I ndeed, what I suggest is that the cave pictographs may have been the
catalyst that, virtually overnight in evolutionary terms, transformed anatomically
modern but intellectually dull, uninspired and spiritually barren humans into
behaviourally modern spiritual and imaginative humans. The therianthropic figures
might be explained as representing the ‘animal divinity’, an aspect of the psyche
that reflects interconnectedness with the whole of creation, the participation
mystique, which was perceived by the primordial psyche. What the cave painters
were experiencing was intensity consciousness, manifested as a narrative in
mythopoeic consciousness. This facilitated access to a dimension of the I maginal
Realm, an ontological prior reality; a form of perception that seemed to penetrate
beyond the substance or membrane of the cave walls of that time and place.
Consequently, the sophisticated genre of cave art that emerged reveals a sacred
imaginal dimension perceived at both the individual and collective level, a dimension
displaying numinous, archetypal symbols, of an elsewhere place that is taken to
exist immediately on the other side of the membrane of place.
(d) The Mythopoeic Membrane of Place
The membrane of place may be the surface of a cave wall or the physical
surfaces of actual, sensate places or it may be the page of a book. The
shamanising artists of the cave pictographs and their readers certainly pierced the
membrane to enter this otherworld or elsewhere-place in an altered state of
consciousness that was the beginning of mythopoeic consciousness, which I have
shown may be identified in various manifestations from pre-historic times to the
present. Sir Maurice Bowra saw the beginning of literary consciousness in primitive
song, my hypothesis simply moves back further in time to mythopoeic narrative
cave image. I ndeed, a reference to Bowra’s work but incorporating my
parenthesised-italicised terms perfectly states my case:
... [ Palaeolithic pictographs] words exert so strong a hold on us
that we can think of nothing else, we still speak of their
enchantment, and though this is no more than a metaphor, it was
not always so and is indeed a relic of what song [ the mythic text-
image] once was. I n primitive song [ paleolithic cave pictographs –
mythopoeic text] it still has a powerful place and is accepted both
by singers [ mythopoeic writers] and audiences [ mythopoeic
readers] as entirely natural and proper. The primitive song-man
[ mythopoeic writer] feels within himself an eruptive domineering
force which he must release upon others. He wishes to exert an