How Art Made the World

by Nigel Spivey

  As with the interpretation of cave-paintings as art for art’s sake, there is a general element to the theory of hunting magic that is immediately attractive. After all, anyone who has ever kissed a photograph knows that images can serve the purpose of wishful thinking. Many instances are known of societies in which images are honoured aspotential surrogates of reality.Voodoo-type superstitions, for instance, rely on the belief that sticking pins in a wax effigy of someone will make that person feel pain. Art thereby becomes a medium for magic. And while we might accept that the image of a lion or a snake does not terrify us like the real thing, it is also well documented that we are quite capable of responding to an image as if it were real. Being a Catholic priest, Breuil knew well enough that many people of his time could stand before a picture or statue of the Virgin Mary with all the respect due to an animate presence.

  10 (previous page)Wounded bison from Niaux caves, near Ariège, France, c.14,000 BC.

  Breuil could point to further specific features of the cave-paintings that favoured his approach. In numerous images, an animal was shown apparently struck by arrows or spears, or else marked as if wounded or snared (Fig. 10). As for the many animals not shown as direct victims of the hunt, they could belong to art’s magical purpose nonetheless. Large herds, with well-fed or pregnant beasts signified yet more wishful thinking on the part of hunters hoping for the bountiful increase of their prey. And, of course, it was the mysterious or occult function of the paintings that, for Breuil, explained why they were located deep under ground. Magic had to be performed in dark places, out of sight; it was a secret operation.

  Breuil’s theory appealed to those who envisaged the Ice Age in Europe as a period of hard survival, when mammoths roamed the land, and fierce bears competed with humans for rocky shelters. And the element of superstitious or irrational belief suited anyone whose view of the past was shaped by the sort of desk-bound anthropology so eloquently presented by J.G. Frazer in his multi-volume compendium, The Golden Bough (1907–15). Subtitled ‘A Study in Magic and Religion’, Frazer’s work seemed, from the poet T.S. Eliot’s admiring point of view, to create ‘an abysm of time’.Yet the Frazerian pursuit of data from ‘primitive’ societies relied upon an ideal of progress characteristic of Victorian Britain. Frazer himself styled it as ‘the long march, the slow and toilsome ascent, of humanity from savagery to civilisation’.Trust in magicians was, for Frazer, a key defining feature of ‘savage’ societies.

  Anthropology has moved on from such complacency. But the main objection to Breuil’s theory arises not from ideological disdain; rather from more attentive archaeological examination of the ancient debris within the caves – in particular, analysis of food remains left around hearths or in middens (rubbish dumps). If the paintings were created for the purpose of successful hunting, it would be logical to expect that the animals depicted on the cave walls were those featuring in the daily diet of the cave’s inhabitants. But this correlation does not hold. At Lascaux, the animals painted were bulls, horses and red deer. Most of the bones discarded in the cave, however, were of reindeer. At Altamira they drew bison, but the associated bones were those of deer, goat and wild boar, with shellfish adding a little variety. Mammoths appear with some frequency in the caves of the Ardèche and Périgord regions, but not in the record of human subsistence at that time. As one archaeologist puts it, ‘the Upper Palaeolithic painters had horses and bison on their mind, whereas they had reindeer and ptarmigan in their stomachs’.

  If not propelled by hunger, why did they paint? Although the science of neurophysiology was in its infancy, Breuil and his contemporaries sensed that it was fundamentally unnatural for the human mind to produce and use representational images in the first place, citing the reported case of a Turkish Muslim who, having had no experience of pictures or drawings, failed to identify a two-dimensional image of a horse because he could not walk around it.The capacity for images, though quickly acquired, did not seem to be innate. If we need to have some mental experience or training in order to recognize symbols, how did we ever acquire the ability to create them in the first place? So the quest continued – the quest to explain how this peculiar human habit of representation began.

  ART AS A SYMBOLIC SYSTEM

  Anyone who considers the practicalities of interior decoration at Altamira and Lascaux will suppose that some system of scaffolding must have been erected for the painters. Experts confirm the supposition. Images were not casually scrawled on the walls, but laid out as part of a considered programme or scheme of decoration.

  It is to the credit of another French scholar, André Leroi-Gourhan (1911–86), that the theory he offered as an alternative to art-for-hunting was based on an acceptance of Palaeolithic imagery as a grand project – anything but random sketches. Strongly influenced by the Structuralist school of anthropology (see page), Leroi-Gourhan proposed considering the cave-paintings as a symbolic system based on binary oppositions or pairings, with the essential division being that between man and woman.

  Notoriously, there are very few images of humans in the caves. But what if certain animals were to be associated with males, and others with females? With reasons ranging from the elementary to the sophisticated, Leroi-Gourhan argued that horses, ibexes and deer were symbolically masculine, while aurochs and bison were feminine. His analysis defies summary: but ultimately – as might be guessed – it leads to the supposition of some kind of fertility rite staged in the caves, for which the images must serve as liturgy.

  Some would say that Leroi-Gourhan’s approach was music to the ears of anyone raised on the psychological doctrines of Sigmund Freud. Certainly there were Freudian overtones to the way in which Leroi-Gourhan explained the geometric motifs that recurred in the caves. Again he identified a male–female gender divide. Straight lines and dots signified male, while circular or enclosing forms were emblematic of female form. Other archaeologists had already noted certain painted shapes or graffiti suggestive of one particular part of female anatomy – the vulva – which favoured this sexually symbolic reading. Leroi-Gourhan himself, however, remained reluctant to specify the implied fertility rite.

  Today it may be hard to resist being amused by the sort of interpretation that sees every straight line or spear as phallic, every circle as a womb.Yet, as even his critics agree, Leroi-Gourhan was surely right to persevere in his assumption that the Palaeolithic artists worked intentionally; that there was a method and a meaning to their work as a whole. But if one problem with his theory is that it depends upon a modern obsession with sexuality, then the general question arises of how we should proceed.We still need some explanation of how the knack or capacity for representation first clicked into place. Can any analysis bridge the distance between modern viewers and ancient artists?

  OUT OF AFRICA

  In the age of our great-grandparents – the generation for whom the work of J.G. Frazer was enlightening – there was little objection to making comparisons between the prehistoric past and communities of so-called ‘primitive peoples’ that had survived (by isolation) into the industrialized world.Today, it would be thought offensive and misleading to describe, for example, the existence of Australian Aborigines around 1800 AD as equivalent to the Stone Age. And yet the impulse to draw some analogies between a surviving or documented society of hunter-gatherers and the hunter-gathering existence of people in the Palaeolithic past is difficult to resist, even if the distance is measured not only across time, but also across continents. Just such a non-judgemental explanation by analogy has lately emerged, injecting fresh energy in to the debate about the beginnings of humanity’s gift for representation.The theory comes from Africa, and how it evolved is worth tracing in some detail.

  The Drakensberg mountains are the main contours of southern Africa.To the east, beyond a coastal plain, lies Durban; due north is Johannesburg and the interior plateau or veldt; within the range, geologically, is the small, snow-topped kingdom of Lesotho. Most of the Drakensberg peaks now belong
to the province of KwaZulu-Natal. In and around this area are many place-names that resonate in South Africa’s modern history, sites of conflict between Boer settlers, British colonists and Zulu tribesmen: Spion Kop, Ladysmith, Rorke’s Drift and more. But before the British, the Boers or the Zulus impacted on this landscape, it had been long occupied by a people whose official place in history is so uncertain that no one is quite sure what to call them.They used to be referred to collectively as ‘Bushmen’; lately ‘the San’ has been preferred. In fact, both names have pejorative connotations, but since there is no ready alternative, we shall use the term ‘Bushmen’ here, for the sake of convenience and without disrespect.

  The Bushmen’s modes of habitation and subsistence in the Drakensberg changed very little over thousands of years.The men hunted animals, using spears and arrows tipped with poison; the women gathered plants, grasses and roots, with no other tool than a weighted digging-stick. Small communities moved from upland to lowland areas as seasons changed, making use of natural shelters where available. Like other nomadic peoples, the Drakensberg Bushmen needed very few possessions, so one might have guessed that they left few traces of their presence in this territory.This is, indeed, the case – except in the crags and crevices of the sandstone escarpment there are thousands of painted images.

  Comparable in quantity to the rock art sites of the Kakadu area in northern Australia, the Bushmen paintings of the Drakensberg are not catalogued; unlike the Kakadu images, they are entirely anonymous and impossible to date. Paintings done only 200 years ago may look brighter than work done 20,000 years earlier, and certain scenes (such as men shown carrying guns) appear to be references to the colonial intruders. Essentially, however, the numerous images seem very similar and coherent within the region, and similar to paintings left in some other places occupied by the Bushmen.

  These were not always recognized for what they were. In 1918 climbers exploring the Brandberg Massif (of modern Namibia) came across rock paintings in a certain ravine. Coloured copies were duly made and shown some years later to Henri Breuil, then attending a conference in Johannesburg.The Abbé pronounced that no indigenous people had made these images, but foreigners of ‘Nilotic-Mediterranean origin’ – perhaps émigrés from Bronze Age Crete, whose style seemed apparent in a particular figure dubbed by Breuil as the ‘White Lady’. It has since transpired that this figure is male, and typical Bushman work; but to upholders of the apartheid system – whereby white and black people in South Africa were kept apart – Breuil’s verdict was welcome proof that the earliest inhabitants of this land had been Europeans.The notion was so pleasing to the country’s colonial administrators that, during the Second World War, they gave academic refuge to Breuil in Johannesburg – sponsored by none other than the country’s premier, J.C. Smuts.

  Breuil’s preposterous gloss of the ‘White Lady’ is perhaps sufficient indication of how little specialist attention was devoted to the images left by the Bushmen – images that were, of course, gradually fading from modern view.The neglect more or less persisted until the early 1960s, when a young local schoolmaster started to explore the Drakensberg paintings more studiously. His name was David Lewis-Williams, and what began as a teacher’s pastime led first to a doctorate, then a professorial chair, and ultimately a dedicated Rock Art Institute (at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg).

  The conspicuous subjects of Bushmen paintings throughout the Drakensberg are animals (Fig. 11). Often enough it seems there is a scene in which some four-legged prey, such as an antelope, is surrounded by figures armed with bows or spears. Casual viewers might readily suppose that these were characteristic reflections of daily life among the Bushmen, to whom hunting was supremely important (their disputes with the settlers arose mostly from access to game or cattle raiding). But, as Lewis-Williams showed, one does not have to look very hard at the Drakensberg paintings before realizing that these depictions of hunting are not so straightforward as that. Some of the human figures, on closer examination, appear to have hoofs for feet, and animal heads. Other figures, seemingly realistic at first glance, have their necks represented in lines of many white stipples.A certain large sort of antelope, the eland, did indeed appear often and prominently in the paintings. But the Bushmen had many other sources of food, four-legged or not.Why so much emphasis upon the eland? As for these hybridhuman-animal figures – therianthropic is the official descriptive term for them – why were some of them appearing to snatch at an eland’s tail?

  11 A scene from the main frieze of the Game Pass Shelter, Kamberg, South Africa. Date uncertain.

  12 (right) A drawing of a detail from the main frieze of the Game Pass Shelter, showing a dying eland and a figure with hooves and an animal head.

  Lewis-Williams aired all these queries, which arose from interpreting the Drakensberg images as scenes of everyday life among the Bushmen. He was also aware that while hunter-gathering peoples may seem, in Western eyes, to be leading remarkably simple lives, at one with nature, anthropological research invariably demonstrated otherwise. Hunter-gatherers around the world tended to organize their lives around very precise and prescriptive systems of ritual and supernatural belief.Why presume any less of the Bushmen?

  Answers to questions about the meaning of the Drakensberg images would, naturally, lie with the Bushmen who painted them. Despite near-genocide in the past, and the more recent imposition of borders and passports, Bushmen have survived in the Kalahari Desert, especially in parts of Botswana and northwest Namibia. But the problem for those trying to track down the meaning of Bushman art is that since their displacement from the Drakensberg to the Kalahari over a century ago, the Bushmen have not been able to sustain the artistic tradition.The Kalahari is a very different terrain from the Drakensberg: it offers few rock surfaces or shelters suitable for painting.What did persist among the Kalahari Bushmen, however, was a powerful strand of religious practice and belief that could be connected to previous images; also, the rare testimony of Bushmen voices recorded during the nineteenth century and kept in an archive at Cape Town. Combining these two sources, Lewis-Williams was able to make a convincing case that the thousands of Bushmen images in the Drakensberg were far from being scenes of daily life; rather, they belonged to the surreal experience of minds and bodies in a state of ecstasy.

  An eland is in the throes of death (Fig. 12): its head hangs heavy; its dewlap – the thick fold of skin below the neck – is sagging; and its hind legs are crossed.The Bushmen say that the crossed hind legs of the eland are a clear sign of poisoned darts taking effect. Here, however, we notice something else.The therianthropic figure holding the eland’s tail in one hand, and a spear in the other, appears to have his legs crossed too. He has an animal’s head and hoofs. Can it be, then, that he is also dying? If so, is he a figure who not only connects between the realms of human and animal, but who also interacts between the living and the dead?

  Transcripts of Bushman beliefs and practices point to the reality of just such a figure in the person of a shaman: a senior individual esteemed as a healer, a rain-maker, an inspiration for the hunt, and someone with access to the spirit world.This is not only the stuff of archives: to this day, shamans exist among the Kalahari Bushmen. Being good-natured about visits from inquisitive researchers, tourists and film crews alike, the Bushmen have repeatedly confirmed the central significance of shamanic rituals to their society. Bushman shamans have their own metaphoric ways of recounting how they experience their connection with the supernatural; they speak in terms of being stretched on ropes, lines or threads to an almighty creator or some netherworld of ancestors. But (again thanks to an open disposition on the part of those concerned) it is also possible to witness a ‘trance dance’, in which a Bushman shaman performs.

  This was how it happened in a small kraal or village not far from Tsumkwe in northwest Namibia. At dusk a fire was lit, around which the women of the village, with their infants, sat in a circle.They began to set up a rhythm of chanting and
clapping. Various of their menfolk were around, including the aged headman of the village; some began to tread around the circle, humming along with the songs.The star of the showthen arrived: a diminutive, sinewy old man, wearing only a loincloth and a set of rattles about his ankles. He now led the stamping around the circle; and for the next two hours or so he hardly paused as lord of the dance. Sometimes he reached for the heads of those sitting down, as if to transmit some of his energy to them. Occasionally, he staggered away into the shadows, doubled up and gasping for breath; at one point, while weaving across the circle, he fell into the fire and had to be pulled out: sand was heaped over him to cool him down. Some of the women rose up and followed him.There was no weariness from them in clapping and singing. It seemed the ceremony could go on as long as the fire glowed under the stars (Fig. 13).

  THE BLEEK AND LLOYD ARCHIVE

  DEFINED BY one anthropologist as ‘the harmless people’, the Bushmen communities of southern Africa were persecuted throughout the nineteenth century by white settlers and Bantu pastoralists alike. Many were exterminated; some were kept as convicts in Cape Town. It was among these prisoners that Wilhelm Bleek (1827–75) did his research. Bleek was a philologist, with a primary interest in the clicking language of the Bushmen. Aided by his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd, he filled numerous notebooks with transcriptions of interviews covering all aspects of Bushman life and folklore. Alas, two notebooks carrying information about Bushman painting are listed as missing from the archive kept at the University of Cape Town. Others, however, provide a rich verbatim account of hunting techniques, stargazing, medicine and so on. It is from this record that we comprehend the centrality of ritual in the lives of the Bushmen. Christian missionaries thought them irreligious. On the contrary: the most powerful figures in any Bushman clan were its spiritual leaders, its ritual specialists.They have their own local titles: to term them ‘shamans’ is, for the sake of convenience, at least preferable to ‘witch doctors’. Whatever we call these elders, the Bleek and Lloyd papers suggest that they were very likely to have been the artists of the Drakensberg and other Bushman-painted sites.