PALEOLITHIC POLITICS The Human Community in Early Art
BARRY COOPER
University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana
University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 www.undpress.nd.edu Copyright © 2020 by the University of Notre Dame All Rights Reserved Published in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data [to come]
CONTENTS
Preface ix
PART I: A Voegelinian Prelude 1
Paleoscience and Political Science
3
PART II: The Bold Outsiders 2
Marie König
63
3
The Early Work of Alexander Marshack
103
4
Marshack and Very Early Symbolization
145
PART III: The French Achievement 5
From Breuil to Leroi-Gourhan
193
6
Jean Clottes and the Shamanic Hypothesis
245
7
Concluding Reflections
303
Appendix. Kant’s Importance for Voegelin’s Philosophical Anthropology 327 Notes 341 Selected Bibliography 421 Index 443 vii
PREFACE
This is the third book I have written that tries to apply insight taken from the political science of Eric Voegelin to a subject matter that he did not discuss. The other two dealt with contemporary terrorism and Canadian politics. Unlike with those subjects, Voegelin was actually interested in Paleolithic political symbols. At one point his interest seemed to be sufficiently robust that his students in Munich speculated “on whether he might write a volume ‘zero’ for Order and History on prehistoric orders of symbolization. Obviously he did not.”1 Why not? According to Thomas Hollweck, he was not interested in “origins” or with “prolonging our history by pushing it further back” but with corroborating “his analysis of the structure of consciousness.” He found such corroboration in prehistoric symbols. “In other words,” Hollweck states, “the whole [of political reality including the Paleolithic] doesn’t have parts, it has a structure, just as consciousness doesn’t have parts, but is a structure.”2 Those already familiar with Voegelin’s philosophy of consciousness, which we discuss briefly in chapter 1,3 will easily understand what he found so congenial in the approach of Marie König, discussed in chapter 2. Her discussion of stone tools and images in Paleolithic “art,” or of the importance of change within continuity, can be translated without distortion into Voegelin’s language of compactness and dif ferentiation of experiences and symbolizations. Until the past few centuries, human beings lived in a world where there were far more animals than humans. It is perhaps not surprising that both portable Paleolithic artifacts and the cave walls were extensively decorated with the images of animals. One of the conclusions of this book is that the animal imagery expressed a differentiation of human and animal consciousness within the continuity of human ix
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and animal being. These very early symbols were both immediate and simple. Such “reflective distance” (to use a later term of Voegelin) as existed would have been expressed in stories and myths illustrated by the animal images. Following Voegelin’s argument, discussed in chapter 1, we would call these stories cosmological myths. The details of such stories are, however, irretrievably gone, and we are left to consider what has been called “the material fragments of the practical expression” of Paleolithic politics/religion/cosmology “if we but have the wit to interpret them.”4 Whether such an observation could apply to the “signs” also found in Paleolithic caves depends on how such phenomena are understood. At present the signs are highly understudied and, partly for that reason, their interpretation is controversial. In this book we say very little about the signs. König also argued that the earliest and most compact symbolic forms were also the most universal, immediate, and directly apprehended. For this reason, they may have been the most arresting in terms of spiritual potency. Later symbolism, Voegelin argued, was both more differentiated and specific and thus was more accurate, in the sense that it provided a more nuanced and adequate representation of reality. This did not mean that later, more differentiated symbolisms added to the stock of human knowledge in the sense of providing additional information about reality. The very notion of differentiation for Voegelin presupposed the presence of reality in a compact and comparatively inarticulate form. Differentiation simply brought to consciousness what was already present and inchoately “known.” Voegelin discussed this process of differentiation within reality many times, especially in his later work. A particularly apt formulation regarding the problems associated with very early symbolism is found in the introduction to volume 4 of Order and History. Here Voegelin raised the question of why, despite the existence of more differentiated symbolism, the compact cosmological symbolism meaningfully persisted: “This peculiar structure in history originates in the stratification of man’s consciousness through the process of differentiation. The truth of existence discovered by the prophets of Israel and the philosophers of Hellas, though it appears later in time than the truth of the cosmos, cannot simply replace it, because the new insights, while indirectly affecting the image of reality as a whole, pertain directly only to man’s consciousness
Preface xi
of his existential tension [toward the divine ground of being].” In conventional language, one would speak of the revelation of the hidden god beyond or transcendent to the intracosmic gods. Voegelin’s emphasis, however, was on the visionary or auditory or meditative experience of the individual who responded to this divine presence. More precisely, the individual discovered that his human consciousness was somehow also the site where divine presence was experienced. Such an individual participated in a “theophanic event,” and his or her consciousness became “cognitively luminous for his own humanity as constituted by his relation to the unknown god whose moving presence in his soul evokes the movement of response. I have circumscribed the structure of the event as strictly as possible, in order to make it clear how narrowly confined the area of the resulting insights actually is: The new truth pertains to man’s consciousness of his humanity in participatory tension toward the divine ground, and to no reality beyond this restricted area.” That “restricted area” referred only to the immediate experience in the consciousness of the individual who responded to the theophany, thus making it an “event,” which is to say, if no human response, then no event. Of course, the human beings who underwent such experiences sometimes did not acknowledge the “narrow” or “restricted” area of reality involved, namely, their own human consciousness in tension towards the divine Ground of Being. More specifically, “the differentiation of existential truth does not abolish the cosmos in which the event occurs. Regarding its existence and structure, however, the cosmos is experienced as divinely created and ordered. The new truth can affect the belief in intracosmic divinities as the most adequate symboli zation of cosmic-divine reality, but it cannot affect the experience of divine reality as the creative and ordering force in the cosmos.”5 That is, because the differentiation of consciousness occurred within the cosmos, the need to symbolize the reality of the cosmos did not disappear. What Voegelin called “the primary experience of the cosmos” and the earliest symbolization of it were never superseded by the later forms, including revelation and philosophy. In one sense this was self-evident: the earliest symbolic forms constituted the context or background in light of which all subsequent differentiations took place. If later symbolizations were in some sense an advance, this did not abolish the need to understand what they have advanced from.
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In his extensive history of religion, Robert N. Bellah made a pertinent observation regarding this problem: “Given that ‘we’ are the product of all previous human culture, we have, at some level ‘already’ experienced those gods, as we have ‘already’ experienced the powerful beings of tribal peoples. If we are truly to understand ancient Egyptian religion (or any religion), it will be part of our task to ‘remember’ what we have forgotten, but which in some sense we already know.”6 Bellah’s term, which was cognate with Voegelin’s differentiation, was the acquisition of “new capacities.” This acquisition did not imply any kind of progress so much as a different way of responding to “fundamental anxieties,” to use a term that Bellah borrowed from Alfred Schutz.7 For Voegelin, the fundamental anxiety, as we also discuss in chapter 1, arose from the human experience of the mystery of existence out of nothing. In conventional terms, this book is a cross-disciplinary study, which raises a preliminary question: Why would political scientists, especially those familiar with the modern political science established by Voegelin, be concerned with what is conventionally referred to as prehistoric humanity? The adjective “prehistoric” is not the best. To begin with, it is a nineteenth-century French philological barbarism, like “sociology.” Even so, and ignoring its status as a linguistic mongrel, the term “prehistory” does seem to be a necessary starting point. Prehistory can be distinguished from history by the existence or nonexistence of literary documentation. Given that literacy has been absent from some societies until quite recently, we have an obvious problem that prehistory ends at different times in different places.8 Political scientists usually deal with texts. The absence of texts from the Upper Paleolithic means we must rely on the evidence unearthed (sometimes literally) by archaeologists. André Leroi-Gourhan, one of the great archaeologists of the twentieth century, whose work is discussed in chapter 5, would occasionally refer to “the book of the earth” as the objective of his investigations. But he would add that this book had many missing pages and few complete sentences. Such a book was even more unusual in that it could be read one time only: once one layer or page has been documented, it had to be destroyed in order to examine an earlier page. One of the results was almost Socratic: the deeper the archaeologist digs, the more he or
Preface xiii
she must destroy. This means that often the deeper archaeologists dig, the less they know—at least as compared to what they thought they knew before they started. Time and again we see in this book how one grand theory has been replaced by another. Optimists might call this the progress of science. Those with a more realistic disposition might wonder if the entire enterprise of archaeology and other paleosciences is a grand waste of time. To my mind such defeatism goes too far, but it does reinforce the urgency of the question: What is it that archaeologists do that might be relevant to political science? According to one contemporary school, the goal of archaeology “is to resuscitate deceased culture” by “interpreting their material remains and artifacts.”9 Such an approach seems promising because it allows contemporary human beings to say something meaningful about the extensive phenomena connected to preliterate human existence. Of course, matters are never so simple: historians of archaeology usually distinguish between classical archaeologists and those interested in prehistory—in German, Archäologie refers to the former only; the subject matter of prehistoric archaeology is usually referred to as Urgeschichte or Frühgeschichte. Prehistorical archaeology developed from early modern antiquarianism and was initially mixed up with speculation on such matters as dating the Great Flood and the origins of specific national and ethnic groups. Thus the subject matter relevant to political science must be further distinguished from what is of concern to archaeologists, who, like political scientists, are divided into different schools and approaches anyhow. With all the qualifications implied in the foregoing paragraphs, and notwithstanding Hollweck’s remarks concerning Voegelin’s interest in Paleolithic symbols, one purpose of this book is, indeed, to push the subject matter of political science further back into the past. Ofer Bar- Yosef, a distinguished Israeli archaeologist, provided another justification for cross-disciplinary research: “You can’t remain a worm in your own turnip,” by which he meant you can’t even know your own turnip unless you find another one.10 Voegelin certainly moved from his own turnip, which initially was the study of the law, first to political science and then to philosophy of history and phi losophy of consciousness, which turned out to be constituents of his understanding of political science after all.
xiv Preface
In the present context, moving to another turnip, or perhaps to an apple or a pear, meant to visit archaeological sites in Europe and North America—so far I have been unable to visit sites elsewhere in the world. Mostly, however, moving to another turnip meant having to read a great deal of material, in this case in archaeology, paleoanthropology, and more generally in “paleoscience.” Initially, such reading as I undertook was rather indiscriminate, and I am quite confident that archaeologists, should they happen upon this book, will say I didn’t read enough. Nevertheless, no one can read everything. In the event, it took some time before I could develop a sense of context and so an understanding what in paleoscientific literature might be relevant to political science. Most of this material was interesting enough, but I was often surprised at the ease with which many paleoscientists ignored or otherwise evaded what seemed to me to be important philosophical issues. In this context, Ian Morris, an archaeologist, told an illustrative story. When he was a graduate student, he took a seminar from Ernest Gellner, who had recently left the chair in philosophy at the London School of Economics to become professor of social anthropology at Cambridge. After listening to a talk by Christopher Tilley, also an archaeologist, Gellner said, “They tell me you’re a good archaeologist; so why are you trying to be a bad philosopher?” Morris explained, “Archaeology has unavoidable philosophical implications, and until such time as good philosophers take archaeology more seriously, archaeologists have little choice but to become bad philosophers.”11 Mutatis mutandis, the same might be said of archaeologists and political scientists. Here is an illustration of what I mean. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts houses a fairly large painting by Gauguin. In the upper left-hand corner is its title, “D’où Venons Nous/Que Sommes Nous/Où Allons Nous.”12 Many paleoscientists ignore the second and third questions and think the first can be answered on its own—by history, biology, and eventually by physics. For Gauguin, as for Bellah, Voegelin, and Gellner, and in general for political science, the three questions form a whole, a unified complex of questions that do not admit of an answer. So as not to leave a false impression, the most interesting archaeologists and anthropologists I have read understand this perfectly well.
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A persistent theme in this book is tributary to a widespread observation by paleoscientists, namely, that Upper Paleolithic human beings were as cognitively competent as our contemporaries. It is unclear in many instances whether such a remark was just a nod in the direction of conventional egalitarianism or was a kind of metaphysical statement. In chapter 1 we examine the sense in which this assertion is true. In so doing, we provide the outline of what a philosophical anthropology entails. The point of the exercise is to indicate the kind of enquiries that must be raised in answering a fundamental question: What sort of being is human being? In what sense were Upper Paleolithic Cro-Magnons or even Neanderthals human in the sense that we are human? The assumption I am making here, an assumption I believe is foundational for political science, is that the purpose of political science is to become aware of the fundamental questions regarding political order. The point of philosophical anthropology therefore is not to provide answers to the questions posed at the close of the preceding paragraph, and even less to provide the answer. In the chapters that follow, we will have occasion to draw attention to assumptions made by paleoscientists that seem to provide answers but in fact do not. The form of the text in this book is a narrative essay rather than a report, a meditation, a poem, or a treatise. It is not intended to provide new information, though much of what follows may well be news to normal political scientists. Obviously I am not a “dirt” archaeologist even though I have visited a good number of remote rock art sites and not a few dank caves and rock-shelters. This particular essay in book form provides an interpretation of the work of others, starting with Marie König. Apart from a handful of Voegelin scholars, she is unknown beyond the rather narrow world of German feminism. And yet she raised some questions of genuine interest to political science. Her ability to do so, moreover, is connected to her status on the margins of academic life. More generally, by adopting an approach centered on narrative, we look at specific persons whose individual stories carry meanings. This is why, for instance, we mention that Marie König was best known as a German feminist, André Leroi-Gourhan as a maquisard, and Jean Clottes as an haut fonctionnaire. Their stories are inseparable from their biographies.
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In other words, despite devoting two chapters to the work of several major French archaeologists and paleoanthropologists of the past few generations, we are concerned less with the “progress of prehistoric studies” than with the often idiosyncratic contributions to what political scientists might make of an ongoing story of paleoscience. Others—Michel Lorblanchet and Norbert Aujoulat come immediately to mind—could have been added to the French story, but, so far as I can see, they are significant for our purposes chiefly for moderating the excessive and eccentric claims of their colleagues or for recovering the centrality of fundamental questions of space and time in the context of archaeology and prehistory that had been neglected. Although we discuss narrative in detail in chapter 1, it is important at the outset to stress that it is a form of rhetoric, not science or knowledge. As Bellah said, “The truth of a narrative . . . does not arise from the ‘correspondence’ of its words or sentences to ‘reality,’ but from the coherence of the story as a whole. Just as a poem cannot be paraphrased conceptually without irreparable loss, neither can such narratives be.”13 In other words, narrative does not argue or demonstrate, it persuades. In that sense it is pretheoretical or even prescientific. And yet it also guides and contextualizes argument, knowledge, and science. As we shall see as the paleoscientific narrative unfolds, there are several occasions when the paleoscientific rhetoric exceeded what was actually known. It would be naïve to think that the same thing never occurred in political science. Reference to the decorated caves and other rock art is not intended to be a sample or epitome of something but “an instance of something, a case in point. . . . Examples instruct, they do not prove.”14 We have reproduced (or provided links to) a few of the images discussed in the text. Nearly all these examples are well known and can be found easily enough on the Internet or in any number of lavishly illustrated books on paleoart, many of which are listed in the bibliography. I mentioned above a couple of distinguished French archaeologists whose work I did not examine in detail. Indeed, there are notable British, German, and American paleoscientists whose excellent work appears in this study mainly in footnotes. There are also several questions that I did not consider. The two major ones involve the interpretation of Upper Paleolithic signs and the very broad area covered by paleoastronomy.
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Regarding the first, about all one can say with confidence at present is that they meant something to those who made them.15 Regarding the second, since this book is the first of two on prehistoric political science, and because astronomy is central to the megalithic monuments of the Neolithic period, we can postpone consideration of the second problem. It would seem, however, that whatever sense one makes of the later artifacts and symbolism, they were likely to have been rooted in the Upper Paleolithic. The problem is that, even if one can draw a plausible link between, say, the aurochen of Lascaux and a constellation of stars, there are so many stars to choose from that, if one takes enough care, it is possible to outline nearly anything.16 This commonsensical word of caution has been formalized mathematically as Furstenberg’s multiple recurrence theorem, according to which, with a large enough collection of possibilities, such as heavenly bodies, any pattern whatsoever can be discovered. The Neolithic astronomical megaliths reduced the range of possibility considerably. Research for this book has been fun. You can’t—or at least I can’t—say that about very many projects. Writing is always enjoyable, but undertaking the preliminary work for this study was nearly always a treat. Glade Hadden, an archaeologist, said that “for me, the thrill of discovery is the juice,” not picking it up or putting it in a museum.17 On a number of occasions, in the Fontainebleau forest, rural Ireland, or West Texas, coming across a poorly described or hidden site did indeed provide the juice. I consider myself fortunate indeed to have had such experiences. First of all I must thank the Donner Canadian Foundation and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for picking up most of the tab. I must also thank my wife, Denise Guichon, and daughter, Meg Cooper, who accompanied me on several exciting rock art hunts. Jessica Weber has been an exceptional research assistant; Camilo Gil Gonzales helped with some Spanish sources. Colleagues at the Eric Voegelin Society and the American Political Science Association have provided intelligent audiences in front of whom I developed many of the arguments presented in the chapters that follow. Audiences in Madison, Baton Rouge, Lethbridge, Cologne, Munich, Baltimore, and Washington have also provided attentive if sometimes bewildered audiences, as have my colleagues at the University of Calgary.
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Then there are the pros. Among the archivists, Patricia Kervick and Katherine Meyers at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard were extraordinarily accommodating. My formal thanks for the use of the materials in their collection: Peabody Museum numbers 2005.16.1 and 998-27-40/14628.2, Alexander Marshack and Hallam Movius Papers, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University. Aimée Calfin at the Getty Research Institute Library facilitated, often on short notice, access to their amazing collection. The diligent staff in the Interlibrary Loan office at the University of Calgary have been consistently helpful in acquiring material, as have librarians at Stanford, University of British Columbia, and UCLA. Alain Bénard, of the Groupe d’Étude de Recherche et de Sauvegarde de l’Art rupestre (GERSAR) in Milly-la-Forêt, showed me several of the well-hidden rock-shelters in the Fontainebleau forest. For their helpful conversations on various aspects of this project I would like to thank Paul Bahn, Jodi Bruhn, Paul Caringella, Jean Clottes, Michael Franz, Thierry Gontier, Don Johanson, Wolfgang Leidhold, Geneviève von Petzinger, Brendan Purcell, Tilo Schabert, and David Walsh. At the University of Notre Dame Press, I must thank Eli Bortz and Matthew Arnold for the helpful suggestions, and Scott Barker for his splendid copyediting. I’m sure there are others I have neglected, and for which neglect and forgetfulness I apologize.