The Ice Age cave art in Southwestern Europe is one of the great wonders of the world–true world heritage art incredible in its realism and artistic quality. It was first brought to the attention of archaeologists in 1879 when the young Maria Sautuola entered a cave now known as Altamira on her father’s property in northern Spain. No one had ever seen mammoths, rhinoceroses, bison, reindeer, or lions before. These only existed in Europe over 12,000 years earlier during the Ice Ages. At first, people could not believe that these paintings could be so old, but gradually more examples were found and they were accepted as genuine. And so began a long line of attempts to try to understand what motivated people to create this art so long ago (32,000 to 12,000 years ago) and what role it might have played in their societies.
The explanations that people have used over the last century have varied from hunting magic, to simple art for art’s sake (by gifted and inspired individuals), to shamanic records of their visions or animal familiars, to representations of family or lineage crests, to representations of binary oppositions (male: female; light: dark; life: death; &c.); to rituals to increase animals; and for tribal initiations. There has been no consensus about their meaning.
Source: Norbert Aujoulat. 2004. Lascaux. Seuil: Paris.
The most striking things for me about the best of these paintings are: 1) that they occur so deep inside caves; 2) that the artists were clearly trained specialists; 3) that great efforts were often taken to create these paintings (erecting scaffolds, complex paint recipes, long sojourns inside caves); 4) that visits to caves were infrequent; and 5) that the animals depicted were not the animals which were usually hunted but what I would call “power animals.” In addition, a study conducted by Suzanne Villeneuve and myself in some of these caves indicated that only a restricted number of people could have viewed some of the best art at one time indicating a fairly exclusive group of people privileged to see them.
All of these factors made sense to me in terms of my studies on ethnographic traditional secret societies and the secret rituals that they held in remote, secluded locations. So, we can now add another, and I think the best, explanation for the creation of Ice Age cave art: it was created and used by secret societies for their rituals. This is a major feature in my adventure novel for young readers about those times: The Eyes of the Leopard.
