The Human Cosmos. Jo Marchant

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СКАЧАТЬ down the rope, nervous not because he doubted his own strength but because he feared his younger friends might drop him. When his feet touched the bottom, 8 metres down, he raised his lamp to the walls and saw one of the strangest scenes in all of cave art.

      It features a stick man with a bird head and prominent penis – the only human figure in the cave. Often described as ‘the Dead Man’, he lies at a 45-degree angle with his head back and his arms and fingers splayed. Bearing down on him is a bristling bison, head low, horns thrust forwards, with a black spot on its shoulder and a series of loops hanging beneath its belly, as if its guts are falling out. Directly beneath the man is a bird perched on a vertical staff.

      This bizarre tableau has mystified generations of scholars. But d’Huy and Rappenglück both suggest that the secret to understanding it may lie in the sky. With a slight shift in perspective, it is the man who stands vertical, looking to the heavens as the bird stick and bison follow him upwards. D’Huy suggests that the scene might show the Cosmic Hunt, as hunter and beast rise into the sky to become constellations. That would explain why the bison, despite its aggressive position, doesn’t appear to be charging forwards. The black spot on its withers might be a star, and black marks on the ground beneath could be the bloodstained leaves of the hunted animal, signalling the onset of autumn.

      It is no more than ‘a plausible hypothesis’, d’Huy admits. But the shaft scene does look strikingly similar to a Neolithic rock painting from the Maia river in Siberia that is thought to represent an early version of the Cosmic Hunt, in which a hunter takes aim at an elk with the sun hanging under its belly. Perhaps the loops beneath the Lascaux bison, too, represent not its intestines but the sun.

      Rappenglück, meanwhile, thinks the birdman is a shaman with a staff, and that the bison is his spirit-helper, guiding his journey to the sky. Similar scenes appear in the art of modern-day shamanic cultures, such as the ecstatic shaman in flight to the sky, penis erect and bound to a celestial bull, that appears on a tipi of the Oglala people in North America. Rappenglück further suggests that the eyes of the Lascaux bison, birdman and bird correspond to Vega, Deneb and Altair – the ‘Summer Triangle’ – among the brightest stars overhead in summer. Twenty thousand years ago, this trio never set but rotated around the northern celestial pole, indicating the time of night like a giant sky clock. Perhaps the people of Lascaux imagined this constellation as a celestial shaman (the Palaeolithic equivalent of the Chumash’s Sky Coyote), turning each night around the axis of the cosmos. Surrounded by spirit-helpers, he ruled and fertilised the sky. Rappenglück interprets the scene as an image of the sky, but also a map for an earthly shaman’s own voyage to the celestial pole.

      It won’t ever be possible to prove what the artist really intended. But the different strands of evidence do seem to converge on one explanation: that this prehistoric scene, far underground in the deepest part of Lascaux cave, represents a journey to the stars. Similarly, the various lines of enquiry described in this chapter – Bull No. 18, the Dead Man, the Cosmic Hunt – seem to me, despite the uncertainties, to add up to an overwhelming broader conclusion: that if we want to understand where we come from as a species, to reach the source of humanity’s earliest beliefs and identity, then we have to include a consideration of the wheeling night sky.

      Seeing those repeated celestial cycles – night to night, season to season – surely helped to stimulate the very first ideas about who we are and about the nature of reality; ideas that survive in hunter-gatherer communities today. ‘They had the same questions,’ Rappenglück says. ‘What is birth? What is death? Where does the sun go? What is behind the world?’

      The universe that our ancestors came up with in answer to those questions was a quintessentially human one, inspired not just by the sky but by the shifting states of consciousness that our brains can produce. In it, there were no boundaries between living and non-living, humans and nature, Earth and stars. It was a cosmos that created us as we created it; in which internal experience and external reality were inextricably entwined. We’ve been trying to separate ourselves from it ever since.

      2

      LAND

      Just before dawn on 21 December 1967, archaeologist Michael O’Kelly stepped into the darkness of a 5,000-year-old tomb. He clambered through a long, narrow passage towards a burial chamber hidden deep inside the huge mound of stones, and then turned to look back towards the entrance. The visible patch of landscape looked dark and featureless, cut through by a glittering silver river. Flocks of starlings looped across the sky. He checked his watch: two minutes to nine. What happened next would catapult him to fame and change his life for ever.

      O’Kelly had been excavating this site in Newgrange, Ireland, for the past five years. Workmen realised in the seventeenth century that what appeared to be a small, scrub-covered hill was actually built from ancient stones: a passage tomb, of a type common across parts of the British Isles. But this one was huge – an impressive 90 metres in diameter, with a 24-metre-long passage constructed from great stone slabs leading to a cross-shaped chamber with a high, corbelled roof. Inside and out, the walls were alive with art – elaborate chevrons, diamonds, spirals – picked into the rock using flint-tipped chisels.

      Local people said the tomb was a burial place for the legendary Kings of Tara, whom medieval writers said ruled from a hill nearby. During his project to excavate and restore the stones, O’Kelly did find human remains mixed into the earth floor. But radiocarbon dating showed that the tomb was far more ancient than the stories about Tara. It was built around 3200 BC, centuries before even Egypt’s Great Pyramids.

      O’Kelly also noted a curious rectangular opening high above the tomb’s entrance, which he called the ‘roof box’. It was partly blocked by a square chunk of crystallised quartz, which seemed to have worked as a shutter; a second chunk had fallen to the floor. Scratches on the stone of the roof box suggested that these shutters had been repeatedly slid open and closed. The opening was too small and high for people to climb through, so O’Kelly was mystified by its purpose. Perhaps it was a place for offerings, or formed a doorway for the souls of the dead.

      Then he considered a third possibility. Another story told by locals was that at midsummer, the light of the rising sun shone into the tomb, illuminating a distinctive triple-spiral carving at the back of the burial chamber. O’Kelly couldn’t find any witnesses. And he knew that the story was impossible, because the tomb faces southeast, over the valley of the Boyne river, whereas the midsummer sun rises much further north.

      But the stories were persistent, and O’Kelly realised that the tomb’s entrance does point in roughly the right direction to be lit at midwinter, when the sun rises at its furthest point south. So in the early hours of the morning on the winter solstice in December 1967, he drove over a hundred miles through the darkness from his home in Cork to test the idea. When he arrived, the surrounding fields and even the road below were deserted. He entered the tomb feeling utterly alone.

      It was a clear morning, so as he waited in the burial chamber he was hopeful that the sunrise might indeed creep inside. But what actually happened was sudden and dramatic. As the sun’s first rays appeared above the ridge on the river’s far bank, a thin, bright shaft of light burst through the roof box and struck not the entrance passage but the floor at his feet: a direct hit right in the tomb’s heart. The light soon widened to a rich golden beam about 15 centimetres across, until the chamber was so bright he could walk around without a lamp, and see the roof 6 metres above.

      ‘I was literally astounded,’ O’Kelly said later. ‘I expected to hear a voice or perhaps feel a cold hand resting on my shoulder, but there was silence.’ After 17 minutes, the sun passed across the slit and darkness returned. He was deeply moved by the experience, and returned to the tomb every winter for the rest of his life, lying on the soft sandy floor of the burial chamber as the light shaft danced across his face.

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