WHIPTAIL

ANTENNAPEDE

Tor and Anthro comics 1960s

BULL

Tikis

HIPPO

Imps, golems, homunculi, alchemy…

Graffiti, tagging, street, sticker, and guerrilla art…

Masks

BELUGA

Prehistoric art

Hermaphrodites TSD 2000

CROW

Early man

SEAHORSE

Illuminated bestiaries and marginalia

Petroglyphs

CHAMELEON

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BOOKS:

Art Through the Ages, Paleolithic and Prehistoric, Helen Gardener, 1926 (1st edition).

Primitive Mythology, Joseph Campbell, 1960.

Technicians of the Sacred, Jerome Rothenberg, 1968.

A History of Religious Ideas, Magico-Religious practices of the Paleoanthropians, Mircea Eliade, 1978.

The Third Chimpanzee, Jared Diamond, 1997.

Smithsonian Guide to Human Origins, Carl Zimmer, 2005.

Sapiens, A brief history of Humankind, Yuval Harrari, 2018.

The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber, 2021.

ARTICLES (linked):

The Stone Age, Boundless Art History.

Top 10 Things that Make Us Human, Livescience.

Definition of Art Brut, Artsper.

Art Brut and Outsider Art, ArtStory.

The Rise of Graffiti Art, Artworld.

Surrealist Techniques: Automatism

Exploring Pop Culture’s Subversive Sticker Art Culture, 99Designs.

Street Art, Google Art & Culture

Defending your territory: is peeing on the wall just for dogs, Scientific American.

Sticker Art, Graphotism.

The Lord of the Beasts, Reza Azlan.

VIDEOS:

How to make a petroglyph, youtube.

QUOTES:

The mystical solidarity between the hunter and his victims is revealed by the mere act of killing: The shed blood is similar in every aspect to human blood. To kill the hunted beast, or later, the domesticated animal, is equivalent to a sacrifice in which the victims are interchangeable. Though all these concepts came into existence during the last phases of the process of hominization, they are still active-altered, revalorized, camouflaged-millennia after the disappearance of the paleolithic civilizations. Eliade.

Reflection is a mysterious activity. It’s not just rational analysis. It has to be activated. We all have this capacity. It is Man’s capacity. No other animal reflects. It is a wonderous instinct. Helen Luke, Parabola.

Burning animal bone in these hearths is likely a means of absorbing the essence of the animal. Azlan

…the walls practically pulse with brightly colored images of animals, both drawn and incised into the rock. There are hundreds of them, superimposed one on top of the other, frozen in a frenzy of activity: bison and bears and horses, reindeer and mammoths, stags, ibexes, and a few creatures that are mysterious and unidentifiable—some too fantastical to be real, others that muddle the boundary between human and animal. Azlan

…there is no grass or trees or shrubs or streams for them to move upon; there is no “ground” at all. The animals seem to float in space, upside down, at odd, impossible angles. They are hallucinatory, devoid of context, unreal. Azlan”It is a man—that much is certain. But it is something more. It has the legs and feet of a human being, but the ears of a stag and the eyes of an owl. A long, bushy beard falls from its chin to its chest. Two beautifully wrought antlers jut from its head. Its hands resemble the paws of a bear. Its muscular torso and thighs belong to an antelope or a gazelle. Thrust back between its hind legs is a large, semierect penis, which curves upward, almost grazing the bristling horsetail that protrudes from its buttocks. The figure is drawn in what appears to be mid-dance; its frame is lunging leftward. But it is facing the viewer, its owl eyes lined in black and open wide, the pupils small and white, and centered in perpetual focus. It was, as he wrote in his notebook, the earliest image ever found of God. It is known as the Lord of Beasts.”Azlan

How did our prehistoric ancestors evolve from a state of primitive animism to the kind of sophisticated belief system that would result in the creation of the Lord of Beasts in the first place? Azlan

We are Homo religiosus, not in our desire for creeds or institutions, nor in our commitments to specific gods and theologies, but in our existential striving toward transcendence: toward that which lies beyond the manifest world. Azlan

Belief in the The Lord of the Beast develops through a process of transformation: Ontological categories like “human” and “animal” carry with them certain clearly defined expectations. Simply violate one or two of those expectations in a minimally counterintuitive way (a human who communicates with animals), then make the new creation useful (a human-animal hybrid that provides us with the food we need to survive), and what you have is a belief durable enough to evolve from its origins as an ancient mental abstraction, to the Sorcerer some 18,000 years ago, to the book of Genesis some 2,500 years ago, all the way to neopagans today. In this way, a specific god is born and remains active in human culture through the millennia. Azlan

The domestication of fire marks the definitive separation of the paleanthropians from their zoological predeccors. Eliade

It is obvious that humans are unlike all animals. It is also obvious that we are a species of big
mammal, down to the minutest details of our anatomy and our molecules. That contradiction is the
most fascinating feature of the human species. Diamond

Killing the animal constitutes a ritual, which implies the belief that the Lord of Wild Beasts takes care that the hunter kills only what he needs as food and that food is not wasted. Then, too, the bones, especially the skull, have a marked ritual value (probably because of the belief that they contain the “soul” or the “life” of the animal and that it is from the skeleton that the Lord of Wild Beasts will cause a new flesh to grow). Eliade

The young man, after bringing down his first game animal, smears the walls of the cave with it’s blood. Eliade

The existence of a certain type of shamanism during the Paleolithic period seems to be certain. On the one hand, shamanism still dominates the religious ideology of hunters and pastoralists in our day. On the other hand, the ecstatic experience as such, as an original phenomenon, is a constitutive element of the human condition; it is impossible to imagine a period in which man did not have dreams and waking reveries and did not enter into “trance”—a loss of consciousness that was interpreted as the soul’s traveling into the beyond. What was modified and changed with the different forms of culture and religion was the interpretation and evaluation of the ecstatic experience. Since the spiritual universe of the Paleolithics was dominated by the mystical relations between man and animal, it is not difficult to divine the functions of a specialist in ecstasy. Eliade

It is only the shaman who, by virtue of his supernatural vision, is able to “see his own skeleton.”²⁸ In other words, he is able to penetrate even into the source of animal life, the bony element. Eliade

We must consider seriously the now well-proven fact that the human nervous system was the governor, guide, and controller of a nomadic hunter, foraging for his food and protecting himself and his family from becoming food in a very dangerous world of animals, for the first 600,000 years of its development; whereas it has been serving comparatively safe and sane farmers, merchants, professors, and their children for scarcely 8000 years (a segment of less than 1½ per cent of the known arc). Who will claim to know what sign stimuli smote our releasing mechanisms when our names were not Homo sapiens but Pithecanthropus and Plesianthropus, or perhaps even millenniums earlier—Dryopithecus? And who that has knowledge of the numerous vestigial structures of our anatomy, surviving from the days when we were beasts (for example, the muscles of the caudal vertebrae that once wagged our tail), would doubt that in the central nervous system comparable vestiges must remain: images sleeping, whose releasers no longer appear in nature—but might occur in art? Campbell

There is a motif occurring in certain primitive mythologies, as well as in modern surrealist painting and neurotic dream, which is known to folklore as “the toothed vagina” — the vagina that castrates. And a counterpart, the other way, is the so-called “phallic mother,” a motif perfectly illustrated in the long fingers and nose of the witch. Campbell

Psychopaths or not the shamans are expected to pass through certain initiatory or deals and to receive an education that is sometimes highly complex. it is only this twofold initiation Dash ecstatic and didactic Dash that transforms the candidate from a possible neurotic to a Shaman recognized by his particular society. The same observation applies To the origins of shamanic powers: it is not the point of departure for obtaining these powers (heredity, bestowal by spirits, voluntary quest) but the technique And its underlying theory, transmitted through initiation. Eliade.

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