figure and who appears to be wearing a bird-like mask or beak. A broken spear and
a staff, topped by a bird, appear at the bottom of the painting. I t is uncertain
whether these elements are symbols or represent a name or designate something
else.
At another cave site, Altimira, there is clearly some sort of interdependency
between the images and the rock formations (Lewis-Williams, 2002:37), and Picasso
was to say of these cave pictographs; “None of us could paint like that ...” (in Lewis-
Williams, 2002:31). At other caves such as Niaux, there are marks on the images
that look like crudely drawn arrows. Almost all cave art contains therianthropes;
part human, part animal figures along with handprints and a multiplicity of signs or
geometric forms such as grids, dots and chevrons. These images and markings raise
the question of why they were made, and, thus, of what they tell us about the
minds of the people who made them and those who were to view them.
Leroi-Gourhan believed that such art was an expression of ideas about the
natural and supernatural organisation of the living world and suggested that it might
have been perceived that the two might have been one and the art to be a
mythogram that carried a wide range of meanings (Lewis-Williams, 2002:63). The
words “... the two might have been one,” resound with the idea of the Edenic state
of participation mystique where the human psyche was embedded in nature and
thus, the cave pictographs might well be considered to reflect the quintessential
expression of mythopoeic imagination emanating from a primordial period of history
depicting realities distilled in the imagination of the artists.
Lewis-Williams has brought to the controversy over the meaning of the
enigmatic cave pictographs a scholarly methodology and up-to-date research to
hypothesize that some of the paintings were produced by shamans who aimed to fix
on the underworld membrane of the cave walls what they experienced in states of
altered consciousness and also suggests the adaptation of the topography of caves
for arcane purposes (Lewis-Williams, 2004:80). He analyses the universal myth of
the underworld, which he explains is attributable to purely neurological processes
hard-wired into human consciousness, the functioning of the human nervous system
in altered states of consciousness (2004:193). His detailed descriptions and rigorous
interpretations do enable readers to imagine the cave walls as our ancestors might
have, that is, as the membrane between themselves and the subterranean spirit
world; but his insistence that any sense of the spiritual is strictly the product of
ron
(Ron)
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