alt Hacker News'They take you out of life, out of time': a journey into Spain's cave paintings
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Stunning, and amazing to consider that these were painted by firelight/flaming torch.
If you've not watched the Herzog classic "Cave of Forgotten Dreams" - I highly highly recommend it - the paintings are amazing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_Forgotten_Dreams
I was recently remembering my son's obsession with trains, buses and dustbin lorries when he was 2 to 5 - a friend tried to explain it as akin the the passion people would have felt for mega-fauna of the past. Did children of the cave-ages obsess over mammoths in the way he did over our local bus?
I can no longer see images of cave paintings without having The Caves of Altamira start up in my head. There's worse conditions!
What's really amazing is that they still don't know the "why" other than some interesting speculation: religious purposes, places for psychadelic trips, "the creation of surpluses in some kind of hierarchy."
Coincidentally, last week the local public television station was replaying a very old program of Bill Moyers interviewing Joseph Campbell, who died in the late 80s and was known for studies of mythology. He had visited Lascaux, and believed that it was used for coming of age ceremonies:
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: The message of the cave is of a relationship of time to eternal powers that is somehow to be experienced in that place. Now, I tell you, when you’re down in those caves, it’s a strange transformation of consciousness you have. You feel this is the womb, this is the place from which life comes, and that world up there in the sun with all those … that’s a secondary world: this is primary. I mean, this just overcomes you. ...
Now, what were these caves used for? The speculations that are most common of scholars interested in this, is that they had to do with the initiation of boys into the hunt. You go in there, it’s dangerous, it’s very dangerous. It’s completely dark. It’s cold and dank. You’re banging your head on projections all the time, and it was a place of fear. And the boys were to overcome all that, and go into the womb of the earth. And the shaman, or whoever it was that would be helping you through, would not be making it easy.
BILL MOYERS: And then there was a release, once you got into that vast, torchlit chamber down there. What was the tribe, what was the tradition trying to say to the boy?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: That is the womb land from which all the animals come.
BILL MOYERS: I see.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: And the rituals down there have to do with the generation of a situation that will be propitious for the hunt. And the boys were to learn not only to hunt, but how to respect the animals and what rituals to perform, and how in their own lives no longer to be little boys but to be men. Because those hunts were very, very dangerous hunts, believe me, and these are the Original men’s rile sanctuaries, when: the boys became no longer their mothers’ sons, but their fathers’ sons.
https://billmoyers.com/content/ep-3-joseph-campbell-and-the-...
Amazing that some of those paintings have a very good quality. They really trained for a long time before making some of those drawings, so they are much more intelligent than I think they were
I've been to the Altamira cave reproduction and I was skeptical at first on whether I'd feel immersed but they've done an incredible job of it. You quickly forget it's "fake" and sink back into time... It's marvellous.
It makes me wonder how much palaeolithic art has been lost because it wasn't done inside a cave.
I feel the same sort of floating disconnected-ness when I am out back in the desert of Western Australia, and come across a rock shelter with paintings and obvious signs of working by human hands.
Its just such a humbling thing, to look at a piece of art that is 10's of thousands of years old, and realize that a human was once there, making it, just so that some day, a human would be there, looking at it.
What it would be to have a way to talk to these old humans and let them know just how inspiring their work turned out to be...
Would that we could have the same impact on humans a thousand years from now, ten thousand years from now. Hello, Future Human.
As a couple other comments have alluded, we’re the same essential creatures then as we are now. We create, we appreciate beauty, stories, and art. Sometimes it’s hard for me to feel connected to other humans, but stories like this make me feel profoundly connected to humanity. :)