was born in a dungeon, a metaphorical cave. I t is interesting to note that the
Grotto (cave) of Lourdes, where so many miracle cures are reported to take place,
is the site of much Upper Palaeolithic art (Bahn, 1997:58).
At this point we should be able to comprehend the Fall or Great Transition as
an archetypal diametric pattern of the developed and the archaic or primitive, one
that continues to repeat itself in myth and literature with each major historical-
cultural movement. We can see also in the narratives of Gilgamesh and Enkidu and
in other pairs like Jacob and Esau, Robinson Crusoe and Friday, Natty Bumpo and
Chinachgook, I shmael and Queequeeg, the coexistence of Homo erectus and Homo
Sapiens in Central Europe during the interglacial period and later, in the coexistence
of Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon. As Thompson points out, in our religious myths
we announce that we have fallen from heaven to earth, and in our scientific myths
we say that we have evolved from animals (Thompson, 1981:188). We have a
need, an imperative of stories or mythic narratives that express the two races, the
brothers of two different mothers or the loving friendship of the wild man and the
civilized man, the modern and the archaic, that each one of us is.
The cave paintings confirm that the cave artists discovered another reality,
one that transcended ordinary existence; that beyond the three dimensional world
of daily life there was another mode of living, another dimension, the I maginal
Realm. The cave pictographs are hieroglyphics of a mode of life that embraces the
inner, the outer and the imaginal. Thus, what seemed to be surface art or
decoration gains an inner depth; objects and events, which were only outwardly
discernable, become a vehicle of meaning and an idea, an allusion to a secret,
which can be found by inner contemplation. However, the cave pictographs within
the archetypal cave realm are transpersonal, esoteric and layered with not only
individual but also collective meaning. They are the beginning of a visual
mythology, indeed, probably the beginning of mythology, a visual syntax of the
narrative between the human psyche and locale that expresses a metaphysical
reality. As in the setting of much Australian aboriginal rock art, locale becomes
mythic in a conceptualised sacred topography, criss-crossed by invisible entrances,
dreaming tracks or song lines; a sacred geography referred to as cognised
landscape by some anthropologists (Devereux, 2000:29).
David Lewis-Williams is not the only researcher to find shamanistic
explanations in the cave pictographs and to explore the relationship of shamanism
to other ecstatic states of consciousness, particularly those involving poesis or
ron
(Ron)
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