"Homo Ritualis"

Homo Ritualis: In illo tempore…

In this month in which we celebrate Creativity, I invite you to steep with me in the mystery of the remarkable origins of human creative activity.. How prehistoric art wed to ritual seems to have arrived on the scene with a bang, at least in terms of the archeological record, with “nothing to foreshadow its emergence” and “no sign of crude beginnings”…[i]

The paintings on the walls of the Paleolithic Chauvet cave are still startling in their beauty. In Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Werner Herzog’s cameras capture the wonder and immediacy of this creativity which occurred over 30,000 years ago: the elegant lines of the Red Bear, the Bison, the Horses and Fighting Rhinos, the Lions, the Panther and the Venus and Sorcerer.  But, perhaps the most startling wonder of human activity found in the Chauvet Cave is that seen in the gallery of the Skull Chamber.  Moving from chamber to chamber, from one massive expanse of darkness to another and finally, into this room, the lights reveal engravings, claw marks, torch wipes on the walls and handprints, signets of the human in red ochre; on the floor, footprints are to be seen amongst scattered bones and skulls.  And there, in the exact center of the cave, sits a rock and upon it, a bear skull.  Sculptor John Robinson, one of the members of a small scientific team that was allowed to visit and investigate the Chauvet cave in 1998, describes his first encounter with the Bear Skull Chamber:  

In the middle of this chamber is the Altar on which is placed a Bear skull. On the floor around the Altar are 36 other Bear skulls. Obviously they had not all died in this one chamber, but must have been collected from around the Chauvet Cave, or perhaps came from outside kills. For me this was a place where people gathered for some really important ceremony connected with the Bears. I began to get a picture in my mind of the social life of the Clan.The Altar is roughly two foot square on top and two foot high. I squatted down in front of this skull and looked into the eye sockets. With the aid of my pocket torch I could see the surface of the rock beneath the skull. It was covered with tiny lumps of charcoal and grains of fallen calcite which were exactly similar to the surface not covered by the skull. A human must have put the skull there. Jean took one of these pieces of carbon to have it dated. The carbon was 35,000 years old.[ii] 

Creating a ceremonial space by centering a rock within a room, picking up and centering a bear skull upon it, lighting a fire by it – such behavior deemed “ritualistic” is exhibited by all known societies.[iii]  Religious archeologists are finding “literally tens of thousands of ethnographic, historic and archaeological reports,” for “the ritual use of caves for sacred, religious, special or cultic pursuits,” spanning not only the Paleolithic Age to the present, but across six continents as well.[iv]   While homo sapien may be the scientific name for the only extant human species, a case could be made for homo ritualis as a more apt nomenclature for our species, given the ubiquitous nature of the evidence of a link between the human and rituals across both time and spatial boundaries. It may be debatable whether   our species is that of the wise man, but it is undoubtedly from earliest days, that of the ritual being…homo ritualis, in illo tempore. 

Signature on stone,
syllables in red ochre,
five-finger haiku.

[i] Pfeiffer, John E., The Creative Explosion, 1982.
[ii] http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/chauvet/page4.php
[iii]http://www.britannica.com/topic/ritual
[iv] Holley Moyes in “Introduction”, Sacred Darkness: A Global Perspective on the Ritual Use of Caves, p 1.