CHAPTER 9
Cave and Community
One of the most demanding challenges to understanding Upper Palaeolithic art, especially parietal art, is to go beyond generalities to the empirical specifics of images and caves. As we saw in Chapter 2, there has been an uneasy tension between generality and particularity. With structuralist explanations, the tendency has been towards generalities. On the other hand, present-day empirical work goes to the other extreme. Researchers now abjure generalization and explanation (which must, of course, include some generalization) in favour of what they see as objective data-collection.
Rather than think in hard-line structuralist terms and focus on the animal species depicted, as Leroi-Gourhan and others have done, I consider a congeries of aspects of Upper Palaeolithic parietal art as I try to come to grips with specific caves:
– the ways in which images were made,
– the spaces in which they were made,
– the social implications of how and where images were made, and
– how modes of execution, meaningful spaces and social relations all interacted within a shamanistic, tiered cosmos.
In adopting this multi-component approach, I take up the position that Max Raphael initiated but did not develop. In short, we need to consider the exploitation of the varied topographies of caves from a social perspective. In doing so, I identify what I call ‘activity areas’, spaces in which people behaved in what they considered appropriate ways and in which they performed rituals relevant to those parts. It was communities of people, not just random, isolated individuals, who used the caves. There must have been shared notions about what the caves were and what counted as appropriate activities to perform in them. There was therefore some sort of ‘structure’, some set of beliefs about the caves, but it was not inexorably superimposed on the caves by unthinking automatons. Rather, the beliefs were a malleable resource on which individuals and groups of individuals drew and which they consciously manipulated when they embellished the caves.
The argument that I explore in this chapter acknowledges two dialectic relationships:
1 between, on the one hand, cosmologies and beliefs in people’s minds and, on the other, the shapes of the caves;
2 between social structure and the topographies of the caves.
I use the word ‘dialectic’ (in the sense of progressive, interactive unification of opposites) because I wish to move away from the purist structuralist notion of a fixed mental structure that people impose on the world. Instead, I argue that the uses that people made of the caves did not merely reflect the structure, or structures, of diversifying Upper Palaeolithic society. Rather, the caves were active instruments in both the propagation and the transformation of society. As the anthropologist Tim Ingold puts it, ‘Culture is not a framework for perceiving the world, but for interpreting it, to oneself and others.’1 How this could be will become apparent as I proceed.
From the outset, it is essential to remember that the ‘shamanistic explanation’, that I built up in previous chapters, and that I now use as the foundation for an exploration of specific caves, should not be taken to be a monolithic invariable that obscures temporal, geographical, social and iconographic diversity. On the contrary, it is (or should be) a tool for uncovering diversity, not for concealing it. To demonstrate the heuristic potential of the explanation I contrast the ways in which Upper Palaeolithic people exploited different caves. They explored and adapted each cave in accordance with its peculiar topography2 and in terms of the particular shamanistic cosmology and social relations that prevailed at that time and place. There were probably Upper Palaeolithic ‘shamanisms’, rather than one immutable, monolithic religion.
To illustrate these points, I contrast two caves in the Dordogne that are believed to be of approximately the same age but that have vastly different topographies – Gabillou and Lascaux.We shall see similarities and also dissimilarities between them that point to different kinds of social relations within the societies that embellished them and thus to different ‘shamanisms’.
Gabillou
Gabillou, a cave that overlooks the Isle River near the small town Mussidan in the Dordogne, is a fairly simple initial example of how the distribution of imagery within caves may be understood in terms of the shamanistic explanation.
Not long after the discovery of Lascaux in 1940, workmen were enlarging a cellar beneath a modern house when they found an entrance to a tunnel; it had been blocked by a medieval wall. The area had also been part of a quarry. Alerted by the discovery of Lascaux, a bricklayer was on the look-out for Upper Palaeolithic art – and he was not disappointed. In the late 1940s, Jean Gaussen, a local doctor and enthusiastic prehistorian acquired the property. The owner, one of Gaussen’s patients, had been having a long wrangle with his tenants, who refused to leave, and who denied Gaussen access to the site because they perceived him as a friend of the owner. Exasperated, the owner sold the house to Gaussen at a very reasonable price. Gaussen thus bought the site without having seen it. The tenants were immediately content to let him into the cave. Once their dispute with the original owner had thus come to an abrupt and, from their point of view victorious, end they left amicably within three months.
Visitors caused a little damage in the narrow tunnel soon after its discovery, but Gaussen at once put a stop to that. Through his concern, the cave has been well preserved. It has never been open to tourists, and Gaussen, who died in 2000, never allowed more than two, or at most three, visitors at a time to enter the narrow tunnel. I am greatly indebted to the late Dr Gaussen for allowing me and my companions three extensive visits to the site.
Because early Magdalenian deposits were found inside and outside of what is now the entrance, Gabillou is believed to date from the early part of that period; it was thus contemporary with Lascaux.3 Unlike many caves that ramify into complex interlinked passages, chambers and small diverticules, Gabillou comprises only an entrance chamber, that was probably at least partially open to natural light during the Magdalenian, and a single slightly sinuous tunnel that extends from the entrance chamber for approximately 30m (100ft) (Fig. 54).4
Several researchers, including Gaussen, excavated the cave. The first investigator, Gaston Charmarty, found eight lamps on the surface of the tunnel, a horse molar and several pieces of bone. Subsequently, Gaussen himself excavated the tunnel and found a further 10 lamps, a stone hammer, a rock plaquette with traces of paint, and 20 flint flakes or blades, one of which was covered on both sides with red ochre.
THE ENTRANCE CHAMBER
Unfortunately, the entrance chamber was partially destroyed when the cellar was first constructed. Apparently, the builders were unaware of the images. As far as we can tell from what remains of them, the chamber was embellished with paintings and also with ‘simpler’ engravings. The species represented include two deer, a bird, a horse, and bison; there are also now-unidentifiable marks. Some of these images are on projections from the ceiling, the reason why they escaped destruction during the modern centuries when the space was occupied. Because of poor preservation, it is impossible to say how many images were originally in the entrance chamber. Images exist wherever the old surface is preserved.
54 A plan of Gabillou Cave.
The space is today large enough to accommodate a fair number of people, and the distribution of images on the ceiling and on the wall near the entrance to the tunnel suggests that this was also so in Magdalenian times, though it is hard to establish the exact Upper Palaeolithic dimensions. It does not seem to have been large enough to have made a commodious living site; perhaps there was a living area outside the entrance. We cannot tell.
THE TUNNEL
The floor of the tunnel that leads off from the entrance chamber was considerably lowered by excavations; the excavators painted a line on the walls to indicate the ancient surface. Originally, the tunnel contained a fine clay filling 1.2 to 1.5m (3ft 11in–4ft 11in) deep. During the Magdalenian, visitors to the passage were obliged to go on hands and knees, and movement was restricted. Indeed, only one person at a time would have been able to crawl along the tunnel with any ease; two people would, especially at narrow points, have been impossible. The images must have been made by people sitting or lying down. They do not extend below the former level of the floor surface.
In the tunnel, preservation is excellent. Beautiful engraved images of horses, aurochs, bison, ‘monsters’ and a remarkable hare are strung out along virtually its entire length, though they tend to concentrate in bays in the wall. Most were made by only a few deft engraved strokes in the soft rock; even a fingernail could produce an engraved line, but most of the lines seem to have been made with an implement with a wider point.
There are no elaborately painted images in the passage, although there do appear to be patches of red ochre that may be the remains of paint. The Abbé Breuil believed that the engravers ‘took care to show certain characteristic details so as to make the attitude of the animal more exact…The rest of the figure seems to have been intentionally neglected as it took secondary importance in the mind of the artist.’5 He also argued that the many engraved lines that overlie a number of the images were ‘magical strokes’.6 I return to such lines when I consider Lascaux.
A considerable number of the images are fitted into inequalities in the rock – or, as I argue, extracted from suggestive features of the surface. The nose of one animal is neatly shaped around a small boss of rock. At least one image is engraved so that it is clearly coming out of the rock face. Then, too, some few red-painted images were executed after the engravings. At the end of the tunnel, an engraved horse is superimposed by a painted one. The painter used the mane and part of the head of the earlier image, but the breast of the later image is new.
This kind of participation in already-existing images is characteristic of parts of Lascaux. Other parallels with Lascaux include: quadrilateral grid signs, a distinctive way of painting the hoofs of animals, and the presence of a claviform at the end of the tunnel in Gabillou (there are numerous examples in Lascaux). ‘Broken signs’, that is, lines with detached, short side additions, also occur in both sites. Finally, the trick of draughtsmanship of leaving a gap between an animal’s leg and the body, apparently to show depth, is found at both sites. As many researchers believe, large Lascaux and the smaller Gabillou were probably used by people belonging to a single social network, a point to which I return.
MAGDALENIAN GABILLOU
Because of its good preservation, the quality of the images and its contemporaneity with Lascaux, Leroi-Gourhan7 regarded Gabillou as ‘one of the most important French caves’. In order to make sense of the images and the cave in terms of his mythogram, he had to postulate not one but two sanctuaries. The first, he claimed, comprised the entrance chamber, its ‘end’ being marked by two felines and a ‘horned personage’ near the beginning of the tunnel. The end of the second sanctuary – and the tunnel itself – was marked by another feline and ‘horned personage’. Within these two postulated sanctuaries, the horse/bison theme was ‘taken up over and over again’.8
If we abandon any attempt to plot the distribution of motifs and instead examine the cave from the point of view of contrasting human activity areas, we find that the relative sizes and shapes of the two parts of the cave suggest a significant distinction.
Communal rituals could have taken place in the entrance in the presence of images now only fragmentarily preserved: there is space for a number of people. The remains here of simpler engraved images show that the area was not exclusively reserved for one kind of activity. Because we cannot date individual images, we must also allow that the two kinds of image may reflect changes through time in the uses to which the entrance chamber was put. This part of my interpretation must remain tentative because of the destruction of so much of the entrance.
The situation in the tunnel is clearer. Throughout its length, it was, I argue, used by individual vision questers who, isolated from the community in a restricted space, made comparatively swiftly executed engravings. Questers passed through three spatial stages and in doing so crossed two thresholds: first, they left the outside world for the entrance chamber and communal, preparatory rituals; then they left that space to penetrate more deeply into the underworld, the tunnel replicating – and possibly inducing – the mental vortex that leads to vivid visions. In the depths, they individually sought the visions of altered states that would guarantee them supernatural power, and then they either fixed those visions as they were experiencing them or reconstituted them after returning to a more normal level of consciousness (Fig. 55). Amongst those visions were the ‘monsters’ of Gabillou: weird creatures with long necks (Fig. 54).9 As Ann Sieveking remarks, they are comparable to those at the end of Pergouset in the Lot district of central France, another long tunnel cave. She entertains the possibility that they may have derived from drug-induced visions.10
Finally, transformed mentally and socially by their experiences, questers returned to the level of daily life where they were regarded as those who had traversed the cosmos and had thereby acquired abilities not possessed by everyone. They entered into new kinds of social relations with other members of their community. Every time the cave was used, social divisions were dramatized: the many outside, probably the few in the entrance, and even fewer in the depths, face to face with the creatures of the nether world.
Paralleling those social divisions were segments of the spectrum of consciousness. Although deeply altered states could, of course, be experienced outside the cave or in the entrance chamber, it seems likely that a more delimited distribution would have been insisted upon, if not actually achieved: ‘true’, mentally and socially transforming visions could be obtained only in the underworld. As our two ethnographic case studies suggest, dreams and visions experienced on the level of daily life were probably considered to be mere glimpses of what was possible in the cave. In this way, a group of people within the community, and with the community’s general consent, linked the cave to the spectrum of consciousness to create social divisions, not the only ones, but significant ones. The topography of the cave thus paralleled narrowing social divisions – a form of hierarchy – and underwrote them with varied mental experiences, access to which was controlled.The cave itself and the experiences of shifting consciousness were thus implicated in the fashioning of social structure that was not founded entirely on brute strength, age or gender, though those discriminating factors probably played some role.
| CAVE Outside | Entrance chamber | Tunnel | |
| SOCIAL RELATIONS Whole community | Select group | Individual questers | |
| CONSCIOUSNESS Alert/dreams | Full spectrum | Autistic end of spectrum |
55 A highly generalized summary of space, society and consciousness in Upper Palaeolithic caves.
We should not suppose that this pattern of space and consciousness was rigidly observed. People, being the individuals that they are, always blur divisions. We should therefore not be surprised to find some swiftly made, personal, fixed images in large chambers where there are, principally, communally constructed images. What I propose is a generalization, a pattern that emerged as caves were explored and adapted, and as people used them over extended periods. The ways in which such explorations and adaptations changed over time remain to be studied. Nor is it likely that people moved through the caves while in states of deeply altered consciousness: the journeys are often hazardous enough for someone in a fully alert state. Deep, visionary states would have been incompatible with negotiating the passages and chambers and would have been achieved in specific places.
Returning to specifics, we can draw two further inferences from the distribution of images in Gabillou. The first concerns the few who had access to the tunnel.It is important to note that they did not, by and large, crowd and superimpose their images on one another, though they could have done so if they wished; certainly, there are no dense clusters of images such as we shall encounter in Lascaux. This kind of separation between images probably paralleled social relations between shamans. By and large, it seems that questers aimed for individuality: they did not want their own spirit helpers’ images to be mixed up with those of other shamans.
The second inference derives from the most convincing therianthrope (part human, part animal figure), the so-called ‘sorcerer of Gabillou’, that is at the very end of the tunnel (Fig. 54). (Another two so-called ‘sorcerers’ are certainly anthropomorphic, but I am unconvinced that they are therianthropic.) At the end, the tunnel turns slightly to the left and the image is on the wall facing the visitor. It is in a striking, confrontational position. The image is a bisonheaded human figure with a tail. Its form implies that it is not simply a masked person. The bent legs of its posture suggest that it may be dancing, though this may be a tenuous inference. A line extends from its mouth to the right where it crosses a fairly deep cleft in the rock and then brushes the top of a quadrilateral grid sign and extends beyond it.11
The deep, terminal position of this therianthrope was probably significant: its remote location is comparable with that of the therianthrope in the depths of Les Trois Frères that dominates the Sanctuary (Chapter 1, Time-Byte I) and with the figure in the Shaft in Lascaux, which I describe in a moment. Its association with a grid motif, a form found elsewhere in Gabillou and also in Lascaux, links representational images with signs, though in this case the representational component is, of course, not ‘naturalistic’. As we saw in earlier chapters, both the therianthrope and the grid could have derived from the deep level of autistic consciousness that I labelled Stage 3.
Before we leave Gabillou, I sum up the key points of its topography and imagery. Seen from a social perspective, the topography of Gabillou divided a (probably select) group of people who occupied the entrance from those individuals who crawled into the tunnel and made swiftly executed images. (This does not, of course, mean that images were made every time people entered the tunnel.) Communal activities – dancing and choral chanting, for instance – may have been possible in the entrance but certainly not in the tunnel. In addition, one must allow the possibility that a still larger group of people was not allowed even into the entrance chamber.
Art, religion and social discrimination were thus intricately interwoven. Here are the seeds that grew into the sort of society we know today with its cross-cutting social differentiations. How did the people of Gabillou regard the ‘seers’ who had penetrated the tunnel and had experienced visions? We cannot say in exact terms, but Coleridge probably captured something of their awe in poetic imagery:
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
We can now contrast this ‘simple’ cave with the more complex topography and imagery of Lascaux, where we can identify multiple activity areas.
Lascaux
Lascaux, the most famous of all Upper Palaeolithic caves, is situated on the left bank of the Vézère River near the small town Montignac. For just over two decades after its discovery, it was open to visitors, and tens of thousands trooped through every year. It is said that over a million people passed through the cave in the first 15 years. In 1963, when a growth of micro-organisms caused by the presence of so many people was discovered, the cave was closed to visitors, an action that was essential but which caused shopkeepers and hoteliers in Montignac considerable distress. Today, the cave remains closed to the general public, but an astonishingly accurate replica of two parts of it has been constructed nearby, and this affords visitors an excellent experience of what the cave itself is like, physically, visually and atmospherically. Lascaux II, as the replica is known, was opened in 1983 – and Montignac revived.
Modern visitors to Lascaux I are so overwhelmed by the beauty, size and startling preservation of so many of the images thronging the walls that ‘scientific’ appraisal is apt to be silenced. A prominent American archaeologist, who was granted 20 minutes in the cave, told me that the first half of his allotted time was rather wasted because, overcome by the wonder of it all, he viewed the art through a curtain of tears. Such is the impact of Lascaux.
However one looks at it, Lascaux strongly gives the impression of having been a much-used and highly structured cave. Soon after the end of World War II, when archaeologists could begin to study it in earnest, this quality excited Laming-Emperaire’s structuralist interest.12 Surely, she and many others felt, Lascaux holds the keys to major mysteries – if only we can spot them.
To do so, researchers need to study not only the comprehensive publications on the site but also the cave itself. They need to visit the cave repeatedly and to spend more than the 20 minutes or so that are normally allowed those who are fortunate enough to be admitted at all. I am therefore deeply grateful to the authorities charged with the preservation of Lascaux for permitting me generous access and for valuable discussions with them. At present, Norbert Aujoulat is conducting a reappraisal of the imagery: his meticulous work and expert photography are bringing to light much that was formerly unknown.13
Lascaux is customarily divided into seven sections (Fig. 56):
– The Hall of the Bulls
– The Axial Gallery
– The Passage
– The Apse
– The Shaft
– The Nave
– The Diverticule of the Felines
I now give a brief description and interpretation of each of these sections. This should not be seen as anything like a complete inventory of every image; that would require a book to itself. To guide my discussion, I expand concepts that I developed in earlier chapters and in my account of Gabillou. I also introduce a distinction between ‘composed’ and ‘confused’ parts of the cave and argue that it points to different human activity areas.
THE HALL OF THE BULLS
When the young discoverers of the cave slid down the sink hole, it was in this chamber that they found themselves, though the first images that they noticed were in the Axial Gallery. Although the Upper Palaeolithic entrance to Lascaux may not have been in exactly the same place as the hole that Marcel Ravidat and his friends used, it must have been close by; this is the part of the cave that is nearest to the surface. Most researchers now believe that the ancient entrance was blocked by a rock fall, not dissimilar to the one that exposed the entrance so many millennia later. Although there may have been other means of access that are now blocked, there seems to be little doubt that the Hall of the Bulls was the first section of the cave that Upper Palaeolithic visitors encountered; it would certainly have been the most accessible. There was probably a widening passage some 18m (60ft) long that led from the outside world down to the Hall of the Bulls. Dim light may have penetrated this far, though it would have been insufficient for image-making.
The Hall of the Bulls is a large, roughly elliptical chamber measuring some 9m (29ft 6in) across the painted section.14 When the cave was discovered, parts of the floor were covered by pools of water. Breuil, who was summoned within days of the discovery, ill-advisedly drained them by making holes through the floor to a lower level and allowing the water to drain away – and to carry with it valuable archaeological remains. The lower cave system has not been explored, but it is generally believed that it was inaccessible to Upper Palaeolithic people. While archaeologists were trying to excavate the site, workmen were inexorably digging away deposits to prepare the cave for tourists. All in all, it was a highly unsatisfactory situation.
56 Plans and cross-sections of Lascaux Cave. The complexity and locations of its imagery suggest that different rituals were performed in its contrasting areas.
The upper walls of this large chamber are covered with white calcite that gives a glistening appearance and that has contributed to the preservation of the paintings. In parts, though, the calcite has flaked off. Some flaking took place in prehistoric times, for a couple of images extend onto the flaked surfaces.
The part of the Hall of the Bulls farthest from the entrance is covered by two converging cavalcades of animals (Pl. 21). This is one of the few instances in which a natural feature, here a brown ledge about 1.5m (5ft) above the present floor, seems to provide a vague ground line for some (by no means all) of the images. Apart from a small, incomplete horse, the first image that a person entering the cave comes across is the approximately 2-m (7-ft) long socalled Unicorn (Pl. 20). The appellation is inappropriate for a number of reasons, not least being the fact that, if it has horns at all, it has two; they slope forward from its head. The creature has a pendulous belly and six oval shapes painted on its upper back. Some researchers see a resemblance between its head and a bearded human head. Brigitte and Gilles Delluc, who have studied the cave extensively, believe that the Unicorn has ‘the body of a rhinoceros, the withers of a bear or bison, the head and spots of a big cat, the tail of a horse’.15 It is certainly a puzzling image, especially as the species of the other images in the cave are easily identified; its form is not the result of poor draughtsmanship.
The outlines of two horses are within the body of the creature. In front of the fantasy animal are seven more horses, not all of them complete. Then there is the head and forequarters of a huge bull, or aurochs. A large red horse with black mane and head has its ears pricked in an alert state. Many of the images here and throughout the cave have been integrated with folds and ridges in the rock wall, indeed so many that it is impossible to mention them all: the images fuse with the ‘membrane’.
In front of the nose of the right-facing aurochs is the central part of the frieze: four, possibly five, small red deer stags, facing left. Some of them have unnaturally complex antlers. Above these deer is a partial horse, facing right and with its ears pricked; the painter took care not to allow it to impinge on other images. Part of its back is emphasized by a natural hollow in the rock.
Then, facing the animals that are coming in from the left, are three huge aurochs bulls advancing from the right; the largest is 5.5m (18ft) long, the other two not much less. There are the less distinct remains of three aurochs moving in the opposite direction to these bulls; they are in a lower part of the panel and may date from an earlier period than the large animals. Laming-Emperaire remarks that the hindquarters of the first of these bovids ‘are outlined by a horizontal protuberance of the rock, and when viewed in a slanting light the flank and bony rump stand out in remarkable relief’.16 This effect is destroyed by the electric lighting that has been installed in the cave. In a dark area below the second bull there is a small image of a bear, the head, ears and back of which are formed by a natural ridge in the rock. It is a brown bear, not one of the larger, now-extinct, cave bears. The bear tends to blend with the black belly-line of the aurochs; this makes it rather difficult to see. It seems that the claws of the bear that protrude below the black of the aurochs were touched up with darker paint.
Some parts of some of the animals in the Hall of the Bulls were painted by means of the blowing technique. Horses’ manes are examples, but, more interestingly, at least one of the large aurochs has its nose fashioned by blown paint. One of the aurochs also has a line painted in its open mouth that may represent the tongue or an emanation of ‘breath’. Just which images were made, or partially made, by the blowing technique is a line of research that will be followed up in the future.
In addition to the animals, there are some signs, though fewer than elsewhere in the cave. They include nine short, red parallel and right-angled marks and dots above the snout of the last of the right-facing bulls, and two ‘broken signs’ in the right-hand section that comprise a central line and separated segments. There are also sets of black dots and lines.
The highest parts of the frieze are some 4m (13ft) above the floor. The image-makers must have constructed some means of reaching that high up. When one thinks of the 51⁄2-m (18-ft) long aurochs on the right, it becomes clear that the painters must have constructed a large platform or a series of smaller movable platforms made, probably, of tree trunks lashed together with rope. Serious, planned labour was needed before the work of painting could start.
That the paintings in the Hall of the Bulls were carefully ‘composed’seems inescapable. But more can be said. The sheer size of the images suggests that they were communally made. People must surely have co-operated in the preparation of paint, construction of scaffolds, outlining the huge images, and then the application of the paint, even if one, or a few, highly skilled people directed the work. The space available in the Hall of the Bulls would have readily facilitated such co-operative labour. In addition, the chamber would have permitted a large number of people to view the images and to perform various rites, of which no evidence now remains. Such activities may well have included dancing, music and chanting. This is the only part of Lascaux that could have accommodated a large number of people. The Hall of the Bulls may therefore be regarded as a ‘vestibule’ and thus be comparable to the poorly preserved entrance to Gabillou.
THE AXIAL GALLERY
The composed nature of the frieze in the Hall of the Bulls is evident in the way that it accommodates the entrance to the Axial Gallery (Pl. 21). This gallery leads off the far left side and may in some limited sense be considered an extension of the Hall of the Bulls. Its entrance is between the second and third aurochs. These two images were positioned to allow for the entrance, which arches up between them; one leg of the right aurochs folds into the entrance to the Axial Gallery. Entering the Gallery thus entails passing beneath – and through – the cavalcade of animals in the Hall of the Bulls. Having done so, one is no longer standing back and looking at a procession of monumental images: one is now among them.
As in the Hall of the Bulls, the walls here are covered with sparkling calcite. In prehistoric times people would have been able to walk upright through the gallery, though the floor is now lower than it was. The remains of scaffolding have been found; it was used to reach the higher parts of the walls and ceiling. The Axial Gallery is richly decorated with images that extend over the ceiling: visitors to the Axial Gallery feel entirely surrounded by wonderful, vivid paintings. As is the case with the Hall of the Bulls, it is clear that the scaffolding and images were made by co-operating people in an alert state of consciousness. I select a few images that are especially significant for our enquiry.
On the right wall, just inside the entrance are the head, neck and back of a large black stag with open mouth; it is known as the Roaring Stag (Pl. 22). Stags lift their heads and roar in this posture during the rutting season at the end of winter. Mario Ruspoli, in his photographic study of the cave, suggests that this image should be seen in association with two butting ibexes and a male horse chasing a mare in other parts of the cave; all these images, he says are indications of the rutting season.17 That the stag is emitting a sound was probably significant in terms of multisensory experiences in the cave: sound is implied by the image. Perhaps people participating in rituals imitated the roaring sound; some may have interpreted their aural hallucinations as the roaring of stags. If we take ethnographic evidence into account, we must allow that the painted and engraved animals of Upper Palaeolithic art probably also ‘spoke’ to people in auditory hallucinations. Intense, concentrated viewing of ‘fixed’ spirit animals, may, in the subterranean conditions of sensory deprivation, have triggered parallel hallucinations, Stage 3 visions that involved all the senses and imparted messages and truths to awed recipients.18
Beneath the Roaring Stag is a line of black dots that terminates at a quadrilateral sign that is probably earlier than the dots.19 A little farther to the left is a tawny horse with a black mane, legs and underbelly; it faces towards the stag (Pl. 23). Beneath the horse is a line of dots that appears to be a continuation of the dots beneath the stag, though whether they were made at the same time is debatable. The dots associated with the horse have two noteworthy features. First, they seem to disappear behind a boss in the rock and then emerge again beneath the stag. Secondly, the line of dots bends up and back again so that it suggests the front legs of the horse. Signs and representational images thus combine, as the neurological model shows they indeed do in deeply altered consciousness.
At the end of the Axial Gallery is a section known as the Meander. It is of great interest. At this point the gallery is narrower than at its entrance, and on the left is a ‘pier’ of rock that juts out to create a tight, semicircular space. Past and behind the ‘pier’, the passage swings to the left and becomes so narrow that further progress is soon impossible. On the calcite of the left-hand wall at this point are a number of small horses and branching signs.
On the opposite wall are a bison and two horses; they appear to be coming out of the narrow tunnel behind the ‘pier’ (Pl. 26). The bison is of particular interest: it has its tail raised, a point to which I return later, and its penis is shown. The horse deepest in the tunnel is also remarkable. Its eye is formed by a small circular hole 5 cm (2 in) deep. Laming-Emperaire writes, ‘Perhaps this hole inspired the artist to place the animal’s head at this point.’20 Here is another instance in which touch and sight may have combined in the detection and creation of images.
Painted on the curved ‘pier’ itself is the Falling Horse, a miracle of Upper Palaeolithic draughtsmanship (Pl. 26). The horse is upside down, its head towards the entrance of the gallery, its legs in the air. As Laming-Emperaire rightly says, ‘The impression of a horse falling into space is vividly conveyed.’21
Here, the passage is only 90cm (3ft) wide, and visitors have to turn sideways in order to slip into the space. To see the entire image of the Falling Horse, one has to crouch down in the Meander and move around the rock. The whole horse cannot be seen at once: complete viewing implies movement around the ‘pier’.
Naturally enough, the Falling Horse has excited much interest and comment. Some researchers consider that it depicts a horse tumbling over a cliff during a hunt or corralling.22 The various strands of evidence that I have so far intertwined suggest that this literal reading is unlikely.To explain the significance of the Falling Horse, we need to retreat back along the Axial Gallery and then turn to look down as much of its length as we can.
From farther back, we see that the gallery slopes downwards: the Meander is in fact some 9m (30ft) lower than the threshold where the gallery leaves the Hall of the Bulls. The Axial Gallery distinctly leads deeper into the nether world than the Hall of the Bulls. At the same time, the way in which the images swirl around and over the ceiling of the Axial Gallery recalls the neurologically generated vortex with its surrounding images that leads into the deepest stage of altered consciousness and the most vivid hallucinations. This impression is strikingly heightened by the Falling Horse turning over at the focus of the vortex. The Axial Gallery, carefully planned and communally executed, is, all in all, a remarkable evocation of the neurological vortex. As I have argued, physical entry into the subterranean passages was probably seen as equivalent to psychic entry into deeply altered states of consciousness. This parallelism is nowhere better seen than in the Axial Gallery.
In addition to being the focus of the vortex – a point of breakthrough – the Meander is special in another way. Its floor was originally 1m (3ft 3in) lower than that of the far end of the Axial Gallery. The Abbé André Glory, who excavated areas of Lascaux and copied many of the engravings, found that the earth at this point contained ochre and the remains of flint knapping. Opposite the Falling Horse, he made an even more notable discovery: three flint blades were thrust into a small niche in the wall; they showed signs of use, but they were also covered with red paint.
This find recalls the prehistoric person in Time-Byte I who carried the tooth of a cave bear through the low, narrow passage that leads to Les Trois Frères, and then placed it in a niche in the small chamber with engravings of lions. In Enlène itself, where there are no parietal images but many engraved plaquettes, hundreds of small pieces of bone were thrust into cracks in the rock (Pls 24, 25).23 In addition, larger pieces of bone were deeply planted into the ground by the first people who used the cave; the bones were subsequently covered by later deposits. Further examples from Upper Palaeolithic caves could be cited.
People placed objects of various kinds into the walls and floors of caves. Small pieces of animals clearly had significance, a point that supports my explanation for the origin of three-dimensional images (Chapter 7). If, as I have argued, people saw the walls as a ‘membrane’ between themselves and the spirit world, they were performing a two-way ritual. They were drawing (in two senses) spirit animals through the ‘membrane’ and fixing them on the surface; they were also sending fragments of animals back through the ‘membrane’ into the spirit world. In these instances, one may possibly discern some sort of restitution ritual: two-way traffic between this world and the spirit world. The Upper Palaeolithic people who entered these spaces were behaving in terms of a pact between the powers of the nether realms and the community that they represented and on behalf of whom they acted. The powers of the underworld allowed people to kill animals, provided (in some expressions of Upper Palaeolithic shamanism) people responded in certain ritual ways, such as taking fragments of animals into the caves and inserting them into the ‘membrane’.
There is ethnographic support for these suggestions. In shamanistic societies throughout the world bone has special significance and is associated with spirit. For instance, the Huichol of Central America believe that the spirit, or soul, of a person lodges in the top of the head and in the bone that grows over the fontanel in the months after birth. The Iroquois of North America have a development of this idea that may throw some light on what was happening in Enlène (Time-Byte I). Their word for ‘burned bones’ (uq-sken-ra-ri) also means ‘the soul as “animated skeleton”, or ghost’.24 In the Salle des Morts, some 160m (525ft) from the Enlène entrance, people kindled fire with wood and then used bone as the chief combustible material.Vast quantities of bone were brought into the cave: the stench must have been overpowering.25 Around the world, notions of a skeletal soul and rebirth from bones are expressed ritually. The Warao of Venezuela, for example, place fish bones into the walls and thatch of dwellings in the belief that this display of respect will lead to new fish being born; fish and animals, like people, are believed to have souls.26 Such instances are paralleled in many shamanistic societies. I do not wish to imply identical practices among Upper Palaeolithic communities, but the notions of soul/bone and revitalization of bones in the underworld are eminently compatible with the west European subterranean evidence.
In the case of the paint-covered flints in the Lascaux Meander, we seem to have a variation on this theme that brings us back to the symbolic importance of technology. Paint is not merely ‘paint’. It had supernatural properties and significances that facilitated the apprehension and fixing of visions. In the Meander there is a suggestion that stone artefacts also, at least in certain circumstances, meant more than simply ‘tools’. Indeed, there are numerous other instances in Upper Palaeolithic caves in which stone tools were evidently treated in special ways and associated with the walls of the caves. There is, for example, the ochre-covered blade that Gaussen found in the Gabillou tunnel. Stone tools, as most researchers now recognize, had social significance, and their special treatment in Upper Palaeolithic caves was one manipulation of that significance.Whatever that significance may have been, it was being deliberately associated with the spirit world.
Already, we can see that the parts of Lascaux suggest different kinds of activities. Numerous people probably congregated in the Hall of the Bulls for a range of rituals. All of these rites may not have been related to vision questing; some may have been associated with economic and political relations between comparatively far-flung communities that came together at Lascaux at certain times.27 Vision questing was but one of the functions of the caves. Nor was the whole cave necessarily traversed every time people entered it. In the very nature of the topography, fewer people were able to enter the downward sloping Axial Gallery and the terminal Meander/vortex. Then someone, in a very restricted space next to the Falling Horse, placed paint-covered stone tools in the cave wall.
Both the Hall of the Bulls and the Axial Gallery are composed areas: people co-operated to produce patterns of images that evoked particular kinds of responses. In the other parts of Lascaux, we begin to encounter different evidence that suggests ‘confused’ pot-pourris of images.
THE PASSAGE
If one is standing in the Hall of the Bulls, the entrance to the Axial Gallery is on the left, highlighted by the great frieze. Far less noticeable is the entrance to the Passage. It is over to the right, below the feet of the last large aurochs. It is almost as though the composition of the frieze was designed to draw attention away from the Passage and to direct it to the Axial Gallery.
During the Upper Palaeolithic, the entrance to the Passage was much smaller than it is now. Photographs taken in 1940 show how inconspicuous it was.28 People entering it had to crouch down. Its floor is lower than that of the Hall of the Bulls, and there is no calcite; the walls are softer and far less even.
Especially the left-hand wall of the Passage has been repeatedly painted and engraved. Over and over again images were added, one on top of the other, some painted, some engraved, and some executed by both techniques. Unfortunately, the Passage conducted a slow draught for many millennia, and as a result the images are poorly preserved. As Laming-Emperaire remarks, the passing of human beings through this narrow area may, even in prehistoric times, have contributed to the destruction of the images.29
There are images of horses, aurochs, and ibex heads. This was an area of ‘confusion’ in which image-makers did not hesitate to place their handiwork over that of other people; in that way, it is in direct contrast to the ‘composed’ Hall of the Bulls and the Axial Gallery. This characteristic is even more pronounced in the next section of the cave.
THE APSE
The Apse is a comparatively small, domed chamber on the right of, and a little higher than, the Passage. The walls are harder than those in the Passage, and this has contributed to the better preservation of the engravings found here. There are also a few paintings. Most of the walls and the ceiling are so dense with engravings that it is difficult to decipher them. The copying of these images was one of the great achievements of Upper Palaeolithic art research. The Abbé Glory undertook the daunting task, and his copies are published in Lascaux inconnu.30 Since then, Norbert Aujoulat has returned to the Apse and has found even more engraved lines than Glory detected.
The complexity of the Apse is indeed astonishing (Fig. 57). There are crowded images of horses, bison, aurochs, ibexes, deer and a possible wolf and a lion, though these seem doubtful to me. Many of the images have ‘hanging’ hoofs that are sometimes interpreted as a graphic device to show the hoof to better advantage. There are also large numbers of partially depicted animals, especially heads. This is another instance of ‘confusion’, clearly something different was happening here from what was taking place in the ‘composed’ Hall of the Bulls and the Axial Gallery. The impression of confusion arises from uncoordinated participation by many people, probably over a long period.
To complicate matters further, large numbers of engraved lines cut across the images. In one instance, just above the opening that leads straight down to the Shaft, a natural seam in the rock has been cut across by a long line of independent short strokes. This sort of occurrence shows yet again that the rock face was not a neutral tabula rasa: it had its own significance and needed to be ‘respected’, or ‘acknowledged’, in its own right.
As with ‘macaronis’, the engraved lines have not attracted much study. Although there are many single lines, most appear in parallel sets, some straight, some curving. Some seem to be hatching between two parallel lines; others are a series of much shorter strokes lined up one after the other. The sets themselves frequently cross over one another. Far from being uncontrolled, the individual lines within the sets usually avoid crossing one another. Although they give an overall impression of being random, perhaps even destructive of existing imagery, they are in fact carefully executed, ordered additions to the panels.
Can such additions to panels of representational images be explained in terms of ‘art’? Probably not. They are, however, explicable in terms of the explanation I have been developing. They probably represent participation in a panel of spirit animals set on the living ‘membrane’ between realms. Individuals who did not (at any rate at that time) make representational images of visions could nevertheless participate in the experience of the spirit world in other ways. Many of the sets of lines may, of course, have been made by people who had earlier made the images and were now re-participating in the experience of the ‘membrane’. In doing so, they cut or scored the ‘membrane’, perhaps to allow power to seep through to them. The sets of parallel lines, then, represent attempts by individuals to access supernatural power and to participate in ways that we do not fully understand in religious experience.
57 Dense engravings in the Apse in Lascaux. Images and apparently random lines are piled one on top of another in a dense confusion.
Although we may see the results of such activity as confused, that was the effect that people were content to create. Perhaps it was not so much in a visual sense – that they valued ‘confused’ panels for aesthetic reasons – but because ‘confusion’ represented the spatially focused access of numerous people to religious experience. These cut marks are thus comparable to handprints (Chapter 8). Although the resultant visual effect doubtless had significance, it was the ritual act of their making that was of principal importance.
In amongst the representational images in the Apse are many grid, branch and other signs. One of the grids in the Nave has been exceptionally closely scored with lines that fill its segments in different directions. I return to grids in the next section of the cave. There are also funnel-shaped clusters of converging engraved lines.31 It was one of these that Breuil famously, but unconvincingly, likened to a ‘French Guinea black sorcerer clad from head to foot in a disguise of plaited fibre’.32 It was this kind of slick, one-to-one ethnographic parallel that persuaded Leroi-Gourhan to attempt to abandon all ethnographic evidence. Similar but more curved engraved forms in the Apse have been interpreted as ‘huts’, but the same reservations concerning simplistic ethnographic analogies apply.
If my explanation of the engraved lines as cuts across the ‘membrane’ be accepted, we can see that these so-called ‘sorcerers’ simply comprise sets of cut lines that converge and relate to the narrowing vortex that leads to a focal point at which the ‘membrane’ is actually penetrated. This suggestion is eminently compatible with the overall view that Upper Palaeolithic art was implicated in various shamanistic rituals that took people into the subterranean spirit realm and through the ‘membrane’.
Before considering the mysterious chamber below the Apse, I return to the Passage and its continuation.
THE NAVE
After having crawled through the Passage, Upper Palaeolithic visitors came to the junction between it and the Apse, which is on the right. At this point the chamber widens and the ceiling is much higher: it would now have been possible for them to walk upright again. Straight ahead of them, the level of the floor fell away into the Nave.
This part of the cave is less densely embellished than the Passage. Here the ceiling is high (5.5m or 18ft), and the 25-m (81-ft) long chamber slopes quite steeply downwards. The walls of the Nave are smoother than those of the Passage, and there is some calcite. The images are all above a ledge that is at floor height where the Nave begins, but that is soon above head-height as one moves through the chamber. The visitor thus drops down below the images. Lamps and pigments were found on the ledge. Bone remains show that people ate here as well, though whether they did so while they were making the images or whether they came here subsequently for other purposes is not clear. The bones found in the Nave and elsewhere in Lascaux came largely from young reindeer, yet there is only one reindeer image in the cave; it is engraved in the Apse. The Lascaux people were not painting their diet.
Once inside the Nave, we leave behind the ‘confusion’ of the Passage and the Apse and again enter a more ‘composed’ area, though one with its own characteristics. Here there are monumental images of horses, bison, and the line of deer heads that has been dubbed the ‘Swimming Deer’. But the ways in which the images were made suggest that this space was by no means equivalent to the Hall of the Bulls or the Axial Gallery. There are more ‘additions’ and ‘participations’ than we find in those two sections – but the impression of order remains.
Many of the images have been both painted and engraved, some repeatedly. This applies to the quadrilateral grids that are numerous in this part of the cave and that seem to link Lascaux to Gabillou. Some of the grids have been outlined and painted a number of times; the individual segments of the grids are in some cases coloured differently (Fig.58).Participation in their significance by renewal (even though the original does not seem to have been especially faded) was clearly an important ritual. It is tempting to see these quadrilateral signs as formalized, elaborated representations of the grid-shaped entoptic phenomenon to which people ascribed meanings now lost to us.
Participation is also evident in the head of one of the horses that has been outlined five times and its mane four times.This reworking of images, something we do not find nearly as much in the Hall of the Bulls and the Axial Gallery, suggests repeated returns to specific images and participation in their alreadyexisting meaning. Probably, going over existing images of powerful spirit animals was one way, in a complex system of rituals, of accessing transforming power and experience by imprinting the outline of the spirit animal on one’s mind. Some of the images are also cut across with lines that have been interpreted as spears. Whether they are or are not spears, they represent another sort of participation in the imagery comparable to what happened in the Apse.
58 A painted and engraved grid in the Nave in Lascaux. The image was renewed, a feature that suggests its lasting significance.
The additions and re-workings do not destroy the impression that we are once more in an area of planned, balanced imagery. This characteristic is especially noticeable in the last panel on the left wall. Two splendid male bison are shown back to back, their rumps overlapping (Pl. 27). Their tails are raised in a manner that recalls the bison at the end of the Axial Gallery and that suggests anger and arousal. This composition has been interpreted as an early achievement of the kind of linear perspective that is usually associated with the Italian Renaissance. This is an attractive conclusion, but the images were probably not recording a threedimensional ‘scene’ from life outside the cave, as the perspective explanation implies. We should rather bear in mind what we noted about the difficulty in ‘seeing’ two-dimensional images and extrapolate our inferences to the notion of perspective. There is not simply one ‘correct’ way of representing perspective: Eastern artists, for example, often adopt an approach very different from the converging sight-lines of Western art. The Renaissance artists did not discover a ‘truth’ that, by a stroke of ingenuity and brilliance, was foreshadowed by a couple of Upper Palaeolithic image-makers.
This kind of art-historical approach tends to obscure significant inferences with a cloak of Western conventions and concerns.33 It is of more interest to note that the two bison are placed in a hollow bay in the rock wall: they seem to be issuing forth, tails raised, from inside the rock. The curve of the rock, not visible on the page of a book, enhances the sense of the bison charging towards the viewer. As we have seen, they are by no means the only examples of animals painted so that they appear to be coming out of clefts in the rock face; photographers who, understandably enough, try to avoid any distortion of images, often miss this feature.34 Emergence from the ‘membrane’ is, I suggest, the kind of ‘perspective’ that would have been intelligible to Upper Palaeolithic artists who believed that a spirit realm filled with powerful animals lay just behind the rock wall.
The bisons’ raised tails have been plausibly interpreted as suggesting bulls intimidating one another in the rutting season; indeed, one of them seems to be shedding its winter coat, as the species does at the end of spring. This is another instance in which ethology (the study of animal behaviour) becomes an evidential strand, though not in a simple, straightforward way. We need to ask: what, in the context of the nether world, could this depiction of aggressive behaviour mean? If the animals are issuing from the hollow, as I argue they are, their belligerent posture may have been associated with the fear that shamans experienced when, at the climax of their quest, they faced their spirit animals: they had to maintain a stoic disposition in the face of such danger if they wished to acquire power. Perhaps the aroused bison bulls prepared Magdalenian vision questers for terrors that lay ahead in the next section of the cave, the Diverticule of the Felines. Perhaps even merely passing by this ‘picture’ required courage, as, in flickering lamp light, the two bison sprang forth at one. If indeed we are here dealing with perspective, it is, as Michael Kubovy pointed out for the Italian Renaissance, not simply the discovery of the ‘correct’ way to represent space but rather a ‘symbolic form’ that created in the viewer a deeply religious response.35
The intimidating pair of bison are the last images in the Nave. Perhaps this was a second but somewhat different ‘vestibule’, a ritual space preparatory to the Diverticule of the Felines.From that point the passage narrows sharply and the hazardous route to the Diverticule of the Felines begins.
THE DIVERTICULE OF THE FELINES
The character of the cave changes markedly as one leaves the Nave. One is soon on all fours making one’s way through a narrow tunnel. Then comes an area of soft clay walls. Eventually, one reaches the Diverticule of the Felines where one has to lie down or crouch. Despite its remoteness, this section of Lascaux is filled with many images.
59 Engravings in the remote Diverticule of the Felines, Lascaux.
The motifs include the eponymous felines, aurochs, a horse seen face-on, a bison with raised tail, ibexes, some dots, grid ‘signs’, branching signs with the lateral parts separated from the central shaft (Fig. 59), and sets of parallel lines. The felines, possibly as many as eight, seem to be so-called cave lions, a type of Panthera leo without manes that occurred in small prides in Ice Age Europe.36 One has its ears back and its mouth open in the posture I noted in connection with the early Aurignacian statuettes. One of the lions has lines emanating from its mouth and anus. Its tail is extended and apparently lashing. The mouth lines have been interpreted as representing an angry growl, the rear ones as indicating that the creature is marking its territory with urine. Perhaps both oral and anal lines should be seen as emanations of spirit, essence or power.37 The terminal dots are six in number and painted in black in two rows of three. As we shall see, a similar set of dots is in the Shaft beneath the Apse.
A horse tooth was found in this chamber, as well as pieces of bone, a considerable quantity of pigment and, most remarkably, a piece of hard clay bearing an imprint of rope seven millimetres in diameter and made of plant fibres. The storing of pigment in this remote spot may have reinforced or conserved the power of the substance. But why would someone carry a horse tooth this far underground? Again, we recall the cave bear tooth in Les Trois Frères and the paint-covered flints in the Meander. People were taking special objects of various kinds into the underworld and deliberately leaving them there.
All in all, it seems that people did not visit the Diverticule of the Felines often; the walls are soft and there would be more prehistoric damage than there is if people had crawled there frequently. Although some of the engraved animals are technically the equal of those in other parts of Lascaux, it does seem that they were, for the most part, made comparatively swiftly. Together with the numerous ‘cut marks’ and parallel lines, the engraved animals and the painted sections of this small, remote chamber suggest an extremity of experience as well as of topography. If there were vision quest niches in Lascaux, this was surely one of them. Long separated from the communal, mind-orienting viewing of the great images in the Hall of the Bulls, possibly having performed other rituals in the Axial Gallery, the Passage and the Apse, and having passed the Cerberuslike paired bison, it was here, in the extreme depths, that questers came face to face with visions of power and made personal contact with the spirit realm.
THE SHAFT
One section of Lascaux remains to be discussed – the Shaft. The opening to this deep well – in France it is known as the ‘Puits’ – is at the back of the Apse; over it, on the curved wall and ceiling of the Apse are engravings that include a grid and claviforms. The young discoverers of the cave descended the 16 or so feet into the Shaft by means of a rope; their exit proved more difficult, but Ravidat was eventually able to haul the others out. Today, the original projection of hard clay has been removed, and there is a metal platform and manhole; one now descends by means of a ladder fixed to the wall.
The Shaft is the most enigmatic section of Lascaux. First, there is some debate as to whether it was part of Upper Palaeolithic Lascaux or whether it belongs to another cave altogether. Many researchers today accept that it was indeed part of Upper Palaeolithic Lascaux. They point out that arguments from style (for example, the human figure in the shaft is in a ‘stick’ style not found elsewhere in the cave) are unreliable. More positively, they note that ‘broken signs’ appear on the beautiful lamp that was found in the Shaft (Fig. 53), on the wall of the shaft, and also on the walls of other parts of Lascaux: they are characteristic of the whole cave. Then, too, the raised tails and series of dots seem to be associated with other ‘end’ areas of the cave. Finally, quantities of clay from the upper parts of the cave were found in the archaeological strata in the floor of the Shaft. It seems that it was brought down by Upper Palaeolithic people as they descended by means of a rope. On the other hand, none of these points is conclusive, and we must allow that the Shaft may have been part of another cave that was related to Lascaux and that it was reached via another entrance, now blocked. Either way, it is an area of great interest. In what follows, I take the widely-held view that the Shaft was indeed part of Upper Palaeolithic Lascaux.
60 A seashell made into a pendant. It was found at the bottom of the Shaft in Lascaux.
The finds in the floor of the Shaft are of particular significance. Following Breuil’s initial excavation in 1947, Glory undertook more refined work in 1959. True, one must allow that some other parts of Lascaux were dug out before archaeological work could be carried out, but, even conceding this reservation, it seems that the large number of objects, in addition to quantities of pigment, found in the Shaft suggests that Upper Palaeolithic people deliberately left them there. Amongst these finds were many lamps, including the shaped and decorated one. It was found just below the tail of the rhinoceros image. Its presence in the Shaft suggests something more than the practical provision of light. The exact number of much cruder lamps found here is not known because some of them cannot now be located, but it seems that two dozen would not be too high an estimate. In 1951, charcoal from one of these lamps was dated to 17,500 (± 900) years before the present. Glory noticed that the lamps had been turned over so that the charcoal side faced the ground, perhaps because the people who left them there wished to extinguish them. In addition to the lamps, there were numerous flint blades and ivory spears decorated with ‘broken signs’ (central lines with detached side marks). There was also a seashell from the 200-km-distant Atlantic coast, stained with red ochre and perforated so that it could be used as a pendant (Fig.60).The floor area of the Shaft is so limited that the space could not have been occupied by many people at one time; nor could it have been used for any mundane activities, such as artefact manufacture or food preparation.
Descent from the lip of the profoundly embellished Apse would, in terms of shamanistic cosmology, have been seen as venturing down to a deeper level of the cosmos – as would also have been the case in the sloping Axial Gallery and Nave, though not as dramatically as in the Shaft. Indeed, it is hard not to conclude that the Shaft was a special ‘end’ area, a narrow cleft to which people went, where they conducted some sorts of rituals, where they deliberately abandoned objects, such as the spears which would have no utilitarian function in a deep cave, and from which they returned having extinguished the light that had guided them there. In some cases, lamps may have been thrown down the Shaft after the users had climbed up from the depths.
But what of the images in this remarkable area? They too are exceptional. On one wall there is the partial image of a black horse. Opposite it is the most discussed group of all Upper Palaeolithic images (Pl. 28). To the left is a rhinoceros, the underbelly of which is sketchily drawn. It has a raised tail, and beneath the tail are two rows of three black dots each. The similarity between these dots and those in the Diverticule of the Felines is unmistakable. Beyond a slight curve in the rock wall is the famous man and bison. The bison was drawn around a darker, ochrey patch of rock that extends in some places beyond the image and is, to my way of thinking, not especially reminiscent of a bison. An Upper Palaeolithic artist was, as in so many other instances, taking a natural formation and making an image out of it: the rather amorphous discolouration already on the wall was fashioned into an animal. The bison’s head is lowered as if it is charging, and its tail is raised and bent back over its rump in anger. Its entrails seem to be hanging from its belly, and there is what appears to be a spear across its body.
In front of the bison is a black, comparatively crudely drawn ithyphallic man who appears to be falling backwards, though the angle seems to me to be more pronounced in photographs than on the rock. The most remarkable point about the man is that he has a bird’s head and four-fingered bird-like hands. The avian theme is taken up by what appears to be a staff with an effigy of a bird on its top. Beneath the feet of the man is a ‘broken sign’ that some writers have taken to represent a spear-thrower.
One can hardly blame researchers for concocting stories to explain what they see as a picture of a tragic incident. Usually, they claim that the man was hunting the bison; he wounded the animal (hence its entrails); it then turned on him to gore him, and he is therefore shown falling backwards. Breuil was so convinced by a slightly more elaborate version of this reading that he excavated below the panel in the expectation of finding the remains of the unfortunate hunter. He did not.
More usefully, possible shamanistic associations have been explored, the most detailed of which came from two University of Santa Barbara researchers: Demorest Davenport, a biologist, and Michael Jochim, an archaeologist who has written extensively on the Upper Palaeolithic.38 Rightly acknowledging that it is impossible to demonstrate that the images depict a historical event, they stressed the significance of the four-fingered hands and their parallel in birds’ feet. They concluded that the figure is bird from the waist up and human from the waist down. The bird on the staff is virtually identical to the man’s head. Davenport and Jochim pointed out that it is ‘unmistakably gallinaceous or grouse-like’ and, as Leroi-Gourhan saw, resembles that carved on a spear-thrower found at Mas d’Azil, another Magdalenian site. They went further and identified the species as a Black Grouse or Capercaillie, and illustrated a contemporary Siberian shaman’s ongon, or spirit helper, in the form of a grouse. Both the Black Grouse and the Capercaillie perform elaborate mating dances on traditional gathering places, or leks. Perhaps, Davenport and Jochim concluded, the shaman is being transformed into his gallinaceous spirit helper at the moment of death and his erect phallus suggests the role that some shamans play in the fertility of their communities.
Davenport and Jochim’s interpretations are almost entirely acceptable. There are, however, aspects of Upper Palaeolithic art with which they were unfamiliar. First, I suggest that an image-maker fashioned a spirit bison out of the stain on the rock, thus ‘fixing’ a spirit animal. This is not a real-life tragedy. Secondly, its hoofs are shown to be cloven, and are in the position that I take to mean that the animal is not standing on the ground but rather ‘floating’ in spiritual space. Thirdly, I argue that the man’s erection suggests death in two senses. Alan Brodrick, one of the earliest writers on Lascaux, pointed out that the erect phallus may indicate ‘death by severance of the backbone’.39 But, as we saw in the two ethnographic case studies (Chapters 5 and 6), ‘death’ in shamanistic thought may also mean travel to the spirit world in an altered state of consciousness.We also saw that sex is sometimes associated with shamanistic travel.Indeed, male erections are common in altered states and in sleep, and it is a peculiarly Western notion that the motif always stands for virility and fertility. Fourthly, ‘death’ is commonly a portal to shamanistic status. Shamans are said to die, to be dismembered or reduced to a skeleton, and to be resurrected with a new persona and social role.40
So what we have in the Shaft is not a hunting disaster; far too many points count against so simple an interpretation. Rather, we have transformation by death: the ‘death’ of the man paralleling the ‘death’ of the eviscerated bison. As both ‘die’, the man fuses with one of his spirit helpers, a bird. The close juxtaposition of the ‘broken sign’ and the similarity between such signs and the bird staff suggest that this type of sign was in some way associated with zoomorphic transformation and the bridging of cosmological levels that becoming a shaman necessitated.
It is highly probable that, as in many shamanistic societies, the metaphors of transformation into a shaman would have been woven into a myth or series of myths. But it would be naive to assume that the images in the Shaft merely ‘illustrate’ a myth, as pictures in a child’s book may illustrate events in a fairy tale. Rather, the metaphors and images that lay at the heart of Lascaux shamanism and that structured the people’s thinking were expressed in different contexts – myth and art, and probably in dance and music as well. Those who descended the Shaft did not simply view pictures: they saw real things, real spirit animals and beings, real transformations. In short, they saw through the membrane and participated in the events of the spirit realm. The paintings in the Shaft capture the essence of Lascaux shamanism in a compaction of its complex metaphors.
One final and intriguing point deserves to be mentioned. The Shaft is characterized by a very high content of naturally produced carbon dioxide. Today the carbon dioxide is pumped out of the cave, but it is still noticeable if one remains at the bottom of the Shaft for even a comparatively short time. Did, we may wonder, this high concentration of carbon dioxide induce altered states in prehistoric people?
These remarks on the Shaft conclude my examination of Lascaux. The cave has a coherence and organization that is remarkable; but it is also complex in its topography and its embellishments. No unitary explanation can cover all of Lascaux. To be sure, there is unity in that the whole ensemble of cave and embellishments is explicable in terms of a shamanistic cosmology and diverse explorations of a nether realm. But the precise ways in which the various contrasting parts of the cave were used and the rituals that were performed in them – ranging from vision questing to social (probably seasonal) aggregation of Upper Palaeolithic communities to shamanistic puberty rites and no doubt others as well – suggest a complex, sophisticated community with significant social distinctions that were reproduced (or challenged) every time the cave, or parts of it, were used.
Two caves: similar yet different
Broadly speaking, both Gabillou and Lascaux can be understood in terms of Figure 61, though Lascaux has more ramifications, more evidence for diverse activities and experiences. It would be rash to suggest that we can thereby infer that the people of Lascaux had a more complex social system than those at Gabillou. It is, however, possible that the sites were part of the sort of symbolically sustained social network that Clive Gamble describes (Chapter 3). People used symbols of various kinds to stand for social groups and were thus able to extend their influence and power beyond face-to-face contacts.
There is also evidence for important inter-cave diversity. ‘Simple’ Gabillou and ‘complex’ Lascaux seem to have differed in the ways in which shamans conceived of a relationship between their ‘fixed’ animal helpers. By and large, Gabillou vision questers preferred to keep their images separate from those of their fellows. In Lascaux, they crowded images together in the Apse as if they wished to be united with other shamans in the acquisition of a spatially concentrated power. This contrast points to somewhat different ‘shamanisms’, or different emphases within Upper Palaeolithic shamanism. If Gabillou was the focus of a comparatively small band, its shamans may well have wished to be independent of one another; but, if a number of groups came together at Lascaux, including the Gabillou people, shamans from all the participating groups may have wanted to integrate their visions and experiences with those of the wider community.
61 Diagrammatic representation of the way in which Upper Palaeolithic people used caves.
That those different kinds of relationships between images held implications for above-ground social relations seems likely. But all that we can conclude at present is that the caves were implicated in social distinctions and the spiralling diversity of Upper Palaeolithic societies. Exactly how subterranean image-making was manipulated by individuals is a matter I take up in the next chapter.