Witnessing the unseen: why cave art captivates us

Iwan Russell-Jones recounts the discovery of stone age art that still connects 30,000 years after its creation.

Iwan Russell-Jones

Iwan Russell-Jones is a Cardiff-based filmmaker and theologian.

A cave wall drawing of wild animals galloping across other images of themselves.

Animals on the wall of Chauvet Cave.

Late on a winter’s afternoon in December 1994, a group of three French cavers received the kind of Christmas present that most spelunkers can only dream of. They were exploring a cave system that they had just discovered in a deep gorge in southeastern France, and were already delighted by some of the natural geological formations that they’d seen. Suddenly they emerged into a large cavern and found themselves standing in front of a series of wall paintings that took their breath away. In the feeble beams of light from their torches the three explorers were stunned to see huge painted panels swarming with vibrant, beautifully crafted images of animals, including species like mammoths, lions and rhinoceros that had long been extinct in Europe.

The only way in and out of the cavern was through a series of narrow passageways and shafts. So, these experienced explorers understood immediately that the paintings must have been created in the Stone Age and that they were probably the first people in tens of thousands of years to see them. They had made a spectacular archaeological discovery and Chauvet Cave - named after the group’s leader, Jean-Marie Chauvet - quickly took its place alongside Altamira and Lascaux as one of the most important sites of prehistoric art.

Although the cavers were very much aware of the historical and scientific value of their discovery, what really overwhelmed them was the nature and quality of the images. In their book, The Chauvet Cave: The Oldest Known Paintings in the World (London: 1996), Chauvet and his colleagues described their feelings in this way:

“During those moments there were only shouts and exclamations; the emotions that gripped us made us incapable of uttering a single word…. Everything was so beautiful, so fresh, almost too much so. Time was abolished, as if the tens of thousands of years that separated us from the producers of these paintings no longer existed. It seemed as if they had just created these masterpieces. Suddenly we felt like intruders. Deeply impressed, we were weighed down by the feeling that we were not alone; the artists’ souls and spirits surrounded us. We thought we could feel their presence; we were disturbing them.”

These modern explorers felt strongly connected across an almost unimaginable chasm of time to the people who had once frequented the cave, and at the heart of this vivid sensation was the images they had created. This is a remarkable thing to consider. ‘Presence’ is certainly a quality that contemporary lovers of art look for and admire in paintings. When viewers stand in front of an original work by the likes of Caravaggio or Van Gogh or Chagall, they often experience a very powerful connection with them. They see their brushstrokes, marvel at their distinctive technique, and get a strong sense of their personal investment in the work, their individual genius and vision. It’s as if the artists are very much alive and kicking and still making their presence felt. Jean-Marie Chauvet and his colleagues had an electrifying sense of that on their first encounters with the cave paintings.

Many of the painted caves discovered across France and Spain have a shrine-like quality and contain evidence that rituals of one kind or another were practised in them.

But the notion of ‘presence’ in art goes way beyond the artist’s personal charisma and touches on an even more profound matter - the feeling that one is somehow being confronted by the mystery and reality at the heart of life. It’s an understanding of presence that modern people, in their enthusiasm for the individual brilliance and skill of artistic superstars, can sometimes overlook. But it’s an important dimension of palaeolithic art which cannot be ignored. The painters of Chauvet Cave were clearly captivated by the multitude of creatures who shared the world with them. Their imaginations were stirred by the grace of the ibex, the power of the bison, the dignity of the horse, the inquisitiveness of the bear, the ferocity of the lion, and their close observation of these animals is striking. There can be little doubt that the behaviour and characteristics of these fellow creatures led them to reflect on the meaning and significance of their own lives. And underlying all of this is a quality of wonder in their paintings, a sense of what the Jewish philosopher, Abraham Heschel, called ‘radical amazement’ at the sheer fact of being alive in such an extraordinary and beautiful world.

Of course, we’ll never know exactly what was in the minds of these ancient artists as they were busy creating their masterpieces twenty thousand years before writing was invented. But archaeologists and anthropologists are convinced that the cave paintings are intimately linked with the beliefs and rituals of Stone Age peoples, and that this was their way of connecting with unseen spiritual realities. Many of the painted caves discovered across France and Spain have a shrine-like quality and contain evidence that rituals of one kind or another were practised in them. It seems that when these people went deep underground to create their images, it was in the belief that they were immersed in, and surrounded by, spiritual power and meaning. As scholar David Lewis-Williams puts it, ‘Every image made hidden presences visible’.

Art still has this power. In the modern world it is rarely produced for overtly religious or ritualistic purposes. Nevertheless, art of any era cannot but bear witness to the unseen, sometimes in ways of which the artists themselves are not aware. Whatever their own philosophical and religious convictions may be, artists who labour in the fields of truth and beauty and meaning cannot help but create work that is allusive and open to transcendence. They cannot avoid the untameable and disruptive presence of their Creator. This will come as no surprise to anyone who has read the Psalms:

Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there also…

The understanding of reality found in the Bible leads to a recognition that wherever people may be on the face of the planet and at whatever point they stand in the long, long history of the human race, they are always in the presence of, and confronted by, the Great I Am, who is the Lord of all times and places.

The spelunkers of Chauvet Cave received an extraordinary gift at Christmas 1994, and through their discovery the rest of the world has been its beneficiary too. It’s a truly wonderful thing to have been given this glimpse into the lives of people so long ago, and through their creative endeavours to recognise our common humanity and the abiding power of art and the imagination. And at the heart of this present to us all was a presence that Jean-Marie Chauvet and his friends felt so vividly. But they were only partly right in linking that sense to the creative artists. For beyond those ancient cave painters is the object of their concern, the One who, as the Welsh poet, Waldo Williams put it, stands before us all as ‘Each witness’s witness, each memory’s memory, life of every life’ - the Presence behind all presence.

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Culture

Film & TV

Monsters

Weirdness

Zombies

24 October 2024

5 min read

Zombies: a philosopher's guide to the purpose-driven undead

Don’t dismiss zombiecore as lowbrow.

Ryan Stark

Ryan is the author of A Guidebook to Monsters: Philosophy, Religion, and the Paranormal.

A regency woman dabs her mouth with a bloody hankerchief.

Lilly James in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

Lionsgate.

Writing from his new book, A Guidebook to Monsters, Ryan Stark delves into humanity’s fascination for all things monsterous. In the second of a two-part series, he asks what and where zombies remind us of, and why they caught the eyes of C.S. Lewis and Salvador Dali

On how Frankenstein’s monster came to life nobody knows for sure, but he is more urbane than zombies tend to be. Nor do Jewish golems and Frosty the Snowman count as zombiecore. The latter sings too much, and both are wrongly formulated. Frosty comes from snow, obviously, and the golems—from mere loam, not what the Renaissance playwrights call “gilded loam,” that is, already pre-assembled bodies, which is a zombie requirement. Tolkien’s orcs function likewise as golem-esque monsters, cast from miry clay and then enlivened by the grim magic of Mordor. We do not, for instance, discover scenes with orc children.

And neither is Pinocchio a zombie, nor Pris from Blade Runner, but dolls, automatons, and C3POs border upon the land of zombies insofar as they all carry a non-human tint. Zombies, however, carry something else as well, a history of personhood, and so in their present form appear as macabre parodies of the human condition writ large. They are gruesome undead doppelgangers, reminding us of who we are not and perhaps—too—of where we are not. Hell is a place prepared for the Devil and his angels, Christ tells us in the book of Matthew. And maybe, subsequently, for zombies.

Kolchak, in an episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker aptly titled “The Zombie,” correctly discerns the grim scenario at hand: “He, sir, is from Hell itself!”

C.S. Lewis pursues a similar line of thinking in The Problem of Pain: “You will remember that in the parable, the saved go to a place prepared for them, while the damned go to a place never made for men at all. To enter Heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth; to enter Hell is to be banished from humanity. What is cast (or casts itself) into Hell is not a man: it is ‘remains.’” Lewis makes an intriguing point, which has as its crescendo the now-famous line about the doors of Hell: “I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of Hell are locked on the inside by zombies.” I added that last part about zombies.

I make this point—in part—to correct those in the cognoscenti who dismiss zombies as a subject too lowbrow for serious consideration.

Not everyone believes in Hell, of course, yet most concede that some people behave worse than others, which also helps our cause. Indeed, part of zombiecore’s wisdom is to show that bad people often produce more horror than the zombies themselves. Such is the character of Legendre Murder, a case in point from the film White Zombie. Not fortunate in name, Mr. Murder runs a dark satanic mill populated by hordes of zombie workers, which is the film’s heavy-handed critique of sociopathic industrialization. The truth to be gleaned, here, is that zombies did not invent the multinational corporation; rather, they fell prey to it.

We might think, too, of Herman Melville’s dehumanized characters from Bartleby the Scrivener: Nippers, Turkey, Ginger Nut, and the other functionaries whose nicknames themselves indicate the functions. From an economic standpoint, their value becomes a matter of utility, not essence, which is Melville’s reproach of the despairingly corporate drive to objectify personhood—of which zombies are an example beyond the pale. They might as well be fleshy mannequins, in fact, and as such provide the perfect foil for the human being properly conceived.

Here, then, is why we do not blame zombies for eating brains, nor do we hold them accountable for wearing white pants after Labor Day, as some inevitably do. They cannot help it—in ethics and in fashion. Perhaps especially in fashion. The best we can hope for in the realm of zombie couture is Solomon Grundy, the quasi-zombie supervillain who holds up his frayed pants with a frayed rope, a fashion victory to be sure, however small it might be, though “zombie fashion” is a misnomer in the final analysis. They wear clothes, but not for the same reasons we do.

The point holds true for Salvador Dali’s zombies as well, most of whom find themselves in nice dresses. I make this point—in part—to correct those in the cognoscenti who dismiss zombies as a subject too lowbrow for serious consideration. Not so. Exhibit A: the avant-garde Dali, darling of the highbrow, or at least still of the middlebrow, now that his paintings appear on t-shirts and coffee mugs. Burning giraffe. Mirage. Woman with Head of Roses. All zombies, too ramshackle and emaciated to live, never mind the missing head on the last one, and yet there they are posed for the leering eye, not unlike those heroin-chic supermodels from Vogue magazine in the late 1990s. Necrophilia never looked so stylish.

The zombie’s gloomy predicament bears a striking resemblance to that of the Danaids in the classical underworld, those sisters condemned to fill a sieve with water for all eternity...

But never let it be said that zombies are lazy. They are tired, to be sure. Their ragged countenances tell us this, but they are not indolent. Zombies live purpose-driven undead lives. They want to eat brains, or any human flesh, depending on the mythos, and their calendars are organized accordingly. No naps. No swimming lessons. Just brains.

But we quickly discern that no amount of flesh will satisfy. There is always one more hapless minimart clerk to ambush, one more sorority girl in bunny slippers to chase down the corridor. In this way, the zombie’s gloomy predicament bears a striking resemblance to that of the Danaids in the classical underworld, those sisters condemned to fill a sieve with water for all eternity, an emblem of the perverse appetite unchecked, which has at its core the irony of insatiable hunger. And as the pleasure becomes less and less, the craving becomes more and more. The law of diminishing returns. So, it is with all vices. The love of money demands more money, and the love of brains, more brains.

And so, in conclusion, a prayer. God bless the obsessive-compulsive internet shoppers, the warehouse workers on unnecessarily tight schedules, and the machine-like managers of the big data algorithms. God bless the students who sedate themselves in order to survive their own educations, taking standardized test after standardized test. And God bless the Emily Griersons of the world, who keep their petrified-boyfriend corpses near them in the bedroom, an emblem of what happens when one tries too mightily to hold on to the past. And God help us, too, when we see in our own reflections a zombie-like affectation, the abyss who stares back at us and falsely claims that we are not the righteousness of God, as Paul says we are in 2 Corinthians. And, finally, Godspeed to Gussie Fink-Nottle from the P.G. Wodehouse sagas: “Many an experienced undertaker would have been deceived by his appearance, and started embalming on sight.”

From A Guidebook to Monsters, Ryan J. Stark. Used by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers.