Spirituality and Sexuality in Prehistoric Art
Richard Alan Northover
Abstract
The study considers what can be known about prehistoric spirituality and sexuality based on selected art
and artifacts that have survived prehistory, using case studies from Palaeolithic Europe, North America and
southern Africa, and Neolithic Ireland. Examples of parietal and portable art, as well as the structure and
setting of the caves and buildings in which these have been found are discussed. The study examines the
very different approaches of David Lewis-Williams’s ethnographical and empirical research, including
cognitive neuroscience, and Georges Bataille’s more hermeneutic and phenomenological method. The
study considers the possible sexual basis of David Lewis-Williams’s concept of supernatural potency,
which he claims shamans attempted to acquire in order to achieve various purposes, while in altered states
of consciousness, in trans-cosmological forays into the spirit world. The study also scrutinizes Bataille’s
ideas on tools, taboo, violence, transgression, art, excess, eroticism and death, which he applied to the cave
art of Lascaux, describing it as the cradle of humanity. Alternative interpretations of the only human figure
in the almost inaccessible Shaft of the Lascaux caves are put forward to illustrate the differences between
the two approaches. Despite their differences, both approaches emphasize the connections between
spirituality, animality, sexuality and death, and both presuppose a common human nature connecting
modern humans to our Homo sapiens forebears. While Lewis-Williams contests Bataille’s use of terms
such as ‘art’ and the ‘sacred’, both thinkers would presumably agree that prehistoric spirituality involved
immanence rather than transcendence, an embracing rather than a rejection of our animal nature, even
while, paradoxically, expressing a desire to endure beyond death.
Keywords
Prehistoric, sexuality, spirituality, David Lewis-Williams, shamanism, altered states of consciousness,
Georges Bataille, taboo, transgression, eroticism
*****
1. Introduction
A short paper can hardly begin to justice to a topic of this scope but the study provides a very rough
overview. It is not possible to know for certain how prehistoric people experienced spirituality and
sexuality, but tentative hypotheses can be used to interpret the religious art and architecture that they left
behind. The study argues that the respect for wild animals which is central to understanding Palaeolothic
sexuality and spirituality begins to be displaced during the Neolithic.
The study uses two different approaches to attempt to understand sexuality and spirituality evident in
prehistoric art, the work on eroticism by the philosopher and anthropologist George Bataille and the
shamanistic theory of the archaeologist David Lewis-Williams. Bataille takes a philosophical,
anthropological approach and Lewis-Williams makes use of ethnography and cognitive neuroscience. With
the help of these theories, the study explores three Palaeolothic rock art traditions – in southern Africa,
northern Europe and North America – and two examples of Neolithic architecture – Çatalhöyük in southern
Anatolia and the Newgrange passage tomb in the Bend of the Boyne, Ireland.
While the approaches differ, the theories are not necessarily incompatible and help to illuminate
different aspects of sexuality and spirituality in prehistoric art. Although Lewis-Williams, disputes the
usefulness of the terms ‘art’ and ‘sacred’ in relation to prehistoric rock art and prefers the term ‘meaningmaking’, he would agree with Bataille on the religious basis of the artifacts and architecture. Their
respective approaches are illustrated in analyses in the next two sections of the only human figure in
Lascaux, one of the several caves in southern France and northern Spain that feature spectacular images of
animals from the Ice-Age, dating back to about 30 000 years ago.
2. Georges Bataille on the sacred and eroticism
For Bataille, eroticism is closely tied to sacredness and taboo. David Macey sums up Bataille’s notion
of the sacred:
The unifying element in society is the sacred, which both establishes cohesion and sets limits
on individual behaviour. The sacred implies that the individual has a self-sacrificial relationship
with the collectivity … The sacred is the forbidden element that lies on the margins of society, and
no society can exist in its absence. According to Bataille, the presence of the sacred is manifested
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in extreme emotion, pointless activity such as play and non-reproductive sexuality, and body
exhalations, or in other words in everything that a rational and homogenous society would like to
expel. The sacred also becomes apparent in festivals of waste and expenditure … 1
This study makes use of Bataille’s Eroticism and his two works on prehistoric art – Lascaux: Origins of
Art and The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture.2 Bataille’s work concerns animality, work,
taboo, transgression, sacrifice, death and eroticism. This applies to the images of fertility, too, since the
violence of nature includes both life and death. Bataille was fascinated by the prehistoric rock paintings of
Lascaux, particularly concerning the significance of animals in them. 3 He suggests that animals were
respected as sacred by early humanity as a result of their independence from human prohibitions and
taboos.4
Bataille distinguishes between continuous being – the realm of life in all its excess and violence – and
discontinuous being – the realm of individual consciousness. Consciousness and self-consciousness arise in
the world of work, which divides the world into objects for manipulation with tools. In Lascaux and
Cradle, he argues that Hominids (Homo faber) left the animal world once they learned to use and make
tools, but humanity proper arose, when Homo sapiens started doing art (meaning-making).5 The world of
work (tool-use, society), made possible by taboos and prohibitions, keeps humans productive and safe from
their potential animal violence. The world of work is an attempt to escape the violence of nature, including
birth, life and death. Yet, through tools, humans become aware of death, perceiving that a tool often
outlives its maker.
Furthermore, life’s excess and violence remain suppressed in humans but are allowed expression on
festival days, when partial transgression of taboos is allowed. The festivals are sacred since they allow a
temporary return to animal violence and excess, a temporary attempt by discontinuous beings to achieve
continuous being. The paradox at the heart of humanity is that, as a discontinuous being, the individual
fears death and desires continuous being, which, however, can only be attained through death. This paradox
explains the emotional power of ritual sacrifice of living animals (and of humans in some societies) and the
execution of humans.6 Through witnessing the termination of one discontinuous being, the witnesses to the
sacrifice are reassured that life nonetheless continues. Transgression, eroticism and art involve the attempt
to bridge this divide between continuous and discontinuous being, between life and death.
Art gives expression to this excess of life, as evidenced by the astonishing paintings of animals in the
Lascaux caves and other rock art sites, and shows a reverence for the sacredness of animals that the modern
world has lost, where animals have been reduced to things. 7 It also shows an artistic excess out of
proportion to any utilitarian purposes the images may have had. In Lascaux, Bataille contrasts the world of
work, governed by taboos, with the sacred world of play, defined by art, transgression and sacrifice. Since
play serves no further end, unlike work and tools, it is sacred, and art is a form of play. Both art and play
involve (imaginative) transgression and excess, without being a simple return to the animal world of
continuous being. This includes sexual play, or eroticism.
Bataille’s ideas appear to be confirmed by the only human image in the Lascaux caves, in the almost
inaccessible Shaft. Unlike the richly and realistically detailed images of animals in the rest of the caves, the
human image is a stick figure, although he is only partly human, a therianthrope (half-human and halfanimal). He has a bird’s head, four fingers on each hand and an erect penis. A bird-headed staff lies beside
the figure, which appears to be lying on its back just in front of a disembowelled, still standing but dying
bison. Behind the stick figure is a wooly rhinocerous, with raised tail, defecating. Animality, eroticism,
death, sacrifice and transgression seem to be depicted in this scene of sacred mystery, including the idea of
sexual climax as the little death.
3. David Lewis-Williams’ shamanistic theory
According to Lewis-Williams and Pearce, Bushman and most other prehistoric rock art traditions
presuppose complex religious and cosmological beliefs. 8 These involve a three-tiered cosmos in which an
upper and lower spirit world intersect with the natural world. Shamans make trans-cosmological journeys,
while in trance states, into the spirit world in order to obtain spiritual potency for various purposes, such as
healing, rain making, acquiring assistance for hunting and fending off evil spirits. Portals to the spirit world
include water holes, holes in the ground, caves and the rock faces upon which images were painted.9
According to Lewis-Williams, this multi-tiered cosmology, which appears in most religious traditions,
is hard-wired into the human neuro-psychological make-up which involves a spectrum of consciousness. 10
This encompasses a whole range of conscious states, from alert, rational, problem-solving on the one
extreme, through day-dreaming, to what Lewis-Williams and Pearce call autistic states on the other
extreme, bifurcating into a normal and intensified trajectory. 11 The normal trajectory involves dreams and
unconscious states. The intensified trajectory involves altered states of consciousness, composed of three
stages. The first stage involves entopic phenomena – various geometrical images (dots, zig-zags, nested
Richard Alan Northover
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images, criss-crossing designs, spirals, diamond shapes, and so on) – that are the product of the human
neuro-psychological system. Stage two involves construal of these entoptics in terms of familiar natural and
cultural objects in the environment of the trancer. Between stages two and three is a vortex, the experience
of a tunnel, sometimes with objects in its walls, with a light at its end. The third stage involves
hallucinations, including the experience of becoming-animal. The shaman would become the animal whose
potency he seeks to obtain, which may partly explain the presence of therianthropes in the rock art.
According to Lewis-Williams:
The therianthropy of Upper-Palaeolithic images suggests an intense kind of transformation,
an interaction of both spiritual and material animality with humanity. Such interaction points to
mediation, first between human beings and spirit animals, and secondly, between human beings
thus endowed and another realm of existence at the end of the narrow vortex where the integration
and the fragmentation of mental images is neurologically generated.12
The theory helps to explain the presence of geometric images in many rock art traditions of the world
that have puzzled researchers for decades.
The explanatory power of Lewis-Williams’s theory is clear when applied to the human image depicted
in Lascaux, discussed above. The human figure is a shaman in a state of becoming animal, evident in his
bird head and bird-headed staff, indicating his ability to travel to the spirit world. He is depicted as dying
since, according to shamanistic religions, shamans have to die in this world before they can enter the spirit
world and access the potency of the dying animal, in the Lascaux painting, the eviscerated bison. The
shaman’s erection suggests a connection between the shaman’s sexual and spiritual potency and the
potency of the spirit world that the shaman seeks to obtain by becoming animal. Unlike Bataille’s
philosophical approach, Lewis-Williams’s explanation of the human figure in Lascaux relies on
ethnography and, in this sense, is more convincing. It does, however, involve an extension of local
indigenous knowledge to other rock art traditions far removed in time and place. Nonetheless, the neuropsychological structure common to humans provides considerable justification for his extension.
4.
Palaeolithic southern Africa
In southern African rock art, the sexuality and spirituality is less easily discernible in the rock art than
in some traditions in the northern hemispehere, but is abundantly evident in the rich ethnographical records
made by anthropologists over many decades, especially in the recorded myths. In southern African, there
are several rock art traditions: rock paintings where there are mountains and rock shelters, and petroglyphs
in the more arid western regions. The petroglyphs tend to depict animals and geometric images (entoptics)
but seldom human figures. The cave paintings tend to depict animals, both natural and supernatural, and
often geometric images too. They also frequently depict human figures and therianthropes usually dancing
but sometimes apparently hunting or fighting. The men are sometimes depicted with erections. 13 Basing his
interpretations of rock art on recorded Bushman myths and recorded comments by Bushman shamans on
the rock art, Lewis-Williams argues that these scenes are more plausibly interpreted as shamans’ forays into
the spirit world, during altered states of conscious attained through the trance dance, than depictions of the
Bushmen’s natural environment and everyday activities. In Drakensberg Bushman belief, the dying eland
possesses the greatest potency of any animal, which can be accessed through a trance dance soon after its
death. This belief may help explain the dying bison of Lascaux.
There are several Bushman groupings in southern Africa whose languages are mutally
incomprehensible. Yet all of their myths include a creator-god and trickster-god. According to the
anthropologist Mathias Guenther, the /Xam mantis trickster-god and ur-shaman also has the name of
‘penis’.14 #Goa!na, !Kung trickster god also engages in sexual exploits. The trickster figure’s main moral
shortcomings are gluttony and lechery, and he engages in numerous sexual transgressions. 15 While the
trickster-god was often treated with ridicule, the creator-god was always considered with awe and
reverence, and speaking his name out loud was avoided. Perhaps the creator-god can be interpreted as a
personification of Bataille’s world of continuous being and the trickster-god, of the world of discontinuous
being.
Guenther points out that in Bushman thought hunting, meat and honey were equated with sex.16 He
explains that the Bushmen equated the trance dance with hunting and compared the staying power of the
trance dancer to sexual staying power.17 In addition, spiritual potency was compared with sexual potency. 18
In fact, in the early stages of the trance dance there are many ludic moments and sexual banter, which later
give way to seriousness once the trance dancers enter altered states of consciousness and cross the threshold
into the spirit world.19
Guenther discusses the importance of wild animals in Bushman cosmology and belief and shows how
they were respected and revered – not seen merely instrumentally.20 He mentions Bushmen’s awareness of
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the absence of taboos amongst animals such as incest and goes on to describe how the Bushmen
experienced hunting and eating animals as something akin to cannibalism, the transgression of a taboo.21
Thus, in southern African art, sexuality and spirituality were expressed indirectly both in the activity of
the trance dance and in the spiritual potency shamans were supposed to access while in altered states of
consciousness. The idea of the shaman as both sexually and spiritually potent is reinforced in Bushman
myths and ritual, and is linked to wild animality.
5.
Palaeolithic northern Europe and North America
Two particularly engimatic images in Les Trois Fréres in the Volp Cave, Southern France, are
particularly interesting in terms of what they suggest about Palaeolithic spirituality and sexuality, the image
of what has been named the ‘Sorcerer’ or the ‘God’ and the image of a female bison looking over her
shoulder at a ithyphallic human-bison therianthrope.22 The Sorcerer combines the features of several
animals – deer’s antlers, an owlish face, human hindlegs and genitals, but projecting backwards like a cat’s,
and possibly a horse’s tail. The figure itself is leaning forward – neither standing upright nor on all fours. In
the other image, the female bison’s vagina is pronounced and it appears as though she is inviting the bison
therianthrope to copulate.23 The bison therianthrope has bison forelegs but is standing upright on human
hindlegs and appears to be bleeding at the nose. While these images can be interpreted as suggesting erotic
bestialism, it is far more plausible that they depict shaman figures becoming spirit animals in order to
access the spirit world and its supernatural potency.
In Lascaux and other caves, natural rock formations are also modified to suggest animals or human
sexual organs, specifically the vagina. 24 In the Tuc d’Audoubert, moulded clay sculptures depict a male
bison about to mount a female bison.25 According to Lewis-Williams, the caves themselves represent the
various stages of altered states of consciousness, and hence the multi-tiered spirit world.26
David Whitley, a leading American archaeologist, who endorses the work of Lewis-Williams,
emphasizes the sexuality in prehistoric art to the point of eroticism, linking it to shamanism.27 Many Native
Californian petroglyphs involve wild goats and bison. The goat, a symbol of fertility, is often depicted
dying, its death representing the shaman’s entrance into the spirit world. 28 The shaman, himself, is often
depicted as feathered or as a bird, signifying his ability to fly to the spirit world.29 Whitley emphasises the
outsider status of North American shamans, who were feared for their dangerous unpredictability and their
sexually predatoriness.30
6.
Neolithic Southern Anatolia and Ireland
The ruins of Çatalhöyük feature rooms decorated with ‘plaster-covered bulls’ heads’ and female
fertility symbols, including images of women giving birth to animals.31 Spirituality is linked, once again, to
sexual reproduction and to the potency of large ungulates, here the aurochs, as elsewhere the bison or the
eland. Lewis-Williams and Pearce argue that the domestication of the aurochs was originally motivated for
religious reasons, linked to sacrifice and the possession of supernatural potency, rather than for economic
considerations:
… the domestication of animals was already conceptually embedded in the worldview and socioritual complex we have described before people began actually herding the aurochs. (Italics in the
original)32
This later led to the instrumentalisation of animals by humans and a corresponding loss of respect for
them, since their potency, in Bataille’s terms, was founded on their independence from human taboo and
conventions. Lewis-Williams and Pearce argue that Neolithic religious buildings recreated above ground
symbols of the multi-tiered cosmos represented in the Palaeolithic caves. 33
Newgrange is one of three Neolithic passage tombs situated in the Bend of the Boyne River in
Ireland.34 Its elevation gives it a commanding view of the surrounding countryside. Several large standing
stones circle the tomb. The structure is built of stone and is partly covered by grass. Several of the stones
that constitute its walls, both inside and out, are carved with geometric images (entoptics): zigzag,
triangular, diamond and spiral shapes. A very large stone lies across the entrance to the tomb, also engraved
with geometrics, and it would have taken effort for people to climb it in order to enter the tomb, possibly
symbolising the crossing of a threshold to enter, via altered states of consciousness, into the spirit world.
Above the entrance to the passageway is the roof box that allows a ray of sunlight to travel along the
passage into the room at the centre of of the tomb where it touches a triple spiral shape inscribed on the
back wall. This happens on the Winter Solstice, 21 December, the shortest day of the year. 35 The ray of
sunlight thus represents the renewal of life, revealing the tomb to be a womb. However, it represents not
just physical and spiritual rebirth, and the promise of renewed plant growth, but also the discovery of
consciousness, of human self-awareness.
Richard Alan Northover
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7.
Conclusion
Sexuality in prehistoric art appears to have been closely connected to belief in a spirit world, closely
connected to the animal world, to which shamans had privileged access. Shamans’ ability to access the
potency of the spirit world, during altered states of consciousness, was compared with their sexual potency.
The evidence for this is fragmentary but reveals striking similarities among prehistoric societies since the
Upper Paleolothic and across continents. The multi-tiered cosmology, hard-wired into a neurological
structure common to humanity, is expressed to varying degrees in the myths prehistoric people narrated, the
art that they carved and painted, the rituals they performed and the structures they erected, all involving
common themes of death and desire. The artifacts indicate a fall into consciousness, the displacement of
animals by tools, the awakening of an awareness of death and a paradoxical desire to return to continuous
being while enduring as an individual.
Notes
1
David Macey, The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory (London: Penguin, 2000), 32.
Georges Bataille, Eroticism, translated by Mary Dalwood (London, New York: Marian Boyars, 1962).
Georges Bataille, Lascaux: Or the Birth of Art (Skira, n.d.).
Georges Bataille, The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture (New York: Zone Books, 2005).
3
Richard White provides an overview of Bataille’s Lascaux in ‘Bataille on Lascaux and the Origins of
Art’, in Janus Head, 319-331.
4
Georges Bataille, Eroticism, 83.
5
Bataille, Lascaux, n.p.
Bataille, Cradle of Humanity, 89.
6
Bataille, Eroticism, 82.
7
Bataille, Cradle of Humanity, 55, 75.
8
Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art (London: Thames &
Hudson, 2002).
J. David Lewis-Williams and David G. Pearce, San Spirituality: Roots, Expressions & Social
Consequences (Cape Town: Double Storey, 2004).
9
Lewis-Williams and Pearce, San Spirituality, 51-5.
10
Lewis-Williams, Mind in the Cave, 144-5.
11
Lewis-Williams, Mind in the Cave, 124-7.
Lewis-Williams and Pearce, San Spirituality, 31.
12
David Lewis-Williams, Conceiving God, 226.
13
Forssman and Gutteridge, Bushman Rock Art, 75.
14
Guenther, 105.
15
Ibid., 109.
16
Lewis-Williams
Guenther, 107-09.
17
Ibid., 184.
18
Ibid.
19
Ibid., 183, 191.
20
Ibid., 70-80.
21
Ibid., 73, 74-5.
22
Bataille, Cradle of Humanity, 63.
Whitley, 170.
23
Whitley 169.
24
Ibid., 73-4.
25
Whitely, 175.
26
Lewis-Williams, Mind in the Cave, 266.
27
Whitley, Cave Paintings, 186.
28
Lewis-Williams, Mind in the Cave, 174.
29
Ibid., 175.
30
Whitley, 224.
31
David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce, Inside the Neolithic Mind: Consciousness, Cosmos and the
Realm of the Gods (London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 2005), 102, 113-5, 137.
32
Ibid., 141.
2
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33
Ibid., 85, 194.
Ibid., 198.
35
Ibid., 230.
34
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