I recently paid a visit to the Provencal village of Roussillon, that extraordinary location where great ochre deposits are visible in the cliffs upon which the town is perched. During the trip I learnt that the village has a legend to explain these colours, the tale of Lady Surmonde. The legend has similarities to many aboriginal myths in the way it explains the origin of the colourful red ochres as having been stained by the blood of a mythological figure.
I decided to write a poem about this, expanding the legend a little to make Surmonde a rock artist and trance dancer so the blood infused in the rock carries the essence of her passion.
It’s a curious fusion in some ways. The myth has some obvious similarities to those of the classical / Western / Greco-Roman tradition with its tragic heroine. I’ve drawn this out and expanded on it, making her the muse of rock art.
For me, this conflation of aboriginal Dreamtime and the realm of classical myth is not so odd. Part of how we can put the final nail in the coffin of the colonial mindset is by transforming Western culture itself into an indigenous one, and that means allowing it to stretch back to and embrace its own Dreamtime, the age of the European cave painters, so its roots are in the Earth and there is deep cultural richness at the heart of the culture rather than a gap that might seem to need to be filled by conquest and acquisition.
The Greek theatre of Golden Age Athens has been described as the greatest miracle in the history of culture, but all they really did was add polish, proportion, geometry, rhetotic to story telling traditions and modes that had been maintained for tens of millenia. The Greeks were jusy expert makeup artists of mythic matter.
Aboriginal cultures long told stories in dramatised ways, with different voices for different characters and making use of other arts such as song and dance. It’s too easy to fall into the trap of making biased comparisons between Greek mythology and these other mythologies that are skewed by the halo effect, mesmerised by attraction to the makeup that was applied to the core mythic matter. But that halo effect is in this case a valuable precious thing, so the answer is not to uglify the Greek myth; rather, the obvious course of action is to take other matter from elsewhere and apply the same makeup. To show that Trojan women are as beautiful as Helen and that Paris had no need to sail away with the Greek queen – hence that there is no need for another Tojan war.
One of the simplest ways to apply proportion and geometry to a story is to turn into metered verse.
In this case I haven’t done so with an actual aboriginal myth but rather with this French legend that has this strong similarity with such myths about ochre-blood, because as said part of my goal is to reveal Europe’s own Dreamtime – the Arcadian Dreamtime. Afterall, the motif of ochre as the blood of a mythic figure is a meta-myth: there are many versions from different places and it was obviously transported to new lanscapes and applied in new ways, so why not France, given that there is already such a tale, authentically old?
You can read the poem here below, but there’s also an audio version in the YouTube video above, complete with some images to help tell the tale, created with a bit of AI assistance. The irony of using AI to create images of the story of a muse of a rustic art form that is all about perfornance and process and working tangibly with materials from the ground is not lost on me, but these are merely intended to be illustrations of the story, not works of art themselves, and i like a bit of contradiction.
In the starting stages of writing the poem, I also used some AI assistance just to get the ball rolling. Having decided on the general thematic structure, I gave Chatgbt my instructions, and there was that initial surprise when it came back with something intelligible, but on reflection I realised it wasn’t saying what I wanted it to say nor in the way I wanted it to say it, but it served as a starting point to use for a rewrite. I think one, maybe two verses have remained from that AI version (the bit about love’s snare), but most of it has changed completely. Here is the final version:
An Ochre Ode
In Roussilon, the southern sunlight streams, On ochre cliffs, lit sharp against the blue, The rocky walls, banded with fiery seams, Rise bold in brightest red and yellow hue.
High pinnacles remember what is past, Strong colors sing of nature’s art profound, With lofty grace, the ancient rocks hold fast, The painter’s eye in awe forever bound.
Whence came such colour? How and when and why? There lived a lady, Sermonde was her name,
With passion for the Earth and for the sky, Her young and tender heart was all aflame.
With brush in hand, she captured what she saw, From birds that soared upon the Summer breeze, To noble beasts that roamed the forest floor, In every stroke, she breathed life into these.
This lady loved the wild Bacchic dance, Through which a mantic fire flowed through her heart, And as she entered elevated trance, A mystic potency enthused her art.
From here, her story takes a crueller twist, Her lover to her husband is revealed,
Who to Sermonde serves up the foulest dish: Her lover’s heart beneath the sauce concealed.
In grief and horror Sermonde climbs the hills,
Despairing, throws herself from their great height,
Then from her mortal wounds the red blood spills, To stain the rock with colour, ever bright.
The cliffs, a testament to her despair, Their hue a tribute to her anguished soul, Each crimson drop, a symbol of love’s snare, Her tragic tale, forever they extol.
But in her wake, her passion still remains, Infused within the pigments we procure, From rocks she fed, her ardor yet sustains, The vibrant art, by love’s fair touch ensured.
So, when the brush upon the surface glides, And ochre pigments bring the scenes to life, It’s Lady Sermonde’s spirit that abides, Her passion, fierce, dispelling all dull strife.
So blend the pigment, make the sacred mixture, Take the brush and work in ancient style, Use living paint to make a living picture, Culture makes a window on the wild.
And so through many metamorphoses, Into the beasts that walk the scrubland plain, Once more she breathes and moves and feels and sees, For when we paint, fair Sermonde lives again.
Above the clouds where Zeus’s temples shine, The Muses circle round and round again, And while some say the count of them is nine, Others know in truth the number’s ten.
For Sermond’s spirit rose to her new home, Within the gods’ great sacred company, Zeus honoured her for painting beasts on stone, And made her muse of rustic artistry.
“The lynx would contribute markedly to ecosystem functions by hunting and disturbing roe deer… It is a disgrace to UK wildlife conservation that the species is still absent.” Roy Dennis, Restoring the Wild.
If you’re at all familiar with rewilding, you probably know about the importance of apex predators as keystone species and how trophic cascades impact biodiversity. You may be familiar with particular examples. You may have heard how the first discovered case of this was the ochre sea star, and how it has a regulating function in rock pool ecosystems without which the system collapses completely. After the importance of apex predators was discovered in the context of this small marine ecosystem, opportunities arose to witness the same phenomenon in much larger ones.
You’ll probably be familiar too with the case of the wolves of Yellowstone in the US. Wolves were eradicated, and it had a massive effect on the place. Numbers of deer (known as elk in the US) went up, and these deer also moved around less and spent more time in certain places which previously they had avoided out of fear that they might get trapped there and be unable to escape. Coyotes became the apex predator, but their prey was smaller, so levels of smaller mammals dropped. The deer overgrazed, reducing the number of trees. The beavers who ate these trees had less food and less material for their dams and shelters, and their numbers dropped, which had knock on effects as they are themselves a keystone species. There was much erosion of river banks and the courses of rivers were changed, becoming less meandering, and less conducive to wildlife. The numbers of fish, insects, songbirds and amphibians also dropped. Species that were used to scavenging on wolf kills also suffered, such as bears, eagles and ravens.
A decision was made to reintroduce wolves, and everything I just mentioned was reversed. That the wolf creates the right kind of order and even, indirectly, changes the course of rivers, makes it seem just like one of those Australian Dreamtime totems that emerged in deep time and created the landscape and instituted that right way to live on the land – which gives this a powerful cultural resonance, as well as – and reflecting – the ecological value. Indeed, the wolf is a feature of this ecological landscape. Imagine that ecological landscape represented as an actual physical landscape, and you would have a wolf mountain somewhere in there, as it is necessarily a permanent feature of it: a landscape feature creature, like a Dreamtime site sacred to an animal totem.
Of course, it wouldn’t be appropriate to release wolves into any little woodland – for one thing, they need a big range so there’s enough prey to support them. But the resistance that many people have to the release of wolves even in appropriate places is unfounded. There is in fact a sparsity of evidence that wolves have ever been much of a threat to humans. So where did that idea come from? It is more likely that they became demonised by farmers when they took livestock. New ways to protect livestock are a better option than simply eradicating wolves, who have a right to exist in the plces where they are part of the natural ecosystem.
While there may be resistance to releasing wolves into the wild in many areas, this is less likely to be an issue with lynxes, as these extremely shy creatures are even less likely to attack humans than wolves. We should think of the few hundred years since they became extinct in Britain as being only yesterday, a blink of an eye, and this would help us frame it as the very recent loss of a natural feature of the landscape, that, no questions asked, should be restored.
It’s partly because the lynx stands a better chance of being reintroduced in my home country of Britain that I’ve chosen it as my next rock art Keystone Creation. More specifically, the lynx could be released in the Scottish Highlands, as it needs a large territory, and it could prove enormously valuable in restoring the Caledonian forest, by its impact on deer. It was also considered for the Forest of Dean to keep wild boar numbers in balance, as it would prey on the piglets, but this didn’t get final approval because of the number of roads running through the area, or something.
“There’s been enough research. At some stage politicians must be bold enough to show support so that we can just get on with it. Surely it’s time for the Scottish government to license the return of the missing lynx.” Roy Dennis, Restoring the Wild.
Another reason I’ve chosen the lynx for my next rock art piece is because it’s an animal whose presence requires amplification through art, because even if it’s somewhere in the landscape, we’re very unlikely to see it, as it’s so shy and elusive. If it is reintroduced, art will have a real role to play in making us conscious of its presence, by acting as its stand in. So for example, lynx rock art in a highland glen could make the invisible visible.
It’s this very shyness that could well work in its favour, because it is so unthreatening to us humans. The |Xam San hunter gatherers of Southern Africa even had a myth a bit like the story of How the Leopard Got its Spots, but which took the theme of How the Lynx Did NOT Become a Man Eater.
The Hyena and the Lynx
Back in Primal Time, when animals were like people and people like animals, an anteater person and a lynx person quarrelled over a springbok maiden. The anteater wanted to be the springbok’s mother and the lynx wanted to be her husband. The lynx pointed out that the real mother of the springbok girl was a female springbok. The anteater then cursed the lynx so that he would only marry a female lynx and would be an eater of springboks – this is when lynxes became not lynx people but full lynx animals. The lynx in turn cursed the anteater to be an anteater animal, and this is when anteaters likewise became not a type of person, but an animal, living in a hole, having only anteater children, and eating ants. The impact of the curses then expended: the anteater’s curse on the lynx expand so that all animals would marry their own kind and the lynx’s curse on the anteater expanded so that all animals would have children of their own kind. These rules are known as the Anteater’s Laws, and they extended to including what each animal would eat, with the remaining human people being the ones who would get to eat meat cooked on a fire and wear clothes and shoes made from skins. As such, these were early time events accounting for the current order of things, which is a feature of totemic cultures; there are many aboriginal myths that do the same thing. The lynx is then a totem that plays a key part in how the order of things comes about.
Anyway, for whatever reason, the hyena, according to these rules, would be a human eater. The lynx, meanwhile, was to be an eater of springboks. However, the hyena then put some of her hyena potency into the lynx, and the lynx started to change (rather like someone becoming a werewolf). She grew longer hair, and started becoming more wild, less civilised, on her way to being a human eater, like the hyena. However, a dance was then held around a fire, like the all night curing trance dances the San still hold. Curing shamans, in their potent trance state, put their own elevated potency into the lynx, forcing out the hyena potency. The lynx lost the long hair from all over its body, except one place – it kept it on its ears, so it would have the hearing abilities of the hyena. This is why lynxes have long dark tufts of fur on their ears, as well as – importantly – why lynxes do not hunt humans. Meanwhile, the hyena was burnt by the fire, and withdrew into the darkness, away from the fire. And this is why this kind of hyena has a dark foot, because it stepped in the fire and was burnt.
This is a fascinating story. Not only does it have the key themes of lynxes being a) necessary features of the order of things (which we can take in our present context to mean the ecosystem) and b) of lynxes not being a threat to humans; it also tells us something about the very concept of rewilding. What do we mean when we talking of rewilding ourselves? Do we mean becoming more wildin the sense of less civilised, more like the hyena and less like the lynx? No. I think the curing trance dance is the kind of wildness we’re talking about: the wildness that makes us more civilised: the healing catharsis that pushes the sick, dysfunctional wildness out of us. I’m a regular trance dancer, using contemporary Trance music for my weekly and often twice-weekly sessions, and if you’re interested in my thoughts on this, have a look at one of my other blog sites, The Confessions of a Hungry Dawn Raver.
The Lynx would benefit the system
The lynx’s favourite food is deer, and by leaving their scent around the forest they also keep deer on the move, which has a big benefit in terms of preventing over-browsing. This means that in those areas at least, patches of lower story growth will appear that are beneficial to birds and insects, and this also helps to conserve the types of woodland plant that might otherwise be grazed out of existence. This is how they could help significantly in allowing the return of the Caledonian forests.
Lynx need large areas to roam, but even in Britain there are certain areas that would be suitable. At the moment, they’re extinct in Britain, but this could easily change. Britain is currently over populated with certain types of deer, so there is a strong argument for lynx reintroduction.
There are a number of reintroduction programs already underway in other parts of Europe, complete with compensation schemes for occasions when they take farmers’ livestock. Lynx need wooded areas, as they hunt by ambush.
If it were to be released in Britain, the lynx would be our largest wild predator, and the closest thing we’d have to the lions and leopards of the Serengeti. Predatory cats have been part of ecosystems across the world for a long stretch of deep, evolutionary time – they are a prominent feature of the ecological landscape. When thinking about the beneficial effects that the reintroduction of such a creature would bring, I can’t help but be put in mind of the return of Aslan to Narnia. The lynx is another landscape feature. The landscape feature in question – the Lynx Mountain – might be called the Sph-lynx.
There are a number of mountains and hills that look like lions, but there’s one for which I feel a particular affection. I refer you to the following video:
This one’s not on a Palaeolithic theme, but Pictish Stones are still a type of rock art, and a fascinating one at that. So I thought it might be worth posting here this video i made a while back. And one day I might have a go at making this type of art on a rock slab. It is, when all’s said and done, just a theory, but quite a good one a think.
This was a couple of years ago now. My first experiment in Earth Pigment Rock Art. I loved the experience of heading out into nature in my local area, finding some orange clay and then using it to paint a deer on piece of local limestone. It was like the re-enactment of some ancient myth of how the first deer was painted into being from the blood of the Earth.
A balance of woodland and grassland is facilitated by herbivores who maintain the meadows and by thorny scrub that creates protective nurseries for saplings, and the spread of thorny scrub is assisted by berry-eating birds that play a role in the dispersal of the seeds. But seeds need to get into the soil, and that can be tricky when there’s a thick mat of grass cover. Plants evolved seeds around the presence of animals that disturb the ground, creating bare and opened up patches. Wild pigs such as the wild boar played a very significant role.
Pigs with rootling habits once lived in natural ecosystems across vast swathes of the planet. There’s the red river hog and bush hog of the African forests and the warthogs of the African savanna and the wild boar that once roamed across most of the northerly regions of Eurasia. The animal was food for predators, which kept it moving and reduced its numbers, and this is part of the pattern, as too many pigs in one place creates damaging over disturbance. But assuming such balancing factors are in place, ground-disturbing rootling is a feature of the ecological landscape for all these regions – the wild pig is a keystone, a landscape creature feature, or, in terms of the totemic metaphor I explore in my Keystone Creations series – a Dreamtime being that became part of the ecological landscape.
The Knepp Tamworths and the Purple Emperor
Charlie Burrell and his and wife Isabella Tree witnessed the role of the wild pig when they rewilded the estate at Knepp, in Sussex, introducing Tamworths as a proxy for wild boar. Pioneer plants were able to seed in the disturbed ground left by their rootling, including those that created a better habitat for insects, such as wild flowers. Patches of disturbed ground allowed the spread of sallow, and since the rare purple emperor butterfly lays its eggs on sallow leaves, Knepp became the home of the largest UK colony of these impressive butterflies. Rare bees colonised some of the bare patches of ground, using it for their burrows. Ants made use of the clods of earth for their colonies, with these anthills in turn increasing biodiversity. The pigs also kept down plants that other grazers don’t eat, such as bracken and the underground roots of thistles and docks. And in Winter Charlie and Isabella noticed that wrens, dunnocks and robins trailed behind the ploughing boars eating the exposed invertebrates.
Henwen – myth of the biodiversity-spreading Wild Pig of Wales
There’s an old Welsh myth which seems to reflect the way wild pigs can bring biodiversity. A sow named Henwen (“Old White”) was chased through Wales, and at various, particular geographical locations, she gave birth to a number of different plants and animals. So, for example, she stopped at a place in Gwent and gave birth to a bee and a grain of wheat. The place is known as Wheat Field. As we’ve just seen, the disturbance of wild ranging pigs does indeed allow seeds to be born, to take root and grow and boars create habitats for rare bees. Henwen stopped again in Llonion in Pembroke/Dyfed, and gave birth to another bee and a grain of barley. At Lleyn in Arfon she gave birth to a grain of rye, and at the Hill of Cyferth in Eryri she produced a wolf-cub and eaglet, and at Llanfair in Arfon under the Black Rock, a kitten.
This story is more than passingly reminiscent of Australian myths of how a Dreamtime being such as the Rainbow Serpent passed across the land producing various plants and animals as she went, with the story being tied to particular locations and geographical features, and the journey forming a songline of interrelated stories.
Such Dreamtime beings often either painted themselves onto the wall of a rock shelter, or became features of the landscape. There are a couple of ways in which pigs can be thought of as having become part of the landscape here in Britain. For a start, there’s the long hill ridge in Surrey that is known as the Hogs Back, because it looks like this from a distance. For my latest Keystone Creation, I chose to paint an African red river hog, simply because it looks paint-o-genic to me, with striking colours that suit my earth pigment palette well, with an orange I’ve made from mixing red and yellow ochre from the south of France, lamp black (which is made from soot), and a white paint I made from British chalk. Would’ve been quite cool if I’d collected the Chalk from the Hog’s Back in Surrey, because it is indeed a ridge formed from chalk, and the red river hog does have a white line along the ridge of its back. I may get a chance later in the year to get some chalk from the Hog’s Back, in which case I will over paint using it along the ridge of the red river hog’s back.
The Cartographic Boar of Wales and England
Another of the ways in which pigs can be thought of as having become part of the landscape here in Britain. For a start, there’s the long hill ridge in Surrey that is known as the Hogs Back, because it looks like this from a distance. For my latest Keystone Creation, I chose to paint an African red river hog, simply because it looks paint-o-genic to me, with striking colours that suit my earth pigment palette well, with an orange I’ve made from mixing red and yellow ochre from the south of France, lamp black (which is made from soot), and a white paint I made from British chalk. Would’ve been quite cool if I’d collected the Chalk from the Hogs Back in surrey, because it is indeed a ridge formed from chalk, and the red river hog does have a white line along the ridge of its back. I may get a chance later in the year to get some chalk from the Hog’s Back, in which case I will over paint using it along the ridge of the red river hog’s back.
Another way that the pig can be thought of as having become part of the British landscape can be seen by looking at a map. As you can see, Wales and the southern half of England form the image of a charging boar. The Gower Penisula is the tusk. The Vale of Glamorgan is the cheek. Pemprokeshire is the snout. Anglesea and the Llyn peninsula are the ears. Cornwall is the front trotter. East Anglia is the rump.
Finally, it’s worth mentioning that of course the wild boar has returned to Britain. There are a number of areas now where they are living wild. Without their natural predators, the numbers need to be managed to mimic the natural balance, but if this can be achieved without going too far the other way, this can be counted as a British rewilding success story.
I do earth pigment rock art because I think we need to change our relationship to the planet. We need to feel less disconnected from it, and what better way to achieve that than through a “right brain” artisitc, creative engagement with clays and rocks to make earthy paintings of natural fauna on piece of rock? It’s a time-out, a break from the rat race of progress in the technological age, a return to an earlier time, a step away from the need for development and progress. I feel myself becoming once again a member of that ancient stone age clan: the People of Ochre.
A Most Inclusive Clan
All the same, I like to be a bit paradoxical, so I’m not a total luddite, and in fact I find it interesting to ponder how that favourite Earth pigment – hematite rich red ochre – is part of a long human story of technological development. It turns out that the People of Ochre clan is so inclusive that it encompasses rather than excludes the Neolithic and Classical cultures.
Hematite and human civilisation go hand in hand. Humans have had a great interest in hematite for a very long time. Indeed, there is evidence that we first started using it for decorative purposes as long as 100,000 years ago. Haematite, with its iron oxide content, is the mineral that gives red ochre and orange clay their colour. Its use in rock art as a potent paint with a long lasting stain on silicate-containing rocks spread around the world with the exodus of the first anatomically modern humans out of Africa (if not before). It was probably very early on that we discovered that heating yellow chore (containing hydrated iron oxide) would turn it, as if by magic, into red ochre – the first chemistry experiment?
Left: Red ochre bison, Altamira, Spain; Right: Roman mosaic, Verulamium, with terracotta tesserae
Pottery, roofing and Iron
The use of pottery was a major cultural shift, and as we started making clay pots, we continued using hematite-containing clays, also baking them to make roof tiles, so that the iron-oxide look continued to be a major feature of the aesthetic of towns in the classical world. We also made bricks from clay, and came to prize red-figure vases using red clay slips and terracotta amphorae as objects of beauty, as well as continuing to use ochre-based paints a great deal. Even as we left the stone age, the association continued: hematite is one of the principle iron ores from which we learnt to smelt iron, heating it at high temperatures along with charcoal, so the carbon combined with oxygen to make carbon monoxide, which reduced the iron oxide in the hematite, leaving pure iron and slag.
Hematite and Cheap, Clean Energy
And this close relationship between human culture and hematite may be set to continue. What the world needs now is dirt cheap clean power. A great number of geopolitical tensions and conflicts would evaporate and climate change could be far more effectively mitigated if energy was clean, easy and cheap as chips, and a shift to green transport and heating would be a synch if it was cheap. Hydrogen is a clean fuel – whether used in a combustion engine or a fuel cell. A fuel cell’s only waste product is water. But how do you get the hydrogen, cheaply?
Hydrogen can be obtained by water splitting – splitting apart the hydrogen and the carbon. This can actually be achieved using concentrated sunlight, with iron oxide (such as hematite) being placed in the water as a photocatalyst. It’s something to do with electrons and electron holes. (Don’t press me for the details.) This is very promising because hematite is cheap, and so is water, and sunlight is free. OK, you need a bit of apparatus too, but nothing too pricey. With plain hematite, it’s an inefficient process, but progress has recently been made using things like mesocrystals of hematite that have been ‘doped’ with metal ions. And even undoped nano-films are proving promising. And it looks like this can still be done without adding too much extra cost.
Coating objects with films of haematite is the root of human culture; it’s what rock artists did for thousands of years. Wouldn’t it be funny if it turns out this is the way forward for human culture too?
In today’s post I get to the heart of the idea that underpins the whole Rock Art 4 Rewilding thing: unifying nature and culture through totemism as ecological metaphor.
The Dreamtime
First, what do I mean by totemism?
One of the old hunter gatherer rock art cultures that we actually know something concrete about is the one from Australia. We know that they had -and still have – a concept of a time of origins, which is conventionally known as the Dreamtime. We know that the Dreamtime is a time of great ancestral animal beings whose activities in the deep past shaped the world and brought into being patterns of activity that paved the way for the right way of living on the land. We know that the landscape is written with the memory of these stories, with features of the land being lasting testaments to the events that occurred there, and with some special features being the bodies of those beings when they became one with the land when the events were done. We know that for these people, a connection to this Dreamtime must be maintained and we know that the practise of rock art at these special places is one of the ways the potency of the Dreamtime – its ability to infuse and enrich the present – is maintained.
Art making as a re-enactment of Dreamtime creations
Because this rock art is about the process of creation, with the act of making the rock art image dissolving the artist back into the Dreamtime moment of primordial creation, it is a practise that is more about performance and mythic re-enactment than it is about the finished product. This is incredibly freeing. When you create rock art in this tradition, it isn’t just a competition about who can create the most realistic image. It’s about how deep you can get into the spirit of the thing.
A Fusion of Old and New: Dreamtime as Ecological Metaphor
But for me it’s not all about escaping to ancient ways of being in the world in order to leave behind modern ways of seeing. There’s actually a lot of scope for a new fusion, I think, between the Dreamtime as a cultural concept and that branch of modern science that becomes more important every day: ecology.
For me the idea of the Dreamtime – a deeply ancient period that is in some sense still present – is easy enough to equate with the scientific idea of evolutionary time, during which the various organisms of nature came into being and assumed their patterns of form and behaviour, patterns that are still present, still played out. Ecology understands that each species has evolved to fill a particular niche in the ecological landscape, and if they lose that niche and can’t find a close analogue for it, they’re in trouble. It was during the Dreamtime that the various procedures for living life on the land emerged, yet the Dreamtime still mysteriously encompasses and guides the present moment. And keeping with this analogy, the totemic physical landscape with its mythologised hills and rocks becomes a metaphor for the ecological landscape, with the right order that emerged and which is to be maintained taking the form of an ecosystem. There are certain keystone species whose presence is particularly important to the maintenance of a healthy ecosystem, and so the Dreamtime animal beings whose great bodies became one with the landscape in the form of rocks, hills, mountains and so on – these can stand for those keystone creatures that have had such a longstanding impact that other organisms have evolved around that impact, so that these keystone species are likewise lasting features of the ecological landscape. Were they to disappear, the land would be downgraded because all those other organisms that are used to them being there would reduce in numbers or disappear completely, leading to a loss of biodiversity and thus a loss of the robustness of the system’s ability to deal with whatever may come.
An animal like, say, a tiger, can be kept alive, with human intervention, in an environment that isn’t what it evolved for, like, say, a cramped city Zoo, but its endless pacing back and forth is clear evidence that it is not happy; it needs to express its natural behaviour. The same goes for the animals that humans raise in battery farms, kept alive with antibiotics even though they’re sick; it’s no life for them. So we can go beyond cold, dry equations here, and consider that a high-functioning ecological landscape where the niches animals evolved for are still present…this is also landscape of fulfilment for the various stakeholders. And that goes for us too. Rewilded areas stir something natural in ourselves. And the fact that we engaged with nature in various ways including the creation of animal image rock art for many, many thousands of years suggests to me that it is a natural behavioural expression for us, and that might be part of why it feels good. I refer you back to my earlier points about doing paleo style art as I way to open a dialogue with your inner paleo self.
But back to the Dreamtime=Evolutionary Time analogy. I think the power of this analogy – where the Dreamtime-mythologised physical landscape is a metaphor for the deep-time evolved ecological landscape – derives from the fact that the physical landscape and the ecological landscape really are scarcely distinguishable from each other; ecosystems are what happen on landscapes when they’re left to their own devices.
The Goanna: both Keystone Species and Dreamtime Landscape Being
The Australian monitor lizard came to mind because it stands at the intersection between the ecological and Dreamtime landscapes, between the modern concept of a keystone species and the totemic concept of a Dreamtime animal, and that’s why I chose it for my piece of rock art.
In Australia monitor lizards are known as goannas, and in the Bundjalung area on the West Coast it’s the great goanna that is the primary Dreamtime totem of the local clan. It’s called Dirawong. There are various versions of the story of this creature. It was one of the beings that rose up out of timeless slumber in the Dreamtime and shaped the landscape during its battle with the Rainbow Serpent, including creating the course of a river that flowed out into the sea, before eventually settling into the landscape as a fixed form itself: the Evans Head headland that juts out into the ocean near this estuary. An ochre deposit on the top of this headland is said to be the wound where the Rainbow Serpent bit it, with the ochre being the blood of the Goanna. This ochre is held to be sacred, containing the potency of Dirawong, and the people apply it to the skin as body decoration in ceremonies, thus strengthening their quasi-ancestral connection to this being and its potency.
The Dirawong story does seem to lend itself very well to an ecological reading, because according to some versions, Dirawong attacked the Rainbow Serpent because the latter was trying to attack a bird and the goanna wanted to protect the bird. Snakes do eat birds and goannas do eat snakes, and this part of the story is echoed by the way that the goanna, as an apex predator, is a keystone species: if it were to be removed, there would be an imbalance in the system, a trophic cascade, a knock on effect cascading through the food chain; for example it might indeed be that there would be too many snakes and this could indeed lead to a reduction in the number of birds, which would have further knock on effects. Apex predators really can affect the course of rivers, as with the reintroduced wolves of Yellow Stone: by reducing the overgrazing of deer they allowed trees to grow again by the rivers which shored up the banks and changed the way the water flowed over the land.
I don’t know whether there was a time when the people in this part of Australia hunted too many goannas, noticed the impact this had on the other wildlife, and then chose to limit the hunting of the goanna to allow what we would now call rewilding. It’s entirely possible. But either way, the story fits the ecological narrative perfectly.
Also fitting with this is the way that this lizard, Dirawong, is directly associated with the order that emerged out of the Dreamtime and which is to be maintained if nature is to continue to be high-functioning, for Dirawong is believed by the people to have taught the correct way to live on the land.
There are other ways that monitor lizards are keystones, beyond the role as apex predator. It’s been found that yellow spotted monitors bury their eggs in burrows as deep as four metres underground and a whole host of other animals then repurpose these as their own burrows, nests and places to seek refuge. If the monitor lizards were to disappear, then a literal ecological niche in the landscape would be lost – these burrows. Gopher tortoises in the USA play a keystone role for a similar reason, their borrows being used by a vast array of other animals.
Among the many things that Dirawong taught the people was how to create rock art, which also uses the ochre – its own blood – as the substance. We could make a literal interpretation of the way that this lizard is seen as a teacher of body decoration and painting techniques, because the markings along its back are a series of spots that look like they could have been done by finger painting with yellow ochre, encouraging people to create similar patterns on their own skin with ochre paint for special occasions such as ceremonial dances in which they renew their connection to the totem.
Totemic peoples believe direct contact with sacred Earth pigment paint gives them a quazi-ancestral connection to the Dreamtime beings whose potency the paint is believed to embody, which provides the flexibility for newcomers to join a clan and acquire its totemic ancestors, but also connects them to nature. The ochre-blood of Dirawong and many other similar Dreamtime figures is in the land in the sacred places where it was spilled in the Dreamtime events, in the animals descended from the being and painted into being from that blood, and in the people who paint themselves with this same substance. So there is a three-fold consubstantiality connecting land, people and animals. Another example is Marlu, the Dreamtime red kangaroo, whose blood spilt when it was being hunted became the big ochre deposit at Wilgie Mia. Kangaroos are also ecosystem engineers in Australia, with studies showing that there are places where there was increased biodiversity where they grazed.
Dirawong: Teacher of Spot Art
We still like the feeling of belonging to a tribe, and engaging directly with Earth pigments can feel like an induction into a tribe that has no other, no enemy, because it encompasses all of us: the Earth Tribe, the People of Ochre in its many shades. We at least want the practise of rock art to be as hands on as possible so it can be a healthy counterbalance to the preponderance of digitally created images in the modern world.
As the teacher of finger painting and body decoration, Dirawong seems to draw us into an artistic engagement with the Earth and with nature, which I think has enormous value. Even in the current age, artistic engagement with rewilding is an important element of community uptake, facilitating a big shift in how it’s framed. Wherever we find communities who have embraced the reintroduction or conservation of a particular wild animal, we find them congealing this energy of communal enthusiasm into works of art that then radiate these positive feelings. Think of the German town of Bad Harzburg, which has taken the reintroduced lynx to its heart and expressed this through a number of sculptures; or the way the people of North East England have welcomed the reintroduction of red kites with the local buses being covered in red kite artwork; and in Africa’s first community-owned elephant sanctuary, the Reteti sanctuary in northern Kenya, the enthusiasm for conserving the elephant radiates from a wonderful contemporary large-scale piece of rock art of an elephant. There are many other examples, such as the bronze Golden Eagle sculpture in Glendoe in Scotland, and the giant 50-ton American bison monument in Jamestown in North Dakota.
For me personally, it’s the old practise of rock art that seems like a particularly appropriate medium for expressing ideas about keystone species who are part of the landscape, because both the rock and the paints made out of Earth pigment are themselves literally parts of the landscape, and more specifically the pigments soak int the rock and become a part of it.
I’ve gone for the contemporary Australian dot art style here around my rock art Goanna. This style evolved relatively recently, in the context of a non-aboriginal art market, but since it emerged it has always been associated with telling the stories of the Dreaming. I chose it here partly to make the piece more eye catching, but also because the dot art style comes out of the much older aboriginal traditions of body painting, where spots of colour added by finger painting are a common feature. This seems to be appropriate for this particular piece because of this way that the monitor has natural spots of colour of a similar type, as if it too has been decorated by finger painting.
The short video here shows me making a rock art image of three animals that form a “herbivore guild”. For me, this is rich with intriguing associations – see my blurb below to find out why.
Like many people who are into “rewilding”, I like the idea of there being impressive creatures living lives where they can express their natural behaviours in natural settings in appropriate areas not too far from where I live. I felt an urge to create some art that carries the essence of that idea. The animals that live on a landscape are part of that landscape, which means the landscape includes the animals, and they also form an ecological landscape – a set of niches that various other animals have evolved to make use of – and so I thought I’d make a piece of art that does the same thing – makes animals that are part of the landscape, by using paints made from Earth pigments on a real rock canvas. So the canvas is a piece of landscape, or a micro-landscape. So in its very substance the rock art really embodies this idea of these animals being part of the landscape. That’s the basic idea of it: rock art for rewilding.
Herbivore Guildand Mosaic of Habits
For this painting, I decided to show three large herbivores that together can contribute to biodiversity: a red deer stag, a hardy Tauros bull close to its wild aurochs ancestor, and a wild Exmoor pony, again, of a kind close to the ancient type, as these wild types are hardy and able to survive in the wild. Such guilds can form an important part of rewilding projects, where they are allowed to engineer mosaics of different habitats.
The importance of these mosaics is talked about a lot, but what does it actually mean? I think this can be illustrated by the case of the nightingales of Knepp. Ornithologists are still, at the time of writing, trying to work out exactly why, when these birds with their amazing song have disappeared from most of Britain and their numbers are still falling, there is a burgeoning population at Knepp which has arrived since the rewilding project began. It’s known that part of the reason has to do with the way that thick scrub has grown up in this landscape in a special way, namely where it is in close proximity to fertile grazed meadow. This has come about through the combination of allowing the land to scrub up, as well as introducing large herbivores hardy enough to survive without chemical assistance. These herbivores have both slowed down the process by which thorny scrub becomes closed canopy woodland and have kept open the areas of meadow between the patches of scrub, keeping these grass areas full of healthy dung that sustains large numbers of invertebrates, tightening up the scrub between the open patches in the process. Populations of creatures that depend on dung need it all year round, so animals that are hardy like their ancient ancestors and don’t need to be taken into barns in the Winter are important. This mixed habitat is what many animals are after. For example, the nightingale seeks the thick thorny scrub to nest and for safety and shelter, but it also likes to be on the edge of grassy areas rife with invertebrates where it can venture out short distances to hunt for food.
Knepp gives it exactly what it needs. Turtle doves and cuckoos are likewise honey-throated birds of the scrubby, grassy ‘woodland edge’ who are doing surprisingly well at Knepp and badly in most other places in the UK.
Earth Pigment Paints
The colours I needed for the three herbivores in my painting are not at all difficult to make, which is handy. I only really needed some red, orangey browns, dark brown, black and some white for the muzzles. I always use natural pigments, sometimes purchased or made using purchased ochres and sometimes I find pigment sources myself in the landscape. Finding the pigments can be fun. We’re hunter gatherers by nature, so we like to get out into nature, find something and bring it back. So going out and collecting earth pigment materials just kind of fits well with our own nature, which makes it an example of rewilding yourself, or perhaps re-naturalising would be a better term.
Making paints can be fun too. For this painting, the red pigment for the red deer came from a beach in Studland on the Isle of Purbeck. I made this from some soft red sandstone I got from a boulder that had fallen down onto the beach. I didn’t want the sand from the sandstone to be in the paint, making it rough and grainy. I didn’t want to grind the sand down into a fine powder either, because the inside of the grains is a light colour that would lighten the paint. I loosely broke it down into sand and then boiled and stirred it in water for a time, then decanted off the coloured water leaving the sand grains behind (as briefly shown in the above video). The other paints in this piece are also made form materials I’ve collected in the landscape, except the black which is lamp black: a paint made from soot. The rock slabs I use are a hard sandstone, which allows the paint to soak in and stain it.
Calling out from the past
As regards the subject matter, this is my own version of that scene in the Lascaux Hall of Bulls where aurochs, deer and wild ponies are shown together. A few years ago, I was out shopping – I think I was in WHSmiths – and the Simple Minds song with the refrain “Don’t you forget about me” was playing at the moment that I happened to be looking at some artwork showing some animals that went extinct around the time of the last mini ice age – I think it could have been a promotional poster for one of the animated Ice Age films. Anyway, the combination of this song along with the sight of those animals felt like one of those skin-tingling moments of a-causal meaningful coincidence that Jung called Synchronicity. In other words, it felt like this was a kind of message from the beyond saying “don’t forget about those animals.” When I chose the title for my current series of rock art paintings, I went for Keystone Creations, and I also chose a secondary strapline: Rock Art for Rewilding. Looking at those ancient cave paintings from places like Lascaux, Chauvet and Altamira can give you the same skin-tingling feeling of something calling out from the past asking not to be forgotten. And in fact the feeling that these paintings give us has surely helped the rewilding cause in tangible ways.
Pony, deer and aurochs in Lascaux
While I felt the tingle, standing there hearing the Simple Minds song while looking at the Ice Age poster, I couldn’t answer the why: why might it be so important not to forget about them?
The important of the ecologically “recent” past
From things I’ve been reading and watching more recently, I think I have more of an answer to that now. It’s not simply a matter of recreating something from the past that is lost, just for the sake of it. There have been many different ecosystems in different periods of Earth’s history with all sorts of creatures that don’t now exist, and we couldn’t recreate all of them. It has to start from a position of finding nature based solutions. I’ll pick out three things for now that need solutions. Firstly, the Earth, including my native Britain, is suffering from a great loss of biodiversity. Biodiversity allows nature to be robust in the face of future changes. We need to keep nature biodiverse. Second, in large areas of Europe there is rural depopulation and a decline in traditional agriculture. These areas could quite easily become self-managing national parks with the same kind of pull as those in Africa if they hosted diverse, vibrant and charismatic communities of flora and fauna. People would be drawn to visit them, which would have economic advantages for those areas. Thirdly, such rewilding areas would be of great psychological benefit to humans. Getting out in nature is good for mood, but having the Serengeti on your doorstep is at a whole other level.
Large herbivore guilds are an important part of this picture. Animals that had an ongoing impact over evolutionary spans of time created niches for other animals to occupy. To upgrade ecosystems, you need an awareness of what those niches are, even if you need to introduce proxy animals or analogous niches to create them. Those plants and animals that are around now fit into niches in the recent ecological past, and by recent I mean the Pleistocene and Mesolithic, because evolution is a slow process. And it so happens that human culture existed in the Palaeolithic; we ourselves evolved into what we are, took on our current nature, during the Pleistocene.
The Eco-Services of the Aurochs
To choose one element of the herbivore guild shown in my painting, large, hardy cattle capable of eating a diverse natural diet can have multiple ecological effects. Aurochs were massive animals, with the males standing up to 2m at the shoulder. There are projects underway to breed cattle similar to aurochs, their ancient ancestor, such as the Tauros project in Spain. I should mention first of all that we’re talking about much lower numbers per acre than the ten million cows currently in the UK, so methane release is not something we need to be concerned about. The aurochs was an important feature of the fauna of old Europe. Some of the ecological effects are:
Maintaining a balance of woodland and pasture. Their heavy hooves push tree seeds into the ground and their weight and behaviours can help tree growth, which is to their benefit because the woods provide much of their winter food, when the temperature cools and the grass stops growing. Simultaneously they maintain areas of open pasture. The evolution of grass is such that it expects to be grazed. Without grazing, the old dead grass lies around, only decomposing slowly. Grazing rapidly turns grass into dung which puts the nutrients back into the earth more quickly in a decomposed form. This combination of wooded areas and pasture is good for biodiversity.
Healthy dung. Because these types of cattle are hardy, they can survive on natural food and without medication throughout the year. This means their dung is healthy, not polluted by strong chemicals. As a result, it’s fantastic for the soil and for invertebrates. A quarter of its own body weight in invertebrates per year are sustained by the dung of one cow. These invertebrates are then food for other animals such as birds and small mammals. The urine and dung also enrich the soil, helping to increase biomass.
These large animals create paths through the forest that are important for many other small animals and plants. Because they browse, they also trim back the forest plants, which again creates the niche that natures expects, on an evolutionary level, and so benefits a number of plants and animals. Without these herbivores, certain plants grow into a “leggy” form that is not actually the balanced state that nature expects to see in evolutionary terms. These leggy plants crowd out other ones making poor quality habitats for flora and fauna.
Nutrient pathways. These large animals eat in one place, then move around, dropping their dung as they go. This can help to move nutrients from areas where they are rich to areas that would otherwise be nutrient-poor.
What about methane?
You might be thinking: hey, but aren’t the livestock that are killing the planet also large herbivores? There’s actually no comparison. It’s not just the difference in diet that means less methane. It’s also, above all, the massive difference in numbers. Natural, wild populations in functioning ecosystems are much smaller than intensive livestock ranches. Then there’s other factors, such as the make up of the herds. Livestock operations consist of young, fast growing, quick metabolising cattle, which are replaced rather than living lives as mature animals. Hence, they consume more and produce more methane. Then there’s the equine component: horses produce less methane than cattle. Plus there’s the fact that existing ecosystems are systematically destroyed in order to create livestock operations, which is very different to rewilding projects. But mainly, it’s the massive difference in the numbers.
A diversity of eating styles
The rewilding idea is not about introducing just one large herbivore. It is a mixture of different grazers and browsers with different dietary predilections that helps to maintain a diverse range of plants, and thus wildlife. While red and roe deer are predominantly browsers of fresh tree growth by choice but will also graze to an extent, fallow deer, ponies and cattle are grazers by choice, but will also browse. And while ponies eat coarse grasses, cattle prefer fine grass. As such, this trio are not in major competition for food, and because diversity creates diversity, these guilds are also good for maintaining a wide array of plants, their combined effect reducing the chance that one particular plant will dominate and crowd out others. As deer’s favourite food is saplings, they help maintain open grassy areas, which benefit the grazers, and the deer feel more safe with big things with horns on side. This guild can exist autonomously within mosaics of woodland and grassland, as a keystone collective, in other words engineering habitats that many other creatures make use of.
In various places there are now areas of mixed landscape combining grassland and wooded areas where herbivore guilds graze and browse in the ways they evolved for, such as deer as well as wild ponies and hardy wild cattle chosen to be as close as possible to their ancestors, as found in the old cave art. A pioneering example was the Oostvaardersplassen in the Netherlands. As an experiment, to counteract biodiversity loss, a guild of large herbivores was introduced here featuring wild ponies, hardy cattle and red deer, to create a Serengeti-like landscape. The results were amazing, with populations of small mammals and birds rebounding. An example of a British rewilding experiment inspired by the Oostvaardersplassen is the Knepp estate in Sussex, which again has been an extraordinary success and has produced results concerning the numbers of other species such as rare birds and butterflies that conservationists had only dreamed about. I find it interesting also that the only place where a type of cicada lives in the UK is the New Forest, which has long been grazed by both ponies and cattle, as well as deer. The New Forest is a very important area for many other plants and animals too, several of which are found nowhere else. It’s interesting now that nature reserves in the Isle of Purbeck area are looking to follow in the footsteps of the New Forest, by introducing some ponies and cattle and also pigs I believe to reduce certain plants that are threatening to overtake the area. There’s also something to be gleaned from the fact that though sparrows have disappeared from almost all of London now – an extraordinary concept to get your head around – the one place in London with a descent sparrow population now is London Zoo, because of the insects that the large animals attract.
As well as this ecological motivation, such rewilding is also motivated by the idea that people will benefit from contact with such charismatically creative natural systems, and undoubtedly the images in those old caves has helped to inspire the vision. Indeed, one of the reasons why I think deer and horses should be considered where suitable and appropriate for rewilding projects is precisely that they create human engagement. Now that – like it or not – we’re in the Anthropocene, this is a very important factor, giving humans a gut level reason to value the area as an, in quotes “undeveloped wilderness”. Such animals become an asset to an area precisely for this reason. It’s been said that horses make a landscape more beautiful and the same can be said of deer, which we feel lend an air of nobility and majesty, and humans have long felt some kind of totemic connection to large ungulates such as cows. We continue to get a moment of thrill from seeing deer unexpectedly, derived in large part no doubt from ancient, atavistic instincts hardwired into us in evolutionary time, where we recognise an animal with which we existed in a natural predator-prey ecological relationship. Our myths are full of magical deer, white harts and golden hinds, spirit animals that guide us to our exalted fate in the enchanted forest. Really, they’re guiding us back into the world of our inner hunter gatherer. As such, the presence of these animals has the potential to further the conservation cause, because it is a major motivation at a deep, non-intellectual level, for keeping areas natural, much as the Norman kings kept forests to go hunting in.
True, deer can do a lot of harm ecologically if there aren’t other forces in the system moving them around to prevent over browsing in one place and keeping the numbers down. But assuming that’s taken care of, they are an asset to an area in the Anthropocene because of how they can turn it into one that humans value at a gut level.
This current painting, as I’ve mentioned, draws some inspiration from the palaeolithic art in the Hall of the Bulls in the Lascaux Caves. I’ve no desire to produce a replica of the Lascaux paintings – I want rock art to be reborn as a living tradition, not just a museum piece, so I’ve done them the way I wanted to do them.
If such guilds were in operation in Ice Age Europe, and this Lascaux art shows they were, then it tells us that there must have been open grassy areas, but it also tells us more than that. Deer are natural browsers and do not do well if there is only grazing, so presumably there were trees too, and in the cold of Winter, when grass stops growing, the natural tendency of wild cattle and bison is to browse in woodlands and eat materials from trees as grass stops growing and grassland no longer provides enough food to sustain them. There were no farmers around to provide bales of hay to supplement winter feeding. So the fact that these guilds survived the Winter tells us this must have been a balanced landscape of woodland and grassland.
How did areas of woodland manage to grow with these browsers around, eating the saplings? We’ll look at that in another post in this series, and it’s not just about predators moving the herds on and reducing their numbers; it’s also about nature’s barbed wire: thorny scrub. In terms of rewilding projects, before you let these herbivore guilds loose, you need to allow time for that scrub to develop, as via the process of succession these will create protective nurseries for saplings and will thus develop to become the wooded areas. But I thought it best to start with the large herbivore guild for my first painting in this series to establish the connection with the Lascaux art.
For now, let’s just take it as red that these herbivore guilds are moving around, not staying too long in one place, and that the landscape is a balance of woodland and grassland with a great diversity of different plants.
The Cosmogonic Primordial Bison as Ecological Metaphor
Making the World-Making Bison : A Cave Painter myth
The short video here shows me making an Earth pigment rock art bison with ochres purchased from Provence and from the Forest of Dean.
For me, the act of creating a rock art image of a bison is rich with intriguing associations, as this very process may once have been seen as the model for and the re-enactment of a myth of how the first bison came into being, a myth akin to Australian myths of the spilling of ochre blood in the Dreamtime, the South African San myth of the creation of the first eland, and the widespread Proto-Indo-European myth of the first bovine that became the first sacrifice and from whose bodily effluxes the world, plants and animals was made.
So, ochre pigment found in the landscape may have been seen as the anciently-spilled blood of the primordial bison. The Lascaux painters may even have seen the ochre from the same Luberon source as that which I used here as this blood. This ochre may also have been mixed with bison fat, conceived of as still having some of the creative potency in it of that first bison. And so the first bison died, but from its body came the substances that were used to paint new bison and other animals into being.
Not Plucked Out of Thin Air
How have I come to this theory of an ancient cave painter first bison myth? It started with my Lascaux Leaning Man theory, itself an astronomical reinforcement of Mary Settegast’s theory that the Leaning Man and Bison scene in the Lascaux caves shows an early version of the old and widespread Indo-European myth of the first twins and the primordial bull.
This theory still excites me and it has created quite a bit of interest among other writers and researchers: David Warner Mathisen (Star Myths of the World) called it “utterly astounding” amongst other accolades and has made it a key part of his own theories; Adrian Gilbert (The Orion Mystery) in an unsolicited personal email to me called it “very interesting and plausible”; Graham Hancock (Fingerprints of the Gods), again in a personal email, said he thought it might be “revolutionary”; Mary Settegast (Plato, Prehistorian) called it “a delightful theory” and Barbara Hand-Clow (The Pleiadian Agenda) in a handwritten letter faxed to me called it “very hot”. My theory has been quoted at length in the paper No Bull – Taurus in the Lascaux Caves by Damien Mackey. It’s also mentioned in a paper by Dr Rappenglück who is less happy about it – it conflicts with his own earlier (and in my view singularly unconvincing) Summer Triangle theory – so he sees me as an “astromaniac” – the feeling’s mutual. To be honest, I think there’s vastly more evidential support for my theory, but enough bitchiness. (If it’s any consolation to Dr Rappenglück, I like his Northern Crown theory.) You can have a read and make your own mind up. I was also contacted by Red Ice Radio a few years back to see if I’d like to do an interview. I hadn’t heard of them, and I went ahead and did the interview, during which I outlined this theory. I had no idea at that time that this station was going to go on in more recent years to go down an Alt Right path; I’m not aligned with that type of ideology myself, I hasten to add.
Further down I’ll focus more specifically on why bison are a keystone species, but first I’m going to take you through this Lascaux theory here, because it’s not unfitting for this Rock Art 4 Rewilding site: the process of understanding this Lascaux painting turns out to be a journey through nature, and we’ll need to know about things like the activities of territorial rhinos and the feeding habits of yellow wagtails. As well as comprising a fascinating trail of clues to track – and for me when we talk of rewilding ourselves, we really mean getting in touch with our Inner Hunter Gatherer, who loves nothing more than following trails of clues – as well as that trail, this exploration gives us a window onto the wild world of Pleistocene Europe, where mega herbivores grazed and browsed in a landscape more like an African plain than anything; it gives Europe its Dreamtime.
The Rhino that Pooped the World, the Primordial Bison that gave substance to the animals and the Yellow Wagtail that perched on the Pole of the Sky to sing up the Sun in the First Time
Further down there’s a lengthy video on my Lascaux Leaning Man theory, but since it was made quite a few new details in support of the theory have emerged, and while there’s some extra stuff in the video that I’ve cut out in the below to make things more succinct, I’ve also included this new material that’s not in the video for the first time in the following text:-
There is a widespread Indo-European mythological theme, found in places as far apart as India, Persia and Scandinavia, of the first mortal man, or the first man and woman couple who were twins, plus the first bovine, telling how this bovine was killed and from the substances that flowed from its body a multitude of other beings were created, and how one of the twins was the first human to die and pass to the Afterlife realm. It was as far as I know Mary Settegast who first suggested that an early version of this might be shown in the Leaning Man painting of Lascaux.
In this painting, shown here, there’s a bison, a man, and a rhino. The mystery of this painting is the human figure. Quite apart from the fact that human figures are rare in Palaeolithic cave art (and this is the only one at Lascaux), and leaving aside for the moment his bird head, the big question is why he’s shown in this way. As the rhino shows, these artists were more than capable of showing things in a pretty well proportioned way. So why is this figure so elongated? Why is he a stick figure made out of two long parallel lines? And most of all, why does he lean over at that angle? The idea that he has fallen on the ground and is shown lying on the ground as if seen from above doesn’t make sense because there are no other cave art images showing things in plan view.
The rhino has lifted its tail and is ejecting faecal pellets, which is what they do when in an aggressive, territorial mood, because creating mounds of dung is a key part of how they mark their territory. These dung mounds are known as middens. More on them later.
The bison’s stomach appears to have been gored, with intestines or lines representing bodily fluids coming out. This suggests that the bison has been gored by the rhino, as in Africa inter-species attacks by rhinos in territorial mood on other large herbivores are not unknown; they’ll use their horns to gore the sides of those that are stubborn enough to take them on, such as buffalos.
As the grass stopped growing in the colder months of Old Europe there would have been increasing competition, and so the woolly rhinos may have become increasingly territorial at this time. However, while this wasn’t great for the individual bison who has been gored by the rhino, the death of a large bison would have been a godsend for many other creatures who could scavenge the carcass, and this may have been one of the elements that contributed to the mythic idea of the sacrifice of the first bull leading to the creation of the other animals. (This idea may then have been reinforced and re-enacted in the use of paint made using bison fat as the medium, where the paint was used to create images of various animals – so the bodily substance of the bison engendered the other creatures. I explore this idea more further down.)
The Starry Bull and the Starry Twins
Settegat’s theory was an interesting one, but there could never be further evidence to support it. Or could there…? I became intrigued when I noticed that actually there is something with supports Settegast’s proposition rather strongly, and it’s something which is fascinating in its own right. This comes from a dovetailing of two separate observations.
In many of the versions of the Indo-European myth, the man has a name meaning “twin”, such as Norse Ymir with his first cow, Persian Yima with his Primordial Bull and Hindu Yama who with his twin sister Yami had a black buffalo. These stories have shared themes of the bovine being the first to be sacrificed and providing the first meat, and of the world being made from its body, as well as funerary cult associations with the male twin leading the way to the Afterlife in the sky. The names Ymir/Yima and Yama are etymologically connected, and so is the word gemini – “twins”, just as in some versions of this story the first man was one of a pair of twins, such as the Hindu Yama and Yami. That the man called Twin and the first cow appear after a period of ice in the Norse version sounds like a seasonal event – could it be about the skies? In the Persian myth, the soul of the primordial bull associated with Yima (“Twin”), ascends into the sky, and so does Yama in the Indian story, both of which sound like the rising of constellations. Could the Twin be Gemini and the attendant bovine be the neighbouring constellation of Taurus?
Taurus in the Lascaux Caves
The other part of the dovetailing is the suggestion that the Taurus and Pleiades constellations seem to be represented in the Lascaux caves. In this image, the dots hanging over the shoulder of the bull look like and are in the position of the Pleiades star cluster. This was first observed by Luz Antequera Congregado in her doctoral thesis in 1992.
Lascaux Leaning Man as Gemini
So I wondered if the bison in the Leaning Man image might also be Taurus, because the Gemini constellation is located to the left of Taurus and is formed of two long parallel lines leaning over at the same angle with respect to Taurus as the Leaning Man, whose image is likewise made of two long parallel lines.
I then noticed a number of other interesting things which either support this, or else are amazing coincidences. Firstly, the back end of the rhino maps well in terms of both form and location onto the Leo constellation.
The Bird on the Pole Beneath Gemini in Egypt
The next connections, surprisingly, come from Egypt as well as from India.
First we need to consider the role of Yama in the old Indian traditions, where he was connected to funerary cult as the one who had lead the way into the Afterlife. So we find that it was said to the spirit of the deceased person:
Yama was the first to find the way for us, this pasture that shall not be taken away. Where our ancient fathers passed beyond, there everyone who is born follows, each on his own path.
[To the dead man:] Go forth, go forth upon those ancient paths on which our ancient fathers passed beyond, rejoicing in the sacrificial drink.
Unite with the fathers, with Yama, with the rewards of your sacrifices and good deeds, in the highest heaven. Leaving behind all imperfections, go back home again; merge with a glorious body.
The fathers have prepared a place for him. Yama gives him a resting place adorned by days, and waters, and nights.
In the story of the twins Yama and Yami, Yama after he died went to live in an afterlife paradise where it was always neither too hot nor too cold, where there were always blooming flowers and fruitful trees and refreshing waters, and here, with the help of various record keepers, he became Lord (and judge) of the Dead. This is very much like the Egyptian concept of the Afterlife, where if all was well you crossed over the celestial river to the Field of Reeds.
This sets the context of our figure as one who ascends into the afterlife, leading the way to the realm of the dead. The earliest Egyptian religious texts are also funerary, namely the Pyramid Texts, and they too are concerned with the deceased following the established path to the realm of the dead, and in one part of these it is said to the spirit of the deceased pharaoh:
You ascend with the head of a hawk and all your members are those of the Twins of Atum.
Now then, Atum is a creator god in Egyptian tradition, and his twin children are a direct equivalent of Indian Yama and Yami, the first couple. He gave birth to the girl and boy twins in the “First Time”. If we consider the Lascaux Leaning Man figure as Gemini, we can see that this Egyptian text gives an excellent description: being a constellation, he has ascended into the sky, and his head is indeed that of a bird – it could be a hawk – and his other members/limbs – the arms and legs – are formed from the constellation of the Twins. Hence, it’s all there: You ascend with the head of a hawk and all your members are those of the Twins of Atum. It fits perfectly.
How could these traditions have become so widespread? Our beliefs about the Afterlife are often those to which we hold most tightly. This may have contributed to the continuity and wide dispersal.
Of course, what I’ve mentioned so far could be coincidence, but something else from Egypt really blew my socks offs, and it concerns a feature of the Lascaux image that I haven’t mentioned yet, namely the bird on a pole beneath the Leaning Man figure.
As background, consider that this same creator god, Atum, the father of the Twins, took the form of a bird who flew over the primeval waters of creation and alighted on the first perch to rise above those waters. This was at dawn and timed with the rising of the Sun, and was equated with flush of light on the top of a gilded obelisk, many obelisks being gilded in this way in the Egyptian Old Kingdom.
With this in mind, we proceed to the temple in Dendera in Egypt which contains much constellation imagery, including the famous Dendera Zodiac. Firstly here we can note that the male and female twins representing Gemini shown in the constellation figures of this Egyptian Zodiac run contrary to the Greek idea that the Twins are two male brothers; this is because in Egyptian tradition they are the twin male and female children of Atum, namely Shu and Tefnut.
And now to the amazing thing: both on the Denderah Zodiac itself, and repeated in at least one other image from the temple, there is a constellation of a bird wearing the same crown that Atum wears standing on a perch that looks like a papyrus reed pole, and it is located in the same location as the bird on the pole in the Lascaux scheme, as I have interpreted it: below Gemini (the male and female pair holding hands), to the left of Taurus (the bull top right in the image below), and to the right of Leo (the Lion), as shown here.
Bird on Pole beneath Gemini in Dendera and Lascaux
I then noticed that the back of the rhino with its raised tail maps very well onto the pattern made by the stars of the Leo constellation, while the rhino is also in the Leo location relative to the other figures, as shown here:
The bird on the pole here wears the “double crown”, which was worn by the god Atum, so the bird may indeed be Atum as the Benu bird on his perch. Looking at the position of the Bird on the Perch in the Lascaux painting as it maps to the skies, it can only really be Canis Minor, which is formed from two stars, the bright Procyon and the less bright Gomeisa. The pole in the Egyptian images looks like a reed or papyrus stalk, fitting with the myth of the first plants that grew on the mound that emerged from the waters, the island upon which Atum placed the Twins.
When we look at how the Lascaux Leaning Man maps onto the sky, his feet turn out to be Orion’s Belt. His feet curl slightly upwards, as does Orion’s Belt. In Ancient Egypt one of the stars of Orion’s Belt was known as “Toes Star”, which fits very well. Also, it makes sense that this would have been seen as the giant’s feet, for in 15,000 BC the stars were lower in the sky, and at the latitude of Lascaux at this time, Orion’s Belt never rose very high above the horizon. So this was the part of the giant that walked along the ground – logically his feet.
Yima’s feet (Orion’s Belt) are fittingly on the ground
So, the feet of Yima are Orion’s Belt, and below them in the Lascaux painting there is what appears to be an arrow, as if lying on the ground. Below Orion’s Belt in the sky is Orion’s Sword, and Orion’s Sword has indeed been seen as an arrow that fell to the ground, namely by the indigenous Nama people of Namibia in Southern Africa. So again, this is intriguing as it fits perfectly. Orion’s Sword was visible briefly when due south at the Lascaux latitude in 15000 BC, as shown here.
Left: the arrow below the foot of Yima; Right: the arrow that fell to the ground below Orion’s Belt
Below is a second image from the same Dendera temple which again shows the bird with the double crown on its papyriform perch, and again it is next to the Orion constellation, and we also see the Twins Shu and Tefnut to the right (with feather and sundisk headdresses respectively.)
Now, this temple is from quite late on in the timeline of Ancient Egypt, but there is an inscription in the temple saying it was rebuilt based on a plan written on an old animal skin parchment dating from the time of the Shemsu Hor. These Shemsu Hor – the Followers of Horus – were held to have arrived in Egypt from a distant shore in a very ancient time. The Egyptian King Lists have the gods ruling Egypt first, starting with Ra (equated with Atum) and followed by Geb, the god of the first land that emerged, and ending with Hor. Following Hor (and in that sense, those that followed Hor – the Shemsu Hor) were these Followers of Horus, starting – according to the chronology in the list – from around 13,000 years before the beginning of Dynastic Egypt – 13,000 + 5,000 = 18,000 = back in the time of the Lascaux cave painters, in other words. A bird on a pole is present in early Egyptian rock art and 2004 research by Dirk Huyge revealed very early Egyptian rock art showing bulls in what he describes as the Franco-Cantabrian (i.e. Lascaux) style. This rock art is scientifically dated to between 8,000 and 10,000 B.C. This fits the narrative well, and while of course I can’t prove that this is more than coincidence, I like to imagine these Shemsu Hor were people of the old Cave Painter culture who perhaps came to Egypt as a haven of better weather during the shock onset of the last mini ice age, the very time when the cave art suddenly stops.
I do not, however, see this as confirming any kind of alt right / white supremacist notions of how the Egyptians couldn’t have achieved their glories without help from Europeans. For a start, the Paleolithic European hunter gatherers were dark skinned. Secondly, the glories of Egypt came thousands of years later. Thirdly, I see this type of culture – the cave painter culture – as having its origins in pre-exodus Africa, and being directly equivalent to other rock art cultures, such as that of aboriginal Australia. I’m interested in giving Europe back its Dreamtime so that its song can become part of a global symphony of such indigenous cultures – more like the colonists being colonised by the culture of the colonised than the other way round.
To recap, in the creation myth from Heliopolis in Egypt the creator god Atum emerged from the primordial darkness in the form of the Benu bird, and flew over these waters before coming to a site in Heliopolis where there was perch (the Benben) on the first mound to rise out of the waters – (Tatenen). The bird uttered a cry and this was an act of creation. That Atum took the form of the Benu bird was mentioned as far back as the Pyramid Texts.
At this early time the sign used for the Benu bird was not the heron of later times, but a smaller song bird; it has been suggested that it looks like a yellow wagtail. A counter theory says that a later occurrence of this same sign shows blue paint, and that therefore it can’t be a yellow wagtail, but might be a kingfisher. However, there is a type of yellow wagtail that has some blue feathers, with its head in particular being blue. The bird with the crown standing on the reed perch in the Dendera temple has been given a form similar to Egyptian depictions of hawks (fairly standard for depictions of Egyptian solar gods), but (and this may just be coincidental, but it’s nice how it fits) it also has a blue head and the pattern on its wing does not match that of hawks, but does look like the wagtail’s wing, and wagtails are very light and could easily sit on a papyrus stalk, whereas a hawk is a heavier bird.
Left: the blue-headed bird with the double crown of Atum next to Orion in the Dendera temple; Right: a blue-headed yellow wagtail
And wagtails do like to stand on such perches from which to look out for insects to catch. Here below we see one standing on a tulip stalk and another two examples on reeds, plus one on a vertical twig and yet another on a wooden post. The obelisk shown with a bird at the top is from Heliopolis and is the oldest obelisk still standing in Egypt.
The bright yellow plumage of the yellow wagtail also fits perfectly with the association with the flush of sunlight at dawn catching hold of the gilded top of an obelisk.
The reason I’m going into this wagtail stuff in some depth is because I find it intriguing to ponder whether the identity of the bird on the perch had been brought from the Lascaux culture. The yellow wagtail certainly makes good sense in the context of the myth of the primordial bison. Yellow wagtails are a migratory bird, and they come to Europe around April time and stay for the Summer. They come to grasslands near rivers, particularly where there are cattle, and they often hop around near the muzzles of grazing cows catching the insects that are disturbed by the grazing – an example of how large herbivores benefit biodiversity. Or these wagtails may find a suitable perch and sally out to catch insects on the wing.
Wagtails catching insects disturbed by a grazing cow
The Xhosa people of South Africa, partial descendants of the San hunter gatherers, call the wagtail “the bird of the cattle” and see it as a bringer of good fortune. Something similar could easily have been the case with the hunter gatherers of the Lascaux area, 17,000 years ago, with this migratory bird being an indicator of more favourable season. As the weather warmed up, the grass started to grow and the herds returned to the pastures, as did the yellow wagtails. The ‘bird on the pole’ in the Lascaux painting shown near to the bison could indeed be a yellow wagtail on its chosen perch near the bison, catching insects in the Summer. Such a scene – with grazing animals in lush pasture next to a river and the brightly coloured wagtails catching insects – it’s easy to see how this could have become a model for the idea of the paradise of the Afterlife, the place to which Yima passed on.
And seasonal considerations allow us to piece together a narrative connected to the skies. In 15,000 BC, (17,000 years ago – the age of the Lascaux painters) what I have proposed as the woolly rhino stars (i.e. those of the Leo constellation) dominated the night sky to the South at sunset in midwinter.
The Rhino (Leo) dominates the evening sky to the South at sunset at the Lascaux latitude in early January 15,000 BC
In later periods in traditions related to the Yima complex of myths such as Mithraism, the death god Ahriman continued to be associated with Leo. The aggressive, dangerous rhino could easily have been seen as an aspect of the god of death/Winter. In the cold months, the yellow wagtails flew south to overwinter Africa, the grass stopped growing, the rhinos became more aggressively defensive of their territories and the bison herds dispersed into the wooded areas to browse.
Then in April the Wagtail star (Procyon) was visible neither in the evening nor the morning for a time because it rose with the Sun.
However, by early May, the Wagtail star rose shortly before the Sun. And at this moment, the bull (Taurus) and the Twins (Gemini / Yima) were hovering above in the pre-dawn sky. This fits with the Norse myth where Ymir (“Twin”) and the first cow appeared when the primordial ice melted, and with the Egyptian myth of the Benu bird that arrives, lands and sings up the Sun and thus kicks off a new round of creation, and with Yima leading the animals out of the underground Var after the cold period in the Persian mythology, as well as with Yama ascending into a flowery pasture that is not too hot and not too cold in the Hindu tradition.
The rise of the Procyon-Bird at the Lascaux latitude just before the Sun in early May 15,000 BC
This re-appearance of a star just before the Sun is what is known as the Heliacal Rise, and it is naturally associated with the idea of a return after an absence. So just as the wagtails were returning, the weather warmed up, the grass grew and the herds came to the grassy plains, leaving their Winter forage sites in the forest. Now was the happy time when the meadows were filled with bison and wagtails. The World was made anew. It’s easy to see how an association could have formed between the reappearing star and the reappearing bird – the bird who brings the Sun.
This annual recreation of nature could easily then have been seen as a re-enactment of the original, primordial creation of the world, with the creator god being associated with the bright yellow wagtail who brings the warm sunshine to the World. The helical rise of a star as the return of the Bennu actually fits with a passage in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, quoted by Wallis Budge: “I go in like the Hawk, and I come forth like the Bennu, the Morning Star of Ra [Ra being the Sun] ; I am the Bennu which is in Heliopolis.” The Greek historian Herodotus’s account of the Phoenix dying and being reborn in the temple of Heliopolis is thought to have been based on the traditions of this Bennu bird. The Phoenix rises from its ashes. This actually fits the idea of the heliacal rise of the yellow wagtail bird star too: it disappears when obliterated by the light of a great fire – the Sun – as if burnt up by it, but then it is reborn anew as it rises just before dawn as a Morning Star: “I come forth like the Benu, the Morning Star of Ra.”
The Midden of the Meridian
In the reading thus far, the Rhino seems like a bit of a bad guy – the death principle – but actually I think it was more nuanced than that, and the rhino did some good stuff, just as rhino have important ecological impacts in the African plains. At the time when all the constellations that make up this Lascaux scene – ranging from Leo to Taurus – were visible at once in the night sky, the bird (Canis Minor) was at the Meridian, the imaginary line that runs due North-South, bisecting the sky into East and West, and running directly through the pole of the sky. So, is the pole on which the bird is perched representative of the extended pole of the sky??
The Procyon-Bird on the Pole at the Meridian when the full scene was visible in the sky
There’s more to this. Egyptians had this idea of the first risen land, the Primordial Mound, on which the Benu bird’s perch was located, upon which the bird alighted, and this had its equivalent in the sky, for the stars climb as they rise on the eastern side of the sky heading westward, reach their highest point when culminating due south at the meridian, and then descend towards the West from that point. So the pole of the sky in this sense is planted right on the summit of the celestial Primordial Mound.
And there’s something else that comes out of this which in a weird way is rather wonderful. The Leo-Rhino in this scene has its hindquarters pointing towards this place at the base of the pole on which the bird is perched. If you watch a rhino building its territorial midden, you’ll see that first it poops (copiously) and then kicks this dung back with its hind legs, and this forms the low dung mound. So in our Lascaux scene, the rhino is building its mound right where the Primordial Mound should be.
This actually fits well with Egyptian Tradition, because there is reason to see the Egyptian mound as being made of dung, because the scarab dung beetle was closely associated with primordial creation and the Egyptian primordial mound, and in particular the birth of the Sun from out of this mound. The birth of Khepri as the scarab beetle god was seen as a spontaneous creation based on the idea that baby dung beetles emerge out of dung balls, and the birth of the rising Sun was seen in the same way. The realisation that the Egyptian primordial mound must itself have been a fertile dung heap is actually unavoidable. And where do dung heaps come from? They get pooped out of large herbivores. So in the Lascaux myth that we’re uncovering, the primordial mound was a rhino midden! This was the Rhino-that-Pooped-the-World. Surely you’ve heard of him?
Rhino as Geoformer
That the rhino becomes the World-creator is fitting, because rhinos are very much a keystone species. They have been shaping the ecological landscape in a particular way for millions of years, which means the rest of nature has adapted itself to fit around that niche, which also means that if they go, that niche will be lost. Their impact on the landscape is so great that they are described as “geoformers”, which fits with the mythic idea that they formed the World by pooping it into being as the first midden mound.
Summary of the Cave Painter Myth
In the beginning all was ice and there was no land to be seen but the Rhino then created the first mound by creating a midden. The first plant grew on this mound of dung, and on this stalk the creator god in the form of a yellow wagtail alighted and perched, and let out a call that call forth the warm light of the Sun. There were no other animals yet except the primordial bison, but then the rhino gored the bison and it died but from the fluids that drained from its body all the other animals were created. The first man was Yima, and as the first to be born he was also he first to die. His soul and that of the first bison ascended into the sky, where they found their way into the Afterlife paradise where it is never too hot and never too cold, where flowers perpetually bloom and trees are fruitful. Here Yima is Lord and the bison grazes in lush pastures next to the celestial river, the Field of Reeds.
Blood Paint – the Rock Artist’s Myth
So, that’s the theory. OK, towards the end it got a little more speculative with that stuff about the rhino pooping out the primordial mound, bit it’s all good fun. I wanted to present this theory both as an opportunity to add in some of my new ideas on the subject and so as to emphasise the strength of the connection between the Lascaux painting and the Indo-European primordial bull myth.
Now it’s time to draw out the particular aspect of that theory that allows me to return to the point I was making at the opening of this piece. In the Persian, Mithraic and Nordic versions of the Yima myth, the substances resulting from the primordial sacrifice form the World, the land, the rivers, the sky, the animals. This is reminiscent of the South African San myths where the first eland was killed but from a mixture of its blood and fat, new eland and other types of animal were created (as I explore here), and the darkness of the night was made from the gall that came out when its call bladder was burst, and the Moon was made from eland leather. The blood and fat mixture matches ingredients used along with ochre by San rock artists, so it sounds like the animals were painted into being using a paint made with eland substance. In many Australian totemic myths, the ochre in the landscape is itself seen as the blood of the great first ancestor animal beings that was spilled during the events back in the Dreamtine and then when this paint is used to create animals in rock art, they are seen as having Dreamtine potency because because they are made from this ochre blood.
It is my strong suspicion that this is a myth-type that predated the African exodus of anatomically modern humans and that it was carried around the world with those rock artists. Another example is the Sandawe (a people for Tanzania) rituals and myths whereby the fat of a sacrificed animal was used with ochre to create paint, and where the myth of the creation of the first people and animals talks of a hollow rock where a cow was sacrificed and where these first beings walked out of the rock, while cows are still sacrificed at the old rock shelter art sites. Hence, it sounds like the cow was sacrificed, the ochre paint was made using its fat, the figures were then painted onto the rock wall in the rock shelter by the creator, who them called them out of this place and into the World.
My suggestion then is that the Indo-European myth is about the same thing: the bison was sacrificed and its substance was used along with ochre in the paint that was used to create more bison and other animals in the cave galleries; from here the creator called them out into the World. And conveniently this then works as a metaphor for the bison as keystone species – more on that further down.
There’s more San mythology that may be relevant here. The Tsodilo Hills in Botswana are covered in animal rock art, and it has been believed by the locals that the creator god painted some of these. It’s said that this is the place where he made the first animals, and then they walked down off the hills. A myth from this region says that the first animal he made was the large, cow-like antelope, the eland, and that he made this out of red clay he obtained from the ground, and following this other animals were made from white and black mud. This mirrors the fact that red ochre, mixed with animal fat, was used in this region to make paint, and there are many red ochre animal images on the Tsodilo Hills, including some notable images of eland. The San also see themselves as the red people, saying that they came first, with black and white people being made later, and they say that the first man – the first of the red people and of all modern people – was also placed on these hills. This indicates that the act of creation both of the first people and the first game animals was seen as an act of painting, using red ochre paint. For a more racially inclusive version, the San of the Darkensberg region created polychrome eland rock art images using white, red and black – a equivalent story would then allow the eland to be a totem for all races – I like that version.
So we have a mythic complex here with similar themes: like the Yima stories, it links to the creation of the first man, and it also links to the theme of an animal which dies but where other animals are made from its bodily fluids.
I won’t go into more detail, because the point here is that this gives us an intriguing way to interpret those Yima stories as having been, originally, a reflection of the process of creating paint and then creating rock art images of animals using that paint. When a bison was hunted and then its fat was mixed with red ochre and this was used to create cave paintings, this was like a sacred re-enactment of the myth of how the first bison dies but then other animals were made from its blood and fat, especially if, as I suspect, the red ochre was itself mythologised as the spilled blood of the primordial bison.
Some of the Persian stories about Yima tell how in a cold period he created a vast underground place called a var which he filled with all sorts of animals. This sounds like those French and Spanish cave complexes filled with animal rock art, including Lascaux, where we have indeed found Yima.
The Yima myth survived the shift to agriculture, partly – I suspect – because it was so firmly enshrined in funerary cult and important beliefs about the Afterlife, and also perhaps because bovines continued to be so important, now being a source not just of meat and clothing, but also of milk and power full pulling the plough. So there was a continuing sense in which the bovine created the things of the World. The myth adapted to survive, you might say.
The World-Making Bison: An Ecological Perspective
And what excites me at the moment is that the myth can now undergo another adapt-to-survive moment, and can continue to stay with us, because it is a great ecological metaphor. The creation of the other animals from the substance of the bison becomes a metaphor for the way the bison leads to the generation of the other animals because it is an important feature of the ecological landscape.
This way in which a particular animal that has a continued to have large impact through evolutionary time as a part of the ecological landscape is an idea which has a very strong resonance, as far as I see it, with the totemic culture model, where stories are told about how the bodies of great Dreamtime animals became this and that feature of the landscape. The metaphor works just by seeing this Dreamtime landscape as a metaphor for the ecological landscape. The Dreamtime is a period of deep time, which we may easily equate with evolutionary time for the purposes of an effective metaphor. And totemists believe that during the Dreamtime an order emerged which is the right way of doing things, and that as long as that order is maintained, nature will continue to be abundant, and continuing to honour those Dreamtime beings in the landscape is of vital importance. Rock art is, incidentally, one of the main ways they invoke the Dreamtime in particular locations. The metaphor may even stretch that far, because art can be an impetus for conservation and its modern incarnation – rewilding – because it can bring our values to a sharp point of focus.
As regards the bison, a study in the USA compared three areas of grassland prairie, and found that the one where bison were reintroduced had twice as much biodiversity as the one without large herbivores. This is a very significant alteration. In the third area of prairie, cattle were allowed to graze. This area didn’t have as much biodiversity as the bison-grazed area, but it did still have more than the area that wasn’t grazed at all. Another interesting observation was that the increase in biodiversity in the bison-grazed area made the grasslands significantly more resistant to drought, and the other thing to be mentioned is that the increased plant diversity also leads in turn to more insects, birds, reptiles and other mammals. The bison leads to the generation of the other animals, just like the myth of the primordial bison. With its hump being hill shaped, it’s easy to imagine how the bison might have gone into the land and become a landscape feature in the Dreamtime.
The European bison has been brought back from the brink of extinction by a number of rewilding projects. Might it have similar beneficial impacts on ecosystems in this area as the effects the American bison is having across the pond? Given that it was both part of the ecosystem for a long time in Europe and also had a big impact on that ecosystem, it is highly likely that allowing it to return could lead to increased biodiversity here too. While in the US there are areas of restored prairie now where bison roam and where controlled burning is used to keep trees away so it stays as grassland, in Europe bison have been released into forests, which are of course quite different. This may have been influenced by the fact that it was within forests that the last few European bison remained, but this might have been more because it was a refuge for them rather than because it’s their preferred habit. In fact, it seems bison like to move around between woodland and grassland, having both available, so perhaps it would be better to allow some trees to grow on the US prairies and at the same time to allow European bison access to grasslands adjacent to the forests. Time will tell what the best approach is.
So to sum up, as with the wildebeest, the bison is a keystone species, an ecosystem engineer, or as I call it, a landscape feature creature, and just like that primordial bison of the old cave painter myth, this animal brings about the creation of a host of other organisms.
Here below is the video I did a while back about the Leaning Man theory. As I’ve said, it has some stuff not covered above, but lacks some of the more recent insights.
ROCK ART 4 REWILDING 