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meirimerens · 6 months ago

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MEIRI!!!! i am taking a class in art history and i wanted to ask about your favorite paleolithic cave paintings, cause i know you're very passionate about that!

OOOHHAHHGRGHH MY GODDDD

YOU'VE AWAKEN MY EVIL POWER......

okay so this is gonna be real hard for me to choose. like reallll hard. but i think i can narrow it down. i don't know how much #info you need or how much Lore you care for me to add, but you've activated my trap card, so now you're stuck in the cave with me, i have the torch, and if you try to leave you won't find your way back. okay. let us start.

GENERAL LORE:

at least in the Franco-Cantabrian geographical and paleo-cultural area [this thing], which contains some of the most famous painted caves such as Lascaux, Chauvet, Pech-Merle, Altamira, etc, one main currently reigning hypothesis, because it allows to explain the most amount of [gesture] Stuff Going On, is that cave art exist within a magico-spiritual system of belief of the animist persuasion likely with shamanic elements. The places where walls were painted in the caves, were very, very rarely Living quarters. paleolithic tribes prefered to make camps outside, or just at the very entrance of caves: the depths were Hard to navigate, dangerous, possibly inhabited by predator animals. you didn't got to these places to fuck around; you went because you had a drive, you believed in something about them.

Jean Clottes (one of our main prehistorians in France, who wrote Pourquoi l'Art Préhistorique ?, or "Why Prehistoric Art", translated into english as "What is Paleolithic Art" which is fucking stupid, the "why" is the whole question he's trying to answer in the book, is this guy fucking stupid) identifies 4 main concepts that exist within indigenous, nomadic or semi-nomadic, hunter-gatherer, animist & shamanist societies and peoples, that are widely distributed (as such having "universal" elements) and could, likely, have been found within paleolithic societies, and possibly give us clues to their belief system, which are:

the INTERCONNECTEDNESS: of animal species between one another (explaining the numerous accounts of paloelithic art depiction species together, or separated), and of human and animal: including through mythologies in which humans were created from animal(s), or animal(s) later changed into human(s).

the FLUIDITY of the living world: animal species are recognized as kin, for they can become it; animal species are given, or projected-onto attributes that make a tribe, a clan, recognize themselves in it

the acceptation of the COMPLEXITY of the world: paleolithic people likely had deep, complex mythologies and cosmogonies, which we might Never, Ever, know anything about (this drives me insane.) their language, and their rites, might (have) reflect(ed) an understanding of the complixity of nature, or animals, that sedentary, then later capitalist societies might have lost the nuances of.

the PERMEABILITY of the living world(s). this again is seen in beliefs in the permeablity between human & animal, human a animal, animal as human: this is also where Shamanism might come into play. shamanism(s) rest(s) upon the conceptualization of the world as divided-but-permeable between a physical, living world, and an unseen, spirit world: the Shaman is the mediator, the person who can freely go between these two worlds, to communiate, to heal, to direct, to plead, etc. AND, and this is where it gets real interesting for The Caves: potentially, the belief in the permeablity of the cave rock itself: multiple painted sites might contain hints of a belief in the cave being the place where spirits dwell; and painting them is less "calling" or "invoking", even if there might be some of it, but rather "revealing". the cave itself, maybe, could (have) be(en) considered the place where spirits dwell, and come forth/from. more about that later.

WITH ALL OF THAT IN MIND. at least in the franco-cantabrian area, the placement of cave art is, very Very likely, extremely deliberate. it is not just the art that counts, but where it was made. we can ask ourselves, why it was made here, and not elsewhere. i am picking my answer on this axis. some caves might be so beautifully painted, but are The Vibes here? if the expression of this potential magico-spiritual complex and tens-of-thousands-of-years-spanning(!!!!!!!!!! this is nother thing that's fucking insane btw. did you know we are as close to Lascaux as Lascaux is to Chauvet, another very ornate painted cave. MULTIPLE TENS OF THOUSANDS OF YEARS) is visible, or #feelable, let's mention it. now onto the good part

CAVE ART THAT DRIVES ME CUCKOO CRAZY:

THE NIAUX (pronounced "Nyo") CAVE

reason: i've been there. twice. sobbed both times. came out changed like genuinely. made me go back to uni. the Niaux Cave is located in the Ariège (a-ryeh-juh) département [think smaller than a state bigger than a county] of southern france, in the Pyrénées (pee-reh-neh) mountains making the border with spain.

the almost entirety of the art is concentrated in the "Salon Noir" of the cave.

now. come close and listen to me. the Salon Noir is some 700 meters from both the modern entrance and the prehistoric one. today, like back then, you have to navigate rough, slippery terrain, crouchspaces, and generally accident-inducing (source: my dad slipped & fell just like our guide warned us about) walking space. for most of the way, the ceiling is 5 to 10 meters above, and the walls relatively close together (but not claustrophobic). the Salon Noir seems to be "indicated" by, on both of its sides, red symbol markings. now listen to me. the Salon Noir's ceiling is twice as high. even with modern lamps, you struggle to see it. now imagine. having walked all the way there, in the Wet, the fire of your torch or your grease hand-lamp to guide you, and suddenly not only can you not see the ceiling anymore, but the rock seems to speak back to you. the echo is intense, in the Salon Noir, way more than anywhere in the lower-ceiling'ed cave. your voice carries on for 5 full seconds, if you sing the rock continues singing after you. did you know? in france and spain, studies have shown that most parietal (=cave wall) art corresponds to particular acoustic features. did they sing? did they play the flute, the drums? did they use lithophones: the stalagtites & stalagmites, hit of small sticks, to make them ring? in the Salon Noir, most of the animals are bisons, as is very common in the franco-cantabrian area. now this is just something fun that our guide told us, possibly nothing more than an interesting coincidence, for its truth would rest on an unproven-hypothesis-within-an-unproven-hypothesis, but did you now that the female bison has the same gestational period as the human? 9 months.

the bison to the right, with the red markings and the "eyebrows", is my dad's favorite: he says its profile looks like him, with his beard and his big nose, which to be fair, truly it does. in a previous-previous-previous-previous life my dad as an upper paleolithic era bison. this is my dad's paleolithic fursona.

my favorite is this horsie. see? she smiles.

so does this one on the left, a protome (= name for the depiction of only the front of an animal, of a human)

PERGOUSET (pronounced per-goo*-zeh) CAVE

(* but the "oo" sound is short)

i'm cheating a little. because this is not painting, it's carving. but i consider sculpture an art, and parietal carving to be as important and interesting as parietal paintings, so. take it or don't!

yeah the whole cave. you'll see why. basically if i think about Pergouset for too long my skin starts melting i foam at the mouth etc. anyways. since the cave is closed to the public, and basically only available to researchers' viewings, it is quite hard to find images of it, so we'll just ball on this one.

Pergouset is located in the département of the Lot, in southwest-central france. this region is Plentiful with caves, including Pech-Merle that is basically next door, and Lascaux 1.5h away. why this one & not any of those two? well. come closer.

okay. the pussies & this guy with his penis out cave. what's her deal. Well, first piece of lore is to know that, in the grand scheme of franco-cantabrian paleolithic cave art, human representations are minimal. animals make up the majority of depictions, however, "archetyped" or "stereotyped" human figures that insist on sex characteristics are Plentiful. and within representations of that, "female" archetypes outnumber "male" ones by a lot. basically you cannot cough on a paleolithic "human" depiction without landing on a vulva frankly. many such cases in life as well. one of the hypotheses, which Michel Lorblanchet brings forth in his book La Naissance de la Vie: Une Lecture de l'Art Parietal (from which the picture above is from) is that it could be part of a belief system in which the cave, the whole cave, itself could be a "female" principle or archetype: the whole of the cave a matrix, a uterus. basically its giving, it's giving birth. one of the biggest data point he has for that hypothesis is the Pergouset cave. in the Pergouset cave, carvings of vulvae rhythm a long narrow passage following an underground river. the 3 vulvae could represent that of pre-birth, that of currently-pregnant (with the line in the middle, like the pigmentation line on pregnant belly + carved over a convex part of the stone), and that of currently-actively-giving birth: "vulva 3" is just two streaks in the rock, surrounding a naturally-occuring hole in the rock: as if that feature of the cave itself had been recognized as It's Giving Birth / hereditary voice I Am Your Mother. as you can see on the picture, vulva 1 is all the way back in the #depths, in the #dark, and vulva 3 the closest to the exit, indeed to the light ( -> it's giving birth). now. and this is the insane thing. foaming at the mouth like unwell arms shaking rn. i've had to go pace 4 times since i started typing. in the depths of the cave, the animals that are carved are less (see the numbers on the picture). but also, they're... more fantastic. stranger, more unusual. lacking the realism that is typically associated with parietal art. they're... as if from a dream, an undetermined land of weirdness, of amorphousness. as they get closer to the light, they get more numerous, they proliferate, life crawls the walls: they become also more and more realistic. as we reach the last carved vulva, as it is giving, what is it: giving BIRTH, animals are numerous, abundant, fully formed, their visible selves in the world outside: it is as if the cave itself, the depths of cave itself, gave birth to these animals, formed them inside of itself, let them out from this unknown, amorphous, strange land beyond the stone, where human cannot reach. humans went in, and meticulously, sometimes using a natural relief in the stone for an eye, a feature, "released" the animals from the stone, "revealed" them from their state of hidden-inside-of-the-depths-ness. the whole cave this Mother from which all the animals drawn on the walls emerged.

tldr