THE SHAMAN IN THE CAVE




The Shaman/Trickster appears in the cave paintings of the Early European Tribes, about 18,000 about years ago. Warriors don't appear until about 9,000 years ago. Kings appeared even later. It appears historically that the Shaman/Trickster came a lot earlier, perhaps even before the cave painters appeared. The Shaman/Trickster is closely tied to hunting, and hunting and gathering were the origin of human society, maybe 50,000 years ago. The warrior and the king are possible only after the development of cities.

The above quote from: THEORIES ON THE NORTH AMERICAN TRICKSTER


  • Torso, back, belly, shoulder, paws, mane, penis, thighs, head, ears, face, posture: LION.

  • Feet, toes, calves, thighs, eyes, arms, penis, beard, knees, posture, expression: MAN.

  • Eyes, ears, face, expression: OWL.

  • Ears, antlers, tall: DEER.

  • Belly, tall: HORSE.


Les Trois Freres is the name of a cave in the French Pyrenees. You change when you enter a cave. You wake inside a dream, outside of seasonal Cycles, outside time. The way I feel in caves is safe, protected, loved, held. Caves are crawlways between lives. The images are fourteen thousand years old and screamingly fragile. The engraved mammoths and ibex and owls are still damp in the thin mud layer on the walls. They might have been made in the last fourteen seconds. I felt the old release inward as I climbed down the first rusty ladder, release into the cool and the silence, like getting back to pre-dawn meditation after neglecting it for years.

The highest figure in the rough-rounded sanctuary of Les Trois Freres is the one Joseph Campbell named "God of the Cave." He's two feet tall, and well out of reach, fourteen feet up. He presides over a swarm of bison, ibex, bear, deer, and mammoth incised on the stone slabs below him. The god of the cave is instinct and intellect and spirit in one. The full animal inheritance, and the human dance, some inquisitiveness and concern, with a nurturing hunch to his shoulders. A formidable, but not a confronting figure. And the ratio of intellect to instinct to something else keeps changing as I sit in the chamber and gaze-animal, human, god. He will not stay still. Now I see a masked man, an upright human drenched in animal ways, but a person, familiar.

This creature does not exist on the outside. He's from the unseen inside. He's something other and something whole, but not wholly other. I don't feel his pieces so much as his presence. He's not a man in costume. This is the one who neither has nor needs tool, book, drum, or belief. His palms are not opening up asking for anything. They are not hands, but paws, and ready for the ground again. He's not bent over in some monkey-effort to stand up and be in charge. This is not a communal person. He doesn't worship. He lives within the union. He is not a static icon, but a being surprised in a moment, the live instant of recognition.

Repose and springy-ness, he has both, and a freedom I can barely imagine. Caving is the perfect "out-picturing" of going within. He is our spiritual nudity, before clothes and all other paraphernalia. He is aware of us, but what else, concerned, hurt, beckoning? I don't know. He's moving. He turns to look. I turn. The interruptedness is key. He's in mid-step-leap-flight, looking over at us, who have for whatever reason come into this motherdark. Why are human beings here? And though he may be interrupted, he's not off balance. He is balance itself. There are no separations in this image. He's the hunter, hunted. Looker looked at.

Powerful, receptive, he may be waiting for us to follow. He's a guide, though the boys' initiation theory doesn't seem right. This feels more solitary and adult. He's humble in his magnificence. He flows with a dancy superbness, quizzical, relaxed. He makes me happy. He's stooping, legs bending and arms reaching forward as one might wading into the ocean. His posture has an underwater feel. Maybe he's a picture of what evolves through the evolutionary process, the invisible moving center. I want to sit and look until I can say I am that, the alerted grace of a lion-man-owl-stag-horse-bird being. This dancer is his dance. Joseph Campbell also calls him the Animal Master, with the happy bunting ground stretched out below him. There are black painted flamelike shapes under his hands. What are they? This image is one of the great mysteries on the planet. My reading of what he's composed of is this:

Some features occur in several categories because they're ambiguous. The space inside the image, the unpainted torso cavity, is very much a bird, a stillness roosting inside him. What is this figure doing? Dancing, springing from one ledge to another, from ground to tree, or is he landing here from above, turning his curious, unafraid but cautious feline-owl head to us? He's very fluid and coordinated. The penis is not erect, but blooded. There is a calm readiness here. He is the wildman awake, a definite be, surprised at the far end of the womb where conception begins.

Spontaneity is the feeling. The master at the deep center is entire spontaneity. It's very possible, of course, that I'm projecting onto this cavewall what I want to see, some Sufi, or Zen, or Taoist amalgam. I don't deny that. Others have speculated that he is an initiatory icon, one to help young males become hunters. This figure, to me, doesn't seem to be about hunting. He's a vision, the son of the great mother. This is the energy inside all creating, looking to see what's become of the dance that curves out from his dance. Bach. Shakespeare. Rinzai. Francis of Assisi. Emily Dickinson. Whoever's crawled in here today. The dance this being sparks in visitants is a mysterious partnership.

I have felt this god of freedom and agility in dreams, sailing in great arcs. Cave-consciousness is eternity. Things don't change here for thirty thousand years. The mud drawings are fresh. Daily fears and urgencies dissolve. Caves are the perfect metaphor for moving toward the master within. No goal but a meeting of the eyes. What we see in this fourteen thousand year old Rorschach is what's in us. I propose a new theory. That this image was used in a second initiation, not the rite de passage, but the one that must occur in middleage that tranforms adults into elders.

But what of the artist? Almost forgotten in the excitement, he or she must have lain at a forty-five degree angle painting and carving like Michaelangelo in a slightly listing Sistine Chapel. There is a ledge conveniently beneath the figure where the artist must have reclined to work. But there are nothing but questions about the artist. We have no clues other than the artifact, this black-painted, engraved combination life-form, who may be the first mystical poem, the earliest expression of an encounter with the mystery inside, where all awarenesses blend.

A child asks is this a scary figure. It is. To some eyes it may look like madness. But more frightening to me is the possibility of living without a strong connection to this depth. The way I feel in caves is mothered. The way I feel meeting the god of the cave is brothered, companioned. This -lion-man sees me and I see him. We are together for a while.

It is late afternoon and lightly raining when we come back Out into the odd light of the twentieth century. Billions of rainy afternoons formed the passageways behind us, and for millions more they've held the figures they hold this afternoon. Whatever they are, they can't be brought out, except in old mystery ways. We photograph each other in various happy, muddy combinations at the entrance.




For a truly remarkable cultural comparison, compare the early European "Shaman in the Cave," above, with the "Piasa Monster Bird" by early North American indigenous cultures by clicking the image.




SHAMANISM WEB CIRCLE



WE DO NOT HAVE SHAMANS
The Case Against "Shamans" In the
North American Indigenous Cultures



THE BEST OF
CARLOS CASTANEDA
<<< PREV ---- LIST ---- NEXT >>>



MEDITATION ALONG

METEOR CRATER
RIM


SEE:

SHAMANIC TRANCE STATES


PENDEJO CAVE


SHAMANISM


OBEAH




The above article through the courtesy of Michael Green