As you will know if you have been following the series, ‘caves’ keep coming up in different ways. My journey began with a pilgrimage to a cave on the island of Raasay off the coast of Skye in Scotland, where evidence of our mesolithic ancestors has been found (if you’re curious, you can find the details of exactly where I went here). That trip led me into deeper enquiries around our indigenous ancestors and the ways they might have lived and experienced consciousness.
I recalled in my first interview with Martin Shaw the otherworldly encounter I had with a stag when I got to that cave. It was as real as a stag could be (and as loud) but had a strange face I couldn’t make sense of at the time. I also shared my subsequent astonishment when a first edition copy of The Inheritors by William Golding I ordered arrived in the post soon after (the novel tells the story of homo sapiens arriving in a Britain populated by neanderthals) and I found a frighteningly similar image to the stag I encountered in Raasay on the cover.
Martin then shared his own childhood reaction to an illustration of Herne The Hunter (a ghost of a man on horseback with stag antlers growing out of his head first mentioned by Shakespeare in The Merry Wives of Windsor) on the cover of Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising. Rather enticingly, there are theories that the story of Herne The Hunter has Palaeolithic origins, but I digress. I need to do more research about that before I make any great claims that these human / stag figures are linked.
My enquiries then led me to discover that the image Golding used for the cover was based on a drawing by the renown cave art expert Henri Breuil of a painting discovered in a cave within a cave in Chauvet (also in Southern France) that you have to crawl through a passage a kilometre long to find. The image has since become known as ‘The Sorcerer’. All very goose-bumpy I hope you will agree.
The mesolithic ancestors I went in search of on Raasay were here after the last ice age between 11,700 years ago and 5,000 years ago but we know from DNA their ancestors would have come from what we now think of as Spain and France. The images discovered in France in Lascaux and Chauvet were much earlier and date to around 21,000 years ago and 37,000 years ago respectively. I hope you can see why I found the idea they were all connected so tantalising.
With all this in mind I was excited to visit Lascaux this Summer, where a replica of the cave that was found during WW2 has been created for visitors to experience. This week’s episode is me talking about the way caves have appeared in my journey so far, an interview with Chris Perez, one of Lascaux’s guides, and then ends with my thoughts on The Mind In The Cave by David Lewis Williams, which is the most respected book seeking to make sense of cave art that I’ve found so far.
(Spoiler: DLW makes a compelling and studious case that cave art was inspired by shamanic hallucinatory states, but his subsequent dismissal of those hallucinatory states as being nothing more than the chemistry of the brain felt very anticlimactic to me. We will explore the weaknesses of this stance in my next interview. Details to follow.)
One last piece of news while I have you. I am excited to say that the world famous computer scientist and biologist Dr. Michael Levin (yes, that Michael Levin) has agreed to be interviewed for the series in November. If you want to blow your mind, check out his latest published paper on what he calls the ‘Platonic’ realm.
Much love,
Dan
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