When time began, the first individual died, the poles of the sun
and the moon were flung into space, and between the two, in a
strange chaos and battle, the dead body was torn and melted and
smelted, and rolled beneath the feet of the living. So the world
was formed, always under the feet of the living ... But beneath our
feet, in our own earth, lies the intense centre of our human,
individual death, our grave. The earth has one centre, to which
we are all polarized. The circuit of our life is balanced on the
living soul within us, as the positive centre, and on the earth’s
dark centre, the centre of our abiding and eternal and substantial
death, our great negative centre, away below. This is the circuit
of our immediate individual existence (Lawrence, 1921:158-9).Lawrence’s words “ ...when time began”, might well be an allusion to that
period described by archaeologists, as the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic Transition
(between 45,000 and 35,000 years ago) in western Europe when the Neanderthals
gave way to fully modern people, the Aurignacians, our ancestors (Lewis-Williams,
2004:71). This period, Lewis-Williams’ Great Transition, archaeologically termed the
Magdalenian, saw the creation of cave art, the most notable examples of which can
be found at Chauvet, Lascaux, Niaux and Altimira, all are strikingly similar and
equally, as a whole, enigmatic. Enigmatic because we encounter one of the most
profound problems of Upper Palaeolithic art research: what was the reason the
Aurignacians chose the obscurity of the deep caves and what was it that their
symbolic and iconographic pictographs were intended to achieve: religious
expression, sympathetic magic, a tribal-social record or the cipher of some mystical,
transpersonal experience? What is certain is that when the Upper Palaeolithic
people descended into the obscurity of the caves they created a temenos, a sacred
place. The mode of life, hunting techniques, and even the conception of the
universe of the Aurignacians would have been vastly different to those held today
and yet may present certain correspondences. Carl Jung described an ‘archaic
man’, meaning not ancient but original, that lives in all of us, below the persona of
modern man, and emphasised how important it is for us to remember what it is in
the history of humankind we have lost (in Sabini, 2002:ix).
We cannot dismiss the cave pictographs and their creators as being of little
relevance in the 21st century, for as Jung cautioned:
I t is not only primitive man whose psychology is archaic. I t is the
psychology also of modern, civilized man, and not merely of
individual throwbacks in society. On the contrary, every civilized
human being, however high his conscious development, is still an
archaic man at the deeper levels of his psyche. Just as the human
body connects us with the mammals and displays numerous