Looking Into the Rain: Magic - Moisture - Medium 9783110760620, 9783110726848

Citation preview

Looking Into the Rain

Barbara Baert

Looking Into the Rain Magic, Moisture, Medium

ISBN 978-3-11-072684-8 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-076062-0 Library of Congress Control Number: 2021948064 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de © 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover, Layout and typesetting: Andreas Eberlein, aromaBerlin Printing and binding: Beltz Grafische Betriebe GmbH, Bad Langensalza www.degruyter.com

//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// For my husband Always denying the umbrella Ever accepting the rain

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Content

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

1. Prologue. Why Rain? 9

2. Graphemes. Cave and Clay 17

3. Towards a Hermeneutic of Cave Spaces 37

4. Rain-Therapies and Aby Warburg 55

5. From Zettelkast 6 to Mithras 73

6. Environment and the Participation Model 91

7. Old and New Abstractions 107

8. Bilderatlas. Rain-Saints and Folk-Art – By Julia van Rosmalen 129

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

9. Drawing 139

10. Canvassing 155

11. Oculi. Danaë and the Uncanny Space 173

12. One cannot escape the wetscape. Rain and Woody Allen 197

13. Epilogue. A life of the ‘it’ in it rains 207

Bibliography 213



Index nominum 227

Image Credits 233

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

1. Prologue Why Rain?

The water upon which all of life depends descends to earth as raindrops both gentle and torrential. Rain is a miraculous visitation of heavenly power, natural and immense, necessary and feared, cleansing, releasing, dissolving, flooding, relieving and sweet. Rain precipitates growth, change, refreshment, purification and… disaster. Ami Ronnberg, The Book of Symbols1

Traditionally, humankind has had a special relationship with the atmospheric characteristics of their environment and with rain in particular. There are many different types of rain. In English we speak of rain in terms such as a light drizzle, a refreshing shower, or a destructive torrential downpour. The sensory experience of this water descending down from the heavens has inspired humans to create a range of symbolic depictions, which stretch between feelings of fear of the destruction of the crops and those of gratitude for its fertile watering.2 Rain irrigates the land and, as a result, is seen as heavenly ‘ejaculation.’3 Psalm 72:6 sings of Solomon: “May the king’s rule be refreshing like spring rain on freshly cut grass, like the showers that water the earth.” As we know, Zeus impregnated Danaë with a golden rain. And in China, yin, the female energy, is compared to the rain that must come together with the yang, the male energy.4 In her Rain. A Natural and Cultural History (2015) – a book about the different experiences and perceptions of rain – journalist Cynthia Barnett (born 1966) writes:

1 Ami Ronnberg (ed.), art. Rain, in The Book of Symbols, Cologne, 2010, p. 62–64, p. 64. 2 Manfred Lurker, art. Regen, in Wörterbuch der Symbolik, Stuttgart, 1991, p. 608. 3 Richard Broxton Onians, The Origins of European Thought About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time and Fate. New Interpretations of Greek, Roman and Kindred Evidence, Also of Some Basic Jewish and Christian Beliefs, Cambridge, 1988, p. 230, p. 288–289. 4 Michel Cazenave (ed.), Encyclopédie des symboles, Paris, 1996, p. 538–540.

10

1. Prologue

1 The Black Stone of Paphos, venerated as Aphrodite, example of so-called Argoi lithoi or baitulia: meteorites considered as divine acheiropoietoi, Museum sanctuary of Aphrodite, Cyprus, late bronze age, black basalt

Water alone is not enough. Water is “out there,” too – in the atmosphere of Venus and in the polar caps of Mars – but it does not sustain a living world on either of those planets. To become our life force, water also had to build up in the skies, move along with the wind, and pour back to the surface, replenishing the waters, lands, and beings again and again.5

Rain has an epiphanic character. It is a sign from above. Like Hosea 6:3 prophesies: “He shall come unto us as the rain, as the latter and former rain unto the earth.” And when Noah came out of his ark, God created a rainbow over the new world as a sign of his covenant to never again ravage humankind through such destructive floods (Gen 8:2; Gen 9:12–16).6 Because rain is part of the atmospheric feelings space, it also mirrors people’s inner moods. Hildegard van Bingen (1098–1179) writes that rain shapes the vital power of the soul.7 Thanks to this power, the soul does not dry out, and, in turn, it preserves the capacity to inspire us.8 Rain is also associated with tears.9 When we cry, we essentially

5 Cynthia Barnett, Rain. A Natural and Cultural History, New York, 2015, p. 15. 6 John C.J. Metford, art. Rainbow, in Dictionary of Christian Lore and Legend, London, 1983, p. 209. 7 Michel Cazenave (ed.), o.c., p. 538–540. 8 Ibidem, p. 538. 9 Joseph Imorde, Dulciores sunt lacrimae orantium, quam gaudia theatrorum. Zum Wechselverhältnis von Kunst und Religion um 1600, in Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 63, 1, 2000, p. 1–14.

1. Prologue

overflow. Like a repentant Mary Magdalene, we can emotionally express and cleanse ourselves through our tears.10 Rain and rain gods are associated with high mountaintops. They are signs of the creating Ancient Mother Goddess.11 The Indian deva Indra is the god of rain and lighting. He lives on Mount Meru. His attribute is the bull or bull’s horns. This bull is governed by the female moon.12 Meteorites that fall down from the universe are seen as ‘moon rain’ and objects of fertility. Mircea Eliade (1907–1986) writes: A close analysis of innumerable “rain stones” has always brought to light the existence of a “theory” to explain their power of governing the clouds; it is something to do either with their shape, which has some “sympathy” with the clouds or with lightning, or with their celestial origin (they must have fallen from heaven), or with their belonging to “ancestors”; or perhaps they were found in water, or their shapes recall snakes, frogs, fishes or some other water emblem. The power of these stones never originates in themselves; they share in a principle, or embody a symbol, they express a cosmic “­sympathy” or betray a heavenly origin. These stones are signs of a spiritual reality beyond themselves, or the instruments of a sacred power of which they are merely containers.13

Often, they are honoured in the form of a goddess, such as Aphrodite (fig. 1).14 Rain and rain gods are also associated with caves, where the cave’s ceiling mirrors the expanse of the heavens. We still find signs that rain, rocks, and mountains were worshipped in Christian times, where saints have replaced these locations: the so-called santi pluvialisho such as Severinus and Guido.15 The German Frau Holle, or Mother Holle, was also originally a rain goddess. When she shook the cushion in the underworld – the cave – it snows.16 And when she came to the upper world, the gate was opened and there were golden rain showers.17 The challenge of this essay is researching the transformation of all these rain-centred intuitive patterns into symbols and iconography.

10 Barbara Baert, Interruptions & Transitions. Essays on the Senses in Medieval and Early Modern Visual Culture, (Art and Material Culture in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, 14), Leiden, 2018, p. 73–130; For further reading, see: Piroska Nagy, Le don des larmes aux Moyen Âge, Paris, 2000, passim. 11 Carl Henrik Andreas Bjerregaard, The Great Mother. A Gospel of the Eternally Feminine. Occult and Scientific Studies and Experiences in the Sacred and Secret Life, New York, 1913, p. 19. 12 Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, New York, 1958, p. 87. 13 Mircea Eliade, o.c., p. 226–227. 14 Ibidem, p. 226–229. 15 Viktor Stegemann, art. Regen, in Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, vol. 1, Berlin – Leipzig, 1935– 1936, cols. 577–586, col. 578. 16 James P. Mallory & Douglas Q. Adams, The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo European World, Oxford, 2006, p. 125–128: Ch. 8.3: Table p. 125: multiple words for water/rain: suh- (rain); hwers- (dew); nbh(ro/ri) (torrential rain, flood); dhreg (rains, snow). 17 Viktor Stegemann, o.c., col. 579.

11

12

1. Prologue

2 Tlaloc, God of the Rain, Thunder, Earthquakes, Codex Borgia, Southern Puebla, pre-Spanish conquest of Mexico (1519–1521), Painted animal skins, 27 cm × 27 cm

Depictions of rain in their most ancient form can be found in prehistoric cave drawings and on neolithic pottery. This not only proves that the fascination with rain and its depiction has always guided humankind, but also reveals humans’ ability to combine imagery and fascination to create abstract symbols, icons, graphemes, etcetera. How can one depict rain, a phenomenon that is so dynamic, yet at the same time practically invisible? Recurrent patterns are the wavy line, the zigzag, and the hatch marks. As soon as these patterns become visible and tangible in the world, they compound related symbols – lightning, snake, teeth (or comb), (rain)bow – and connect these to one another. Below are some examples of these connections. The Mexican rain god Tlaloc is also a lightning god – he controls the ‘rain’ of fire – and wears clothing with jagged edges and is depicted with the teeth of his upper jaw visible (fig. 2).18 Even now, there is the folk belief that the rainbow prevents a new downpour.19 The rainbow is a large snake that stretches across the sky and stops the water. In the Iliad, Ho-

18 Jean Chevalier & Alain Gheerbrant, Dictionnaire des Symboles, Paris, 1982, p. 765–767. – Those struck by lighting and storm will stay with the sun god for four years, a unique privilege. But after that period, they become a hummingbird. In the most recent novel by Sandro Veronesi (°1959), Luisa, Marco’s great love, writes in a letter to him: “E oggi che tutta la civiltà azteca è sprofondata in Mictlan, ancora ci chiediamo che razza di popolo fosse quello la cui massima soddisfazione dopo una morte eroica era diventare un colibrì”; Sandro Veronesi, Il colibrì, Milan, 2019, p. 117. 19 Raphael Patai, On Jewish Folklore, Detroit, 2018, p. 72–73.

1. Prologue

mer (8th century BCE) compares the serpent on Agamemnon’s shield to a rainbow.20 The Aboriginal peoples, conversely, believed that the cosmic snake spits on the heavens until a rainbow appears and the raindrops can start to fall.21 Rain and rainbows are opposite forces that charge or curtail one another.22 The rainbow ‘drinks’ or sucks the water out of the earth and turns it into rain. In Metamorphoses by Publius Ovid (43 BCE–17 CE) it reads: “Then Iris [rainbow], Juno’s messenger, dressed in the colours of the rainbow, gathers water and feeds it back to the clouds.” (1.270–1).23 In Hebrew, the word for rainbow – queshet – has the same root as archer: arrows are associated with streaks of rain.24 Formal families of mythical symbols thus contaminate one another. The streak of rain is a snake, lightning, a row of teeth, and so forth. Thomas Munro (1897–1974) writes about this in his Suggestion and Symbolism in the Arts (1956): Any image may become a symbol of its analogue; of that to which it is considered similar; also of the quality they have in common. This is mimetic or analogic symbolism. An abstract idea as such cannot be a symbol: some sensory image (presented or imagined) must symbolize it. Thus, the owl or serpent symbolizes wisdom. A word, as a visual or auditory image, can also be a symbol. In ancient mythology, the sky was compared to a father, fertilizing the earth through rain and sun; the earth to a mother, bringing forth plants and nourishing animals. Gardens, valleys, and soft foliage are regarded as feminine, especially when walled in, protected and protecting. (…) Thus, a study of the career, migrations, and changing meaning of a particular symbol may lead through many different cultures, and provide an enlightening background for the interpretation of contemporary art. The meanings thus acquired by a symbol are often inconsistent or contradictory, because of the various comparisons and trains of thought in which it has been involved.25

Aby Warburg (1866–1929) proved this process of psychological image analogies brilliantly in his 1897 Berlin lecture on the rain and snake spectrum of the Pueblo and Hopi Native American tribes, whom he had visited the year before.26 During the final years of his life, Warburg became more and more fascinated by the imported Roman cult of Mithras, which

20 Homer, Iliad Books 13–24, ed. by William F. Wyatt, transl. by Augustus T. Murray, (Loeb Classical Library, 171), Cambridge (MA) – London, 1999: A, 24. 21 Raphael Patai, o.c., p. 73. 22 Ibidem, p. 75. 23 Publius Ovid, Metamorphoses, transl. by Anthony S. Kline; http://www.gleeditions.com/metamorphoses/ students/toc.asp?lid=108. 24 Raphael Patai, o.c, p. 76. 25 Thomas Munro, Suggestion and Symbolism in the Arts, in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 15, 2, 1956, p. 152–180, p. 156. 26 Aby M. Warburg, Schlangenritual. Ein Reisebericht, ed. by Ulrich Raulff, Berlin, 1988; Aby M. Warburg, Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America, transl. by Michael P. Steinberg, New York, 1995.

13

14

1. Prologue

was also based on worshipping the rain, sun, and moon. Hence, Warburg combined the important insights of his youth with the immense goal he had set for his 1928 trip to Rome, which was developing an understanding of the grand and deepest cultural undercurrents of the Mediterranean. We will see how Warburg achieved these goals, and how his new hermeneutics teach us to look at symbols and their analogies in a different way, in casu the chain of meaning in rain-dance-fear-snake. In regard to innovative paradigms in the field of Human Sciences, we will also use the work of Tim Ingold (born 1948) in this book.27 In the last decade, the anthropologist has been an influence and shared methods with art historians on the relationship between surroundings and imagery. What can we learn through our empirical experiences of weather conditions (the walker, the wanderer) about artistic expression? Are our current paradigms in the visual studies enough to describe the road from reality to the artist’s hand with as much nuance as possible? One does not simply look at the rain, one always looks into the rain. As an anthropologist, Ingold teaches that the point of view of the person creating is often enveloping yet distant. That creating is often a process-oriented growth aimed at a finished product. There are complex relationships between us and the world. Moreover, there may not be a ‘relationship’ as such (something that evokes a linear association), but instead more of a ‘textile’ intertwining, a fusion with our surroundings. And rain happens to be a particularly apt metaphor for that. Its effect on the audience is de facto contaminating, it seeps through, ‘enveloping,’ elusive and dynamic. The essay will as follows also contemplate the artistic expressions that imitate the dynamic of falling rain (dripping, seeping, sieving, soaking), which in this way form a mise en abyme of the medium or the carrier as such on/in which they perform.28 Among others, Paul Klee (1879–1940) had a very pertinent vision when it came to that. The depiction of atmospheric circumstances – mist, wind, and, of course, also rain – is not an easy task for artists.29 The drawings of the great flood and storms by Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) show the desire to mimetically map an occurrence that barely tolerates mimesis.30 Hence, the formal problem of depicting rain is deeply nestled in the paragone debate about the power and capability of the medium of drawing and painting. Graphic materials reach their limits when it comes to depicting this specific wet atmosphere: between mist and diaphane, between drop and flood, between streaks and colour, between contour and liquefaction. In this context, I will discuss works of William Turner (1775–1851) and Agnes Martin (1912–2004), among others. Rain as considered within the context of medium studies also brings us to photography and cinema. Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) felt immensely challenged to create ‘portraits’ of the atmospheric pictorial effects of the rain in 27 Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment, London, 2000, passim. 28 Barbara Baert, About Sieves and Sieving. Motif, Symbol, Technique, Paradigm, Berlin, 2019. 29 Cédric Pannevel, L’eau d’une heure de pluie. Images de la pluie dans l’art, (exh. cat.), Rouen, 2013. 30 Barbara Baert, Pneuma and the Visual Medium in the Middle Ages and Early Modernity, (Art&Religion, 5), Leuven – Walpole, 2016.

1. Prologue

15

his photogravures and thus offers an aemulatio of the painterly arts. Like Stieglitz, I have been engrossed by thoughts on rain and its significance. For some time now I have been specifically occupied by the special iconographical role the scenes in the rain appears to play in the cinematographic works of Woody Allen. In this essay, I try to determine if there is a recurring typology, where rain scenes denote introvert or extrovert tipping points for the protagonists. In short, can we use the phenomenon of ‘rain’ and humankind’s response to it in the form of ombrophilia and ombroclasms (love and fear for rains) to find new methodological insights in art and cultural history? Does this methodology expand into an eco-iconology – so relevant nowadays – in a time where our disruption of the harmony between humans, animals, and nature has caused issues affecting the entire planet? Is that the story the rain is telling us? Is that what we hear when the rain falls thundering into the abyss, and the old cave echoes, only ever understood by the bats, reverberate amidst our fragile, soaked presence? Where would our natural barrier be, if the rain teaches us that escaping its medium is not possible? One lives in the phenomenon, and tries to connect to it.31 ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Rain says that we are always-already environmentally ­enmeshed – ­always in our element of water – and that there is both distress and ­delight to be had with a showering world. Across natural-cultural times and tales, rain, never still, relates this uncomfortable message clearly distilled: that exposure is our greatest risk and greatest potential at once. To listen to the rain is to hear the stories that rain tells, literary ‘re-marks’ that reflect the physical marks the rains made on flesh and page, raindrops sprinkled on skin. Lowell Duckert, For All Waters.32

31 Author’s translation after Sandro Veronesi, De kolibri, transl. by Welmoet Hillen, Amsterdam, 2020, p. 226. 32 Lowell Duckert, For All Waters. Finding Ourselves in Early Modern Wetscapes, Minnesota, 2017, p. 169.

2. Graphemes Cave and Clay

Another universal image is a desert or wasteland, a place where physically nothing grows and spiritually there are no ideas, no hope. In contrast a garden has opposite meanings, a place where beginnings and life are abundant. Associations with the word ‘rain’ were water, clean, spring, farm. From these I pointed out that for any people who depend on some vegetation for food, rain may symbolize hope, the possibility of fruitfulness in any relationship, physical or spiritual, as it does of course in Eliot’s Wasteland. In a different context, however, rain, because of its dark and cold associations, may symbolize a negative feeling, as it does in A Farewell to Arms. Jane Wellborn, Teaching Symbolism1

Like Mircea Eliade (1907–1987) and James G. Frazer (1854–1941) repeatedly showed in their prototypical studies: the desire for the vital-to-life rain has produced rituals, performances, and images that border on sympathetic magic, animism, and shamanism.2 Rain must be wrested from nature (gods) through supernatural means. In his Patterns in Comparative Religion (1958), Eliade writes about the relationship between rain, moon cults, fertility, and rain gods. The rain – the storm’s God “sowing” – fits in with the hierophany of the waters, which are the most important sphere the moon dominates. Everything connected with fecundity belongs, more or less directly, to the immense orbit of Moon-Waters-Woman-Earth. 1 Jane Wellborn, Teaching Symbolism, in Improving College and University Teaching, 23, 2, 1975, p. 89–90, p. 90. 2 Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, New York, 1958; James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough. The Roots of Religion and Folklore, Oxford, 2009; Both studies are of course partially outdated, and the work by Mircea Eliade was later contested due to the Nazi sympathies of the author; Leon Volovici, Nationalist Ideology and Antisemitism. The Case of Romanian Intellectuals in the 1930s, Oxford, 1991, p.104–105, 110–111, 120–126, 134. The following chapters will also discuss more recent views and methods from the field of anthropology.

18

2. Graphemes

Sky divinities, by becoming “specialized” into virile and generative divinities, became firmly bound up with these prehistoric patterns, and have remained there, either assimilating them into their own personalities, or becoming part of them.3

James G. Frazer immediately connects one of his first chapters on “sympathetic magic” to a case about rainmaking.4 “Of all-natural phenomena there are perhaps none which civilised man feels himself more powerless to influence than the rain, the sun and the wind. Yet all these are commonly supposed by savages to be in some degree under their control.”5 Sympathetic magic is a mirroring technique during the incantation or compelling of rain. Rain creatures, for example, are people who are submerged in water and dressed with leaves and other fertility symbols and then sent out to ask for rain. This is still common practice in south-eastern Europe.6 Sacred springs are disturbed with a stick in ancient Greece to free a cloud of mist and thus generate rain. Gervase of Tilbury (c. 1150–c. 1228) references a fountain in Münster that has to be touched or looked at, and then immediately, rain will irrigate the whole province.7 In the Caucasus, an unknown traveller or vagrant would be surprised in times of great drought, kidnapped, and thrown into the river. This would also bring forth healing rain. In this chapter, I will search for a better understanding of the schematic experience of rain in prehistoric graphemes and their pictographic continuation in ethnic communities. I will discuss the rock paintings of the Sān peoples, who have lived in South-Africa for over 20.000 years and seem to have a focus on rain symbolism and ceremonies. Afterwards, I will discuss rain symbolism in the Native American Pueblo and Hopi tribes. “The technological power over the forces of the universe (both natural and supernatural) controlled by ritual practitioners in these traditions has generated fear, suspicion, and persecution. After all, the same power(s) harnessed today in a healing ceremony may be used to injure tomorrow. Those who can bring rain can also bring floods or cause droughts. People need protection from, and often desire vengeance against, those wielding such supernatural power,” writes William H. Walker.8 ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

3 Mircea Eliade, o. c., p. 93. 4 James G. Frazer, o. c., p. 13–22. 5 Ibidem, p. 13. 6 Ibidem, p. 16. 7 Felix Liebrecht (ed.), Des Gervasius von Tilbury Otia imperialia in einer Auswahl, Hannover, 1856, p. 41. 8 William H. Walker, Where Are the Witches of Prehistory?, in Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, 5, 3, 1998, p. 245–308, p. 247.

2. Graphemes

In his Myth and Symbol (1991), Ariel Golan discusses the graphic patterns that he had first collected in the Caucasus mountains, but then expanded into a unique reference book, which clustered and explained ‘floating’ symbols in our global world.9 He did not let himself be impeded by the millennia that these graphemes span. He writes: Graphic patterns that do not always represent elements of a visually perceptible human habitat (i. e. objects or living beings) are encountered on material relics of the past (structures, tombstones, utensils, pieces of clothing etc.), as well as on rock walls and stones. They can be traced to prehistoric times and were common in ornamental folk art up to the early twentieth century. These graphemes, recurring over thousands of years, moving from people to people show remarkable stability both in design and in the mere fact of their existence. Such patterns, which often look like mere ornaments, are in fact symbols that used to have a meaning, ideographs10 which were a way of recording certain concepts or notions long before written language came into being. (…) It was not only faith in the magic power of the images which made them so significant. In them people recorded and conveyed to their contemporaries and to future generations what seemed to them vitally important information. As a result, these symbols acquired the significance of generic memory and reflected relationships between members of a tribe.11

Golan looks at abstract motifs both on façades, wooden doors, and relic shrines as well as cave art, ceramics, and so forth, and combines these into analogue sets, regardless of their origin and date. The author collects ‘semantic groups’ of ornaments, signs, symbols, and ideograms.12 This method is defendable. “Similarity between ancient graphic symbols as well as between related cult and mythological phenomena in various ethnic communities is not unusual in human culture. A distant but undeniable common origin has been revealed in languages like those of Berbers, Finns and Mongols.”13 For the semantic group with regard to rain, the first cluster is made up of celestial curves with vertical lines coming down from them, or of hatches with their outpour of downward trajectories (fig. 3).14 A second cluster is filled with twisted cord or zigzag motifs (fig. 4). It is possible the twist and the zigzag are one of the oldest ornaments of humankind. You can find them on pottery dating back to the Neolithic era, and it was universally used during the Bronze and Iron Age. Horizontal and vertical zigzag motifs live on in European and Asian examples of 3,000–1,000 BCE. In contrast to the rope motifs, the zigzag motifs

9 Ariel Golan, Myth and Symbol. Symbolism in Prehistoric Religions, Jerusalem, 1991. 10 A pictorial representation of an idea or object; Anonymous, art. Ideograph, Merriam-Webster Dictionary, last accessed 28 March 2020, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ideograph. 11 Ariel Golan, o. c., p. 5. 12 Ibidem, p. 10. 13 Ibidem, p. 7. 14 Ibidem, p. 12.

19

20

2. Graphemes

3 Drawing of pottery with rain symbols, vertical zigzags, Iran, c. 3,500 BC

4 Drawing of pottery with rain symbols, rope zigzags, Former Yugoslavia, c. 5000 BC

are not a graphic offshoot of production technology. Rope and cords were used long before the existence of the potter’s wheel to support or tighten the hardening or the mould of the clay, and often left an imprint that people began to mimic ornamentally. Zigzag motifs do not have this practical origin; moreover, they are quantitatively wider spread throughout the world. Zigzag motifs spread out through agrarian cultures and appear across the globe on various carriers: pottery, textile, cave walls.15 An earthenware bowl from Silesia (500–600 BCE) (fig. 5) shows rounded carvings around the centre, like the sun or the sky. On the outer rim, three mountains are depicted, the hatched planes indicating cultivated fields. The branching forms refer to fertile crops and trees.16 Here too, the sun warms the land, respectively interrupted by three juxtaposed zigzag lines. These zigzag lines represent the irrigating rain. According to Golan, the zigzag lines mostly appear separately or in a more complex configuration, like the Silesian example, on bowls and round vases. The author connects these round recipients with the cult of fertility goddesses. The goddess of fertility, she who brings the rain and carries the element of the moon,17 bears water, and thus symbolically requires the curved

15 Ibidem, p. 12–13. 16 Ibidem, fig. 5.1. 17 Reinhold Merkelbach, Mithras. Ein persisch-römischer Mysterienkult, Wiesbaden, 1998, p. 115.

2. Graphemes

21

5 Drawing of pottery with rain symbols, bowl with sun, sky, plants, rain, water, Silesia, 600–500 BC

shape.18 In the Indian language, the word for vase is still connected to the rain goddess Kali and also shapes the term for woman as such.19 In Georgia, the word ‘kala’ means ‘bowl’ as consonant of the word ‘woman’.20 And in Sanskrit, the full, round female breast filled with milk shares the same word with rain cloud.21 An interesting analogy occurs between the zigzag that is often cast downward and the serrated tooth motif (fig. 6).22 The comb becomes an authoritative attribute of rain and water goddesses.23 It is said that forests grow from a comb.24 The wife of the Japanese thunder god is called Kusinado-Khime, where the prefix kusi means comb.25 In North-Mesopota-

18 Friedrich Muthmann, Mutter und Quelle. Studien zur Quellenverehrung im Altertum und im Mittelalter, Basel, 1975, p. 281. 19 Ariel Golan, o. c., p. 12. 20 Ibidem, p. 12; Anonymous, art. Kala, Indo-European Etymology, last accessed 28 March 2020; http://starling. rinet.ru. 21 Ibidem, p. 15. 22 Ibidem, p. 14, fig. 7. 23 Combs have “teeth.” Here, an additional association comes to the fore which is deeply matrixially rooted. Teeth are sharp protrusions, and protrusion are apotropaic: they ward off evil. The history of apotropaism is intertwined with the transmission of vulvaic archetypes. Today, we begin to succeed in coherently reconstructing this history of transmission. A timeline emerges that goes back to the original images, which lie at the basis of these apotropaisms. In this context, we speak of the apotropaism of the vagina dentata. Derivatives of Medusa are indeed often depicted with fiercely toothed mouths; Barbara Baert, Jar and Comb. Verena of Zurzach as an example for the limits and the possibilities in Iconology, in Annual of the Antwerp Museum, 2006, p. 9–25. 24 Ariel Golan, o. c., p. 14. 25 Ibidem, p. 14.

22

2. Graphemes

6 Drawing of rain ideograph as teeth, comb, Southeastern Europe, Neolithic

mian ceramics, the zigzag motif is found in the hairs of the goddess (fig. 7).26 The symbolic link between the rain, cascading hair, and the comb still lingers on in some folk beliefs, where women, combing their long hair, evokes rain coming from the gods.27 But why use zigzag lines to indicate rain? The zigzag presumably refers to the waves in water, but there is also a link to the water demon animal par exellence: the snake. The ancient Egyptian grapheme, and later hieroglyph, for water was a wavy line (fig. 8).28 In Sumerian pictograms, the river is denoted by two parallel zigzag lines.29 In the Phoenician language, the zigzag letter ‘N’ in the Latin alphabet is the equivalent of the phonetic sound ‘nun’, snake, and the zigzag letter ‘M’ is the phonetic sound for ‘mem’, water (fig. 9).30 In Mayan mythology, the snake is deeply connected with rain ceremonies and fear cultures. We will come back to this in the following chapter. First, we will focus our attention on the rock paintings of the South-African Sān peoples or Bushmen. //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// 26 Ibidem, p. 15, fig. 8.6. 27 Ibidem, p. 14. 28 Ibidem, p. 14, fig. 7.1. 29 Ibidem, p. 102, p. 101, fig. 123.1–11.– Also in Sumerian the stem sig underlies a semantic complex that touches on rain, pouring oneself out, and pouring through a sieve; Anonymous, Sumerian and Indo-European: A surprising question, New Indology, last accessed 28 March 2020; http://new-indology.blogspot.be/2015/05/ sumerian-and-indo-european-surprising.html. 30 Ibidem, p. 104.

2. Graphemes

23

7 Drawing of goddess with rain-hair-ideograph, Northern Mesopotamia

8 Drawing of Old Egyptian grapheme / hieroglyph for water/rain

9 Drawing of semantic connections of snake and water, M-like waves, Germany, c. 3,000 BC

24

2. Graphemes

10 San Rock Paintings from a recently located site now known as MK1, eastern Free State Province, South Africa, 130 cm × 70 cm

The Sān peoples are indigenous peoples of South-Africa and Botswana.31 Their rock drawings and carvings in caves and on cave walls are spectacular: very graphic and elongated complex half-human, half-animal figures are found between depictions of hunters, animals, and abstract motifs. The animals depicted are elk, bulls, elephants, birds, and they mix together with human hybrids (fig. 10).32 These hybrid creatures would denote shamanistic trances that were part of the rain ceremonies.33 Shamans connected with the rain-animals on a higher plane through dance and other means, and thus extort the healing rain for the benefit of society.34 The shamans ‘see’ the antelope or hippo during their rain dance, and in their visions they are guided by fish and birds.35 Traditions to this day have Sān priests literally dress in animal hides and animal masks such as goat heads during these occasions.

31 Thomas A. Dowson, Reading Art, Writing History. Rock Art and Social Change in Southern Africa, in World Archaeology, 25, 3, 1994, p. 332–345. 32 Dorothea Bleek, Beliefs and Customs of the Xam Bushmen, Part VI: Rain Making, in Bantu Studies, 7, 1933, p. 375–392. 33 James David Lewis-Williams, Believing and Seeing. Symbolic Meanings in Southern San Rock Paintings, London, 1981; James David Lewis-Williams, Cognitive and Optical Illusions in San Rock Art Research, in Current Anthropology, 27, 2, 1986, p. 171–178; James David Lewis-Williams & Thomas A. Dowson, The Signs of all Times. Entoptic Phenomena in Upper Palaeolithic Art, in Current Anthropology, 29, 2, 1988, p. 201–245; James David Lewis-Williams & Thomas A. Dowson, Images of Power. Understanding Bushman Rock Art, Johannesburg, 1989. 34 James David Lewis-Williams & David G. Pearce, Southern African San Rock Painting as Social Intervention. A Study of Rain-Control Images, in The African Archaeological Review, 21, 4, 2004, p. 199–228. 35 Thomas A. Dowson, o. c., p. 332–345.

2. Graphemes

11 San Rock Paintings with Eland and zigzags, Hallucinatory rain-animals and zigzags painted in red and white, Bethlehem district, Free State Province, South Africa

In the rock paintings by the Sān peoples, there is a notable use of zigzag lines (fig. 11).36 The zigzag lines surround the animals and humans with sharp angles. Especially near the so-called Bethlehem district you see many of these astonishing, vibrating scenes in white and red, the characteristic colour palette used by the Sān peoples. The spasms must have been part of the animist and shamanistic tradition and depict some of these metaphors between human and animal. I will quote authors Thomas A. Dowson and Anne L. Holliday from The South African Archaeology Bulletin. In this panel zigzags surround rain-animals. Bushman ethnography shows that rain-makers (shamans) entered trance to capture rain-animals. Although the central role of hallucination in rainmaking suggests that the zigzags are entoptic in origin, this does not explain what the zigzags signified to the shaman-artists. Perhaps out of ignorance of Bushman beliefs and the nature of mental imagery, we could infer that the zigzags depict some ‘real’ object such as clouds, rain or even lightning surrounding the rain-animals, but certain features of the painting question such a view. For example, the tail of the rain-animal on the left becomes a zigzag, and a zigzag associated with the rain-animal on the right merges with its eye.37

36 Thomas A. Dowson & Anne L. Holliday, Zigzags and Eland. An Interpretation of an Idiosyncratic Combination, in The South African Archaeological Bulletin, 44, 149, 1989, p. 46–48. 37 Thomas A. Dowson & Anne L. Holliday, o. c., p. 46.

25

26

2. Graphemes

12 San Rock Paintings with dots and dashes, Part of a panel showing an ‘animal’ figure surrounded by hairs and dots juxtaposed with a trancing human figure, both of whom are surrounded by a thin red line fringed with white dots, Estcourt District, KwaZulu-Natal Province, South Africa, scale is in cm

In these compositions with animals and shuddering zigzag lines, we often see spots as well: tiny white flecks and larger red fingerprint spots (fig. 12). Thomas A. Dowson gives a possible explanation for these:38 Flecks are an entoptic phenomenon frequently hallucinated during altered states of consciousness. These same geometric forms are also found in a number of paintings that depict trance dances or other activities associated with the trance ritual. Flecks have been noted in depictions of trance dances, rainmaking, fights and clashes between men, felines and therianthropes. Bushmen believe that a place where trance activities take place is redolent with supernatural potency that can only be seen by those in trance. The flecks ‘seen’ during these activities were probably construed as supernatural potency, as were the larger entoptic dots.39

Moreover, the Bushmen themselves say that these spots depict “things growing.” Based on the oral testimony by the Sān hunter Qing, we know more about this.

38 Thomas A. Dowson, Dots and Dashes. Cracking the Entoptic Code in Bushman Rock Paintings, in South African Archaeological Society. Goodwin Series, 6, Goodwin’s Legacy, 1989, p. 84–94. 39 Thomas A. Dowson, Dots and Dashes, o. c., p. 91.

2. Graphemes

He [Qing] would have used an everyday word had he wanted to say plants or some underwater creature. We must also remember that the context of Qing’s comment is metaphorical because he was using the aquatic metaphor to explain where they were capturing the rain-animal. Because capturing rain-animals was an hallucination experienced while in deep trance, flecks hallucinated during these experiences were probably also believed to be supernatural potency. Qing’s “things” are, then, hallucinatory flecks. Neuropsychological evidence suggests he said “growing” because entoptic phenomena are said to expand, contract and flicker. Both these statements show that it is unlikely that painted flecks were abstract symbols, and that it is more probable that the Bushmen viewed these painted flecks as being as real as the hallucinated flecks which they interpreted as supernatural potency: painted flecks are supernatural potency. Having suggested that flecks are supernatural potency, the possibility that they are bees must not be ignored simply because this is a ‘representational’ interpretation.40

An additional and interesting explanation for the bizarre and ever-present vibrations and zigzag lines is offered by John Parkington and Andrew Paterson.41 They defended the zigzag line as a pictographic reference to sound. Especially when drawn near elephants, for example, they could possibly symbolize the trumpeting and bellowing stomping of the animal. This would mean that the drawings are less connected to the shamanistic visions (what the healers see), and more about the ‘somatogenic’ experiences that are associated with trances (what the healers feel). Here, oral traditions have also remained which speak of vibrating, shaking, shivering as ‘anticipatory’ of supernatural contact on the one hand, and as the ultrasonic communication with the ‘rain-animals’, in this case the elephants, on the other.42 40 Ibidem, p. 92. 41 John Parkington & Andrew Paterson, Somatogenesis. Vibrations, Undulations and the Possible Depiction of Sound in San Rock Paintings of Elephants in the Western Cape, in The South African Archaeological Bulletin, 72, 206, 2017, p. 134-141. 42 I leave aside the more recent neurophysiological studies on pre–Upper Paleolithic and Paleolithic geometric marks and spots as so-called phosphenes. “A phosphene is the phenomenon of seeing light without light actually entering the eye. The word phosphene comes from the Greek words phos (light) and phainein (to show). Phosphenes that are induced by movement or sound may be associated with optic neuritis (Wikipedia).” There is not only a discussion of whether or not shamans consciously sought out these neurological effects (trance), – because non-shamanistic cultures show the same abstract iconography –, or if a phosphene is at the base of this artistic fantasy and its execution; For further discussion, see: Derek Hodgson, Shamanism, Phosphenes, and Early Art. An Alternative Synthesis, in Current Anthropology, 41, 5, 2000, p. 866–873, p. 870: “The question then arises how pre–Upper Palaeolithic and Palaeolithic geometric marks are to be explained if shamanism is unable to account for their preponderance but for exceptional instances in the later period. Given that the universality of the visual neurophysiology is widely accepted, we can agree that the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic marks may resemble phosphenes but their principal source was not the attempted rendition of phosphenes themselves or the altered states of shamanism but the practice of or preoccupation with mark-making itself. (…) Hominids involved in mark-making during the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic would, hence, break into untrained subjects ‘learning’ how to make simple lines by recourse to positive feedback involving activation of the visual cortex, and in view of the neurophysiological studies already cited this is more than likely to have been the primary visual cortex.”

27

28

2. Graphemes

13 San Rock Paintings with ‘swifts’, Ezeljagdspoort near Oudsthoorn, Western Cape Province, South Africa

A third take of a more holistic nature is the approach of Jeremy C. Hollmann.43 In the cave paintings, he recognizes a coming together of the cave dwellers and the so-called swift people or animals. Oral traditions say: Our mothers tell us that we should not throw stones at the ‘swallow’ because it is the rain’s thing. We can see that it is not like other little birds that eat earth. For they [i. e. these little birds, I think] eat clay. It [i. e. the ‘swallow’] eats insects which are in the water. That is why our mothers scold us severely if they see us children throwing stones at the ‘swallow’. They ask us whether we do not see that, when the rainclouds are in the sky, then the ‘swallow’ flies about. But when there are no rainclouds in the sky, we do not see it.44

In this oral culture, Hollmann recognizes an iconography found in the caves of Ezeljagdspoort (fig. 13).45 The importance of water and rain and the role these ‘swifts’ (as in swallows and other birds) play in that, come together in these cave paintings in a complex

43 Jeremy C. Hollmann, ‘Swift-People’. Therianthropes and Bird Symbolism in Hunter-Gatherer Rock-Paintings, Western and Eastern Cape Provinces, South Africa, in South African Archaeological Society. Goodwin Series, 9, Further Approaches to Southern African Rock Art, 2005, p. 21–33. 44 Jeremy C. Hollmann, o. c., p. 22. 45 James David Lewis-Williams, Ezeljagdspoort Revisited. New Light on an Enigmatic Rock-Painting, in The South African Archaeological Bulletin, 32, 126, 1977, p. 165–169.

2. Graphemes

composition. The composition actually forms one great, cosmic, swirling dance. The zigzag lines involved in this composition refer to a larger amalgam, according to Hollmann. The amalgam is a variation on flashes of light, rain, because they appear near the ‘rain-animals’ like antelope and elephants, in short, “entoptic forms” that evoke a certain invisible ‘power,’ an energy. In other words, zigzags refer to the supernatural potential of the rain-animals. Finally, the relationship between the zigzag and the shape of the serpent is, according to the author, also associated with the death of the depicted animal that is within the spiritual ‘energy.’ The painters capture their belief in the supernatural capabilities of nature and animals: their sounds, their transformations, their trances. These vibrating energy fields that surround humans and animals are reflected in the structure, grooves, and peculiarities of the surface of the rock itself. It is known that this was a skillful way to integrate volume and even perspective into prehistoric drawings.46 The artistic capabilities to adjust the content and shapes to the structure of the rock walls, indicates a metaphysical application of the iconography and its visual resources. The shaman sees the hybrid in a vision, of which the rock wall is the carrier. This physical carrier becomes a screen and dissolves like a diaphanous membrane to ‘that which lies behind,’ where the trance takes place. The rock artists look through the rock wall, and invite the audience (including the current scientists that still have not quite yet fathomed the riddles of this art) to also look through the drawings into the world that they see. In that sense, the drawing is the precursor of the shadows in Plato’s caves to a higher seeing, bathing in supernatural light. James David Lewis-Williams (born 1934), an expert on the Sān peoples, nicely summarizes it like this: The art calls upon us to look not merely at the painted plane of the rock face but to penetrate that plane and to see into the spiritual realm. In addition to the right-left, up-down axes of composition with which Westerners are familiar there is another that runs at right angles to these. It starts in the world in which we stand and leads us into another world behind the rock face. When the artist and his or her people contemplated the panel, they were not simply looking at pictures of vision and power but at visions and power, themselves.47

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

46 Jeremy C. Hollmann, o. c., fig. 9, “Sometimes images of swift people are painted immediately adjacent steps and cracks in the rock face. The drawing emphasizes this phenomenon, which is less noticeable in photographs. Site 11.1, George District, Western Cape Province.” 47 James David Lewis-Williams, Vision, Power and Dance. The genesis of a Southern African Rock Art Panel, (Veertiende Kroon-Voordracht. Stichting Nederlands Museum voor Anthropologie en Praehistorie), Amsterdam, 1992, p. 27.

29

30

2. Graphemes

A second important case regarding endogenous rain experiences is that of the Hopi tribe in Arizona and the Pueblo tribe (which means “ancestors of enemies” in Navajo) in Arizona, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico. The Pueblo tribe is known for their ceramics. Both Native American tribes have a visual culture that connects the snake (shuddering, zigzag) with rain ceremonies. I will illustrate this by giving four examples from ethnological and archaeological literature. In her article Calling the Rain Gods, Gertrude P. Kurath (1903-1992) discusses the customs of the Pueblo tribe, who, although the region where they live suffers less from drought than the Hopi tribe, still has a large pantheon of rain gods.48 These gods are connected to the four directions of the wind. North stands for the winter and has the symbolic colour yellow, while spring is the blue west, summer the red south, and fall is the white east. The gods bring snow, rain, clouds, and mist. The gods of the north and the west are very active and vital: They also give extended blessings such as life, and everything for the welfare of man. They are invoked in secret masked ceremonies, in which the masks infuse spirit of the Shiwana into the dancers. (…) The most famous Corn Dances, which are open to the White spectator, follow Easter Sunday and celebrate the Pueblo’s Saint’s Day, for instance, Felipe on 1 May, Cochiti on 14 July, Santo Domingo on 4 August.49

Secondly, Richard B. Wright (1937–2017) researched the so-called “white mountain red wares,” an old ceramic production that was invented by the south-western Pueblo peoples between the 12th and 14th centuries.50 As art historian, the author has long been fascinated by the communication and evolution of shapes within communities that have no written sources. The Pueblo peoples use ‘hatching’ designs in black mineral-paint on a white kaolin slip (fig. 14). Hatching has long been associated with rain in Pueblo ethnographic studies, and variations in hatching have been interpreted in varying ways as different kinds of precipitation notes at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) indicate that an informant around 1900 interpreted the stacked triangular shapes painted on one of the cylindrical vessels at Pueblo Bonito as indicating the “tail of summer bird” design, suggesting connections among rain, birds, and seasons.51 (…) Many of the painted designs on these jars, often based on what one scholar has called “counter-change” processes of design, produce contrasts of positive and negative shapes with serrated or 48 Gertrude P. Kurath, Calling the Rain Gods, in The Journal of American Folklore, 73, 290, 1960, p. 312–316. 49 Gertrude P. Kurath, o. c., p. 312. 50 Richard B. Wright, Style, Meaning, and the Individual Artist in Western Pueblo Polychrome Ceramics after Chaco, in Journal of the Southwest, 47, 2, 2005, p. 259–325. 51 Richard B. Wright, o. c., p. 265.

2. Graphemes

31

14 Evolution of scroll-based designs in sequent styles of White Mountain Red Ware. Photo by Roy L Carlson

saw tooth contours. J. J. Brody has noted that serration occurs in all Anasazi media.52 Zigzag forms also have ethnographic associations with rain and lightning, which are most prevalent in the Southwest during the summer months. This serration at Chaco is also found in what seems to be singular objects associated with ritual symbolism, like the mortar. (…) Given the reliance of Pueblo peoples on agriculture in such an arid environment so ill-suited for plant cultivation, such traditional associations are not surprising. In addition, I would like to suggest that the very shape of the cylinder jar has associations congruent with what we know of rain ceremonialism among the modern Pueblo. Simple geometric forms may have significant meaning for Pueblo groups. The inverted bowl has been associated with the cosmos in Mimbres ideology; the coiland-scrape method of construction for Pueblo ceramics may be connected to rock-art motifs denoting emergence and migration toward or from the Middle Place,53 and the coil-woven Hopi wedding plaque known as pota is associated symbolically with the disc of the earth, or Middle World, while its coiled construction has the aforementioned associations of emergence and migration across the Middle World.54

52 Ibidem, p. 266; Jerry J. Brody, Anasazi and Pueblo Painting, Albuquerque, 1991, p. 48. 53 Peter T. Furst & Jill E. Furst, North American Indian Art, New York, 1982, p. 32. 54 Richard B. Wright, o. c., p. 266; Peter T. Furst & Jill E. Furst, o. c., p. 32.

32

2. Graphemes

15 Kachina Sash of the Hopi Indians

Thirdly, Edwin Wade and David Evans discuss the typical kilt/skirt textilia that is woven by men in the Hopi tribe (fig. 15).55 The individual bands of the design portion each have interpretations which when combined present a highly dynamic notion of fertility. We shall begin with the outer bands of black and white which are interpreted as storm clouds coming over the horizon, portending the coming rain. The white zigzag designs are lightning, while the black pyramids are the clouds themselves, the “cloud-pyramid” being a very common motif in southwestern art. The solid green bands are the fertility of the earth in general distinct from the cultivated or man-influenced areas. The black bands with pairs of parallel white lines are rain clouds (the black) and falling rain (the white). The solid blue bands signify simply the blue sky that carries the water to the Hopis. The central band consists of three motifs. (…) Parallel white lines representing falling rain are quite commonly found on other Hopi ceremonial objects. One good example is provided by the solid white Hopi wedding or “rain” sash. The cords are then divided into sixes and twisted together to form a long fringe, which symbolizes in the Indian mind the falling of the rain in its long parallel lines. So far, we have described the sash in spatial terms, 55 Edwin Wade & David Evans, The Kachina Sash. A Native Model of the Hopi World, in Western Folklore, 32, 1, 1973, p. 1–18.

2. Graphemes

but our Second Mesa informants also emphasized a temporal aspect of the sash. The designed portion represents an active process of the rain clouds forming at the horizon with lightning and moving across the sky until they pour their rain upon the Hopi fields. This movement of the clouds and rain is symbolized by the different bands, the movement being from the outer bands to the center. In fact, it was emphasized that the different bands should be viewed as being on different levels, although this was impossible to depict accurately on the two-dimensional sash.56

I saved a fourth study, done in 1985, which really impressed me, as my last methodological approach. In his On the Dangers of Serpents in the Mind, Alexander Marshack (1918–2004) discusses another vision on the creation, dispersion, and the meaning of the zigzag rain motif and in particular the snake in prehistoric Asia, the Pacific, and North-America between 40,000 and 12,000 BCE.57 The author starts a polemic against the important studies on the snake symbol by Balaji Mundkur (born 1924) such as The Cult of the Serpent in the Americas (1976) and The Cult of the Serpent (1983).58 Marshack disputes that the zigzag originally referred to the snake, and, if so, that the possible analogy was actually rooted in fear. He writes: As a ‘materialist-biologist,’ Mundkur addresses himself primarily to the affective, reactive aspects of the discriminatory capacity and to the available psychological data on limbic stress reactions. His data derive from psychological testing, hallucinogenic and dream imagery, and diverse but highly selected myths of serpentine terror. In this sense, for all its claims of novelty, his approach is a traditional, earlier 20th-century one of seeking biological and genetic explanations for both symbol and myth. Addressing, instead, some of the cognitive and historical aspects of the serpentine form as a cultural image and shape present us with symbolic complexity of a different order. In a number of analytic studies, I have shown that the serpentine was a widely used ritual marking motif in the Upper Paleolithic. In none of the Upper Paleolithic or late Mesolithic or Neolithic uses does the serpentine have reference to the snake or to fear and awe. (…) We are dealing with different peoples and different periods, ecologies, regions, and historical developments. Nevertheless, we are dealing with the same human capacity to read meaning into the serpentine form. My studies have suggested that the European Upper Paleolithic and derived traditions and the American Indian traditions were water-related. In the iconography of almost all the Eurasian and American cultures to which Mundkur refers in his

56 Edwin Wade & David Evans, o. c., p. 6–7. 57 Alexander Marshack, On the Dangers of Serpents in the Mind, in Current Anthropology, 26, 1, 1985, p. 139–152. 58 Balaji Mundkur, The Cult of the Serpent in the Americas. Its Asian Background, in Current Anthropology, 17, 1976, p. 429–455; Balaji Mundkur, The Alleged Diffusion of Hindu Divine Symbols into Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. A Critique, in Current Anthropology,19, 1978, p. 541–583; Balaji Mundkur, The Cult of the Serpent. An Interdisciplinary Survey of its Manifestations and Origins, Albany, 1983.

33

34

2. Graphemes

studies the image of water is serpentine or zigzag. The Egyptian sign for water is [drawing of double zigzag line] and the image for water is [drawing of triple zigzag line].59

Marshack is less interested in the ritualistic, even hallucinogenic explanation for the omnipresent zigzag serpent motif, but instead opts for a cognitive-formalistic explanation that the zigzag line was meant to evoke primordial ‘movement.’ The serpentine or zigzag as an image and symbol of linear flow or process, for instance, exists at many levels in our modern cultures. I refer to the simplest of examples: The “S” sign on a highway indicates the danger of a series of sharp turns ahead and warns one to slow down; the zigzag and the serpentine are used in graphs and flow charts as a visual indication of processual variance, temporal change, and so on. Lewis-Williams (1983)60 provides a “primitive” instance in his description of the linear red flow-line that passes between trance dancer and eland in Sān rock art. The concept of linear, directional flow occurs in the Greek word boustrophedon, which refers to the serpentine manner in which the ox plows, turning back 180° at the end of each line or furrow.61

Marshack’s reference to the boustrophedon principle is fascinating. He connects a term and a use from scriptural history – the so-called ox turning script or ox plow script (βουστροφηδό, turning like a plowing ox), where the text takes turns per line being written from left to right and from right to left – with the globally used and archetypical zigzag motif. According to the author, it is first of all the formal boustrophedon principle that resonates behind the snake symbol, which means it is a universal sign that can be read and visually experienced from every side. To this sign of ‘something’ that moves, waves, undulates, other imagery and symbols would start to attach themselves. “In the English language the verb ‘to snake’ means to move forward in a serpentine manner. Like ‘boustrophedon,’ it is the linguistic abstraction of a visual.”62 Marshack explains how this works. The cognitive processes involved in such image formation can, however, lead to the creation of the serpentine as a snake. Granted the human capacity to see motion, process, time, sequence, and flow as a linear zigzag, spiral, or serpentine, then the equally human tendency to anthropomorphize or zoomorphize may produce the image of a serpentine creature that is itself symbolic of periodic, continuous process, time, flow, and change. (…) The serpent of time, of process and continuity, the serpent of self-birth and origins, the serpent of death, birth, and rebirth, the cosmic serpent, the serpent of such processes 59 Alexander Marshack, o. c., p. 140–141. 60 James David Lewis-Williams, Science and Rock Art, in South African Archaeological Society. Goodwin Series, 4, New Approaches to Southern African Rock Art, 1983, p. 3–13. 61 Alexander Marshack, o. c., p. 141. 62 Ibidem, p. 141.

2. Graphemes

as water, rain, and lightning, the ouroboros that bites its own tail in perpetuity, the guilloche serpent of endless continuity and turns (…). To such images there will be attached, develop mentally and historically, other layers of cultural and even limbic reference.63

In closing, Marshack gives an example of annotations from the Hopi calendar. The observation calendar of the Hopi tribe uses the zigzag snake for cosmological purposes: the sun travels to and fro and behaves like a boustrophedon. Marshack places the origin of this type of symbolic linking during the emergence of the bigger agricultural civilizations, when the zigzag and snake motif apparently were intended to express an astronomical reading and cosmological experience of the landscape, where ceremonial rites became increasingly important.64 To summarize: the ever ‘thickening’ boustrophedon, strengthened by new meanings, thus formed in principio a movement and wave pattern made up of wind, water, clouds, speech, and smoke, which as time went on deepened and expanded into the “metaphorical serpent.” A well-defined scriptural and writing style, based on an ancient agricultural custom, bursts forth onto the world of symbolic (natural) experiences (fears, nodes), where it receives the statute of motif and eventually imagery. From that statute, the ancient movement pictogram receives the capacity to multiply, duplicate endlessly often and long – which is very apt for the snake symbol – and shed its skin until the present turns into an analogue spectrum of symbols on countless of artistic mediums. //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// Looking back on these loosely woven contemplations on rock drawings and rain graphemes from the Sān peoples and the Native Americans, and as someone who is not a specialist and thus required to draw from the mentioned experts, I would like to reflect on several questions and insights that have dawned on me during the writing process. How should we view these artists? As ‘primitive,’ formerly underestimated and now appreciated for their expert plastic abilities? And what is the cave, the rock? How do hollow and stone contribute to the hermeneutics and the origin of the image as such? How can we understand their images – rain, animal, zigzag, vibration, hands as imprints, even the flecks – as one universe, which unfolds in front of our eyes, yet at the same time hides its secrets? And will the rain keep playing a part in that? In the following chapters, we will continue to consider these questions using new points of views. //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// 63 Ibidem, p. 142. 64 Ibidem, p. 145.

35

36

2. Graphemes

Frazer says it is very difficult to discover the error in magic and this is why it persists for so long because, for example, a ceremony which is supposed to bring rain is sure to appear effective sooner or later. But then it is queer that people do not notice sooner that it does rain sooner or later anyway. I think one reason why the attempt to find an explanation is wrong is that we have only to put together in the right way what we know without adding anything, and the satisfaction we are trying to get from the explanation comes of itself. And here the explanation is not what satisfies us anyway. When Frazer begins by telling the story of the King of the Wood at Nemi, he does this in a tone which shows that something strange and terrible is happening here. And that is the answer to the question ‘why is this happening?’: Because it is terrible. In other words, what strikes us in this course of events as terrible, impressive, horrible, tragic, etc., anything but trivial and insignificant, that is what gave birth to them. We can only describe and say, human life is like that. Mary Douglas, Judgments on James Frazer.65

65 Mary Douglas, Judgments on James Frazer, in Daedalus, 107, 4, 1978, p. 151–164, p. 158.

3. Towards a Hermeneutic of Cave Spaces

That day in November 1879, when Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola stood speechless below the painted ceiling of Altamira, was the first time we know of that an artist from the distant Stone Age touched the soul of a modern person. Gregory Curtis, The Cave Painters1

It is said that in 1879, when amateur archaeologist Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola (1831–1888) visited the caves, including those of Altamira, on his lands in the hopes of finding remains of prehistoric tools (he had become fascinated by prehistory after visiting a world exposition in Paris in 1878), he did not find any traces of humans.2 That is because Sanz de Sautuola was looking in the wrong place. He was looking at the floor. His eight-year-old daughter, María (1871–1946), who was accompanying him, however, looked up (fig. 16). What was discovered there after millennia is now well-known: an over twenty-metre-long stretch of nearly life-sized bison and other animals (fig. 17). Prehistoric paintings became a fact. A stream, a herd, their hooves thundering on the stone expanse. The prehistoric painterly arts broken out of their silence in the most fierce, stunning, and masterful way possible. The experts of the time did not believe the amateur. Later, after Sanz de Sautuola had sadly passed away, the amateur would be posthumously recognized: these paintings did in fact date back to between 12,820–11,130 BCE.3 I am interested in the daughter, María. She was open-minded. She did not look at the world as an archaeologist, but as a child. Spontaneously looking up. Searching for the limits of the space. Seeking comfort in the dark. Gaze going upward until it reaches the ceiling of the cave. María walked into a room, her father walked into a site. The imagination of the child revealed the truth of the function of the cave; and the truth-seeking amateur 1 Gregory Curtis, The Cave Painters. Probing the Mysteries of the World’s First Artists, New York, 2006, p. 50. 2 Johan Braeckman & Maarten Boudry, De ongelovige Thomas heeft een punt. Een handleiding voor kritisch denken, Antwerp – Amsterdam, 2011, p. 28–31. 3 Émile Cartailhac, Mea culpa d’un sceptique, in L’anthropologie, 13, 1902, p. 349–353.

38

3. Towards a Hermeneutic of Cave Spaces

16 Photo of María Sanz de Sautolo (1871–1946), daughter of Marcelino Sanz de Sautolo (1831–1888), Santander prehistory museum, Spain, Photo taken: 1879, Calotype photograph

17 Cave art, bison, Altamira, Spain, The cave contains paintings from different era’s the earliest of which date from 34,000 BCE, The bison are from the Magdalenian culture and date from 12,820–11,130 BCE, cave painting polychrome

3. Towards a Hermeneutic of Cave Spaces

scientist was caught up in his lack of imagination. The navel gazer surprised by a universe. Eyes grounded (closed), versus eyes skyward (open). In this chapter I will search for the meaning of the cave space that was at the base of prototypical ideas in our culture, such as shelter, quiet, echoes, and the arts themselves. //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// To this day, the subterranean caves and grottoes with their stalactites and stalagmites fascinate us scientifically (speleologists), archaeologically (such as the famous cave paintings in the Chauvet Cave in the Dordogne, Magdalenian, 18,000–10,000 BCE), and recreationally (for instance school excursions with children to grottoes) (fig. 18).4 The caves, with their complex underground chambers, tunnels and unexpected turns (rooms as big as houses that suddenly rise up out of nowhere), with springs that well up from the deepest parts of the earth and strange echoes that reverberate through their spaces, have stimulated all sorts of mysterious religions and given rise to shrines and votive rooms, such as the ancient nympheia.5 Additionally, the natural gloss, the cave walls with their ornamentation, and the colours of the minerals inspired the artistic interventions in the subterranean cultures. The cave, as Gesammtkunstwerk, could be interpreted as the source of plastic dialogues with its pronounced textures and tectonics. The cave can be considered the pure and natural beginning of art (history). The cave quite obviously refers to the female sex.6 Together with the role of the water, the hidden dark and black life force from within, the cave indisputably has uterine connotations. (fig. 19).7 The Babylonian mother goddess Nintu lives in the mountain and embodies fertility and regeneration.8 Her face is represented with the abstract sign of the female sex: an arch ending at the bottom with a curl similar to the Greek letter omega (fig. 20).9 Subterranean springs and rivers function as the amniotic waterways of the earth and in 4 See also: Barbara Baert, The Sleeping Nymph Revisited. Ekphrasis, Genius Loci and Silence, in The Figure of the Nymph in Early Modern Culture, ed. by Karl Enenkel & Anita Traninger, (Intersections. Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture, 54), Leiden, 2018, p. 149–176. 5 See also: Horst Bredekamp, Wasserangst und Wasserfreude in der Renaissance und Manierismus, in Kulturgeschichte des Wassers, ed. by Hartmut Böhme, Frankfurt am Main, 1988, p. 145–188. 6 Ewa Kuryluk, Salome and Judas in the Cave of Sex, Evanston, 1987, p. 189–258. 7 This is also apparent from certain caverns with a serratedness that evokes association with the uterus, such as the Saint-Baume cave, where Mary Magdalene is honoured to this day. The jagged shape has traditionally been a symbol for the uterus. “The jaggedness is an ancient motif associated with the womb, that has been retained in the Mary cult in sites such as Virgen de la Peña (= ‘Virgin of the jagged rock’) or Montserrat (= ‘serrated mountain’);” Paul Vandenbroeck, Capturing nameless energies, experiencing matrixial paradoxes. Syncretist sacred sites on the Canary Islands, in Loci sacri. Understanding sacred sites, (KADOC studies on religion, culture and society, 9), Leuven, 2012, p. 93–123; Paul Vandenbroeck, The ‘Nameless Motif.’ On the Cross-Cultural Iconography of an Energetic Form, in Annual of the Antwerp Museum, 2010 (2012), p. 113–180, p. 160. 8 Bruno Meissner, Babylonien und Assyrien, vol. 1, Heidelberg, 1925, p. 11. 9 Alphons A. Barb, Diva Matrix, in The Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 16, 1953, p. 193–238, p. 199.

39

40

3. Towards a Hermeneutic of Cave Spaces

18 Drawings of lions hunting bison in the End Chamber, Cave Chauvet–Pont d’Arc, Ardèche, France, Aurignacian period (33,000–9,000 Before Present), Cave Painting with charcoal, over 10m long

the Christian period they continued to trigger all kinds of uses, rituals, and beliefs between, on the one hand, black magic and, on the other hand, the acculturation and appropriation of springs dedicated to saints. Below, I will feature cultural thinkers who have contributed in a special way to the meaning of the cave as a gateway to new hermeneutics about the origin of imagery and the potential and power of the visual medium. We will see that concepts like silence and echoes are pivotal. French science philosopher and writer Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) rather poetically dedicated himself to the symbolic experience of spaces inhabited by humans.10 He has written interesting articles on the cave. The cave responds to the imagination of calm, just as the labyrinth responds to the imagination of fear.11 The cave is the sanctuary where one can dream without end.12 The cave with its secretive hidden entrance materializes the threshold, it guards the passage. The cave is always a mystery: the cult of forbidden love, the room of secrets, the place of birth, the realm of spirits.13

10 Gaston Bachelard, La Terre et les rêveries du repos, Paris, 1948, p. 205–234; See also: Paul Masson-Oursel, Le Symbolisme eurasiatique de la Porte, in La Nouvelle Revue Française, 239, 1933, p. 207–212; Gaston Bachelard, L’eau et les rêves. Essai sur l’imagination de la matière, Paris, 1942; Pierre Saintyves (Émile Nourry), Essai sur les Grottes dans les Cultes magico-religieux et dans la Symbolique primitive, Geneva, 2008. 11 Gaston Bachelard, La Terre, o.c., p. 207. 12 Ibidem, p. 208. 13 Ibidem, p. 209.

3. Towards a Hermeneutic of Cave Spaces

19 Anapat grotto with matriarchal reliefs, Lastiver, Armenia, pre-Christian, Stone carving

La grotte ne quittera jamais son rang d’image fondamentale. C’est le coin du monde dit Loti, auquel je reste le plus fidèlement attaché, après en avoir aimé tant d’autres; comme nulle part ailleurs, je m’y sens en paix, je m’y sens rafraîchi, retrempé de prime jeunesse et de vie neuve.14 (…) A l’entrée de la grotte travaille l’imagination des voix profondes, l’imagination des voix souterraines. Toutes les grottes parlent.15 (…) Toutes les grottes parlent. La voix rocailleuse, la voix caverneuse, la voix grondante sont des voix de la terre. C’est la parole difficile, dit Michelet, qui fait les prophètes. (…) C’est parce que les voix sortant de l’abîme sont confuses qu’elles sont prophétiques. Devant l’antre profond, au seuil de la caverne; le rêveur hésite. D’abord il regarde le trou noir. La caverne, à son tour, regard pour regard, fixe le rêveur avec son œil noir. L’antre est l’œil du cyclope. Cette transposition, on doit la vivre sur les plus fragiles images, sur les plus fugitives images, sur les images les moins descriptives qui soient. telle est l’image du regard de la grotte. Comment ce simple trou noir peut-il donner une image valable pour un regard profond? Toute la volonté de voir s’affirme dans le regard fixe des cavernes. Dans la grotte, il semble que le noir brille.16

14 Ibidem, p. 213. 15 Ibidem, p. 216. 16 Ibidem, p. 223.

41

42

3. Towards a Hermeneutic of Cave Spaces

20 Symbols for Nintu and Hathor, Egypt

One should imagine, in fact, that the sensorial space of the cave is a peculiar in-between space: between being closed off from the natural sounds of the outside, and the muted sounds produced in the cave itself. Anyone who has ever visited a cave knows that it creates an ambivalent kind of silence: perfect and imperfect at the same time, because its silence is broken by its own voice. Dripping minerals, a lost gust of wind that makes the stagnant waters tremble, a fluttering bat, an owl hooting with the echo it produces. “Toutes les grottes parles.” Zigzag lines as words for the unheimliche silence. The ear is a cave. The ear is the sound of the night. Sheltered in the flighty, moist hollows with their bizarre reverberations. In their ecstasies, Cumaean Sibyls interpreted the sounds of the wind in the underground rooms. And see, the light coming through a slit creates moving images on the wall that make the ceiling vibrate. Let us unravel the way in which the water and rocks exactly determine the nature of that ambivalent ‘cave silence’. The Hebrew word for silence is at the same time the ‘voice of God’: ‘dmamah’. ‘Dmamah’ links the stem ‘-ma’ (water) with ‘dam-’ (blood). But dmamah also contains the word ‘damah’, which means ‘to be similar to’.17 The semantic core that connects water with silence and the Divine has been kept in this instance. In the Indo-European languages there is also a verifiable etymological connection between silence and fluidity, between silence and something that overflows, fluxus, water sources, rivers. And the Latin murmur (talking quietly, whispering) is also used for the soft rushing and babbling of water. It is indeed 17 Annick de Souzenelle, Le symbolisme du corps humain, Paris, 1991, p. 362.

3. Towards a Hermeneutic of Cave Spaces

peculiar to establish a linguistic relationship (perhaps derived from a symbolical connection) between silence and the spring, a relation that is also implicated in the nymph’s epigram.18 Looking even deeper into the etymology, we can recognize the Sanskrit root ‘mar-‘ for movement (of waves) and the word ‘mar-ma’ for a more wild movement of the sea, which we can still hear when we talk about the the murmuring sea.19 The word ‘marble’ has an interesting etymology akin to the Sanskrit root for ‘frozen liquid’. In a eulogy on a marble font in a now-vanished baptistery, written between 435 and 446, the 5th-century poet Flavius Merobaudes describes it as “the jewel, once liquid itself, still carries the liquid.”20 What originated the idea that marble is a (solidified) liquid? Theorizing on mineralogy, the Arab scholar and physician Avicenna (980–1037) conjectured that conglutination (as seen in alluvial formations) and congelation (as seen in the growth of stalactites) have a lapidifying effect on water; in short, water ‘stiffens’, ‘freezes’, and ‘petrifies’ through the action of a ‘mineral force’.21 The derivation of the word itself – ‘mar/ marmor/marmora’ – may also have contributed to the idea that marble is water metamorphosed into stone. ‘Marble’ derives from the Latin noun ‘marmor’. ‘Marmor’ stems from the Greek ‘marmairein’ (μαρμαίρειν), which means ‘to shimmer’, ‘to shine like the surface of the water’. In the Iliad, Homer (c. 840 BCE) speaks of the shimmering sea: “hala marmareên (ἅλα μαρμαρέην, 14.273).” Virgil (70–19 BCE), when he writes of the marble smoothness of the sea, turns ‘marmor’ and ‘mar-’ into synonyms. In short, this places the setting of the grotto rightly in the peculiar semantic space of ‘murmur = marble = water = silence = petrification’.22 The silence of the cave – of sileo meaning immobility – is a petrified silence. It is of a different, supernatural order. Full of panic. Niobe petrified into a cave. The moisture on the walls, seeping down like her tears. (I will discuss Niobe extensively further on.) Unique to the cave are the nearly untraceable echoes. Subsequently, I will discuss the research of biochemist Steven J. Waller on the resonance of Paleolithic caves with cave art in Western Europe, North America, and Australia for two decades.23 Sound (in the form of an echo/reverberation/resonance) played a vital role for prehistoric humans in choosing 18 Paul Vandenbroeck, Matrix Marmorea, in New Perspectives in Iconology. Visual Studies and Anthropology, ed. by Barbara Baert, et al., Brussels, 2012, p. 180–210. 19 Erkinger Schwarzenberg, Colour, Light and Transparency in the Greek World, in Medieval Mosaics. Light, Color, Materials, ed. by Eve Borsook, et al., Milan, 2000, p. 15–34, p. 22. 20 Fabio Barry, Walking on water. Cosmic floors in antiquity and the Middle Ages, in The Art Bulletin, 89, 4, 2007, p. 627–656, p. 631; Flavius Merobaudes, Carmina, II, 8, in Flavius Merobaudes. A Translation and Historical Commentary, ed. and transl. by Frank M. Clover, Philadelphia, 1971, p. 11, p. 60: “gemma vehit laticem, quae fuit ante latex.” Perhaps Merobaudes visited the Santa Croce Baptistery in Ravenna. 21 Avicenna, De Congelatione et conglutinatione Lapidum, ed. by Eric J. Holmyard & Desmond C. Mandeville, Paris, 1927, p. 46. 22 On these layers: Barbara Baert, New Iconological Perspectives on Marble as Divinus Spiritus. Hermeneutical Change and Iconogenesis, in Louvain Studies, 40, 1, 2017, p. 14–35; Barbara Baert, Marble and the Sea or Echo Emerging. (A Ricercar), in Treasures of the Sea. Art or Craft, ed. by Avinoam Shalem, Espacio, Tiempo y Forma, Serie VII. Historia del Arte, 5, 2017, p. 35–54. 23 sites.google.com/site/rockartacoustics; From: The American Rock Art Research Association.

43

44

3. Towards a Hermeneutic of Cave Spaces

where to create rock art, this point of view says. Ethnographic studies point to animism, where this natural phenomenon is assigned a supernatural role. Waller refers to the mythology of the ‘echo’ that plays a big role for both the ancient Greeks as well as in Central and South American cultures. Echo effects are very complex and can lead the person hearing them to experience a process of ‘spiritualization’ (through auditory hallucinations). Many locations with such a peculiar sound were considered to be magical, sacred spaces in the past (and are still exemplary due to their psycho-acoustics). The author denotes a direct relationship between imagery and sound. A percussion instrument is so similar to the sound of an ungulate that is depicted in the place of the echo (ninety per cent of Paleolithic art depicts animals with hooves.) A reverberating voice that seems to come from the rock’s surface, on which an anthropomorphic image has been left, as if the rock has a soul. Aspects of this connection between imagery and sound, technē and form, can already be found in Homer’s (c. 8th century BCE) Odyssey (725–675 BCE). Homer describes how cave nymphs had woven purple cloths on long stone looms. “Therein [the cave] are mixing bowls and jars of stone, and there, too, the bees store honey. And in the cave are long looms of stone, at which the nymphs weave webs of purple dye, a wonder to behold (13, 107–110).” The ancient looms created textiles from the top down, evoking the walls of the glistening stalactite cave. Thus, the caves with their shimmering, architectural ornamentation are the first places of artistic inspiration and enchantment. In that regard, I will quote French literary historian Bernard Vouilloux from his La nuit et le silence des images (2010) on the oeuvre of author Pascal Quignard (born 1948).24 La scène invisible, mais des injonctions que murmurent [murmur!] les voix lorsqu’elles portent et transmettent les sons d’une langue. C’est ainsi que la grotte a pu fonctionner comme un producteur naturel d’échos, ceux-ci formant les images sonores de la voix lorsque les ondes sont réfléchies par les parois. L’image pariétale, si elle a pour conditions la nuit et le silence de la grotte, est ainsi bornée par les limites sonores, et invisibles, qu’indique l’écho.25 At this point, Vouilloux connects the ambivalent cave silence with the paradigmatic metamorphoses of Echo and Narcissus. Le discours intérieur c’est endophasie il oppose au stade du miroir, la dissymétrie entre les deux types de réflexion, visuelle et sonore, renvoie à la désynchronisation de l’oeil et de l’oreille.26 I would like to delve deeper into this.27 ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

24 Bernard Vouilloux, La nuit et le silence des images. Penser l’image avec Pascal Quignard, Paris, 2010. 25 Bernard Vouilloux, o.c., p. 92–93. 26 Ibidem, p. 90–91. 27 The following passage comes from: Barbara Baert, In Response to Echo. Beyond Mimesis or Dissolution as Scopic Regime (with Special Attention to Camouflage), (Studies in Iconology, 6), Leuven – Walpole, 2016, p. 10–15.

3. Towards a Hermeneutic of Cave Spaces

Ovid tells the story of Echo and Narcissus in the third book of his Metamorphoses.28 Echo’s unreciprocated love for Narcissus led her to a cruel fate. Besides the punishment the talkative nymph received (i.e. the echoing voice), Echo slowly wasted away until her bones became one with the rocks. The senses in the myth are sight (the seeing of the umbra or shadow in the water), hearing (Echo’s voice) and (the lack of ) touch.29 Narcissus does not wish to be embraced, nor can he touch his own image: he is a virgo intacta.30 Philip Hardie points out that the etymological root of the Latin word ‘imago’ can mean both a visual reflection and a sonorous reflection – an echo or imago vocis.31 The Greek ‘eikon’ does not have this double meaning.32 Ovid also questions the role of the body. Firstly, a voice presupposes a body, which is why Narcissus asks the voice to physically show itself. Echo starts with an invisible body, whereafters she appears with a body full of desire, which after its rejection vanishes due to her sorrow.33 The second ambiguity surrounding the body is regarding Narcissus’ reflection or simulacrum (what Ovid calls ‘umbra’). The word ‘simulacrum’ means ‘the spirit of a dead person.’34 And ‘umbra’ also has connotations with the concept of the underworld in Latin.35 “The fatal pool is still in the world above, and Narcissus is still a living human being; in the nature of things his torment cannot be eternal, and a Tantalus on earth starves as a result of his deprivation. The story reaches its final conclusion only with the disembodiment of Narcissus, and with the transformation of his pains on earth into a literal Tartarean torture: tum quoque se, postquam est inferna sede receptus, / in Stygia spectabat aqua. (…) (504–505).”36 In Ovid’s Narcissus myth Mieke Koenen recognizes traces of knowledge about the senses as discussed in the fourth book of De rerum natura (1st century BCE) by Lucretius (99–55 BCE). In verses 563–614, Lucretius mentions sound, the voice and most importantly, the echo.37 Following the Epicurean tradition, Lucretius considers sound to be a group of atoms penetrating the ear. According to the author, sound is the acoustic counterpart of

28 Louise Vinge, The Narcissus Theme in Western European Literature up to the Early 19th Century, Lund, 1967; Véronique Gély-Ghedira, La Nostalgie du moi. Écho dans la littérature européenne, Paris, 2000. 29 Alberto Borghini, L’inganno della sintassi. Il mito ovidiano di Narciso (met. 3, 339–510), in Materiali e discussioni per l’analisi dei testi classici, 1, 1978, p. 177–192. 30 Philip Hardie, Lucretius and the Delusions of Narcissus, in Materiali e discussioni per l’analisi dei testi classici, 20/21, 1988, p. 71–89, p. 78, note 17. Narcissus’ virginity is emphasized even more in the version by Catullus (84–54 BCE). 31 Philip Hardie, o.c., p. 74. 32 Ibidem, p. 72 ff. 33 Ibidem, p. 78. 34 Ibidem, p. 77. 35 John Brenkman, Narcissus in the Text, in Georgia Review, 30, 2, 1976, p. 293–327, p. 325: “a shade gazing a shade.” 36 Philip Hardie, o.c., p. 81. 37 Mieke Koenen, “Loca loquuntur.” Lucretius’ Explanation of the Echo and Other Acoustic Phenomena in “DRN” 4.563–614, in Mnemosyne, 57, 6, 2004, p. 698–724.

45

46

3. Towards a Hermeneutic of Cave Spaces

the simulacrum.38 Images were also thought to disperse an atomic substance that is transmitted as an uninterrupted flow, and were thus ‘perceived’ by humans when they reach the eye. For Lucretius, the sound of a voice contains three ‘actions:’ the voice touches the inner ear, it scrapes along the windpipe, and it weakens the nervous system if someone speaks for too long or too loud.39 Using your voice is comparable to a leaking wineskin.40 Sound spreading amongst people and in a space is like a ‘spark’ that can ignite different ‘hearths.’ According to Lucretius, echoes are also a phenomenon that can be explained by atoms, as the author denounced the superstitions of the people living in the mountains who believed that echoes were created by nymphs and satyrs. It becomes clear that the poet’s account of the formation of echoes runs analogous to his explanation of mirror images. In the foregoing account on effluences and vision, he has expounded that images in mirrors arise when a stream of simulacra hits on the mirroring surface, is thrown back and returns a vision ( for instance 4.106-7: repulsu / reiectae reddunt speculorum ex aequore visum). Within this context he has already hinted at the correspondences between the mechanism of visual reflection and that of the echo in using the expression res respondent to denote the appearance of resembling mirror images. (…) Mirror images seems to be underlined by the repetition of res in res respondent, the corporeal nature of sound is perhaps evoked by the expression sonorem/reddit in 4.570-1.41

The echo, as Lucretius states, can be heard in deserted places (loca sola, taciturna silentia) in the hills at night, when the landscape turns ‘opaque.’ In the verses 568–571, Lucretius explains that the echo is the result of a transitional phenomenon,42 when the atoms of the voice neither penetrate the ear nor scatter through the air. Echoes hover between a voice that was heard directly and a sound that fades away. Nymphs and satyrs are also beings of the in-between; they are demi-divinities with their bodies half man, half animal. They live where the gods themselves would not deign to live. It is in this complete solitude that the desolate echo appears: a non-human place that captures the imagination and hence, according to Lucretius, inspires the wildest myths. In his work Narcissus. Myth and Magic (2000), Max Nelson links the Ovidian myth not only to Lucretius’ Epicureanism, but also to contemporary magical practices.43 In the myth he recognizes the use of ‘scrying:’ predicting the future with a crystal ball, a reflective dish or the water’s surface. Scrying consists of a fixation on a certain point or image, followed 38 Mieke Koenen, o.c., p. 698. 39 Ibidem, p. 699. 40 Ibidem, p. 707–708. 41 Ibidem, p. 709–710. 42 Ibidem, p. 719. 43 Max Nelson, Narcissus. Myth and Magic in The Classical Journal, 95, 4, 2000, p. 363–389.

3. Towards a Hermeneutic of Cave Spaces

by trance and hypnosis with trance and hypnosis.44 According to the author, the Narcissus myth is filled with conditions that comply with this form of magic. First of all, Narcissus is a virginal young man, intact and not (yet) touched in a sexual manner. Secondly, there is the spring which has never been ‘touched’ by animals, the shepherds, the leaves of the trees, nor by the sun. These characteristics are strongly reminiscent of the practice of lecanomancy: waking the spirits of the dead (umbra, simulacrum) from the magical spring, the gateway between the human world and the underworld. To contact the dead, the purity of the water was of utmost importance, and the guidelines often explicitly stated that complete silence was necessary.45 In his Der Blick und die Stimme, Gregor Vogt-Spira looks at the Ovidian myth through contemporary theories on perception.46 Ovid’s unprecedented inclusion of Echo in the Narcissus myth creates ein Spiel mit den unterschiedlichen Registern der Sinneswahrnehmung und den Übergängen des einen in das andere.47 Echo and Narcissus mirror and amplify acoustic and optic registers which the Latin conventions of perception strongly linked. Ovid expands the theme of self-love into the Erkenntnisthematik.48 What one sees is ‘real’ if it lives and speaks; Narcissus’ reflection, however, is shrouded in silence.49 Narcissus enters into a dialogue with his mirror image, his mirage, by verbal (speaking to it), physical (trying to embrace it) and emotional (crying) communication, but all these means of communication just confirm the hopeless limitations of the situation. The most painful limitation is the motif of the mouth: the mouth opens and closes, but when it opens, no sound comes from it. There is no actual voice and Narcissus desperately wonders why no sounds from that mouth reach his ears. The aporia of Narcissus is that his ‘beloved’ does not answer. Nevertheless, it is precisely this lack of voice that leads to the famous insight of iste ego sum.

44 Max Nelson, o.c., p. 365: “Pausanias (c. 115–180) knew of the version represented in Ovid and Conon (9.31.7) but, suspicious of the possibility of one so naive as to not recognize his own reflection, he accepted as more authentic a second version, in which Narcissus goes to a spring to invoke the image of his incestuously beloved deceased twin sister by looking at his own reflection (9.31.8). Pausanias’ second version is remarkably reminiscent of ancient rituals of necromantic scrying, as I shall indicate, but Ovid’s account particularly includes numerous details which parallel prescriptions for scrying.” 45 Max Nelson, o.c., p. 376: “Johannes Tzetzes (1110–1180) (Ex. II. 110.8) goes so far as to say that for lecanomantic scrying a “virginal” bowl must be used in a “virginal” place where no woman has gone, as well as no man who has been made impure by having sex or eating meat. Also, the water is totally undisturbed in Ovid, acting thus as a perfectly smooth reflective surface of the type needed for scrying. In one instance of scrying the magician calls for everything around him to be still (earth, air, and sea) and for there to be no noise, in order for the ritual to succeed.” 46 Gregor Vogt-Spira, Der Blick und die Stimme. Ovids Narziss- und Echomythos im Kontexte römischer Anthropologie, in Narcissus. Ein Mythos von der Antike bis zum Cyberspace, ed. by Almut-Barbara Renger, Stuttgart, 2009, p. 27–45. 47 Gregor Vogt-Spira, o.c., p. 28. 48 Ibidem, p. 30. 49 Ibidem, p. 31; See also: Paul Zanker, Iste ego sum. Der naive und der bewusste Narziss, in Bonner Jahrbücher, 166, 1966, p. 152–170, p. 153.

47

48

3. Towards a Hermeneutic of Cave Spaces

According to the spirit of Ovid’s times, Echo, as the acoustic counterpart, would complete the Roman epistemology. As opposed to the Greeks, the Romans did not think looking at a face was enough to ‘observe’ the true depths of the persona. The voice of the visage (imago vocis) is needed to truly experience a living ‘face’ and thus encounter another person.50 In the Ovidian myth, Echo and Narcissus respectively mirror the ‘lack’ in the optic-acoustic personality theory. Ovid has split the two necessary facets, making the myth a love tragedy within the borders of an epistemological deficit. These analyses indicate how firmly embedded in the culture of the time were ideas surrounding desolate nature and the mystery of the echo, the role of sound as resonance and thus as pendant of the visual ‘reflection’ (imago), the interchangeability (mirroring is sonorous as well as visual) and the contrast of senses (Echo’s voice versus the silence of the umbra) in relation to the layered meaning of the body (physically present, physically disappearing), the allusions to mirror magic, fortune telling, and narcotics (the narcissus flower), the chthonic underlayer that rears up in the myth (death and the underworld) and the tragedy of unanswered love because of the impossibility of being able to experience the depths of the other person (respectively the lack of ‘the speaking visage’ and the ‘face behind the voice’). //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// I would like to conclude this chapter with the thoughts on the cave by cultural thinker Sigfried Giedion (1888–1968) in his The Eternal Present. The Beginnings of Art. A contribution on Constancy and Change (1957).51 The Czech-Swiss architectural historian was taught by Heinrich Wölfflin (1864–1945) in Zürich and went on to study at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology and Harvard University. What Giedion intended to achieve in his opus magnum of over five hundred pages was singularly ambitious. He dedicated himself to writing a comprehensive study of the origin of the plastic arts and their continuation until modern day in six parts: Art. A Fundamental Experience, The Means of Expression in Primeval Art, Symbolization, The Sacred Animal, The Human Figure, and The Space Conception of Prehistory. Giedion’s fascinating The Eternal Present was never a subject of study until an important addition was made by Spyros Papapetros.52 Papapetros writes:

50 Maurizio Bettini, Einander ins Gesicht sehen, im antiken Rom. Begriffe der körperlichen Erscheinung in der lateinischen Literatur, in Saeculum, 51, 2000, p. 1–23, p. 20. Now we understand the topos that were spread about Michelangelo (1475–1564), who is said to have asked his statue of Moses: Perché non parli!? 51 Sigfried Giedion, The Eternal Present. The Beginnings of Art. A Contribution on Constancy and Change, Washington, 1957. 52 Spyros Papapetros, Retracing ‘The Eternal Present’ (Sigfried Giedion and André Leroi-Gourhan), in RES: Anthropology & Aesthetics, 63–64, 2013, p. 173–189.

3. Towards a Hermeneutic of Cave Spaces

Giedion’s very idea of constancy as something that remains “hidden” and periodically “reawakens” is essentially a gloss on the dynamic nature of the unconscious as formulated in Freudian psychoanalysis. Archaic beliefs such as animism – the enlivening of natural and man-made objects by animate forces – signify for Giedion fundamental processes that are inherent to object-making. Giedion notes that animal representations such as those of bison and horses often appear to merge with the rock upon which they are carved; their prehistoric creators simply extract them from the stone or complete what was already created by natural forces on the mineral surface.53

Giedion was fascinated by the presence of large clusters of hands on the rock walls in the Aurignacian prehistoric cave art in France and northern Spain, and added the study Hands as Magic Symbols on the subject to the third part of his masterpiece, namely Symbolization.54 Giedion’s haptic approach, combining tactile with visual impressions, informs not only his original research, but also the basic structure of his writing. Within the long section on “Symbolization” in The Eternal Present, for example, Giedion examines “hands,” “circles,” and “vulva and/or phallus symbols,” followed by “animals” and the gradual emergence of the “human figure.” It is as if the historian immediately transcribed what he had first witnessed during his visit to the caves and simply rearranged the various figures from different sites into similar groups.55

For positive prints, the hand was coloured red with pigment and pressed against the rock wall (fig. 21). For negative prints, the colour pigment was blown between the fingers, which created a contour on the rock base. This last group was found most often in the aforementioned period, for example in the Caves of Gargas (in the Pyrenees region of France) (fig. 22). They are not placed at random, as they deliberately form ‘clouds,’ ‘columns’ or ‘friezes.’ ­Often these hands ‘grasp’ at an important groove or a natural crevice or alcove, which again points to an intentional integration of the natural features of the rock wall. Remarkable is that the cave hands are almost always left hands, and that they often seem mutilated.

53 Spyros Papapetros, o.c., p. 185.– I would like to add an observation by John Onians, Neuroarthistory. Reuniting Ancient Traditions in a New Scientific Approach to the Understanding of Art, in Arts. A Science Matter, ed. by Maria Burguete & Lam Lui, (World Scientific Publishing Company), 2011, p. 78–98, p. 87–88, which proved that there where bears had used their claws to leave behind marks on the rock walls, engraved drawings would appear nearby. The same can be said for stains that animals have left, which were then accompanied by colourful imprints, such as the hands and the paintings. Onians considers these juxtapositions the result of “mirror neurons.” “Unconsciously they imitate the bears in the same way that children would unconsciously imitate their parents.” In my opinion, this reflex also shows an interesting artistic capacity of these cave-dwellers: a visual mimesis between human and animal. 54 Sigfried Giedion, o.c., p. 93–125. 55 Spyros Papapetros, o.c., p. 178.

49

50

3. Towards a Hermeneutic of Cave Spaces

21 Five Positive handprints in the Galerie des Panneaux rouges, Caves of Chauvet, Dordogne, France, Have not yet been directly dated but Predate the black drawings from the same cave