RELIGION AND THE ORIGINS OF ART

With the emergence of figurative art, in the Upper Palaeolithic, a true revolution took place in the cognitive culture of man. Prehistoric rock art and cave art in western Europe, in Azerbaijan, in Tanzania, in South Africa, in Australia and elsewhere include an outstanding collection of mythological descriptions which conception from one region to another, but are globally present.

The myth of an epic migration from the land of origin to the land of arrival is another recurring subject. The myth of exodus goes back to prehistory. It seems that they asked themselves: “Who am I”? “Where do I come from?” The rock art commemorates events and immortalizes them. The main queries still bother us: the core of the Judeo-Christian mythology may be much older than usually believed. Attempts at finding answers to existential queries may well be one of the main roots of religious thought.

This figurative explosion took place some 50,000 years ago and reached Europe 35,000 years ago. Through art, people depicted animals, human beings, and beings that are half human and half animal. Some of the figures may appear realistic. A bison is a bison according to our way of thinking, but for the people who depicted it 30,000 years ago, what was the significance of the bison? And if there are figures of beings half-bison and half-human, what was the significance of this anthropo-bison (Anati 2002)?

Rock art functions like a sacred book, a Bible which retained the memories of stories and symbolized the identity of ethnic groups. It is the principal symbolic heritage to which the tribal people dedicated more time and more energy than that invested in gathering their economic resources.

There are also images of so-called “incantation charms” like the one at the Caverne du Volp, Ariege, France, in which a being with human legs and the head of an ox plays music with a musical bow.

Ethnographic parallels show that this is the description of a performance common in different regions, from Equatorial Africa to Arctic Alaska. Like many other hunting tribes, the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert imitate the movements and the attitudes of animals in dance and music, to propitiate their spirits, persuading them to be hunted and eaten so that their soul may survive in the body of the hunter. The hunters are trying to seduce the soul of the prey.

The aforementioned Palaeolithic depiction has a complex symbolism expressed by metaphors: a bison has the legs of a deer and is associated to ideograms intending to specify its identity (ibid.). The rock art of Palaeolithic times reveals totemic customs according to which humans identify themselves with specific species of animals and develop a special relationship with them. Certain totems may keep relations with specific totems and have to refrain from relations with other totems.

Prehistoric rock art and findings in archaeological excavations reveal, among other aspects, the presence of shamanism and illustrates situations of shamans abandoning their body and travelling into the world of the spirits. Such representations are common in South Africa, in Siberia, and in America after 12,000 BCE, but some cases in Europe seem to indicate the presence of shamanism from about 30,000 BCE.

The rock pictures reveal a cult and worship of animals which were believed to have a soul just like humans. There are also burials of animals, using the same burial customs as those otherwise used for human burials (Bonifay 1965).

For hunting peoples, the relation with the animal world is essential. The and cult practices without temple-architecture. Shamans and wise-men were lonely operators and a priestly class did not exist. It was a non-theistic religion which included an immense heritage of symbolic expressions and performances which included beliefs, rituals, myths and exegesis. The roots of the belief in the after-world, myths connected to a well-conceived structure of life after death and related practices, go back even further, as they were widespread over three continents already with the Mousterian culture of the Middle Palaeolithic, well before 100,000 years ago.

RELIGION AND THE ORIGINS OF ART

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