In addition to the bison-horse pairing, Leroi-Gourhan found that female figures and vulvas were most often paired with bison, while male figures were seen more often near horses. These associations made him suspect that the bison-horse pairing also represented a female-male pairing. Then he turned to the study of the signs found in the paintings. Again statistical analysis lay at the heart of his method. He found that, just as with the paintings of animals, the signs divided into two sets as well. One set consisted of “single dots, rows of dots, short strokes, and barbed signs; the other of ovals, triangles, rectangles, and brace-shaped signs. The first set occurs in entrances and the remote areas at the end of caves and the second among the paintings in the central parts of the cave.” Thus, he thought, these two groups correspond to the same system of distribution as the animal figures. And here begins the “sexomaniac obsession.” He observed that the ovals, triangles, rectangles, and similar signs were basically abstract variations of vulvas, while the dots, strokes, and barbs were abstract male signs. Just male signs are found at the entrance and depths of caves, but, just as with horses, male signs also occur in the central areas along with bison and female signs.
What he had discovered was a repeated pattern in each cave whereby male signs and horses played one role and female signs and bison played another. The discovery was both thrilling and frustrating to him: “I found myself in the end confronted with a system of unexpected complexity—the skeleton of a religious thought, as impervious to my understanding, moreover, as a comparative study of the iconography of sixty cathedrals would be to an archaeologist from Mars.” He was limited to “the reliable but utterly banal statement that there existed a religious system based on the opposition and complementarity of male and female values, expressed symbolically by animal figures and by more or less abstract signs … Although crowded with images this framework is quite simple; it leaves us completely in the dark concerning what we should like to know about the rites, and, let us say, about an underlying metaphysics.”
Leroi-Gourhan's Treasures of Prehistoric Art is a monument, but like many monuments it is not forgotten exactly, but ignored. The reason, unfortunately, is his connecting different signs and animals with a male or female principle. Breuil wasn't the only one who found this identification unconvincing. Others, most notably the English archaeologists Peter J. Ucko and Andree Rosenfeld, attacked him almost immediately. Leroi-Gourhan had his faithful acolytes, many of whom still carry the flame today, but the evidence for his assertions became less and less convincing as new caves were discovered or as other researchers reexamined the known caves and found that the animals weren't always just where Leroi-Gourhan had claimed they were. The vaunted system of punch cards had let him down. Finally, by 1972 even Laming-Emperaire had joined the assault against him. This was a formidable moment, since she herself had proposed a sexual association to the bison-horse pairing. But now she presented a paper at a major symposium in Spain wherein she insisted that his theory of sexual duality wasn't supported by the evidence in the caves because the association of supposedly male and female animals wasn't consistent. Instead, recalling Max Raphael, she said the paintings represented “the image of a system of alliances among social groups.” She presented this as “not so much a theory as a direction of research.” It is not a direction that has been much followed, but the attack on Leroi-Gourhan had its effect. Even he, toward the end of his life, gave up on the idea that there was a sexual duality to the paintings. His last major work on cave paintings was The Dawn of European Art, published in Italian in 1981 and in English in 1982. In it he still analyzes pairings and groupings but without mentioning any sexual association.
His determination to be unique had done him in again.
CHAPTER 8
Three Brothers in a Boat;
The Sorcerer
Robert Begouen handed me a pair of blue coveralls. “Wear your jacket under these,” he told me. “The cave is cold.” He put on a sweater and stepped into coveralls identical to the ones he had given me. I struggled into mine. Then we sat on the back of his peculiar little jury-rigged truck and pulled on tall rubber boots and fastened pads around our knees. Each of us also had a carbide lamp that strapped around the waist. It consisted of a reflector that held a tiny burner tip and a black box about the size and weight of an average book. The reflector, connected by a tube to the black box, could be removed and held in the hand. That finished our preparations. We were going into Les Trois-Freres.
In his masterwork Four Hundred Centuries of Cave Art, the abbe Breuil wrote long chapters about the caves he called “The Six Giants.” They were Altamira, Lascaux, Font-de-Gaume, Les Combarelles,Niaux (the cave with the inscription reading “What can they mean?”), and Les Trois-Freres. Caves have been discovered since then, but only two—Chauvet and Cosquer, both discovered in the 1990s—would merit being included with Breuil's other six giants. The public can visit Font-de-Gaume, Les Combarelles, Niaux, and replicas of Altamira and Lascaux. They are all owned by governmental bodies, but the descendants of Count Henri Begouen own Les Trois-Freres. It is on their estate west of Foix in the Ariege not far from the border with Spain. The art in the cave is vulnerable, the passage is sometimes difficult, and parts of the cave system flood regularly. Consequently, the Begouen family has never opened the cave to the public and will permit only limited visits. From 1912, when the cave was discovered, until 1979, only 1,055 persons had been in the cave, fewer than 16 a year.
The entrance to the cave is a short way inside a forest growing at the edge of a pasture. Nothing announces the cave is here or marks the way through the trees. Robert stopped by a mound in the side of a hill and unlocked a door of iron bars. Just inside that door was another door of solid metal that he unlocked as well. This was not the entrance during Paleolithic times. It is possible that there were several openings then that have since been covered when parts of the hillside collapsed. The cave twists and turns, but the total length of its galleries is about a half mile. Paintings and engravings on the walls, as well as flints, fireplaces, and other traces of human presence, show that the ancient hunters explored every foot of the cave.
I bent over and went through the door into the cave. The going was difficult immediately. The floor, which alternated between rock and clay, was wet. That made the rock slick and treacherous, while the clay tended to ooze around our rubber boots and suck at them. Sometimes the passage narrowed to a tunnel and we had to crawl for some distance, making me glad to have the knee pads. Here and there we descended narrow metal ladders that dated to the time between the two world wars when Breuil studied the cave. The ladders were wet and I wasn't confident of my rubber boots on the rungs. There were some long declines where we sat down and scooted to the bottom. Some of these were quite steep and there were holes dug out so you could use your heels to brace against a precipitous slide. And it was cold. Robert had been right to tell me to wear a jacket. Looming, shadowy shapes surrounded us, and the beams from our carbide lamps faded away in the darkness.
Robert is a prehistorian, and an important one, known especially for his work on Les Trois-Freres and other caves, designated collectively as the Volp caves, that are part of the same underground system. Robert's father, Louis Begouen, was also a prehistorian.Louis's younger brother, Jacques, was a noted folklorist, and his older brother, Max, wrote a novel set in prehistoric times titled Les bisons d'argile, which appeared in English as Bison of Clay.
Max, Louis, and Jacques are the three brothers memorialized in the name Les Trois-Freres. They are the sons of Count Henri, who in a long and varied life also became a prehistorian and was a friend of Emile Cartailhac's. His paper from 1929, “The Magic Origin of Prehistoric Art,” is still cited frequently. From Henri to Louis to Robert and now to Eric, who is Robert's son, makes four successive generations in the Begouen family devoted to the caves.
Count Henri doted on his three sons. He was a charismatic, distinguished-looking man with a round head like a bowling ball pe
rched on a round chest. He had an immense, flowing walrus mustache. The river Volp ran through his property, diving underground at one point and emerging a mile and a quarter later. Over the millennia it had hollowed out an intricate system of caves and underground lakes. Count Henri had once found a carved reindeer antler near the entrance.
In July 1912 the three boys, who were then in their late teens, got the idea of building a boat of boards and boxes, kept afloat by empty gas cans, in order to paddle deep into the cave. Along with a friend their age, the boys paddled about three-quarters of a mile before they found a gravel bed where they could beach their boat. They returned to this spot several times in the next few months. In one direction they found a lake with fish and an enormous eel and a way out of the cave. In the other direction there was a chimney that they could climb that led into a straight corridor. There were engravings here of two fantastic beasts, one above the other, with grotesque heads and ugly, twisted snouts. Breuil later declared that they were the guardians of an important room in the cave.
When the three brothers and their friend arrived at these engravings, the corridor seemed to be a dead end. But during a visit in October 1912, Max deduced that a curtain of stalagmites had sealed off a narrow passage. He broke through it and found himself in a large corridor. This time he was with his brother Louis and their friend. The three boys pushed on as the passage widened and then narrowed so much that they were forced to crawl. When it widened again, they found themselves in large halls with glorious stalagmites.
Worried that their lamps would falter, they exited the cave. That afternoon, all three brothers returned with their father. This time they carried plenty of fuel for their lamps. As they made their way, they saw bones of cave bears. The hollows the bears had made for hibernation still had the imprints from their paws and coats. And there were signs that ancient hunters had been here, too. The Begouens saw footprints, impressions from a knee, and, on a wall, finger tracings. There were even a few objects—a blade or two, a pierced tooth, and a bear skull left where someone had knelt down to pull out the long canine teeth.
But none of that prepared them for what they discovered in a low room at the end of the gallery. Here, three-quarters of a mile deep into the cave, they saw two bison about two feet long beautifully modeled in clay. They were cracked here and there but otherwise in perfect condition. One was male. His eye was extended. The other was female and her eye was indented. Her tail had fallen off, but the parts still lay there on the floor. Nothing like them had ever been seen before.
Max, Louis, Jacques, and their father, Count Henri, searched the room to see if there were more, but they were disappointed. In one corner they did find a sagging heap of clay, probably all that was left of some other statues after seeping water had dissolved them. They also found rolls of clay that looked like phalli, but they could have been nothing more than simple rolls of clay. Nearby, in a damp bed of clay, they saw a random pattern of fifty heel prints so small they must have been made by an adolescent.
Immediately afterward, Count Henri telegraphed a single sentence to his friend Cartailhac: “The Magdalenians also modeled clay.” Cartailhac answered that he was on his way. He and Breuil arrived four days later. Although part of the Volp system of caves, the cave with the bison and the heel prints is separate from the one known as Les Trois-Freres. It is called Tue d'Audoubert. According to the best current dating, the art and artifacts in the Volp caves are between 14,500 and 13,500 years old.
• • •
As Robert and I continued through Les Trois-Freres, squeezing through passages, ducking low here and there, creeping along a ridge with a wall on one side and a sharp drop into darkness on the other, trying not to slip on the slick rocks or stumble over an outcropping jutting from the irregular floor, I marveled over how intrepid the cave artists must have been.
First of all, they didn't get lost. If they had, skeletons of the unfortunate would still litter the cave floors. Evidently they could keep their bearings even though they didn't enter the caves often.
There are painted signs that might mark paths or crossroads or the entrance to a chamber, but they usually appear suddenly deep in a cave, while no signs mark the confusing path from the entrance to the first paintings in the cave. Yet they knew their way. If they left markers, bears’ teeth or pieces of antler or piles of rock, they must have picked them up again as they left.
Their only light came from torches or small lamps burning animal fat. The hunters had to carry enough fuel to last their trip in, the time they spent painting and performing ceremonies, and their trip out. A sudden draft could easily blow out such a lamp. Dropping it would also put it out. When there were several people in the party, such accidents wouldn't have been catastrophic, since the lamp could be relit from a neighbor's flame, but the incident would have been unsettling nonetheless. Did any prehistoric person ever enter the caves alone or, having entered with a group, leave the others to go on to some special chamber alone? It's possible; there are engravings in passages so narrow only one person at a time could have squeezed in. If the lamp went out then, it would have been terrifying.
Rationally, we know that caves do not hold subterranean monsters that lurk in passageways or rise from the center of the earth so they can swallow us up. Still, there are noises, echoes, plops and splashes, and the sound of air going by that all threaten our rationality.
The first painting Robert showed me was a left hand painted in outline in red. The painter put his palm against the wall of the cave and blew red pigment around it. Next to it is a black bison, and next to that, another hand. In all there are a total of five hands outlined in red, some red dots and lines, and several groups of red and black dots and signs. The five hands here are the only ones in the cave.
This gallery narrows to a corridor that ends at a large room. A stalactite has grown in the center of the passage. Without Robert's guidance, I would have slipped around it and gone on without noticing the small room that the formation both creates and partially conceals. Breuil named the room the Chapel of the Lioness because of the principal engraving on its walls. He thought this lioness was the guardian of the important paintings located deeper in the cave. But a visitor coming into the cave for the first time would pass by the narrow entrance without noticing the Chapel or the lioness on its walls. So, contrary to Breuil, the hidden animal couldn't have been much of a guard.
Robert led me through a narrow opening in a shielding curtain of stalactites and into the chapel. Several years ago, right at this entrance, he found a flat rock only two and a half inches across with an engraved bison. The natural shape of the stone forms the bison's back and there is even an edge that juts out to suggest a tail. The head and horns are skillfully carved. The eyes and muzzle are especially vivid. There are three or four upside-down Vs inside the body, signs that are assumed to indicate wounds.
It's possible, of course, that the carved stone was dropped accidentally, but Robert is the coauthor of a paper that argues that it must have been placed there on purpose. Similar pebbles litter the floor nearby, so the artist presumably found one in the shape he wanted and did the engraving on the spot. Enlene, a cave like Tue d'Audoubert that neighbors Les Trois-Freres and may have been attached to it in Paleolithic times, contained more than a thousand engraved rocks and other small pieces of art. But the carved bison is one of only two small engravings found in Les Trois-Freres. That fact, along with ten peculiar objects found inside the Chapel, imply that the bison carving was left intentionally where Robert found it so many millennia later.
The Chapel turned out to be surprisingly open. It has a roughly oval shape and, at fifteen feet by ten feet, is about the size of a modest office. The ceiling is inconsistent but often shoots up to twenty or twenty-five feet high. The walls of the enclosure glowed warmly in the light from our carbide lamps and diffused it. Elsewhere in the cave, light just disappears into the blackness or illuminates a small spot when directed at a wall. But here in this small en
closure the light seemed to fight the surrounding darkness to a draw. The wavering light from a few Paleolithic lamps would have been enough to produce a similar effect, except that their light would have looked even warmer. There are the blackened remains of a fireplace against one wall. It proves that the light in the Chapel was important to the cave artists, too. They built rather large fires there and let them burn. (Elsewhere in the cave the three Begouen brothers found another hearth on their first visit. This discovery was very exciting because they thought it dated to the Stone Age. But when Breuil arrived and they showed it to him, he noticed that one of the burnt pieces of wood looked worked. He picked it up and found an iron nail sticking out of it. He thought Roman soldiers must have come in through an entrance that's now blocked.)
We walked over to the lion and Robert shone his light directly at it. Usually, it's best to illuminate cave art with oblique light. That emphasizes ridges and valleys, however faint. But here the surface of the wall is irregular, so the engraving had to go deep. Direct light best reveals the difference between the white in the depths of the grooves and the yellowish surface of the wall. That contrast, and not a difference in relief, brings up the image. The lion, drawn full figure from the side with its head to the right, is engraved on a solid area in a wall of stalactites. Breuil called it a lioness because the beast has no mane, but paintings and engravings in other caves show lions that are clearly male—either their penis or testicles are showing—but have no mane. Since that proves that cave lions didn't have manes, the “lioness” in the Chapel could be of either sex. There are marks here and there on its body and several barbed lines on its side that could be spears or even arrows.
The Cave Painters Page 16