Teesta Review: A
Journal of Poetry, Volume 8, Number 2. November 2025. ISSN: 2581-7094
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Mary Saracino
In
mid-December 1994, a slender portal expanded the fragile space between
humanity’s liminal soul and its linear mind, offering a glimmer of hope. On an
otherwise unremarkable late afternoon on the Cirque d’Estre near Vallon-Pont-d’Arc,
a town nestled in the southern French countryside, three amateur spelunkers,
Jean-Marie Chauvet, Eliette Brunel and Christian Hillaire, stumbled upon an
extraordinary treasure — perhaps an omen or an escape route through the muddled
labyrinth of our collective thinking.
Jean-Marie
Chauvet had long been curious about the slim opening to a small cave located
near a popular local hiking trial. That December day, he and his cave-exploring
companions felt compelled to investigate. They dug around the earthen aperture,
moved aside the fallen rocks and entered uncharted territory. The trio
proceeded until they reached the rim of a deep shaft. As luck would have it,
the tools they needed for further exploration had been left behind in their
cars. They exited the cave and returned to their parked vehicles. Although
darkness had fallen by then, the friends decided to gather their cave-sleuthing
instruments and return to the grotto. The lure of adventure was simply too
strong to deny.
Back
inside the dim chamber they once again stared into the long shaft of the pit.
Using their speleological ladder, they descended into the abyss. Down and down
they sank into the belly of the Earth. To their amazement, their feet touched
ground in a large chamber with a high-ceiling. Surrounded by towering rock
formations they forged on, entering another chamber adorned with similar
geological beauty. On the earthen floor lay a scattering of animal bones — an
intriguing sign, perhaps, but not uncommon in such an environment.
The
friends pushed further, moving through the unlit rooms, uncovering an intricate
network of stone alcoves, proving to themselves the viability of their original
hunch: rock and dirt were not the only things buried beneath a favorite French
hiking trail. Pleased, they turned to leave. The beam from the lamp that
Eliette Brunel carried flickered against a cavern wall. There, hanging from the
ceiling on a rocky spur, her eyes beheld a figure of a small mammoth, drawn in
red ochre.
“They
were there!” she exclaimed.
With
singular determination, the trio shined their lanterns on the undulating
surfaces of the surrounding walls. Small halos of lamplight revealed hundreds
of other paintings and engravings — ancient treasures, scrawled by prehistoric
hands — some of which scientists would later determined to be 30,000 years old.
Insatiable curiosity, fueled by a collective hunch, led to the uncovering of
some of humanity’s oldest known Paleolithic cave paintings.
Word
of the amateur spelunkers’ find spread throughout the French Ministry of
Culture but legal issues prevented scientific study of the cave until 1997.
When scientists finally gained access to the site they determined that the
cave’s use as a shelter for human habitation was improbable, even though a hearth
had been found on the premises (perhaps used to provide warmth and light for
the Paleolithic artists who originally rendered the images). As for the bones
littering the cave floor, they were determined to have belonged to Paleolithic
bears hunkering down for hibernation.
Not
since the discovery, some 150 years before, of the Magdalenian cave paintings
(dating between 16,000-10,000 BCE) in Lascaux in southern France and in
Cantabria, Spain, had humanity’s collective eye been privy to such an exquisite
array of “primitive” art. In the yellow-white lantern glow an astounding
private gallery had been unveiled. Like long-lost sacred text, the walls
revealed hundreds of pictographs of horses, bison, felines, deer, fish, birds,
serpents, humans, and many species of plants. Thousands of years after
Paleolithic artists had drawn and carved these images, their work had found
favor with an enthusiastic 20th century audience.
Archeologists
believe these Stone Age symbols served as a visual almanac transmitting knowledge
about the rhythms of animal, plant, and human life among Paleolithic tribes.
Many scholars also believe that while caves were often used as community
gathering places or regional social centers, located as they were along
seacoasts and riverbeds, they served a sacred/spiritual function as well.
Who
were these Paleolithic people—the ones who had caused Eliette to exclaim, “They were there!” when first she set
eyes upon their ancient artwork? And what to make of their symbol-language,
scrawled on cave walls, encased in stone for our contemporary eyes to behold
and decipher? What could be deduced from the correspondence left by these
prehistoric pen pals? How could their message possibly be relevant, today? Were
the artists mysterious scribes invoking the sacred side-by-side with the
profane? Or were the marks and lines, the curves and color simply the remains
of a hunter’s game plan, drawing out tactical maneuvers, like some prehistoric
John Madden setting up the next play?
In
their seminal work The Great Cosmic
Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth, Monica Sjöö and Barbara
Mor echo sentiments shared by many who have studied the cultural and religious
expression of Paleolithic peoples:
“The
cave…was considered by the ancients to be the repository of mystic influences.
In the original cosmology, a cave was the symbol of the whole world, providing
passage for the dead and the rebirth of souls…[It] was the home of our Ice Age
ancestors, when they were making the transition from hominids to Homo sapiens. Paleolithic caves were the
matrix of internalized consciousness: womb-like, skull-like, tomb-like…This is
where one went to commune with the deepest, most resonant, and awesome powers.
The wall-paintings…could be reached only with great difficulty, along winding
paths, narrow ledges, slippery and dangerous passages, often crawling on hands
and knees. These were the narrow winding passageways of birth and rebirth” (p.
73).
The
Chauvet cave paintings delineate the sensibilities and ethos of an un-fragmented
culture, a community of people united in common survival of spirit and body.
These naturalistic, animalistic cave images invoke a worldview that mirrors the
evolution of the seasons, the rise of day and the fall of night, the changing
phases of the moon. Such symmetry underscores a vital connection to nature
because, without this intimate understanding of the natural world, Paleolithic
peoples would literally have died. Still, though their day-to-day lives were
more burdened than our 21st century ones, the grave physical
hardship Stone Age men and women endured did not fracture their sense of
connection to the world around them or to one another; instead, it cohered and
strengthened it.
Our
prehistoric ancestors imbued all facets of their lives with magic and
symbolism. Not the kind our contemporary minds view as hocus-pocus, unreal,
make-believe, but instead a mystical way of immersing themselves in ritual,
interweaving every element of their daily lives with a sense of spirituality
that those of us alive today can only faintly recall in the recesses of our
cellular memory. Monica Sjöö and Barbara Mor note that these men and women
possessed, “a spiritual orientation that linked people, body, mind, and soul,
with the intelligence of the earth.” (The
Great Cosmic Mother, p. 163)
Not until the Late Neolithic or
Bronze Age did humans begin to manipulate their environment for individual
profit or personal power. That shift
signaled the onslaught of destruction, unleashing upon the planet a view that
positioned humans as owners of the land, the sea, the skies, and one another.
Homo sapiens then crowned themselves rulers of the universe and, in our
collective arrogance, humans began to usurp the laws of nature and transform
ourselves into takers not co-creators, consumers, not co-communers. As this
unchecked aggression unfolded, gradually the inevitable occurred: the
enslavement of other tribes/communities, depletion of forests and arable land,
the sullying of air, the poisoning of water, the rise of global warming,
overpopulation, corporate greed, and every kind of violence, spiritual and
temporal.
On
the long trek from Paleolithic to Neolithic to Modern times, humans have
created a world rife with bloody wars, indefatigable famine, poverty, and
injustice. We’ve crafted countless ways to kill one another, maim our souls,
decapitate our spirits. Today, cruelty is an art form given more airplay and
news-ink than the greatest of the world’s paintings, novels, poems, plays,
operas, concertos. Front-page banner headlines proclaim the latest casualties
of modern life: war, school shootings and other gun violence, corporate
takeovers, environmental disasters, murders, rapes, sex trafficking, drug
overdoses, political wrongdoing. The tally of woeful world events reads like a
never-ending nightmare in which brutality and tyranny reign without restraint.
Samsara, the Buddhists call it, the fragmented and constantly changing aspects
of the universe that beget the unavoidable sadness and suffering of all. But is
it samsara, or an innate defect in the human paradigm known as patriarchy?
In
the decades since Jean-Marie Chauvet and his friends happened upon the
Paleolithic cave art beneath the French hillside at Vallon-Pont-d’Arc, the
world has witnessed a vast array of natural disasters and human-induced misery
due to climate change denial—including earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes,
wildfires.
War
and political upheaval continue as well.
The
list of injustices and injuries to the Earth and Her people would take volumes
to chronicle. Suffice it to say that we need to wake up. And soon.
The
Paleolithic cave dwellers would have known these aggressions to be a falsehood
beyond all measure. Killing—whether the environment, animal and plant species,
or other humans (casualties of war, refugees seeking asylum, immigrants seeking
a better way of life for their families)—for personal profit, national glory,
corporate greed, or religious domination is anti-life, anti-spirit.
Against
this all too common backdrop of violence and power-mongering in our supposedly
civilized world, some good has managed to surface — perhaps a faint echo of
Paleolithic sanity emanating from the Chauvet cave-walls. Moral outrage has not
yet been fully silenced. We must never forget the pro-democracy efforts of the
protesters in Tiananmen Square in China in the 1980s and the April Spring
pro-democracy in Egypt in 2011. In 2003, more than six million people in over
600 cities worldwide protested the U.S. war on Iraq, launching one of the
largest, coordinated global anti-war gatherings in history. On January 21,
2017, Women’s March demonstrations were held throughout the world to support
gender equality, civil rights, and other issues that were expected to face
challenges under then US President Donald Trump. On June 14, 2025, millions of
people took to the streets for a second time to protest the injustice and
cruelty of the current US Administration, participating in the No Kings
marches, sending an unmistakable signal that many still believe in justice with
compassion, equality, the rule of law, and due process. Resistance against
autocrats and dictators continues in the USA and around the world.
Caves
are the geologic progeny of chemical processes, tectonic forces, and
atmospheric influences and, like nations of innocent people, they are formed by
influences out of their immediate control, becoming repositories of long memory
and enduring cultural conscience. Unlike countries, or politicians, caves have
no stake in being “right” or conquering the world. Thus, they are more faithful
allies of the human spirit, more loyal and truer, and more trustworthy. In
earliest times caves were humankind’s rudimentary shelters—the places in which
early men and early women lived and loved, ate and slept, laughed, cried, and
died. Places where humans were born and where they were buried, curled into
themselves like spent fetuses returning to their mothers’ uteruses. The ancient
ones understood caves as Earthly replicas of the amniotic homes from which we
all emerged. Wombs were our first allegiance, our first country, the original
source of our primal sense of nationhood and unity.
Paleolithic
cave paintings depict a world of inter-dependent action, a cause and effect
between intention, aspiration, and action. Dwelling far below the earth’s
surface for upwards of 30,000 years, the engraved images of the cave of
Chavuet-Pont-d’Arc were encrusted with micro-crystals. Some of the lines and
contours of the paintings had succumbed to erosion, as well, erased by time and
water, air, and all things cave-like. While the cave images, like humanity’s
long-term memory, have lost some of their original potency, enough color and
form remain of the aboriginal pictographs to carry their mysterious messages to
our contemporary eyes. Theirs is a cautionary tale our 21st Century
hearts need to heed; a saga that connects us to our primeval longing, our
genetic yearning for community, connection, completion, compassion.
If
caves, as Monica Sjöö and Barbara Mor suggest, symbolize the whole world, the
entirety of the Paleolithic cosmos, if they were once believed to be the
womb-repository of mystic influences, perhaps the time has come for humanity to
recall its indigenous impulse toward accord, community survival, and empathy.
Perhaps, caves and their rock art are calling us home.
As
a species, our necessity for well-being and our aboriginal urge for survival
are rooted in cooperation, and compassion. How is it that humanity has strayed
so far from what is most essential? Though modern world events provide ample
evidence that the impulse toward benevolence and cooperation is entombed in the
far recesses of humanity’s memory banks, it is not yet dead. A shallow whisper
of promise remains, waiting to breathe new life into our somnolent brains.
The
etchings and the ochre red paintings of Paleolithic cave artists are a clarion
call to reclaim humanity’s connection to something greater than greed and
death. Our unresponsive ears would do well to listen, harder. Like the Chauvet
cave drawings, humanity’s collective soul is buried beneath layers of history
and hillside in the moist nooks of the Earth’s concealed womb, waiting in the
patient silence of rock and air, to relate its narrative—plead with those who
populate the now-known world to turn away from war and destruction, avarice and
its evil offspring—cruelty, oppression, and greed.
Once,
long ago, the peoples of the planet wedded their bodies, minds, and spirits
with the intelligence of the Earth. It is not too late to remember. It is not
too late to recover our original impulse toward civility and peace. Before we
can move forward, we must reach back.
Perhaps
we cannot expect the power-hungry ideologues and the violence-mongering
desperados of the world to pay attention.
But,
what about the rest of us?
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