di Alessandra de Nardis
Some time ago, an article by Dr. Izzy Wisher, researcher at the Department of Archeology of the University of Durham University in the United Kingdom, the article deals with an interesting discovery that occurred in Saint-Germain-La-Riviere in southwestern France where a burial relating to the Middle Magdalenian was found (link to the article).
Discovered in 1934, the tomb housed the skeleton of a woman in her thirties, laid in a fetal position, richly adorned and completely covered in red ochre. The skeleton has only recently been dated and appears to date back to 15.780 ± 200 years ago.
This woman buried with great honor by members of her community is adorned with a necklace composed of 72 red deer canines, belonging to approximately 63 different animals, drilled to be used as beads; 32 signs are engraved on it and there are still traces of ocher in the grooves; no two signs are the same.
Looking at these engravings, made with great care, you cannot hold back your emotion: what do those symbols represent? Are they names? An invocation? A calendar? Certainly meanings understandable to the entire group to which this woman belonged. We are in the Paleolithic, there are no decorations as an end in themselves and even geometric shapes have a symbolic meaning; to make a comparison with Sumerian writing, the oldest we know the word indicating "divinity" is represented by lines that cross to form an asterisk.
Dorothy Cameron writes in hers Symbols of life and death recently published by the Le Civette Saggi series:
"In our time marked by rationalism it is not immediate to accept that a simple geometric shape can contain who knows what meanings, but it is important to remember that we find ourselves faced with a culture that saw palpable relationships between all the expressions of natural phenomena and for which all art was sacred. "
Better to say that there was no difference in meaning between art, the sacred and the real world. This is a time in which the animals that populate the Earth and that provide food, protection and raw material for the creation of tools, but also danger and death personify the Goddess in every manifestation of him; they animate its powers of life, death and rebirth by transcending them to be understandable to human beings. The deer has been one of the most recurring icons in the spiritual field for thousands of years, it embodies many ancestral meanings and, to continue quoting Dorothy Cameron:
“symbols become stronger if they contain more meanings.”
The deer is an animal that changes its appearance a lot depending on the seasons and the summer coat has a rather uniform reddish-brown shade, as if the animal was covered in ochre, a color that was associated with blood and life from populations of humans who represented him with great attention to detail. Another characteristic is the loss of the antlers which fall like old branches and grow back bigger and stronger as the animal grows.
The deer had to appear capable of regeneration, capable of resurrecting stronger with each summer season. A magic that humans probably looked at with great veneration and desire for transmutation.
Recent studies show that in the Magdalenian, due to the cold and dry steppe environment, deer are rare, even absent in southwestern France. The teeth must have been acquired through trade or during long journeys and therefore had great value.
We know that history has been considered as such since the birth of writing in the first great civilizations and certainly this object does not bring with it actual writing but it is certainly proof of the capacity for cohesion, aggregation and cooperation, of the desire to interact , in short, to communicate; knowing how to create meaningful social relationships is a powerful sign of civility.
Each grapheme present on buck teeth is different from the other, in other words these signs are not simple abstract scribbles; they are certainly not a language as we understand it today but a system for codifying and transmitting information, therefore a first step in the development of writing.
Having said this, deciphering the message will probably be impossible if we do not know the symbolic meaning attributed to the graphemes and above all if we do not know the meaning attributed by this human group to animals. In fact, the fact that this code is on deer teeth cannot be a coincidence if we think about how this animal is represented in cave paintings belonging to the same period; Altamira, Tito Bustillo, Font-de-Gaume, Lascaux, Niaux, Chauvet: all great rock art represents this. In the necklace there is the same use of signs that we find in these caves. In rock paintings, even the most abstract ones, this majestic animal is easily recognizable in all its species variations thanks to its antlers, when these even adorn the heads of shamans and shamans.
We are talking about a sacred animal par excellence, a powerful and majestic spiritual entity that populates the Paleolithic caves. The myths linked to the deer have come down to us and connect it to the expression of royalty, to the cyclical renewal of life, to rebirth and also to initiation; a cult whose first version is lost in the mists of time until arriving at the imagery of the doe that appears in medieval literature and art, from the Breton cycle and that linked to the Grail, where for three centuries the deer, or the doe, they appear as signs of Christ or the Church, to the traditions of Saint Eustace and Saint Hubert, until they are connected to the last traces of the mythology of Diana, up to the symbolism of alchemy, in which the deer appears as a sign of the elusive Mercury.
It is difficult to believe that the humans who knew how to paint the great Paleolithic caves limited themselves to simple engravings on deer canines for pure ornamentation. That they didn't instead want to make clear with a message understandable to everyone what that woman was (today we would say she represented) for the human group to which she belonged?
Alessandra de Nardis, December 2020
