Visualization Started at Lascaux

Posted by Mary Rayme Jul 5, 2006

If you are student of art history or graphic design, the first lesson usually focuses on the ancient cave paintings of Lascaux and other regions.

If you have never seen these great paintings, you must spend time looking at them to absorb their meanings and potential meanings. These amazing paintings are the first evidence of image-making or mark-making known to exist on the face of the planet and date back about 30,000 years.

They are also the object of great speculation...what do they mean? One of the big theories is that images represent a kind of hunting magic; that the artists were trying to ensure a good hunt by painting the animals that would feed them to allow them survive. The primary images at Lascaux are of horses and aurochs, a kind of extinct cow. And these animals were not hunted by our ancestors who primarily dined on deer. So much for the hunting or sympathetic magic.

A more plausible theory is found in the fact that these paintings were made not at the convenient opening of the cave but deep inside the passages. Some of the paintings are high up on the walls of the cave and evidence shows that they were created with the help of a scaffolding or poles of some sort. The gyrations our ancestors went to to create these works of art that did nothing to contribute to their imminent survival says to me that these paintings are spiritual.

I imagine that 30,000 years ago our ancestors had a religion of survival that centered around the horse and cow. Why? I don't know... But the repetition of these images some of which are planted deeply within the cave speak of magic and worship of some kind.

What is certain about these ancient cave paintings is that is the beginning of the recording of our collective unconscious, the images that moved us to create beyond survival. What does it all mean? What do you think?