Pech Merle - Where Gods Were Invented

Pech Merle in France, Where Gods Were Invented. 
 Jay Wilkinson, May 2018 

Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops.   H.L. Mencken

 

In the caves of Lascaux, I’ve heard, the Aurignacian 

Men and women took leave of the other animals, 

a trauma they tried to lessen by painting the animal spirits.

   

             “No Matter What, and After All, and That Beautiful Word So" Hayden Carruth

In southwestern France, in the Department of the Lot, east of the Dordogne, the Cele River flows three seasons of the year. In the summer it burbles only here and there while making its way to join the River Lot at Bouzies. At this junction of the two rivers and two roads, a bar-restaurant is A Vendre (For Sale.) Shall I stake my retirement account here?

We have taken the less-traveled road again. The first time on bicycles, this time in the rental car. Both times, German scuba divers have pulled off the two lane road along the Cele and hauled their equipment out of vans to explore deep potholes formed where the limestone layers collapsed. What are they seeking? Underwater natural wonders? Archaeological finds? It was in this area that Eleanor of Aquitaine and her Kings and their sons and successors battled the Hundred Years War for dominion over the Kingdoms of both France and England. Branches of the crusade-era, still popular pilgrimage path to St. Jacques de Compostelle run through the area. Castles with sections dating from those times stand guard on promontories. 

While the divers almost certainly speak perfect English, we don’t stop to ask about their finds and searches.

The D41 provincial road dodges in and out of cliff cuts and in two miles or so, turn left at the village of Cabrerets and ascend a cut rising towards the causses, the limestone plateaus that make up much of the region. If you blink on the D41 and continue east and encounter the autos, motorbikes and manakins hanging off the 100 foot cliffs at Musee de L’Insolite (Museum of The Odd), stop, observe the absurd and reverse course. At Cabrerets drive slowly upwards, and follow signs past fields and into the woods to Pech Merle, a cave complex rediscovered by Cabrerets teenagers in 1922.

Millions of years old and with more than a mile of partially-excavated paths, Pech Merle cavern is a historical monument operated by the town of Cabrerets. Unlike better known Lascaux, where an excellent, modern and air conditioned reproduction of its caves and paintings welcomes millions, Pech Merle is a place where a few, stricted limited to preserve the environment from modern contantiments, can walk in the history where we can inhale the exhalations of our ancestors. Stairs, cut passages, wood walkways, lights and guides give visitors access to the ancients.

Impressive stalactites and stalagmites stud the cave’s crannies and caverns. The mastodon's mane grows from a fall of limestone while its shoulder, tusks and eye are etched into the flat plane above. A single curving line tails down the wall. Sixty yards along, seven images of a woman's hand span a smooth out-crop. The artist splayed her hand against the wall and spit ochre through a hollowed-out bird bone. Greeting? Warning? A seven foot pike rises through another cavern, speckled by black thumb prints. The only man, pierced by arrows, falls into another grotto. Enemy, victim or sacrifice? In other passages aurochs, rhinos and horses gallop around corners. Footprints. Human footprints, thought to be those of a single teenager, stride back and forth through a metamorphosed puddle a mile into the cavern in the wood-topped cliffs above the Cele.

Atheist, yes, I am convinced that Pech Merle is a place where humans invented the gods.

Who paid stipends in the Aquitaine 24,000 years ago so the artist dared struggle through narrow passages into the dark a quarter mile beneath the surface? When every day was a struggle to get enough calories to survive? Boney middens left by bears, hyenas and other carnivores stank in ratty corners. A pitchy torch in one hand, a skin bag with pigment, antler, bones and rocks in the other.

It was a cold, pre-agricultural time. Glaciers weighted down the continent. Summers dwindled. Family bands followed game and rotated homes with the seasons. Bison, hyenas, red deer, fish and fox, horses and mastodons, all happenstance and prey. Flora and fauna changed and genus homo adapted, moved or died. To expend the energy, to skip the hunting, to pass over a harvest, to brave the darkness and the danger of the caverns of Pech Merle, our ancestor must have had transcendent motivation. And support from her people. What did she offer in return?

Did art preserve their speculations and insights, and if not providing them control, at least a sense of boundaries, the sensibilities of myth and some uniting social survival advantage? Alone, after a hungry fever-dream, might she also have lit, in this cave, the first hollowed stone bowl lamp fueled by pigment-stained bear grease?

Thunder and lightning, the wash of the Milky Way, ice on the river, the earthquake, a datura delirium, and ever, death. Days of plenty amidst seasons of starvation, the clutching love of mother for child, dementia among the elders – was that just the way things were? Had they invented luck? Or was it godly retribution?

Our minds may not yet be not equipped to comprehend aspects of the universe – as our senses miss whales’ echolocation and the sun’s ultraviolet rays. All the same, somewhere in our psyches, in the interstices, incontrovertibles lay hidden, essential and still undecipherable. Dance, art, music and poetry give hints of and are tools we can use to reach for the unknowable. For others, the quest is conducted through spirituality or faith, service or voodoo, through acquisitions or the exercise of power, through psychedelics, psychology or physics.

Modern experts opine that Pech Merle’s ancients would not likely have had a conception of gods separate from their world. They were, in my view, much better off for having gods close at hand.

That the artist in Pech Merle was our ancestral Frida Kahlo, I have no doubt. Picasso also studied in her studio. She was our early Marie Curie, who reached out to grasp, define and record the unknowable of her day.

Physicists say that something called dark matter constitutes 85% of the mass of the Milky Way. Dark matter is an item of faithful deductions, unseen, unheard, filling in the deeply-shadowed holes in science’s closely-observed certainties. A mile down in the Soudan mine in northern Minnesota (adjacent to our deepest state park), scientists thought that they detected traces of dark matter’s minute vibrations, recorded like smudged thumb prints on a wall or computer screen. Alas, further analysis showed it to be only the etchings of ordinary subatomic particles.

So we whistle against the dark, penetrate the earth to make traces of and find the promise and threat of the unknowable, still sitting there in the next deep chamber, around the corner, calmly licking its chops.

 

Jay Wilkinson