Lascaux to France!

It's my 64th birthday today.

On our recent trip to France, Neal and I went to Lascaux, where we took in the impression of Lascaux IV. On the way, of course, we drove through the small town of Montignac, where Gurdjieff  stopped before his visit to the caves—a visit during which he insisted that somehow the caves were painted ”after the fall of Atlantis,” as though he had some kind of insider information about this, a well-known habit of his. The fact that Bennett was willing to argue with him about it shows that Gurdjieff’s pupils were not all fawning believers who hung on his every word. (Far from it, in fact; C. S. Nott's A Pupil's Journal recounts similar stories from the Prieure.)

By now we’ve made enough advances in the science of paleontology to know some things that could not be known in Gurdjieff’s era. For instance, the paintings can now be confidently dated to be, as Bennett pointed out, 20,000 or more years old. Gurdjieff appears to have believed that Atlantis was flooded some 10,000 or so years ago, based strictly on the one apocryphal reference that Plato makes about the city (there are no other sources that discuss it anywhere in ancient classical literature.) Aside from underscoring Gurdjieff's debt to Platonic sources – despite his disparagement of Greek thinking in general, which has to be taken not with a grain, but with an entire celler of salt –it highlights the weird obsession that spiritualists have had with the mythical city ever since it entered the radar screen of modern awareness and was hyperinflated by Edgar Cayce.

To be sure, it's certain there were impressive, even spectacular, ancient civilizations we know nothing of. The Turkish site of Gobekli Tepe does more than just hint at the existence of them; it proves they arrived full-blown on the archaeological scene with no earlier presence to prepare us for them… was there an ”Atlantean” predecessor? 

There was definitely something.

What’s even more certain is that one can predict exactly where the evidence of that something lies, as this recent English marine archaeology discovery has proven. 

Sea levels have risen approximately 100 m since the last glacial maximum. What this means is that between 20,000 and 10,000 years ago, all of the major cities in the world were at the mouths of rivers (as most of them still are today) at levels about 300 feet in elevation below present day locations. Despite the impressive ruins of, for example, ancient Egypt at the mouth of the Nile, these are just the locations that the cities moved to as the flooding began. The cities that preceded them lie under the many meters of alluvial deposits that invariably gather at the mouths of rivers. The inundation of “Atlantis,” in other words, was almost certainly a somewhat gradual one, although it is entirely possible that some significant portion of it took place in a very short time, as current global warming trends are beginning to suggest.

Nonetheless, we know so little (that is, absolutely nothing at all) about these civilizations and the purported city of Atlantis that for Gurdjieff to cite it as though he had some special authority on the matter is a bit specious, not only on the surface of things but also at their core.

He was, of course, a raconteur and impresario of the first order, and even here at the end of his life he clearly refused to abandon those roles, which he so dearly relished. They had served him well through the course of a lifetime; why give them up now?

His contention that the figures in the caves were emblems (i.e., heraldic devices, as opposed to symbols) of some kind or another is a different matter entirely. Anyone who visits the site – which is certainly a good enough replication of the original to give one a profound impression indeed—will at once see that the site had deep spiritual significance of one kind or another.

Whether the emblems mean what Gurdjieff said they meant is perhaps immaterial. They definitely meant something; and they were, furthermore, not individual works separated from one another, but part of an oeuvre, a spiritual language of an ancient nature that was carried forward durably through time over what looks to be a rather long period. There's a high degree of likelihood, furthermore, that the figures had some astronomical significance — evidence has been mounting that ancient cave paintings are often maps of constellations. That, combined with the fact that the works are very much on the ceilings of the caves, argues for not just a temporal, but also a spiritual, connection with the skies. And, given the action of higher energies flowing downward into mankind from solar sources and from the moon, which are the very real legacy of the ancient yogic cults, the connection with the skies is that much more evident and that much more important. Cave art was not just about bulls and cows and when they molt and mate according to the stars; that kind of knowledge was all too commonplace, with no need to paint it on cave ceilings. 

The art is, as Gurdjieff intuited, about the primeval power of man’s inner sensation of Being.

Considering the astonishing images at Lascaux, we have every reason to believe that the spiritual practices humanity engages in are as ancient as man's culture itself, and that we can indeed find important traces of all mankind's spiritual teachings in the earliest symbols he left behind. The idea that legitimate esoteric religious practices have undergone vast subjective changes over the last 5, 10, or even 15,000 years in the face of the objective truths which they investigate seems to me unlikely. A person who has been exposed to the deepest kind of religious impulses (the Divine inflow) will definitely understand this far better than those who discuss them as speculation. These sacred energies which engender and suffuse the human soul bring with them a consistent set of experiences and understandings that can be recognized in their symbolic content, no matter what age. 

There are, to be sure, subjective elements; every mystic, it seems, tends to make the mistake of interpreting these experiences a bit too narrowly through the lens of their own upbringing, society, culture, and the symbols that attend to them. Gurdjieff was no different; but the essence of his recognition was pure, even if his interpretation off-center. 

All that being said, there must have been something real to it; several days later, Neal and I found ourselves in the Louvre, where the horned-bull symbolism of Babylon, Egypt, and the classical ancient world is on display, seemingly, almost everywhere. I would, in fact, recommend that anyone putting together a trip itinerary to these locations follow up Lascaux IV with a trip to the ancient near East and Egyptian (Sully) wing in the Louvre, where you will feel the tangible remnants of these influences that have flowed down through time into us.

Then go see the rest of the museum!

Wishing the best for you on this day,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.