I now understand why people risk their lives exploring underground caverns. The ancient watercourses had sculpted an alien landscape of smooth and bulbous protrusions rising from the floor and dripping from the roof. On the outside, the craggy cliff entrance had been blasted away by modern dynamite, but the inside of the mountain seemed organic and alive. The mica and mineral deposits twinkling in the flashlight triggered childhood memories of Disney grottoes and the seven dwarfs mining for sparkling jewels. Halfway into our descent, we found the hand of man. Mixed in with the graffiti left there by intrepid French youths over the past 350 years was an occasional repeated pattern made up of parallel lines and dots that we were told was much older. Our guide invited us to speculate, but like the experts who carbon-dated the work, we were unable to explain the wood-ash markings put there deliberately for a long-forgotten purpose.1
After about an hour, we reached a cathedral-like chamber, the salon noir, or black exhibition hall. With our light sabres, we were able to pick out the remarkably well-preserved images of animals and patterns left more than thirteen thousand years ago on the walls of the cavern. This was clearly the focal centre of activity, though no trace of human habitation had ever been found. No bones, no flints, no remnants of someone’s lunch. Only the art remained. I tried to imagine the scene illuminated by the flicker of simple lamps made out of animal fat. The place was magical. So often we take for granted our modern lives and all the technologies available to us and easily forget how fast and how far we have travelled. This revelatory experience in the loins of a mountain was a jaw-dropping moment for a twenty-first-century scientist. The people who painted the cave must have thought so too. David Lewis-Williams studies prehistoric paintings and artefacts. In his book The Mind in the Cave, he argues that subterranean art was not for general public viewing.2 Otherwise, there would be more examples in less remote and more accessible sites. He proposes that the activity in these caves instead reflects early religious attempts to connect symbolically with the earth in its deepest crevices. These places were sacred. The art was deliberately created around the physical properties of each cave. Natural rock patterns and shapes were outlined to form animals in the same way that we see faces in the clouds on a summer’s day. This human capacity to see structure and significance in the natural world is not only a talent of the artistic mind but an essential quality for the spiritual one as well. The images came alive through the combination of flickering shadows from tallow lamps and the power of human imagination. Some decorated spaces were only large enough for a solitary individual to squeeze into. The geometric patterns found here may have been the first evidence of the altered states of consciousness that the early shamans are thought to have achieved. Lewis-Williams speculates that the shamans, cocooned in these narrow cervices, sought to document their crossover to the underground world through images and symbols. This may be wild speculation, but what is undisputed is that prehistoric art depicts a mixture of natural and supernatural images. Animals such as horses and bulls, as well as extinct species such as the aurochs and mammoth, are represented, but so are half-human, half-animal creatures.
FIG. 3: ‘Lion-Man’, a statuette carved of mammoth tusk, dating from around 32,000 years ago, discovered in a cave at Hohlenstein-Stadel, Germany. PHOTO BY THOMAS STEPHAN, © ULMER MUSEUM.
The most stunning example is not a drawing but a statuette from Germany, the Hohlenstein-Stadel ‘Lion-Man’. Originally nobody knew what it was. It was shattered into two hundred pieces and mixed among ten thousand bone fragments retrieved from a prehistoric cave in southern Germany just before the outbreak of the Second World War. In 1997 it was carefully reassembled. Who could have predicted how spectacular this find would be? The figure has a human body but a lion’s head, stands about 12 inches tall, and is carved from a mammoth tusk. It is not clear whether it is a lion that has taken on human properties or the other way around. Either way, it proves that prehistoric man had imagination and a sense of the unreal. Not only is it one of the most beautiful examples of human art, but it is also one of the earliest. It dates from around thirty-two thousand years ago! Try to get your head around that date for a moment. When it comes to thinking about how long culture and art have been around, we are exceedingly myopic in our outlook.
We may have no written record from this period of humankind, but evidence for supernatural practices can be found in human activity as far back as we can record it. Some of the earliest burials from at least forty-five thousand years ago show signs of ritual. We do not know exactly what motivated prehistoric humans to paint their caves, bury their dead with symbolic objects, or make female (‘Venus’) figurines with enlarged breasts and stomachs, but these behaviours reflect some of the earliest ceremonial practices in the history of our civilization. Ceremony and ritual have been present from the beginning. There was culture in the caves. Everyday experience must have raised questions in minds sophisticated enough to organize hunts, manufacture jewellery, paint, and communicate. Where do we go when we dream? What happens when we die? They must have thought that there was something more to daily existence. Why else spend so much effort celebrating a culture deep in the recesses of a cave if not in the belief that there was something more to reality? From the beginning, humans already had minds prepared for the supernatural.
MODERN MINDS IN THE CAVE
In modern society, we should no longer have a need for shaman to commune with subterranean spirits. Armed with modern science and technology, we can predict and control our lives without the help of trance-induced priests. We can even blast away an entire mountain at the press of a button. We do not have to pray or make sacrifices to control our future. We can measure, test, and document the world. Prehistoric man may have believed in the supernatural, but, then, he did not have the benefit of modern science to explain what he could not understand. Humankind has emerged out of the darkness into a bright, technological, scientific age. By now, we should have abandoned the mind in the cave.
Clearly this has not happened. Over the last four hundred years, we have witnessed an astonishing explosion in our understanding of the universe, something almost like a ‘big bang’ of scientific understanding. In no other period in human history has humankind made such breathtaking advances in explaining so many facets of the natural world. Wander the corridors of the science departments in any modern large university, and you will find experts in the minuscule details of nature. We have reached out to the farthest galaxies and delved into the subatomic through our science. Science should be the bedrock of our knowledge and wisdom. And yet beliefs in the supernatural – beliefs that are unnatural and unscientific – are still very common.
If science is so successful, why do most people ignore what it has to say about the supernatural? Why doesn’t the general public listen to the scientists who say that such belief is unfounded? At this point, I want to draw your attention to the fact that supernatural beliefs generally come in two forms. There are religious supernatural beliefs (God, angels, demons, reincarnation, heaven, hell, and so on) and secular supernatural beliefs (such as telepathy, clairvoyance, and ESP). All religions are based on supernatural beliefs, but not all supernatural beliefs are based on religion. This is an important distinction, since there are some very powerful lobbies and arguments when it comes to the differences between religion, science, and supernaturalism.