La Pasiega Cave Paintings (Artefact I)

WUNDERKAMMER #1

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Artefact No: 1
Description: Entoptic Phenomena, Red Ochre Symbol
Location: La Pasiega Cave, Cantabria, Spain
Age: 64,000 years 

Ben Timberlake February 15, 2024

The first artefact in our wunderkammer, or cabinet of wonders, is wonder itself.

It is an abstract sign of red ochre, painted deep in the cave of La Pasiega in Cantabria, Northern Spain. It dated to over 64,000 years ago. It is amongst the earliest examples of art that we know.

There are earlier claims to the first aesthetic act. Flint tools from 200,000 years ago whose balance and grace go beyond their utilitarian function. Pierced shells that may have been the first body adornments. A cross-hatched piece of red-ochre 73,000 years old recently found in South Africa.

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A close-up photo and drawing of the panel with the ladder-motif. Later artists added the cascading dots, the enigmatic symbol to the right, and even the hindquarters of an animal within the centre square.

But these are examples of more art-in-work rather than a true work of art and none have the sheer beauty and sophistication of this symbol. 64,000 years ago someone chose to take this sign, which until then existed only inside their head, and paint it on the cave wall. This creative act - the earliest demonstration of the ability to use, interpret and respond to symbols - is one of the key defining traits of the modern mind, of the very essence of what it is to be human. It is pure artistic expression. It is an act so perfectly useless as to be sacred.

Symbols like this are known as entoptic phenomena (literally ‘within vision’) that occur somewhere between the retina and the brain. You might see them in their most basic forms now if you close your eyes: tiny pinpricks of red snow, phosphenes, and random meteora. Some are caused by implosions of dying proteins within the eye’s rod-cells, others by static within the ophthalmic nerve’s wiring, or at the processing centre of the visual cortex.

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“This creative act - the earliest demonstration of the ability to use, interpret and respond to symbols - is one of the key defining traits of the modern mind, of the very essence of what it is to be human. It is pure artistic expression. It is an act so perfectly useless as to be sacred.”

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We don’t know exactly how or why these symbols are produced within our vision. We do know that they increase in number and gain in complexity if we put our minds and bodies through stress: tough rituals or religious ordeals, sleep deprivation, extreme exertion, fasting, drumming, dancing, sweat lodges, trauma, or drugs. All humans appear to be neurologically hardwired to see entoptic phenomena, and they occur universally within the earliest art, regardless of time and culture.

The red sign in the picture is a basic ladder motif. Other common motifs might include lines of dots, concentric circles, zig-zags, and diamond patterns. Sometimes they remind me of the earliest single-celled lifeforms and in many ways that is what they are: the first sparks of imagination, the protean beginnings of art and culture.

The archaeologist David Lewis-Williams wrote a paper called ‘The Signs of All Times,’ that looked at entoptic phenomena in rock art from across the world. He proposed that there are three stages to these hallucinations: the basic entoptic phenomena, then the ‘construal stage’ when the brain tries to make sense of the images, and finally the Deep Trance stage.

In the Construal Stage, our brains rely on previous experiences and culture to interpret these minor hallucinations: a line of dots may be seen by one person as a snake and another as a flight of birds. Environment is key: a San Bushman doesn’t hallucinate a polar bear and an Inuit doesn’t dream an eland.

Between the second and third stages is something known as the vortex. Once again, this visual theme appears across many different cultures and periods. It is a buckling of the visual field and a collapse of reality that tapers into a singular point. In rock art this is represented in a number of ways, ladder symbols may multiply into elaborate lattices which begin to form a funnel. Or lines of dots may converge into a crack in the cave wall. In San rock art this is sometimes represented as a swarm of bees entering their hive.

Through and beyond the vortex, in the final stage of Deep Trance, our brains splice animals with human forms to create therianthropes. Again, these types of hallucinations are universal but the form they take is local: a Palaeolithic hunter imagines a reindeer man; an ancient Greek creates a goat-man or satyr; a medieval sailor sees a mermaid.

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The cave of La Pasiega contains all three stages. Its passages are richly painted with a huge variety of abstract symbols: ladder motifs, dotted lines, claviform shapes, triangles, polygons, and tectiforms. Then there is a wild bestiary: an exquisite deer in red, engraved horses, black ibexes and a bold stylised bison. And human motifs too: vulvas, and hand motifs. And lastly a combination of human and animal: a red human figure with black horns and dotted black mane, a Minotaur of sorts, at the heart of this eerie and ancient labyrinth.

But here comes the kicker. The art in this cave has been known to archaeologists for decades, and for all of this time we understood it to be the work of modern man, Homo sapiens. Rock art is very hard to date accurately. Sometimes we can roughly attribute pieces of art to certain periods stylistically. Other times, if there is charcoal present or other organic substances, we can use Carbon-14 dating. But much of the art in La Pasiega is made with mineral pigments that defy this type of dating.

Recently an international team of archaeologists sought to sidestep this problem by using uranium-thorium dating on small calcite concretions covering part of the ladder symbol. As rainwater leaches through the soil above the cave it picks up mineral traces, including uranium, which drip into the cave system below, forming stalagmites and stalactites, some of which cover the art. The uranium is trapped in this mineral veneer and - because uranium decays at a set rate into thorium- measuring how much of either element is present provides an accurate date for the formation. Anything below the layer must be older.

The uranium-thorium dates took the team by surprise because 64,000 years ago we know of only one species of human in Europe and it wasn’t us; it was our ancient cousins the Neanderthals, who we had always assumed weren’t capable of creating such art. Despite still being a byword for oafish savagery Neanderthals have recently been shown to bury their dead with care, use medicinal plants for their ills, and harness complex technology. In their paper in Science the team concluded that Neanderthals and early modern humans were cognitively indistinguishable. Alistair Pike, who was part of the team, said, “What we’ve got here is a smoking gun that really overturns the notion that Neanderthals were knuckle-dragging cavemen”. If creativity is what defines humans, then Neanderthals are us too.

In the West nowadays, we still reference entoptic phenomena in popular culture. And like our ancestors we use our environment and life experiences to make sense of these images: drawing stars or rings of tweety-birds around cartoon characters who have received a knock on the head, zig-zags or lightning bolts in association with stress or anger, or use halos or a lightbulb to signify those who have received illumination.

These sparks of wonder have been with us since our earliest days. We’ve come a long way together. And that’s how I hope you will think about this strange red image: not as something ancient within a distant cave, but living and within you now.

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Ben Timberlake is an archaeologist who works in Iraq and Syria. His writing has appeared in Esquire, the Financial Times and the Economist. He is the author of 'High Risk: A True Story of the SAS, Drugs and other Bad Behaviour'.

The Sacrifice of Isaac

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Andrea Del Sarto, The Sacrifice of Isaac, 1527

Lamia Priestley February 13, 2024

This is a painting about a father attempting to kill his son. 

It’s also a painting about faith. 

In Andrea del Sarto’s The Sacrifice of Isaac (1527), Abraham is instructed by God to kill his only son, Isaac. But as Abraham brings down his knife, an angel of the Lord appears and calls out from heaven: “Do not lay a hand on that boy…do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.” (Genesis 22:15) Abraham looks up and a ram appears—a sacrifice provided by God in Isaac’s place.

A rational interpretation of the Biblical tale would condemn Abraham as a murderer. Instead, the father of the world’s three major religions is considered the face of unwavering faith. 

It's unbelievable, it’s horrifying, it’s beyond all reason. Kiergegaard expresses his outrage at Abraham’s characterisation in his book, Fear and Trembling (1843) when he writes,“there were countless generations that knew the story of Abraham by heart word for word. How many did it make sleepless?” 

In other words, how can we believe in, much less love, a God who would ask such a thing of Abraham? And how can we look to an Abraham who would do such a thing to his son?

A close-looking at The Sacrifice of Isaac with Kierkegaard’s question in mind reveals something of the painting’s ambition. The work shows us the power of visual experience in bringing us to a place, Kiekergaard describes as, where “thinking leaves off.” A place where we can not only interpret, but identify with Abraham’s actions, not as murder, but as the ultimate act of faith. Only then, can the visual experience of Abraham’s story, the experience of its material representation—its colour, texture, brush stroke, composition—become a personal experience of faith for the viewer. 

Look first at Del Sarto’s treatment of light—the areas of canvas that soak it up or are wholly drained of it. The soft washed curls of the hills; the inky dark depths from which the ram emerges; and the pearly luminescence of Isaac’s flesh have a dreamy, other-worldly quality. Distinct from naturalistic representations of light and darkness, this light, its character, is separate from the physical world of the painting. There’s either too much or too little of it across the canvas, as if, unbound by the laws of nature, the light gets to choose what and how to illuminate. Art historian Steven J. Cody describes this kind of painted light, which took Del Sarto many years to develop, as “the fire that totally inflames and carries us into God by ecstatic unctions and burning affections. This fire is God.”  

In their thin application to the canvas, Del Sarto’s brushstrokes are left visible, exposed. This creates a loose patchwork of textures that allow the painting’s ground to show through, giving off a kind of ethereal glow. The surface’s unusual texture and Del Sarto’s rhythmic handling of paint have the effect of entrancing the viewer, drawing her into the painting’s abstraction, into its very painted-ness. Arrested by the overwhelming redness of Abraham’s shirt, the flecks of paint that make up the tufts of his beard, the delicate transparency of his shin cast in shadow, the viewer can no longer read the image before her literally, but absorbs the scene in its totality on a deeper, visceral level. The depiction of the figures, their actions, and the story at large become secondary to the viewer’s experience of the materiality of the painting. In this way she is moved beyond the Biblical story, beyond the painting’s content. 

The Sacrifice of Isaac was completed in Florence in the early 16th century amidst a rising demand for reform in the Catholic Church. Much like their northern counterparts, Italian reformists criticised the Church’s elaborate, institutionalised rituals for offering impersonal, grandiose routes to God. They argued, instead, for a return to a stripped back, “pure faith”, a faith based in a personal, intimate relationship with God. Such a relationship might be cultivated through the experience of reading scripture or contemplating God through works of art. To the reformers, “pure faith” came from acts that allowed “one’s conscience to be addressed by God.”

Del Sarto’s painting is a direct address to the viewer’s conscience. It moves the viewer to an experience of Abraham’s faith and by extension her own, not through a retelling, but through a visual and material evocation of the divine. 

¹ Andrea del Sarto: Splendor and Renewal in the Renaissance altarpiece

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Lamia Priestley is an art historian, writer and researcher working at the intersection of art, fashion and technology. With a background in Italian Renaissance Art, Lamia is currently the Artist Liaison at the digital fashion house DRAUP, where she works with artists to produce generative digital collections.

The Category of the Human and Immanuel Kant

Nicko Mroczkowski February 8, 2024

Immanuel Kant is probably the most difficult Western philosopher with household-name status – and maybe one of the most difficult philosophers of all time. His work is the historic precedent for obscure terminology, and all the difficult philosophers that came after, from Hegel and Nietzsche to Derrida and Deleuze, openly follow his example. According to an anecdote that every philosophy graduate will have heard at least once, first-year humanities students in Germany are encouraged to read Kant in English. Only the lifelong clarification efforts of translators have been able to make his work the least bit accessible.

In spite of his difficulty, and the nearly 250-odd years that have passed since the initial publication of his works, we still can’t stop talking about Kant. Because unlike any other thinker since the golden age of Greek philosophy, and maybe nobody since, Kant managed to define, interrogate, and subsequently shape the soul of the Western subject. His model of the human mind and its limits was a decisive factor in the historic upheavals that define the modern period in which we continue to live. Wherever the ‘human’ is concerned, whether in art, anthropology, hard science, or international law, we are still Kantians, if not by that name.

When he began practising philosophy in 1754, Kant inherited a cultural identity crisis. Two centuries prior, French philosopher René Descartes was inspired by the scientific developments of the Renaissance to consider the soul as a ‘thing that thinks’. These meditations convincingly established that we can obtain solid knowledge and mastery over the natural world without God’s help – a radical proposition in mediaeval Europe. This ushered in a new spiritual and cultural regime that marks the beginning of modernity, the era in which knowledge production, faith, and morality take care of themselves. And with this came the new burden of institutions such as custom and the law, which, in the absence of a divine authority (or the monarch as its spokesperson), needed to be rewritten in terms of unshakeable truths, rather than commandments.

As the dust of this sudden cultural shift settled, early modern philosophers began to ponder the nature of these prospective truths and our means of accessing them. Two competing approaches to these problems – ‘epistemologies’, or philosophies of knowledge – emerged in the two centuries that followed; we now refer to them as rationalism and empiricism.

The rationalists, who were largely based on the European continent – most notably Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Descartes himself – believed that concepts are the true stuff of knowledge. It’s no coincidence that these two thinkers are also associated with ground-breaking developments in mathematics. Concepts, in this case, are essentially pure ideas – logical truths that can be reached ‘in the armchair’, or by simply thinking about them in silence.

Such perfect ideas are, however, perfect only to the extent that they are confined to the mind. They have at best a weak relationship to lived experience, and come to resemble objects of faith. Leibniz, for example, purported to deduce from ‘self-evident principles’ that there is only one thing in existence, God. All activity, from the inorganic to the human, is sustained by His constant intervention, as if everything were a thought in God’s mind. It’s difficult for the individual to achieve very much under this assumption.

Back on their island, the British empiricists saw sense experience as the only reliable source of certainty. Experiences and our memories of them, they held, are enough to add up to a working knowledge of things. Contemporaries of Newton, these thinkers were part of a scientific revolution.

But empiricism, too, had dire consequences for Western culture; trusting experience alone created greater, more paralysing doubts about all the most important aspects of life.The skeptical works of David Hume raised these kinds of questions. Does causality actually exist, given that I only perceive two events in sequence, with no guarantee that this sequence will repeat itself in the future? Is there really a Self, given that I only perceive a jumble of events and memories? Are we really bound by moral law, since I only experience petty incentives or ‘moral feelings’ like pity and compassion, which can be explained by my motives and character?

Neither the rationalist nor the empiricist, it seems, could adequately respond to the urgent task of providing a foundation for culture and practice in the West. Neither tradition had succeeded. Enter Kant, awoken from his ‘dogmatic slumber’ by the questions of Hume. In his most famous book, the Critique of Pure Reason,¹ Kant argued that both concepts and experiences are ingredients in legitimate knowledge, which is actually produced by their interaction. He achieves this by appealing to the notion of a representation. Generally speaking, a representation is an image or likeness that ‘re-presents’ an object to make it accessible to its audience in a particular way.

In Kant’s world, everything that exists is a representation of actual reality, created by the human mind according to its inherent capacities and limitations. Concepts for him are like ‘rules of thought’ which shape everything we can experience. Because of the way our minds work, all things we perceive must take up space, move through time, and be acted upon by causes to produce effects, among other fundamentals. This checks out – quantum weirdness aside, no event we’ve ever known has taken place outside of space or time, and without an initial cause. Kant was the first to realise that this fact tells us more about ourselves than it does about the world.

Modern psychology continues to follow Kant here; in particular, we have him to thank, belatedly, for the cognitive revolution of the 20th century. According to its proponents, the mind is a device that processes information, like a computer, according to its hardware and programming. This, as we are seeing in recent years, is not only a metaphor – the field of AI starts with the assumption that human intelligence, as such a processing device, can be replicated by a sufficiently complex system of algorithms. Our AI models are, at this point in time, essentially Kantian.

So, where both rationalist and empiricist understood the mind as a kind of place occupied by ideas and experiences, Kant saw the mind as an active instrument of sense-making which actively constructs the world it belongs to. Given this role, there is no reason to doubt that the mind is capable of knowing the world – because it made it. It just needs to know itself.

Interestingly, however, there’s still a skeptical element in Kant’s philosophy. He shows that the world behaves in a consistent and knowable way, and that there’s an objective truth about how things are. It’s based on how the human mind processes reality. But it only makes sense to humans, and is not the same as reality from the perspective of, say, an animal, or God. Instead, it’s a facsimile of the ‘really real’ – which, itself, we can never access, because our brains can only handle so much. The kernel of Kant’s humanism is that our kind, with some unfortunate exceptions, is united by our possession of reason, and responsible for the world of representation that it produces. But we are not responsible for the Absolute, or ‘things in themselves as they really are’.

This is a curious conclusion for a philosophy that, above all, championed the autonomy of the human intellect – a philosophy that participated in historic revolutions against high or divine status in favour of common humanity. However, it’s important not to misunderstand this as a weakness of Kant’s thinking; in fact, his point is only that there will always be, and in fact must always be, unknowable elements in any system of knowledge; and this, too, is a necessary aspect of the functioning of human reason.

Today, we understand that a ‘perfect theory’ is not possible, but only the continuous substitution of imperfect hypotheses; but we create these hypotheses by aiming for perfection. And we also understand, for the most part, that perfect knowledge of God or the afterlife would eliminate all the differentiations and beautiful uncertainties that characterise human spacetime. We don’t necessarily want that.

Our finitude, for Kant, is what makes life what it is. Our limited knowledge is sound enough to sustain our limited forms of life – we wouldn’t know what to do with Absolute knowledge anyway. Kant’s humanism is also his humility, and it contains a measure of the anthropologist’s sensitivity to the fact that knowledge, even if it grounds it, is not the greater part of human culture. There must also be an appreciation of love, community, and all those other activities that lie outside of the scope of logic and reasoning. They are uncertain by nature, and beautifully so. He himself understood his philosophy as an exercise in ‘denying knowledge in order to make room for faith’.

¹ The Critique of Pure Reason is Kant’s nearly unreadable masterpiece of philosophy. Kant himself described it as "dry, obscure, contrary to all ordinary ideas, and on top of that prolix." (Prolix means verbose.) He was right. He once sent the completed manuscript to a friend who was himself an eminent scholar. The man read some of the book but returned it unfinished, explaining, "If I go on to the end, I am afraid I shall go mad."

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Nicko Mroczkowski