From an anatomical perspective, humans, Homo sapiens sapiens, emerged some 200,000 years ago, in the Middle Paleolithic period. From a behavioral perspective, however, many scientists point to the Upper Paleolithic (36,000–10,000 YBP), as the
2. The prehistoric art of the Chauvet caves in southern France concentrates on representations of horses and bison—animals central to Paleolithic hunting culture. Some theorists suggest this cave art originated in the visionary experiences of participants in prehistoric rituals.
Ritual
moment in time when characteristics and capacities recognized as distinctly human exploded on the scene, the so-called Great Leap Forward. Herzog’s film is informed by this notion of a Paleolithic cultural revolution, directing our attention to the existence of a number of defining universals that constitute human beings in the world: language, symbolism, abstraction, food preparation, artistic expression, music, games, burial, and the use of tools. Initial efforts at interpreting the significance of Paleolithic cave art advanced an “art for art’s sake” view; cave art was understood to be chiefly decorative and expressive. But following on the heels of Mircea Eliade’s influential book Shamanism: Archaic
Techniques of Ecstasy (1951), which identified shamanism’s chief
characteristic as ritually induced or mediated ecstatic states of consciousness, Paleolithic cave art came to be linked to religious and magical practices associated with shamanistic trance. The word “shamanism” comes from the Tungus people of Siberia and was employed by late-nineteenth-century missionaries and ethnographers who used it to describe a ritual genre subsequently discovered across circumpolar cultures, practices associated with hunting, healing, the ferrying of the dead to the otherworld, and an animistic sense of an ensouled world of spirits or powers. Many anthropologists working in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries understood these shamanistic traditions as the descendants of an original, Paleolithic shamanism. The archaeologist J. D. Lewis-Williams sums up the argument for shamanic interpretations of Paleolithic cave art:
[T]he antiquity and ubiquity of altered states of consciousness, the widespread occurrence of shamanism among hunter-gatherers, and formal parallels between elements of the mental imagery of altered states and Upper Paleolithic parietal imagery are three points that suggest that at least some—not necessarily all—parietal art was probably associated with institutionalized hallucinations. In other words, it seems highly probable that some yet to be precisely
Ritual and the origins of culture defined forms of shamanism were present at, probably, all periods of the Upper Paleolithic of western Europe.
If the Paleolithic era was a “great leap” in cultural forms and cognitive capacities, the point where humans fully arrived on the scene, and if cave art is best understood as the product of shamanic practices, then shamanism becomes the original religious or spiritual expression of humanity, and the caves a kind of womb, the moment and place where such fecund ritualized acts were conceived. To this school of thought, cave art signifies a tremendous advance in representational skills. With these skills comes a corresponding cognitive development, the ability to enter altered states of consciousness and then fix the visions experienced in aesthetic forms. These experiences and their representation in art give rise to conceptions of alternative or parallel, frequently tiered, realities. Ritual then is the means and medium for generating and interpreting such experiences.
If we imagine such a ritual scene, deep in the recesses of the Chauvet caves, what would we see? Small numbers of our Paleolithic ancestors descend into the dangerous territory of the caves. Perhaps a charismatic individual leads them, revealing and inducting new members into the mysteries of the underworld. There, in the shadows and light cast by torches, they drum, sing, and reach out to the textured surface of the walls, with their cracks, folds, and hidden recesses. The skulls and bones of animals are handled and enshrined in niches or on rocks, which serve as our earliest altars. Images of animals are painted; earlier paintings are revered as icons of the intimate relation between human and animal worlds, and as links to the group’s ancestors. The impulse to leave the daily world of light and safety for the dangers of the caves suggest an urge to seek out a distinct place for extraordinary acts, a place that by virtue of its very separation from ordinary life was perhaps thought to offer knowledge and experience of the world in its totality.
Ritual
Functionally, such shamanic rites may have well served the needs of early hunting societies. The challenges and problems associated with securing food, the most basic of life’s
necessities, could be worked through in ritual form. By symbolically enacting the hunt, our Paleolithic ancestors may have gained some measure of control and power over a precarious and demanding part of daily life. Walter Burkert suggests that “men penetrated into those dark caves; and as they repeated this symbolic quest [for food], it became an established ritual: to penetrate, by a daring and difficult exploit, into those underground chambers in order to reestablish and bring back the hope of affluence.” Burkert further speculates that out of this ritual “questing” grew the myths and epics that would form the basis of the earliest literature of the ancient Near East and Greece—heroic tales of exploits, questing, and seeking.
We often find in ritual enactment references and resemblances to daily practices. Burkert tacitly invokes a conception of ritual developed by the historian of religion Jonathan Z. Smith. For Smith, “ritual is a means of performing the way things ought to be in conscious tension to the way things are in such a way that the ritualized perfection is recollected in the ordinary, uncontrolled course of things.” The expression of a tension or discrepancy between the haphazardness of daily life and the formalized, repetitive, idealized perfection of ritual is, for Smith, ritual’s principal function. Ritual is a performance of the ideal, in full relationship with the messiness of life. For Smith, ritual is a special cultural space where life can be imagined, staged, watched, practiced, done right, and then, hopefully, recollected in daily life—but always with the understanding of a gap or distance between ritual and ordinary life. Ritual is in part a model for action, but even more profoundly ritual discloses and enacts the experience of distance and tension between what is and what is hoped for, between the real and the unattainable, actuality and possibility.
Ritual and the origins of culture