Shamanism

The Cave and the Sky

Gyrus

However, while the ‘descent’ aspect of the tiered cosmos maps comfortably onto the painted caves, the ‘ascent’ aspect — supported by ethnographic reports or not — doesn’t seem to fit. Lewis-Williams only really mentions shamanic flight in the context of the more recent rock art traditions he uses for comparison (those in southern Africa and in North America). A diagram showing ‘the way in which Upper Palaeolithic people used caves’ is given, with a two-ended arrow labelled ‘spirit world underground’ and ‘spirit world above’, in the sky over the scene of ‘daily life’ – but no real comment is given on the limited evidence for the importance of this heavenly realm.6 Again it seems that while the Palaeolithic caves may demonstrate a consciousness that is moving beyond the primacy of terrestrial concerns with immediate ecological relationships, towards a verticality that expresses spiritual transition, there is still precious little evidence to implicate the sky in the Cro-Magnon cosmos.

The cave, though, has many aspects. From the perspective of daylight at ground level, its character is obvious: dark, subterranean, enclosed. Once penetrated, however, its contortions confound our habitual categories, and the darkness reveals its own complexities — its own lights and spaces. Perhaps the sky is absent in the specific images in these painted caves, in the overt representations. But perhaps it is intimately present, right there in the metamorphic space of the cave — could the cave itself be a form of the sky?

The idea that the sky is a tent, dome, vault, sphere, or some other grand structure arcing over our heads is widespread in traditional cultures. Such projections of human-scale constructions onto the cosmos obviously help make the vastness more habitable and familiar. And while simplistic ideas pitting the ‘artificial’ nature of agricultural and city-based societies against the more ‘natural’ life of the hunter-gatherer might lead one to locate these projections relatively late in human history, it must be remembered that evidence for constructed habitations reaches surprisingly far back.

See also this note from Gordon White's Star.Ships regarding Nuit:

At first glance, the gender reversal of the pairing – having a female sky and male earth – appears to be an outlier in the motif; ‘earth mothers’ and ‘sky fathers’ are seemingly more common. Dr Witzel accounts for the variation below:

The reversed position may be further elucidated by a comparison with Vedic myth. In daytime, the sky arches over the earth, like Father Heaven, stemmed up by Indra from the prostrate Mother Earth. But at night, the situation is reversed: Earth and the primordial hill or rock, on which she rests, have turned upside down and overarch the now prostrate Heaven as the ‘stone sky’ of Iranian, Hawai’ian and Pueblo myth.

Such an interpretation would explain not only the extremely common depiction of Nuit inside coffins but also the numerous instances of Tefnut, a Mother Earth analogue, painted on the inside of sarcophagi. The deceased is in the Underworld/ stars, thus the earth is now his or her sky. Tefnut, in addition to her consort, Shu, are the conjoined couple ‘the next level up’ from Geb and Nuit, suggesting a ‘passing back up through the worlds’ for the deceased. Recall also that the ritual timings of the Pyramid Texts and royal mummification rituals rely on asterisms such as Orion and Sirius to rise above the horizon, to ‘emerge’ from the Underworld/ sky, from their Mother, Nuit. The Dead are under the earth and also in the stars.

Stone age carvings from Laussel show the same sexual arrangement, with a woman atop and arching over a bearded, prostrate man. From Laussel we also have the more famous sculpture of the ‘goddess’ holding the moon. It appears that the Mother of Osiris, like her son, was supremely old by the time she made it to Egypt. If she was not always too old for even the very idea of temples, they would have been elsewhere, and have long since turned to dust or been lost to the waves.

In Egypt’s Old Kingdom we thus see the most perfect expression of a supremely ancient idea. The spirits – and by extension, humanity – come from, return to and are the stars.