Creation and Consciousness
The oldest story ever told is the one we are still obsessively telling 30,000 years after it first appeared on the cave walls of Lascaux in France. We embellish it according to the tastes of history and culture, but it never changes because it is the imagery of a universal Psyche conscious of itself. We dont invent or own this story because it can’t help but be told the moment we are conscious and if it isn’t told we cease to be. It is the Creation Story, outside and inside, and all we can do is recognise it and tell it to the best of our ability.
For those cave people, the Creation Story is about vibrant animals that move, because that was their world. They chose a subterranean cave system with a morphology that was integral to the telling, suggesting a difficult descent into chambers and tunnels that portray the interior vulvic landscape of Birth, an Earth Womb with warm moist glistening folds of rock reminiscent of the female genital system and the process of birth – labial or vaginal formations, yoni keyhole passages, fissures and openings that lead onwards into the inaccessible dark spaces of primordial existence. As we descend into this underworld we retrace our Origins and our consciousness alters.
At this point, in this hole of origins, the animals come teeming and tumbling over themselves, effortlessly, and in a riot of creation, all shapes and sizes in all directions and in all artistic styles, moving across the walls in a noisy commotion, animated and alive and alert, some looking out at us, possessed by the same consciousness that possessed their makers and me.
The upside down horse emerges from this birth canal, curving round the rock, struggling to get out. Aurochs and pregnant horses, cows and deer cross the cave – all full of movement and energy, this life force and exuberance. At one labial outcrop five half formed deer seem to be swimming in water; the surge of breaking waters or The Flood of Origins. This is Life and water and birth. Its also eschatology and death as the animals are sucked back into their Origins.
These animals are not in danger, not being hunted, nor are they fixed in any landscape. They are just full of the impact of pure Existence and consciously Alive. They are drawn close together but they dont see each other or relate or interact. They float in space, strangely empowered. Some are perfectly proportioned while others are distorted with missing vital parts. Some are finely detailed or modelled and shaded in deliberate earth colours. Others are roughly sketched in monotones. Some are obliviously painted over others. Some bend round to include the rock formations that suggest their shape. Others overlap as multiples moving together, while others stand in the magnetic tension of opposites, facing each other or pulling apart.
This is all inclusive creation with all artistic styles represented; realism and abstraction, naive and sophisticated, sculpted and expressionist. The figures demonstrate all perspectives; frontal and side view, flat and foreshortened, from above and below, even x-ray and what is now called cubism. No wonder modern artists used them to challenge conventions. Everything ever possible is here in this moment. It is all Existence, joyful, the impulse of Life, without judgement and before Reason. ....and frightening because of its energy.
I am in awe of such awareness and skill. We fade in arrogance beside it with our pompous sense of progressive development. Out of this confusion and cacophony and chaos is the Order of Creation as its always been known. The animals burst out of nothing. They are. Then they are not and the caves are silent. It’s simple, this watery subterranean landscape of birth and animals, the conscious imagery of Creation.
They are painted extrovertly, but there is another part to this story that is more intimate and quietly hidden on the back wall of an inaccessible chamber at the bottom of a shaft; a mysterious scene about regulating the rhythms of Life. Sequential dots mark the spot ( : : : ).
This scene shows a naively drawn stick man with the head of a bird and outstretched arms as if flying. He is potent and confident, Ithyphalic man with erect penis and puffed out chest, valiant and defiant yet strangely pathetic and vulnerable. Its a figure that brings opposites together, fearless and frail, the potent physical erect qualities of manhood with the otherworldy or spiritual qualities of a godlike being who flies. So he soars upwards into the unknown in a state of elation, inspired and ascending.
These are qualities we associate with the hero archetype. Then he appeared as a shamanic figure but the same form repeats itself according to the culture it inhabits....knights and cops, soldiers and Sufis, priests and modern therapists; the fighters and originators of Thought and Deed, Rejuvenators who separate as Individuals from the crowd,Self-sacrificing .
The bird imagery denoting flight has always been associated with soul and spirituality and ascent, as it is here. Its in the Egyptian hieroglyph for Ba/ Soul and its in the imagery of the Psyche/Soul used in modern Depth Psychology. Raised arms of ascent signify goddesses like Astarte, the yogi’s stance for prayer to the sun, the catholic priest whose flying arms reach out at Mass to encircle the “flock”, the prostrations of a Muslim at prayer. The gesture opens us up to the sky, to something above us where angels always have wings. It’s another world, an altered state of consciousness, a soul-consciousness. It’s inspirational.
Physically potent Ithyphalic man is later found in hieroglyphs as Min or Osiris (“the mummy with the long member”), or the Welsh hero Peredur who then becomes Persival, a name with sexual connotations that means “to pierce or lance through the valley”. The erect penis suggests a state of high alert, an arousal and excitement or elation. It’s about the invigorating male creative energy that fertilises. Arousal contributes to creation in all its acts, including the act of creativity in the arts, and physical potency is just as important for the hero as any winged consciousness. We diminish it when we just see it as male muscle or prowess.It is so much more.
Here in these caves they knew exactly what they were painting. Below the stick man is another bird on the end of a stick. A lanced line that might be a spear or a line of direction leads to a huge female bison with its tail raised in excitement and something which might be placenta or entrails hanging from its stomach. The bisons head bows down to almost touch the man and the expression on its face is extraordinary. There is no aggression in their relationship. The spear connects more than it kills. It is combat but it is also embrace.
These figures are connected in positions that suggest birth and death together; transformation. The man is flying as much as he is dying, rejuvenated. The bison seems transfixed. They are positioned carefully in a geometric formation I’ve seen on Pictish Stones in Scotland, within a space made by two angled lines capped by a crescent. There its called “the crescent and V rod” symbol interpreted as a sign of empowerment, the v rods being water divining rods held at an angle to each other. The later addition of a rhinoceros also has a raised tail, perhaps chosen because it was an unusual first sighted animal that seemed remarkable in its creation.
This cave scene symbolises empowerment too and may well have been divined to place here. Body and Spirit, birth and death, heroic manchild and Mother Nature in the form of bison...they form a balanced unity here in this scene, suspended in time and beautifully equipoised.
The same scene reappears in medieval icons as St George and the dragon. The hero is now riding his altered consciousness on horseback with his lance holding the dragon. The dragon bends to face the man. His soaring consciousness rides high as he pins down the dragon. There is no animosity or conquest between them, just this strange look.
What is this “Look”? Its on the bisons face and on other animals in other cave paintings, timeless and penetrating and compassionate, a look of heightened consciousness that stares out from the painting and reaches deep into the onlooker. I’ve seen it also in Byzantine icons and in the Fayoum Portraits of Egypt. Its mentioned as “the gaze” in sufi poetry. It appears again in the painting of ten sages on the walls of the Alhambra in Spain. This look is directly communicating the state of consciousness that is being depicted. It is Being contemplating itself in the being who observes. It arrests your attention. You feel it. You know it. It reaches into your own consciousness to recognise itself....or not, if the onlooker is not receptive.
The hero’s story has been externalised into ceremonial epic tales that follow coded patterns, Gilgamesh is one of the earliest recorded, and Greek tragedies are some of the earliest performed. But it has also been internalised into the language of modern depth psychology where soul becomes Psyche and the shaman becomes a therapist, where the Unknown becomes the Unconscious, and the perilous horizontal journey becomes vertical. This Individuation Process is not new, and was similarly practiced by medieval Heychast mystics and Muslim sufis. The hero is Son Ego Consciousness locked in a battle with its greater Mother Self Unconscious as it struggles to detach from that on which it is also dependent. Its a struggle for balance and unity and harmony where neither Ego nor Self destroy each other, for the hero attempts to balance the outside with the inside, in the meaning of the hermetic maxim, “As above, so below”.
This secret shaft scene of empowerment shows a man in that heroic state, taking his place with Nature, a man who harmonises the opposites of Consciousness (Dualities) in himself and in the world, striving to regulate and balance and serve in accordance with natural laws. Its not about winning or conquering. Its about sacrifice and unity and inclusion, whatever the danger. It requires a hero’s consciousness to harmonise these forces,to enter into the unknown knowingly.
This recurring imagery is in the plays of Shakespeare when Renaissance Ideals generated humanism, in the Irish Neolithic earth mound of Newgrange, where the triple spiral geometric motif of balance is similarly hidden on the back wall of a womblike chamber at the end of a narrow birth passage. Its in the earliest writings of the Upanishads, and in the European medieval morality plays, psychomachys where Everyman battles with the duality of conscious existence towards an ideal unity. So the same story is being reinterpreted in different languages, whether it be the language of science or religion or psycho-therapy or Art. Its a universal psychic Truth beyond time and space, telling its own story, reflecting itself.
These paintings were made in a state of creativity that is part of that same story too. The creative act is us at our most alive, often overwhelming and all consuming. It drives artists to extraordinary achievements as they battle the unknown source, pinning down their thoughts with lancelike precision to stabilise into an Artform before it all slips away or overwhelms. That’s a heroic process, whatever the gender.
The most powerful force we know is the generative principle of Life and its natural rhythms. That force flows all around us and in us, made conscious in the imagery of our stories of Origin and in our stories of the human heroic endeavour to help regulate those Life rhythms. These stories are our manual or guidebook. Its a natural Law and Order, not manmade.
For Consciousness IS the Origin of the images we generate. The outer world of Creation and the inner world of Consciousness are the same generative process of “bringing things to Light”, “to Be”. They are the same thing and there are times when expressing one also expresses the other, when the visible World alters through the conscious “gaze” as it develops.
Our human story is not about the progress of knowledge, but about its recovery. These cave people knew as much as we know, living within the constraints of their own technology as we do now. Their paintings are a celebration of Creation as generative power; they show us the creation of the natural world, the creation of the human heroic animating principle that helps regulate the rhythms of Life, and the marks of the artists who painted them out of that same principle of creativity. They are imbued with the wonder of Life.
Alternatively, as my daughter says in her own creative way and with pin point precision lest I seem a little out of balance, “Its like this Mammy, the man got turned on by a cow before it head butted him into the air”.
(the mysterious shaft scene)
