The European Upper Paleolithic lasted around 30.000 years, until the end of the Ice Age, 11.000 years ago.
People at the time were hunters and gatherers, they sometimes fished but they did not practice agriculture, and most importantly, they produced art.
That's what we're going to focus on for this post, talking about the strict relationship between art and spirituality at the time.
A famous example of Paleolithic art is the Chauvet cave. There we see examples that date around 31.000 years ago.
Understanding the meaning and goals of this art, especially in relation with spirituality, is not easy and maybe we'll never have definitive answers, but we do have ways to find evidence and theorize.
Artifacts found in excavations are great for this, but finding evidence of activities doesn't mean knowing the social or spiritual implications of that activity or artifact.
Did different stones have different meanings? Did pendants and beads show somebody's social rank? What had a practical use and what didn't?
Burials are a good way of trying to understand a population's relationship with spirituality.
Of course, disposing of the dead can be a necessity, but the rituals related to sprinkling bodies with red ochre, or digging a grave and positioning stone and ivory artifacts with them, has to mean something.
We also have to consider portable art. Engraved stones and bones that seem to have no practical propose as well as spear-throwers in the shape of animals have been found and can be dated with some accuracy.
[broken weight of spear thrower, carved from an antler, shaped like a mammoth.
Picture from the British Museum]
Cave art is also an incredibly important part of our evidence. Around 350 open cave art sites are all over Europe, from Spain to Russia.
Red ochre was commonly used for red paint and charcoal was used for black paint and to apply them, they used their fingers or flint tools.
We most commonly see represented big herbivores, like deer, bison and horses, but we can also see animals that they were probably afraid of, like cave bears, cave lions and mammoths.
It's very rare to see anthropomorphic figures and smaller animals, while natural elements like the ground or the sun were never represented.
Sometimes the art, paintings and engravings, is found in small spaces where only one person could crawl, while in other cases it was in very large spaces, well distributed on a wall, and both can be found in the same cave.
A very common explanation that connects animal representation in Upper Paleolithic art with spirituality was related to hunt magic.
For this idea, drawing the animal was supposed to facilitate its killing.
Hunt magic could explain why cave art very rarely represents complete scenes and also the geometrical signs that sometimes are around or on the animals depicted, that could be weapons or wounds.
In this scenario, the representation of animals like cave lions and bears could have been to facilitate their killing in case they showed up.
The problem with this is that there's no correlation between the animals that were more commonly eaten and the frequency of the same animals being depicted.
And there's also the subject of composite images of creatures that were part different animals or part human and part animal that obviously did not exist in the real world.
Those would not make sense with the concept of hunt magic.
In the 60s, the theory of a male and female binary opposition in the Upper Paleolithic spirituality started to surface.
It was noted that bison and horses were usually depicted side by side and the theory is that it can't be a coincidence.
[Marsoulas in France, picture by Philippe Blanchot]
The idea is that the bison and the horse represented the concepts of male and female.
Another interesting theory is related to shamanism.
Central Asia, North America and Africa all present and presented forms of shamanism.
Mircea´Eliade argued that shamanism may be the first form of religion and because of that it's thought that some of the rare anthropomorphic figures in cave art could represent very early shamans.
Shamanism in hunger-gatherer societies is defined by the importance of an alternate state of conscience and dreaming, belief in contact with a spirit realm and obviously shamans.
Shamans have special skills and have access to the other realm.
Depending by the society we take in account, they can contact spirits, heal, control the movement of animals or even the weather.
Most importantly, their power is usually associated with their spirit helpers that more often than not take the form of animals.
With this idea in mind, it's interesting to see the caves -where people usually didn't live, or at least not deep into them- as entrances to other worlds, accompanied by the sensory deprivation provided by the lack of light.
It's also interesting to look at how often the animals where "found" into the rock, created by using the shape of the stone, of cracks in it or little bumps, to which lines were added to shape the animals.
The rituals that took places and if shamanism was really part of it will probably remain a mystery, but there had to be something more than purely practical thought.ivity was found.
This could be evidence of the importance of caves and traveling deep into them.
The ritual that took places there and if shamanism was really part of it will probably remain a mystery, but there had to be something more than purely practical thought.
To me, the presence of spiritual or religious practices and ideas related to animals and the importance of them for the people of Europe's Upper Paleolithic is clear.
And the ingenuity of the art, both cave art and portable art, and animal representation really touches me on a deep level.
Even if this will remain a mystery, it's definitely a mystery worth looking into and forming our own theory about.
Comentários