ANCIENT CAVE PAINTING

David Lewis-Williams studies prehistoric paintings and artifacts. In his book The Mind in the Cave, he argues that subterranean art was not for general public viewing.2 Otherwise, there would be more examples in less remote and more accessible sites. He proposes that the activity in these caves instead refl ects early religious attempts to connect symbolically with the earth in its deepest crevices. These places were sacred. The art was deliberately created around the physical properties of each cave. Natural rock patterns and shapes were outlined to form animals in the same way that we see faces in the clouds on a summer’s day. This human capacity to see structure and signifi cance in the natural world is not only a talent of the artistic mind but an essential quality for the spiritual one as well. The images came alive through the combination of fl ickering shadows from tallow lamps and the power of human imagination. Some decorated spaces were only large enough for a solitary individual to squeeze into. The geometric patterns found here may have been the fi rst evidence of the altered states of consciousness that the early shaman are thought to have achieved. Lewis-Williams speculates that the shaman, cocooned in these narrow cervices, sought to document their crossover to the underground world through images and symbols. This may be wild speculation, but what is undisputed is that prehistoric art depicts a mixture of natural and supernatural images. Animals such as horses and bulls, as well as extinct species such as the aurochs and mammoth, are represented, but so are half-human, half-animal creatures.