The Palaeolithic artist: part 26

Wassily Kandinsky

"Every work of art is the child of its age and, in many cases, the mother of our emotions. It follows that each period of culture produces an art of its own which can never be repeated. Efforts to revive the art-principles of the past will at best produce an art that is still-born. It is impossible for us to live and feel, as did the ancient Greeks. In the same way those who strive to follow the Greek methods in sculpture achieve only a similarity of form, the work remaining soulless for all time. Such imitation is mere aping. ... There is, however, in art another kind of external similarity which is founded on a fundamental truth. ... An example of this today is our sympathy, our spiritual relationship, with the Primitives. Like ourselves, these artists sought to express in their work only internal truths, renouncing in consequence all consideration of external form. This all-important spark of inner life today is at present only a spark. Our minds, which are even now only just awakening after years of materialism, are infected with the despair of unbelief, of lack of purpose and ideal. The nightmare of materialism, which has turned the life of the universe into an evil, useless game, is not yet past; it holds the awakening soul in its grip." Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the spiritual in art, 1912.

Kandinsky's last sentence, here, is prophetic. In part 16 of this series Jung says:

“… what did Dionysus mean to Nietzsche? What he says about it must be taken seriously; what it did to him still more so. There can be no doubt that he knew in the preliminary stages of his fatal illness, that the dismal fate of Zagreus was reserved for him. Dionysus is the abyss of impassioned dissolution, where all human distinctions are merged in the animal divinity of the primordial psyche – a blissful and terrible experience. Humanity, huddling behind the walls of its culture, believes it has escaped this experience, until it succeeds in letting loose another orgy of bloodshed. All well-meaning people are amazed when this happens and blame high finance, the armaments industry, the Jews, or the Freemasons.” [Jung notes (44): "I wrote this passage in spring, 1935"] C.G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, p.89f. First Princeton / Bollingen Paperback printing, 1980.

Running as a thread through all of the above, is an awareness that we have lost, and might never regain the self-awareness of the Palaeolithic hunter. For many years, I have noticed that whenever I reach far enough into the unconscious mind synchronicities occur: This Brain Pickings article was published on my birthday. There is nothing particularly strange about any association between Nietzsche and Picasso, but it being published on my birthday, and on the same day  receiving a Google alert about Synchronicity as a Divine Experience where its author speaks about his first encounter with synchronicity being the date of his birth (and also including many other people I have featured in this series), then it becomes worthy of noting.

So who, and under what circumstances, would be best qualified to enter the mind of the Palaeolithic artist who created the painting of the boar?

It would be a female Spanish painter of modern art who lives not too far from the Altamira cave. She would have to enter the cave alone, and without any "protective gear". She would also have to carry the seashell lamp I describe in Friday's post as her only source of light. This is a tall order, perhaps an impossible one, but the closest one can get to it, the more efficiently would the task be accomplished. My reasons are as follows:

1.  The choice of the boar painting as the focus for this study is because, as a Celtic symbol, its correlate is the collective unconscious. The boar is fascinated by what lies beneath: its dark colour represents the night; its tusks, the crescent moon (Campbell, Primitive Mythology).As a symbol on Celtic coinage, it represents the hero's death in warfare and his subsequent rebirth at an elevated status. This is also true for the Gundestrup cauldron iconography  This syncretism took place in northern Italy either early, in the Golasecca culture, or later during the time of Dionysios I of Syracuse when Celtic bases were set up to provide troops to him and others. Dionysios, as his name implies made great use of the Goddess Arethusa, as the Sicel equivalent of Persephone who spent her winter months with Hades, representing thus the first born Dionysos who was the God of the primeval psyche. In reading some of the above links be aware that, once or twice, consulting Robert Graves (unabridged) The Greek Myths will give a more focused view.
2. A female artist will be more likely to have a stronger intuitive sense than a male artist. In the language of the yijing, female is yin and represented by a broken line. In binary language this is is yes/open as opposed to the male Yang which is no/closed. The yijing is Chinese holistic science, although most people think of it as a fortune telling method. As the latter, it would be no more effective than tossing a coin, or using "the magic eight ball". It does, however, yield  far better results when consulted to ask what the subject should be thinking about any given situation. Critics assign "magical thinking" to it because a hexagram can look like the object named, for example, "The Well" (Hexagram 48) does look like a well-head and its changing lines refers to things like "the rope is not long enough to reach the water", or "the rope is broken", etc. The knowledge of these being only convenient metaphors was known to the classical Chinese and the creative use of metaphor is basic to Chinese language, poetry and even science.
3. A local artist will bring a certain degree of cultural pride to the task which is expressed in a numinous manner, somewhat akin to that of the original observers of  the cave art. Remember, the idea that even a modern tribal society has "gods" is due to a modern misunderstanding. Things, people and events can be imbued with a sense of the sacred, meaningfulness, or magic. Like the Polynesian Mana. Gods are part of a religious system, usually unvaried and "official": far more "citified".
4. That she not be encumbered with protective clothing is for two reasons: it would lessen the actual physical contact with the environment, and it would be more experiential and a better duplication of the original scenario.
5. Bringing a duplicate of the original lamp is not just for verisimilitude, its main function is to be able to perceive how certain parts of the paintings were given optical effects by being placed over details of the rock, itself. This would aid in interpretation and might even yield an accurate translation of the visual language of the artists.

The degree to which these steps are followed is the degree to which an understanding of the Palaeolithic artists can be obtained. Stringing up modern lights and entering the caves as groups of people carrying equipment etc.  would result in no understanding, whatsoever.

Tomorrow, how proof can be obtained that cannot be refuted, only denied, and without cause.

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