Caves

(Feb, 7 2023) Ancient people believed that every change on earth was caused by some divine power. They further observed that such changes eventually affected the cycle of life in some way and that all life required a masculine trigger and a feminine time of maturation and growth. Yet the natural division of the life powers would have been between the plant and animal kingdoms  

Caves generated a spooky feeling. It was dark and in the torchlight images of animals seemed to flicker in and out of existence on the walls. The earliest cave paintings in France and Spain were painted on these naturally formed wall patterns to bring out the animal spirits those patterns represented. 

Because of these visions and because caves breathed caves became the place of dead spirits awaiting to be reborn. These dead spirits were still alive but they had no form, no invisible "platonic" image. They were pure sparks of life and represented a motion source of the goddess Selu (Selene). Cave-like dark spaces such including space under the earth plane (the underdome) represent the dark place powers of the life goddess Kate (Hekate). The Hebrew word sheol translated as "the place of the dead" seems to derive from the Akkadian selu (šelû).  

Paleolithic cave art is found worldwide with the paintings in Europe being the most numerous and skilled. (See Don’s maps). These European cave paintings peaked around 30,000-28,000 BCE and around 25,000-24,000 BCE.  

Cave paintings were likely used in rituals to atone for the animal lives the tribe took during the hunt and to encourage the animals to return next year. Eventually the cave artists would paint animals on any cave surface as they ran out of room, even over older paintings so important was the ritual. Human spirits were represented more abstractly as hand prints probably because humans were not prey.

Evidence for ancestral human spirits is also found in caves in the form of painted hand and abstract figurines. They seem to have appeared later but lasted longer than the animal paintings having a date range of 30,000 to 12,000 BCE.