another astounding hallucinogen. And SOMETHING opened up The Brain for these people.
And from then on, it was developing that opened-up brain-power. The images are about the Story. They are the pre-script for The Words which were being developed. The reify the Dreaming these folks were experiencing – whether enhanced or not.
The Caves are a walk through dreams.
Why dream? Why discuss dreams with others? Why paint it and illustrate the dream? The re-emergence from the cave as the awakening.
The dream changed you. Maybe it changes all of us. They do not foretell the future, but they give us some hope of interfering or at least inter-acting with our destiny. If not Foresight at least a feeling of preparation.
DEMENTIA WITH LEWY BODIES. Another hallucinatory event, which would be admittedly rare but not impossible in the Dordoyne riparian paradise of mega-fauna and man, is Dementia. Half-light is a perfect spawning environment for glimpses of skulking "men in trees" or dancing mammoths, both of which appear among other unidentified depicted "sightings" on the Cave Walls. Suppose a respected sachem began suffering memory loss with Lewy bodies--and he knew and spoke of his hallucinatory sights. Surely this would be significant. They would all trot down into the cave, to invoke "that thing".
ReplyDeleteEntheogen theory - in Wikipedia:
ReplyDeleteWriter/philosopher Terrence McKenna in the Entheogen theory proposed that the fruit of knowledge was a reference to psychotropic plants and fungus, which played a central role, he theorizes, in human intellectual evolution.
NONE of the Cave paintings reflect any connection, even remotely, to the Story of Adam and Eve, or The Fall, or eviction from the Garden.
CAVE ARTS CRITIC, in LATimes BK Rev, 7/13/2008.
ReplyDeleteJAMES SALLIS commemorates the fact that THOMAS M. DISCH (Suicide July 2008) "has left the cave". He described pictures on cave walls, as part of all the arts, as ways of remembering. I quote his vision:
"Making their way to the inmost chambers of caves, bypassing other interiors that seem to us just as suitable, our ancestors covered walls with their paintings. We've little idea what purposes (social? religious?) the chambers served, all those detailed renderings, those grand animals. But there in privacy a few invented, for us all, the entire vocabulary of our arts: image, narrative, celebration, form. They speak to us still: We were here. This is what we saw. This is how we experienced our world."
In Darkness and light.