The Lascaux Shaft scene is the most enigmatic painting of Lascaux and, arguably, of all known Upper Palaeolithic art. Its monochrome figures occupy a wall at the bottom of a 17-foot pit at the back of the Apse section of the cavern complex. In terms of artistry, its black oxide prospect offers no challenge to cave art tens of thousands of years earlier. And in comparison to the majestic, multi-hued stock of Lascaux images, the Shaft scene has a graffiti-like appearance. But it would be misleading to believe they were unrelated on that basis.
Early photograph of the shaft entrance from below (Lechler, “The Interpretation of the ‘Accident Scene’ at Lascaux” 1951)
The Shaft scene spreads about 6-foot over the wall and covers a natural bulge. It shows a wounded bison with its entrails apparently spilling. To the left is a seemingly naked man who may have been the victim of the beast’s powerful assault. The aroused man, which counts the only human figure known at Lascaux, is bird-headed or bird-masked. Below him is a goose or grouse on the end of a stick, staff or totem-pole which bears virtually the same profile to the man. The man also has four-fingered hands, further allusive of an avian costume or transformation. Left of the bird-man is a woolly rhinoceros, the only known rhino depiction at the complex. The beast, which seems to be shown moving away from the main scene, has an upraised tail with six black dots beneath. Facing this group on the opposite wall, is the partial image of a horse.
Originally, it was believed the Shaft was not part of Upper Palaeolithic Lascaux but another cave reached by a different entrance now hidden. Lascaux is situated within a rise which may have been known as a holy hill to Neanderthals. At Regourdou Cave, located only 800m from Lascaux, a Neanderthal man and brown bear were buried in deliberate proximity about 80,000 years ago (Pastoureau, 2011). It was thought Regourdou may have housed another underground entry to Lascaux. In lieu of an unknown entrance to the complex, however, the Shaft was accessed by a rope or ladder. The lip of the chasm leading to it is worn showing that people regularly used its opening.
Reconstruction of the “original” Lascaux cave entrance discovered by Ravidat and his friends 1940 (image, AC)
Despite its limited space the Shaft played an important role in the religious mysteries of Lascaux. Early ideas about the meaning of the scene circled around hunting magic and a hunting tragedy. It was thought the man had been stalking the bison before the animal turned and gored him; his ithyphallic condition was explained as death by severance of the backbone. Henri Breuil, who suspected the scene eulogised an actual hunting disaster, thought the Shaft was a crypt and dug for the remains of the slain hunter below the image, to no avail. A dramatically different approach was offered by David Lewis-Williams. He sees physical entry into deep, subterranean passages (exemplified by the Shaft) equivalent to psychic entry into altered states of consciousness, and interprets the panel as an ahistorical depiction of shamanic transformation. For him, the figures of the scene were fashioned out of natural discolorations on the cave wall; the image-makers were fixing spirit animals on spots where, in a sense, they already existed. From this perspective the scene does not portray earth-bound characters on a hunting trip, but visions adrift in a spiritual vortex (Lewis-Williams, 2002).
Lewis-Williams, however, acknowledges a gathering of complex metaphors at large in the scene. Though he suggests the images integrate diverse explorations, he remains cautious about astronomical interpretation, perhaps because this would contradict his theory about cosmologies being neurologically generated (like culturally-neutral, Jungian archetypes) rather than, at least in part, observed.
Main scene (AC)
The archaeologist Michael Rappenglüeck deciphered the Shaft scene against a wide ethnographic spectrum. As a shamanic cosmography, he suggests that the three stars of the Summer Triangle, Deneb, Vega and Altair correspond to the eyes of the man, bison, and bird respectively (Rappenglüeck, 1998). Similarly, Luz Antequera Congregado had pinned the Summer Triangle onto three seemingly unsuspecting bulls from an earlier scene found at the Altamira Caves (A. Congregado, 1992). For Rappenglüeck, the general idea is that the panel portrays a bird-man drifting up the celestial pole to the circumpolar region as if in shamanic flight. Relatedly, the anthropologist and body posture expert Felicitas D. Goodman proposed the sketch of the bird-man was a specific body posture instruction that was taught to initiates. Believing the figure to be recumbent on a hillock at a 37-degree angle, Goodman facilitated workshops based on the scene to cultivate shamanic flight experience (Goodman, 1986). However, she isolated the man from his graphical context for the reason she could not see any connection between him and the wounded beast.
Alexander Marshack, was perhaps closer to the pudding in his approach than a lot of other commentators. He noted the presence of realistic, symbolic and mythological elements in the scene and alludes to the distinction between shamanic experience and later representation which would make the observer (visitor to the Shaft) part of the story. Here, the shamanic or mystic death is embedded in a seasonal account:
Since every shamanistic performance or trance is, in a sense, also a story – the story of an event, a search, a journey, a hunt, a trickery, an escape, a fight, a miracle – the bird as a subsidiary or specialized character able to fly and return and associated with the shaman would have a certain storied validity. Was this bird on a stick, then, the image of the shamanistic spirit, or did the bird carry or lead the spirit of the shaman on a journey? Was it a messenger of the four-fingered “bird-god” in some seasonal myth related to the bison? Or did the bird-headed man wear a mask to indicate his bird aspect in this part of the story? Was this the image of a journey to a far land – say to the land of spirits or the land of death – which required a journey or return in bird shape or with bird help? Or was it a story in which the mythological bison was killed by the shaman with the help of the bird or in his trance shape as a bird? Is this the image of a seasonal sacrifice or periodic rite? The possibilities, as you can see, are vast, and it is probable that none of those I have mentioned is the truth. But as with the notations, the details of the story are unimportant. It is the generalized use of the symbol and of the storied equation, in tradition and in time, that is significant. (1972: 280)
One reading holds the images found in deeper cave recesses, where more violent animals are sometimes depicted, represent archaic shaman séances. The French archaeologist Annette Laming-Emperaire (1959) thought that the Shaft figures were mythical beings connected with the history of the ancestors of the group. Following this line, the American prehistorian Mary Settegast drew a compelling, multileveled resemblance between the Shaft event and the Yima cosmogony of the First Man and Primordial Bull (Settegast, 1987). The archaic structure of this myth and rite continued, she suggests, in the bull-in-cave iconography central in the cult of Mithraism, a secret cult founded upon, it has been argued, a scientific discovery (Ulansey, 1989). Following this theme, it would not be unreasonable to conceive the Shaft as the stage of a hunter-gatherer mystery drama, a place where its story was enacted, with music and costume, to explain its meaning to neophytes.
Mithraeum (Atlas Obscura)
As our cave art paper sets out, the animal forms in the Shaft correspond with the solstices and equinoxes during Lascaux’s Upper Palaeolithic use. The personalities of the animals also relate to the nature of those annual transitions: the seasonal characters are the bird, rhinoceros, horse and bison. The cosmic event they collectively record was appropriately placed within the deep recess of the Shaft, since both cave interior and the outer reaches of visible space mark the boundaries of the ordinary world. The art historian Michael Rice comments on this polarity in relation to bull characters:
The bull leads his followers into some very dark caverns; literally so, since the bull is a chthonic creature and is, however mysteriously, associated with forces which are found under the earth. The bull is identified with earthquake, with the roar of volcanoes and land-slip, and with flood. But the bull also leads on to the stars, in what is surely his most arcane epiphany. (1998:6)
Marshack noted the bird on the stick or staff as a season symbol, one of flight, disappearance and return. Though it is difficult to be certain what avian species it is, a good case has been made for a Black Grouse or Capercaillie (Davenport & Jochim, 1988). These authors compared the Shaft bird, which is virtually identical to the mask or post-mortem identity of the man, to a Siberian shaman’s spirit helper which takes the form of a grouse. Significantly, these gallinaceous birds are also well known to ornithologists and the public for their elaborate mating dances at spring which occur at gathering places known as leks. Together with the “green man” characteristics, this animal behaviour would therefore calibrate the vernal equinox.
A Man. a Supra-ocular comb. B Grouse on stick/staff. C Blackcock profile. c Supra-ocular comb. D Grouse on spear-thrower from Le Mas d’Azil. E Siberian shaman’s ongon or spirit-helper (Davenport & Jochim, “The scene in the Shaft at Lascaux” 1988)
The now extinct woolly rhinoceros is drawn sketchily in a thicker line, perhaps by a different hand, than the main scene and is shown apart from it. A stout and heavy megafauna, the animal is a good match for the descending darkness and lack of spatial quality the autumn equinox heralds. Known for embodying evil in mythologies, an early reading by Henri Breuil held that it was the rhino and not the man that was responsible for goring the bison. Although this view has not been discredited, it is difficult to build upon. Notable are the six dots beneath the raised tail of the animal. The precise meaning of the dots remains uncertain, but it is significant that six red dots arranged in the same two rows appear in the Gallery of the Felines. There, they mark a point where the artistic decoration ends and the gallery becomes physically impassable.
Rhino detail (image, AC)
Next is the image of the horse about which little can be said other than its presence on the opposite wall and the nature of its participation with the other figures. Unlike the portly, chaotic rhino a horse moves swiftly without restraint which is a good equation of the increasing light and energy that starts to build from the winter solstice. Notably, the Lascaux horses have attracted attention as astral symbols before. The German archaeologist Marie Kӧenig suggested the “ascending” mare outlines in the Hall of the Bulls represented the morning sun, whereas the “descending” impressions signified winter (Kӧenig, 1970). Horses were also widely associated with the winter solstice outside the Palaeolithic context. In ancient Greece, the god Poseidon was credited for domesticating the horse and a chthonic horse was his emblem. Poseidon’s major festival was the midwinter solstice (Robertson, 1984). The White Horse of Uffington is landscaped in a midwinter solar choreography which indicates a solstice-horse connection in Neolithic Britain. In Vedic India the midwinter solstice was symbolised by the head of a sacrificed horse.
The bison, however, is central to the drama. It spreads over the main tumescence of the Shaft which is not discernible on photographs. Its raised hackles appear to depict alarm and might also signify the appearance of bison during their summer shedding. Its significance at the summer solstice completes an important part of the annual event the figures write. The bison (Capricornus) marks the position of maximum intensity of the Taurid meteor shower when Lascaux was occupied, irrespective of impact hypotheses. This fireball display was far more intense in that era than it is today and would have provided an awe-inspiring spectacle provocative of cosmic mystery. In this way, the Shaft bison appears to be the celestial ancestor of the perplexing Bull of Heaven, noted by Michael Rice:
It is not clear what in fact the Bull of Heaven constitutes. It is clearly visualized as an actual bull, though of tremendous size and ferocity. As it stamps it foot, chasms open up … Its breath is pestilential. If myth ever truly reflects reality, then the Bull of Heaven is perhaps the earthquake (with which bulls are always identified) or the burning heat of summer and drought which, in contrast to its more usual identification with the spring, as the time of rebirth, it sometimes represented. Whatever it was, the Bull of Heaven is a fearsome beast… (1998: 99)
The line of lethality running through the bison’s body, apparently from anus-to-penis, has been interpreted as the spear or harpoon of the man. In this view the barbed and broken line at the man’s feet, and the bird staff, are the spear-thrower. Amid the items excavated from the Shaft floor were many stone lamps, the exact number and whereabouts of which have become lost, in addition to flint blades, ivory spears and a seashell pendant. The one styled lamp that has survived, together with the blades and spears, were incised with signs which have been compared to the barbed, errant lines illustrating the Shaft painting. These broken lines feature elsewhere in the cave and it is thought that they may have been used by the Upper Palaeolithic Lascaux people as a clan emblem.
Styled Lascaux lamp with broken lines (courtesy of Don Hitchcock)
Do these important lines depict atmospheric phenomena such as lightning or, by extension, a meteor shower? It is significant they were used on lamps. A widespread hunter-gatherer belief is that fire has individualities, like people and animals, and different fires were not mixed. There is a distinction between fire collection (“new fire”) and fire production (“old fire”) in that the purest fire was believed to originate in the sky. Fire collected from a forest struck by lightning was considered more sacred than a fire produced by people. The fact the lamps and pre-metallurgical weaponry bear these marks makes their symbolism more conceivable as aerial streaks of a “fire” that was cosmic in origin.
Together, the Shaft figures record what Marshack identified as a ‘time-factored use of art, myth, rite, and symbol’ and yield a date of 15,150 BC to within 200 years, which agrees with proposed dates for the paintings at Lascaux. The scene’s mediation in myth and symbol does not make it unreal, these substitutes explain an environmental set of circumstances which together write a “cosmic clock”.