When gourmet tourists observe a religious silence. - The Prehistory, from Boucher de Perthes to the Abbé Breuil. -The Altamira's astonishment. - The explanation for the magical hunt. One ethnologist who does typing. - A statistical repertoire of Signs. - Male and female symbolism. - The topography of the Caverns. - A cathedral-matrix. - Strange modesty. -Where Leroi-Gourhan discovers some metaphysicians.

When, after a succulent perigordino lunch in any restaurant of Montignae or Les Eyzies, the tourist goes back up to the his car to go to Lascaux, usually obeys the rite of the stages more than a real curiosity: you don't go through the Montignac without visiting Lascaux. You have to have seen Lascaux. Herself So he comes to the famous meadow, and descends, chattering, the Short staircase leading to the roundabout.

 

At the moment, only the soil It appears illuminated. For a few minutes, visitors squeeze in around the guide. Since nothing is visible, they continue chatting. After that, Turn on the light, and the paintings emerge from the shadow, red and black, on the admirable whiteness of the wall.

And then it repeats itself, once again, as always, the same extraordinary scene. Men and women, children of the twentieth century, who, the vast majority of them know nothing about prehistory. The words Paleolithic, Magdalenian, and parietal have no They feel, without exception, seized with a stupor sacred. There is a deep silence. The group, still subject to the effects of truffle and foie gras, feel the formidable weight of the the presence of men who, 150 or 200 centuries ago, came here to express through painting the highest aspirations of his spirit and of his heart.

Once the visit is over, the silence will last for a long time while. What do these extraordinary paintings mean? To what ideas Did their authors obey? Frequently, the visit to Lascaux It awakens a thirst for knowledge unsuspected a few moments before. The booksellers in Montignac know this very well, for they sell much more after the visit than before this.

The fact that Lascaux deserved, for the beauty of his paintings, the name "Sistine Chapel of Prehistory" (and, to tell the truth, we don't know which of these two places should be more praised), and that this Sistine Chapel was painted so long ago, It poses to every thoughtful mind a problem of such magnitude, that The passions in the midst of which one has been drawn are well conceived. developed prehistoric science.

Boucher de Perthes fought for thirty years to get the Existence of Fossil Man: From 1828 to 1859. It seems that the The stubbornness of these struggles of ideas, and often of people, has persecuted to prehistory to this day, as a sin original. Although the discoveries followed one another without interruption from the time when Boucher de Perthes collected, near Abbeville, the first carved stone axes, identifying them for what they really were, the science of prehistory had not Never, until now, has it been possible to update the methods of a science strictly objective and impersonal, except in one specific respect, that of the stratigraphic context.

 

When a prehistorian discovers a Buried Object describes the other objects found at the same time level (at the same depth) as the former, and, above all, the remains fossils, bones and various vestiges of living beings, animals and Vegetables. No one will dispute this description, if it's done right. Up to this time, this was the only subject on which the prehistorians could be sure that the discussion of His work would not soon become a personal debate.

 

This insecurity of the prehistorian, already very unpleasant in the last century, when it was only a matter of ruling on objects found in soil layers that have long been identified by geologists, becomes obsessive from the first years of the century, when the authenticity of the caverns decorated with paintings and the problem of Establish your chronology. And the fact is that the vast majority of the works painted or engraved on the walls of the caves they offer nothing else to the eye of the examiner but themselves.

 

Here we have a painted bison. It's a painting; Let's say, rather, a fresh. How to know (to use the terminology established with the of the objects found on the floor, which prehistorians call furniture) if it corresponds to the Solutrean or to the Magdalenian? If one is wrong, his mistake can be ten A thousand years! What methods should be used? The essentials of the possible answers to this question are practically the same as the It is an immense work of a giant of prehistoric times: the Abbé Breuil. In the It was at this time that the Abbé Breuil began to study his first Around the year 1900, prehistoric science already possesses A great experience.

 

But, as far as the decorated caverns are concerned, There is a total vacuum. There is nothing, or almost nothing. Equipped with a formidable capacity for work and reading, unable to go backwards in the event of any intellectual or physical difficulties (often to reach the parietal work of art, i.e. painted or engraved on a underground rock wall, you have to climb... climbing, immersing yourself in ice water, etc.), possessing a special sense of smell for what he unnoticed by others, a noted draughtsman, and adding to his creative imagination a lively critical spirit that they will have to fear his possible adversaries, the young ecclesiastic is, Unquestionably, the master of the situation.

 

Classifying the overlays of the drawings, comparing the styles by their affinities, revealing the evolutionary lines of the forms, means, techniques, will create, almost entirely, After half a century of work and reflection, the chronology of this art buried by the centuries. To find, in the sciences of the life, a work similar to his, we have to go back to Cuvier or, perhaps, Linnaeus.

However, Breuil's own genius only aggravates the the subjective character of the science he created. Well, what is it all about? attribute their discoveries? A method? Absolutely not. It's your It is an inexhaustible fecundity of work and imagination that draws from the Shadow all these lost centuries. Breuil is an empiricist who possesses Fantastic gifts. It teaches results, not a method. To follow your footsteps, you'd have to be like him.

Now, back in 1945, a young ethnologist, passionate about prehistory (but who was not a disciple of the Abbé Breuil), He reflected on the situation of a science by which I was irresistibly attracted. André Leroi-Gourhan was, for example, nature, the living antithesis of Breuil: as cold and reserved, as Breuil could be fiery; So preoccupied with the course of their own ideas and those of others, as Breuil could be personal. But they both had in common patience, creative imagination and scientific probity.

Around 1947, Leroi-Gourhan began the task of clarifying Objective Methods for Establishing a Chronology of Art prehistoric. Systematically, year after year, he studied thoroughly the vast majority of the ornate caverns. And right there where Breuil had spent years underground, tracing on paper, one by the other. one, thousands of designs of prints and paintings, Leroi-Gourlian passed years measuring, situating, counting.

 

For the first time, data little by little, they came to be added to the irreplaceable ones Breuil's sketch.

But while all the statistical data, until then despised, piled up in the files, began to assert itself, Little by little, in the mind of the investigator the image of an order, always the same, of the animals and the signs in the caves.

This image shows a very particular order of painted motifs It will shed an extraordinary light on our ancestors of long ago. twenty or thirty thousand years. From now on, we will have to stop to regard them as savage sorcerers obsessed with hunting, like dark primitives dancing around the totems of the hunting. From now on, we will have to have more respect for them and ask ourselves complicated questions about how the human mind in remote ages.

 

Hereinafter, the revelation of an infinitely higher, more subtle, richer figuration. abstractions, rather than mere invocations for nourishment of the tribe, will put an end to a contradiction that should have been We have been concerned about it for a long time: the contradiction between art of the consummate drawing and its high quality of elaborate graphic sign, and the primitive significance attributed to them by ethnography up to our days.

All our knowledge about prehistory has to be reviewed by means of the strictly objective and impersonal method of statistical figures established by Leroi-Gourhan.

In 1879, Marcelino Santuola and his daughter claimed that the caves of Altamira, near Santander, concealed paintings executed by prehistoric men. The prehistorians laughed at flapping jaw. This laughter lasted twenty years. Then the abbot Breuil and Cartailhac went to see what it was, and laughter gave way to stupor. The paintings were authentic. Undoubtedly, they were the work of of Paleolithic men. And they were no less beautiful than the best Modern painting.

Stupor is not a scientific attitude, and the wise are horrified because of this feeling. The need to find an explanation was all the more pressing as the discoveries of caves The decorations increased every year, and Altamira could not be a It was evident that the cave, and Above all, it seems, the deep cavern, the cavern of the eternal night, had played an essential role in the psychology of our children. remote ancestors. It was ethnography, a science at that time in its dawn, which provided the explanation.

 

However it had been I have seen the primitives of the 20th century practice hunting magic, dance before depictions of animals for spell purposes, paint on the drawing of an antelope or a zebu, a line representing a arrow, Paleolithic man was presumed to have done the same than them. And such was the need for an explanation, and for a explanation as harmless as possible, that this presumption was accepted immediately.

 

It didn't matter that some objected that, even today's primitives who practice hunting spell they also resort to the spell for war; We know skulls prehistoric with obvious signs of violence; that our Their ancestors sometimes fought with each other, and in spite of their Of course, almost only animals are found in caves: there was a explanation, and it was not going to be dispensed with for so little a thing.

 

To the point that, for half a century, the sonsonnet of the poor brutalized and bestial savage, dancing in the depths of the grottoes in front of a painted bison, in the belief that this was how he prepared His victory over the galloping bison has never stopped buzzing in our ears.

That ethnography was like an open box, in which it was enough to dig a little deeper to find, believing that you have discovered them, the ideas that One of them was already carrying in their luggage, it was something that, apparently, they didn't have to do with it. It worried no one, least of all prehistorians. Questioning the hunting spell before the mammoths of Rouffignac or the deer of the Pasiega, it was to be dangerously delirious, to look for three feet of the cat, to open the door the door to disturbing fantasies.

 

Pero, mientras tanto, los etnólogos descubrían, poco a poco, al hombre contemporáneo real, primitivo o civilizado, y comprendían que no se le puede encerrar en ninguna fórmula, que es infinitamente variable y variado, que se puede esperar todo y nada de él. Y, si los hombres del siglo XX presentaban tantas diversidades, ¿no era muy aventurado tratar de explicar a sus antepasados de 20.000 años atrás partiendo de observaciones actuales?

Thus, when Leroi-Gourhan wanted to look for an objective path that would To the soul of the Palaeolithic, his first care was to flee from the facilities offered by the crossroads of the Eskimo and the Australian. In doing so, he did not refuse a priori to reach a explanation derived from ethnography, but was only denied to carry this explanation in your suitcase.

The method followed was the statistical analysis of 72 sets parietals studied in 66 caves, representing, Practically all European parietal art (there are 110 sites but the 44 not studied by Leroi-Gourhan are poor in decoration). On the basis of the documents collected, he made a calculation systematic, in which typing and blueprints were involved Drilled. Where were these statistical calculations to lead? Quite simply, to destroy the theory of hunting magic and to destroy the theory of hunting magic. to reveal to us, in the man of the last ice age, a being so complex like ourselves.

To start, let's let the numbers do the talking. 91 percent of bison, 92 percent of oxen, and 86 percent of Horses are depicted in the central composition of the decorated caverns. Consequently, these animals are missing practically in the other parts. Conversely, the composition Central has only 8 percent of the roe deer, 20 percent of the percent of reindeer, 9 percent of deer, 4 percent chamois, 8 percent of bears, and 11 percent of the felines existing in the whole of the caves themselves.

 

These The first percentages show us, without any possible mistake, that Some animals are almost always in the central composition and others almost never appear in it. Why? Achieved this As a result, the statistician could be swayed by speculation: Paleolithic man was especially fond of the bison or the ox. or these animals were relatively more numerous (which, on the other hand, they deny fossil remains). But the The calculator refuses to speculate: he sticks to his method, which consists of to rely only on facts that can be expressed in figures.

 

Like all his colleagues, since the beginning of the explorations of the decorated caves, Leroi-Gourhan observed that in these, in addition to animal representations, certain signs abounded, which always they were about the same. These signs had given rise to Infinite assumptions. To some, they were more or less objects schematized; for others, signposts to guide the pilgrim, and for others, uninteresting doodles, or even signature of the artist.

 

For the time being, Leroi-Gourhan is limiting himself to classifying them according to their forms, establishing what he calls their typology. And Then he notices that all these signs, considered strictly From the point of view of their drawing, they derive from some forms These are essentially the phallus, the vulva and the profile of the A naked woman. There are, then, masculine signs and feminine signs.

Very well. And these signs, where in the cave are they to be found? Here, too, the thing is simple: just count them. And the numbers obtained (we will omit the detail of the percentages, taking into account of the large number of signs) show us, quite simply, that the almost All of the feminine signs are found in the composition and in the diverticula (or lateral cavities of the cavern). By contrast, only 34 percent of the signs are found there masculine, and even, almost always, coupled with feminine signs.

In the decorated cave of Palaeolithic man there are, therefore, sectors with masculine symbolism, and others with feminine symbolism. And, given that the same animals tend to figure in the same places, the animal world itself is, as a whole, spread over an immense bi-exoduated zoogony. The bison, the ox and The horse is loaded with feminine symbolism, as is the center of the cavern in which they appear. But a certain proportion of Abstract male signs (34 percent) are found in the center, with female figures.

 

Thus, in the caves, it is evident that There are three groups of male figures at the entrance, males and females in the center, and males in the background. From the most In ancient times, human figures are schematized by means of the representation of the organs of reproduction, translated into more or less abstract graphic symbols. However, its meaning It is still intelligible, for, at various times, the complete representations of men and women.

We can take the analysis of symbolism much further topographical and sexual. The cave generally comprises six types each of which has its own meaning: central composition, the diverticula, the gallery, the entrance, the "passageways" and the bottom.

 

It is curious to note that the representations of the human hand usually obtained in negative, supporting the hand on the wall and blowing liquid paint around it, or exerting pressure, they are almost all at the entrance of the grotto and in the central composition. It's also shocking that almost all of the Feminine signs that do not appear in the central composition and in the diverticula, found at the entrance, coupled with signs Male.
What does this all mean?

 

Objectively and above any other another interpretation, It means that the decorated cavern is organized according to a metaphysics unknown, but as exacting in its symbolism as the Christian metaphysics. In the same way as the Catholic temple It has, in principle, twelve pillars representative of the twelve Apostles; in the same way that the paintings of the Stations of the Cross continue always in the same order, from the left of the altar to the entrance and from the entrance to the right of the altar, thus the cavern A decorated prehistoric area is subject to a remarkably constant throughout the vast area of Europe where it is located, and during the millennia in which it was Inhabited.
Of course, this constancy is not without its variations. There are styles of place and styles of time, as we have, currently, the Burgundian Romanesque and the Spanish Jesuit.

 

But the organization remains faithful to the conception of a world divided between two opposite sexes. Certain clues, sometimes difficult to decipher but always disturbing, they lead one to think that the cave itself was considered to be a formidable natural symbol of the womb of the woman. For example; Narrow passages appear frequently smeared with red. And the part of the grotto in which the Animals of femininity are frequently marked, sometimes with abstract masculine signs, it was with hands, as if to emphasize possession or, perhaps, human presence. Anyway, as we have The entrance and the bottom of the cavern are frequently dedicated to macho symbolism.

 

But the only explanation for the The universe of sex and fertility is insufficient. Yes If we look at these wonderful graphical sets, it doesn't seem that We find ourselves in the presence of crude representations. The Celebrities The "gravid females" of classical ethnography are neither more nor less "gravid" than the membrute stallion horses in the painting China, and, in parietal art, it seems that nowhere is It reproduces sex for sex's sake.

 

What characterizes this art, apparently dominated by the reproductive act, it is its extraordinary modesty, his deliberate propensity for symbolism, for abstraction. Like this As abstract sexual signs are present everywhere, cavemen, despite being endowed with a dazzling plastic genius, they never once drew the slightest Mating scene!

 

The few men who are depicted in erection (itifalos, as the prehistorians say, by heredity Puritanical) are sketched without the slightest realism. Even They show, in general, like the famous corpse of the Well of Lascaux, animal traits that underline its symbolic character.

If it is not a question of sex for its own sake, or sex for fertility, What was the intention of the painters? What metaphysics is found implied through this symbolism? Let us confess, says Leroi-Gourhan, that we are ignorant of it at all. Confess Modesty of our knowledge, and that those men of two or two years ago Three hundred centuries left us the indecipherable writing of a complex, subtle intelligence, the quality of which we sense, although without know nothing of its contents.

 

But perhaps the mere fact that there has been discovered that it is a somewhat comparable piece of writing to that contained in the art of cathedrals, and to have made This study, according to scientific methods of objective calculation, is promising that one day we will be able to decipher it. Then We shall lose some "primitives" and we shall find brothers in the abysses of time.

 

We'll know who those metaphysicians were, They possessed marvellous techniques of art and that they sank into the depths of their lives. deep of the Earth to capture there, with a desire for eternity, the symbols of their spirituality.

Rise of the Sorcerers - 05 (bibliotecapleyades.net)

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The Rise of the Sorcerers: Chapter Eleven - A CAVE STATISTICIAN (basecamp.com)

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The Rise of the Sorcerers: Chapter Eleven – A CAVE STATISTICIAN – Library of Rickandria