The Religion of the Caves: Magic or Metaphysics?

Abstract

More than a century has passed since E. B. Tylor, an English ethnologist, first formulated the idea that the art of prehistoric man, then a recent discovery, was one essentially dictated by magic. This art, which was born 30,000 years before our era and vanished at about 10,000 B.C., is the oldest known to us. It would appear to have developed simultaneously with the first explicit manifestations of concern with the supernatural. To reach this conviction, the prehistorian has at his disposal only the figures that decorate objects or cave walls. It is comparison with the decorated objects or wall paintings made by the last primitives of the present-day world that has guided perception of the religious content of the artistic remains bequeathed by our distant ancestors. This hypothesis, which in no way excludes real artistic effort on the part of prehistoric man, now encounters hardly any objection in principle, but the mystery of the contents of these works remains almost complete. It can indeed be demonstrated with reasonable certainty that paleolithic men, twenty thousand years before the end of the Ice Age, poured into their images of bison or mammoths feelings which correspond to religion as we understand it, but we have no way of reconstituting the manner of their religious thinking. Our thought, developing out of classical civilizations, has evolved in a manner such that understanding the thought of even living Australian primitives involves great effort on our part. How much greater, then, are the risks involved in the reconstruction of the beliefs of men who lived thousands of years before the appearance of writing. Within the century of our study of living primitives-of Australians, Bushmen, Amazonians, Eskimos ethnologists' ideas have greatly developed; theories have deepened, so that the very structure of religious thought appears in its fundamental outlines. The work of L6vi-Strauss has greatly contributed to the shifting of problems such as those of totemism to a level upon which the superstructure of tradition proper to each human group