The Horse and the Bullin Prehistory and in History

CoordinationFernando Augusto Coimbra

2016

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Horses and Bulls in Portuguese Palaeolithic Art: Realities and Myths?

Mário Varela Gomes Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas,

Instituto de Arqueologia e Paleociências Universidade Nova de Lisboa

mv.gomes@fcsh.unl.pt

“It is well known that the roots of classical religion lie deep in the prehistoric past”(R. J. C. Atkinson, 1956, p. 169)

Abstract: Bulls and horses are part of the ideological and conceptual matrix of Eurasian societies, appearing in quite a few cosmogonic myths that ascend to the earli-est modern humans (H. Sapiens Sapiens). At times these myths have been successively reinterpreted, and a few have reached contemporary times. Representations of horses and bulls in the Côa-Douro rock art complex, like those from the Escoural Cave, il-lustrate biological and social behaviour, as well as messages of metaphoric nature aris-ing from mythological constructions that interpreted the World and found recorded in ancient mythologies that, have survived to the present day, with occasional changes.

Keywords: horses, bulls, Palaeolithic, demiurge, cosmogony.

Resumo: Touros e cavalos integram a matriz ideológico-conceptual das socieda-des euro-asiáticas, transparecendo em não poucos dos seus mitos cosmogónicos, que ascendendo aos mais antigos homens modernos (H. Sapiens Sapiens) foram sendo, por vezes, sucessivamente reinterpretados, alguns dos quais alcançando a contemporanei-dade. Representações de cavalos e de touros, do complexo rupestre Côa-Douro, como da Gruta do Escoural, ilustram comportamentos biológicos e sociais mas, também, mensagens de carácter metafórico decorrentes de construções mitológicas que inter-pretaram o Mundo e encontramos registadas em antigas mitologias ou que, até, chega-ram, não sem alterações, aos nossos dias.

Palavras-chave: cavalos, touros, Paleolítico, demiurgo, cosmogonia.

6is text is not intended to be more than a cause for re7ection, from a less explored approach, on the socio-cultural and ideological dimension expressed by the representations of horses and bulls in rock art, in particular from Pal-aeolithic Age examples acquired from what is nowadays Portuguese territory.

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To do this, we will start from the theoretical position which accepts that mod-ern day humans do not only possess a physical or biological memory of their most distant ancestors but are also the heirs of knowledge transmitted through social processes i.e. behaviours and lessons accumulated over millennia. $is phenomenon is implicit in di%erent information and is what C. G. Jung (1964, p. 67) referred to as the human, physical, and spiritual heritage.

$us, simple actions such as an aversion to snakes, common in all primates making us get quiet when someone imitates the sound of those reptiles and also not eating food that smells bad are cultural inheritances along with others formed by conceptuality, like the idea or time of primordial Chaos, of a ‘dream time’, ‘when there were no two things’ capable of expressing diversity of crea-tion (Sousa, 2006, p. 317), based on many of the cosmogonic constructions or mythological archetypes, made by men, from di%erent geographies, cultures and times.

$e study of Palaeolithic images of horses and aurochs, the two species most commonly depicted in Quaternary European art which are associated with ‘complementary animals’, permit, despite the fact that we know we are dealing with metaphorical messages, the understanding of the existence of two large iconographic classes or themes. One of these is related to social and biological behaviours of the animals while the other concerns the presence of compositions or scenes, with a predominantly mythological character. $ese reveal the great array of archaic human thinking and subsequent continuity, being successively interpreted and reaching the great mythologies of agrarian societies of the Eurasian area and in particular Near-Eastern where they were 2rst recorded through writing.

Bulls and horses from the Palaeolithic age in both the Côa-Douro (Ma-zouco, Canada do Inferno, Fariseu, Penascosa, Piscos, Vale de Cabrões, Faia) rock art complex and the Escoural Cave (Figure 1) illustrate some of the aspects mentioned, acting as the legacy of messages passed down by Palaeo-lithic Man in the form of what we call art, a concept that art historian H. Read (1954, p. 166) expressed as being ‘inevitably in!uenced by the quality of his mind.’

Bulls and horses appear in herds, chasing females in heat, in pairs, or in cop-ulation scenes in Palaeolithic rock art from the Côa-Douro, belonging from the Solutrean to the Magdalenian period (Figure 2). A magni2cent female auroch has also been recognised there with its tail folded over its hindquarters which must be related to a heat cycle. Other horses and aurochs also attempt to simulate movement displaying two or three heads, while illustrating natural behaviours associated with fertility.

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Figure 1 – Palaeolithic art in Portugal (after M. V. Gomes). 1, Fraga Escrevida (Bragança); 2, Sampaio (Bragança); 3, Pousadouro (Bragança); 4, Mazouco (Freixo-de-Espada-à-Cinta); 5, Fraga do Gato (Freixo-de-Espada-à-Cinta); 6, Vale da Casa (Vila Nova de Foz Côa); 7, Vale de Cabrões (Vila Nova de Nova de Foz Côa); 8, Vermelhosa (Vila Nova de Foz Côa); 9, Vale de José Esteves (Vila Nova de Foz Côa); 10, Alto da Bulha (Vila Nova de Foz Côa); 11, Ribeira de Urros (Torre de Moncorvo); 12, Vale de João Esquerdo (Torre de Moncorvo); 13, Ribeira da Sardinha (Torre de Moncorvo); 14, Quinta das Tulhas (Vila Nova de Foz Côa); 15, Moinhos de Cima (Vila Nova de Foz Côa); 16, Broeira (Vila Nova de Foz Côa); 17, Canada da Moreira (Vila Nova de Foz Côa); 18, Meijapão (Vila Nova de Foz Côa); 19, Canada do Amendoal (Vila Nova de Foz Côa); 20, Vale de Moinhos (Vila Nova de Foz Côa); 21, Rego da Vide (Vila Nova de Foz Côa); 22, Canada do Inferno (Vila Nova de Foz Côa); 23 Namo-rados (Vila Nova de Foz Côa); 24, Vale de Videiro (Vila Nova de Foz Côa); 25, Vale de Figueira (Vila Nova de Foz Côa); 26, Fariseu (Vila Nova de Foz Côa); 27, Cardina I (Vila Nova de Foz Côa); 28, Ribeira de Piscos (Vila Nova de Foz Côa); 29, Quinta da Barca (Vila Nova de Foz Côa); 30, Quinta da Barca Sul (Vila Nova de Foz Côa); 31, Penascosa (Vila Nova de Foz Côa); 32 Faia (Pinhel); 33, Morei-rola (Figueira de Castelo Rodrigo); 34, Buraca Grande (Pombal); 35, Gruta do Caldeirão (Tomar); 36, Barroca do Zêzere (Fundão); 37, Ocresa (Mação); 38, Gardete (Vila Velha de Ródão); 39, Palha (Olhalvas); 40, Porto de Portel (Moura); 41, Lousa (Reguengos de Monsaraz); 42, Xarez (Reguengos de Monsaraz); 43, Gruta do Escoural (Montemor-o-Novo); 44, Vale de Boi (Vila do Bispo).

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Figure 2 – Social behaviours. A – Mazouco; B – Penascosa, Rock 4; C – Canada do Inferno, Rock 26B (A, photo M.V. Gomes; B, photo CNART; C, after Baptista and Gomes, 1997, p. 289).

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However, some cattle represented falling vertically or obliquely may depict the known hunting process of game jumps (herding animals o$ cli$s so they fall to their death) used by men of the Upper Palaeolithic and many other ethnographic societies still in our day. Or perhaps these are representations of animals falling from the space or from the sky? (Figure 3A-C).

Questions related to birth from the transcendent world seem to be illus-trated by isolated images or in groups both of aurochs and equines that were depicted as if coming out of the &ssures or fractures in their supports. In some cases they are hanging as if they came from the interior of the rock masses.

An example of this can be seen in the four auroch heads under Faia 6 that appear as if emerging from the fracture lines of the wall where they were en-graved and painted in a red colour, directed downwards, and well-illustrated (Figure 3D).

*e front half of the equidae engraved on rock 22 of Canada do Inferno, with its head hanging also seems to be coming out of the fracture in the sup-port overlapping older images of aurochs and goats produced with &liform engravings (Figure 3E).

Heads of horses on rocks 12 and 22 at Canada do Inferno suggest coming out of &ssures; an aspect that we have seen in the post-Palaeolithic animalistic rock art from the Tagus Valley (Figure 3F, G).

An equine displaying only the body’s front half was represented obliquely and also as if coming out of a &ssure that exists on rock 35 (Figure 3H).

Fractures and &ssures with varying depths, on the surface of rocks in open air sites or the walls of caves and shelters, seem to lead into the earth, to a tran-scendent dimension, and constitute natural elements with important religious signi&cance. Because of this they are often included in the symbolic discourse. One must not forget the cosmogonic power also attributed to rocks (petra generatrix) in di$erent civilizations.

*e most paradigmatic case of such occurrences is found on rock 1 of Ribeira de Piscos where the head and cervical-dorsal line of a large equine ani-mal emerge from an enormous ‘shadow mouth’ (Figure 4). *is becomes even more noticeable at night. *e said &gure seems to be leaning towards another equidae with large and heavy forms. *e two animals cross heads displaying typical behaviour particularly among young horses (facial grooming). It was not a lack of space on the support where the engravings were executed nor was it the fracture that resulted in one of the quadrupeds being incomplete. We believe it had been purposely done this way to suggest a young animal being born from the ‘shadow mouth’ and coming out to meet a partner, evidencing a typical social gesture among young horses. On the other hand, the symmetry between the heads and cervical dorsal lines of the two animals is evident as though it were a desire to represent the e$ect of a mirror image or a duplicate,

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Figure 3 –Animals falling or coming out of fractures. A – Canada do Inferno, Rock 1; B – Vale de Cabrões, Rock 6; C – Penascosa, Rock 2; D – Faia, Shelter 6; E – Canada do Inferno, Rock 22; F – Canada do Inferno, Rock 12; G – Canada do Inferno, Rock 22; H – Canada do Inferno, Rock 35 (after Baptista and Gomes, 1997, pp. 264, 274, 276, 296, 379; Baptista, 1999, pp. 137, 157).

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of two parallel worlds; one real and the other transcendent, and the passage from one to the other. We should not fail to remember as M. Mauss noted (2000, p. 47), that the &gurative unfolding in the art of certain ethnographic societies could be linked to the attempt at acquiring magical virtues with the objective of travelling into the transcendent world in order to afterwards be re-born. In Faia’s shelter 6 a horse and bull cross at the tips of their snouts which we believe has a unique parallel with two horses with their heads crossed en-graved on a small stone Gourdan plate (Guthrie, 2005, p. 67).

Figure 4 – Social behaviour. Ribeira de Piscos, Rock 1 (photo CNART).

Relationships amongst images of horse and bull, most recurrent in Palaeo-lithic art in caves of Europe, as was demonstrated by A. Leroi-Gourhan, are also made evident in the Côa-Douro Complex and the Escoural Cave. 0ese quadrupeds make up pairs whose symbology, still scarcely studied, represents the dichotomous view of the Universe according to the aforementioned au-thor, defended by Frazer, Gerasimov, and several other anthropologists. It also symbolise the diversity of creation, an aspect that would survive into Christian mythology in &gures such as the donkey and cow mandatorily present in cribs that celebrate the birth of a god-man (Figure 5).

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Figure 5 – Binary connection of Bull-Horse. A –Escoural Cave; B – Faia, Shelter 6; C – Life of Christ, illumination of the 14th century (A, photo M. V. Gomes; B, after Baptista, 1999, p. 156; C, after Acosta González, 2008, p. 88).

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"e ox and donkey in the Nativity emerged in the third century, being widely reported in the following century and was recorded in the Pseudo-Gospel of St Matthew at the end of the $fth century (Almeida, 1982, p. 137). Its popular signi$cance in the archaic Christian context was deprecia-tory relating the animals to the Jewish people and pagans, although closer examination helps to understand that the ox helped Jesus to survive, warming him with its breath and therefore linking it with the world from which the breath of life emerges, while the Virgin rode the donkey before the Nativity and continued after, in the /ight into Egypt, that is, the donkey, like horses, served as a vehicle of deities with solar connotations. "ey are, after all, the two animals that represent two great levels: the underground or chthonian of Chaos, and the air, celestial, and cosmic that the recurrent horse-bull bonds in Palaeolithic art celebrate, re/ecting a binary or dichotomous understand-ing of the Universe.

In Ancient Egypt it was believed that the Amentet bull transported the body of Osiris, demonstrating its psychopomp function, this is, able to conduct the deceased.

We can recall that in Greek mythology, where Mesopotamian, Anatolian and Egyptian contributions were blended, a bull was born from the foam of the sea water (Poseidon) startled the horses of Hippolytus who dragged him to death; a Greek myth that opposes the symbol of darkness, the bull, aquatic, terrestrial and female, the light translated into horses, attached again to a solar or Uranian symbology with masculine value.

One of the most interesting engravings in the Côa Valley (rock 24 of Pis-cos) shows an almost amorphous monster, from whose mouth comes a taurine $gure (Figure 6). "is is not a $gure being born from an irregularity in the rock as if coming from the earth but rather a vaguely anthropomorphic being, but perhaps it is translating the same concept. It occurs to us that on the one hand, in the Near-Eastern cosmogonies there are mother goddesses whose children (who are, not uncommonly, their lovers as well) take the form of a bull (Hepat, Kupapa, Agdistis, Cybele, Magna Mater). Also, Queen Pasiphae, the wife of Minos, fell in love with a white bull that emerged from the Aegean Sea and gave birth in Crete to the terrible Minotaur, half human and half bull monster revealing a dramatic and symbiotic relationship that is characteristic of many of the great myths. On the other hand, this shapeless monster expelling the bull o2ers chthonian connotations bringing to mind Egyptian cosmogonies dated prior to the fourth millennium B.C. as was reported in Esna with the bovine goddess (Mehetueret) coming out of the waters of Chaos and giving birth to the Sun God (Sousa, 2006, pp. 315, 319, nota 29). It is through the throats of telluric monsters that other myths tell of the birth of renewed gods and men like Jonah, who is an example in Christian literature.

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Figure 6 – Birth of a divine entity. A: Piscos, Rock 24; Jonah coming out of the mouth of the whale (A, after Baptista, 2009, p. 99; B: Jonas and the Whale, 1621, by Pieter Lastman, 1583-1633, Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf ).

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Figure 7 – Demiurges. A: Piscos, Rock 2; B: Piscos, Rock 24; C: Fariseu, Rock 8; D: Cueva de los Casares (Guadalajara, Madrid) (A, after Baptista and Gomes, 1997, p. 320; B, after Baptista, 2009, p. 98).

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It is not by chance that the impressive anthropomorphic $gure known as the Man of Piscos appears overlapping the image of a bull as occurs with the vaguely anthropomorphic clearly itifalic form at the same archaeologi-cal site (Rock 24), or a character possessing human pro$le that is connected to the $gure of an equidae in Fariseu’s Rock 8 and in the Los Casares Cave (Guadalajara), showing similar symbolic purposes, that is, the animal, perhaps created from the Chaos, that gave origin to the anthropomorphic demiurge (Figure 7).

*e $rst of the characters mentioned above shows a body with ill-de$ned forms, that is, no more than the support of the two elements, believed to cer-tainly be the most important, and that we see as interconnected: the head and the sex. It was depicted in pro$le with a certain caricatural aspect that is common in almost all other Palaeolithic anthropomorphic images. It has narrow formal a+nities and examples can be found in some anthropomorphs of Rou+gnac (Dordogne) and of La Marche (Pales, 1976). *e $gure has an ovoid skull, ear, eye in the form of an oval, a rounded nose and an enormous open mouth. Emanating from the head are very $ne curved lines.

*e outline of one of the upper limbs is directed out in front of the $gure. *e lower limbs are shown in perspective and the only almost complete one presents a V shape common in zoomorphs from earlier Palaeolithic art periods.

*e erect penis which is leaning somewhat downwards, o1ers a dispropor-tionate size in relation to the rest of the human $gure, in particular its small sized lower limbs. It also displays a glans and a line that comes out of its tip which should represent ejaculation. *us, this is a depiction of an orgasm, where the open mouth and small lines coming from the head of the individual represent the sensations and emotions occurring, an aspect that for the time being is the only known example in all European Palaeolithic art, immediately giving it a new dimension. However, both this anthropomorph and the one on Rock 24, where we can also observe the representation of ejaculation, and the animals associated to them; allow us to recognise a scene, mythographic in character, which is re2ected in Egyptian cosmogonic accounts, the most com-plete to have survived to present day. In fact, according to the texts of worship practised in Heliopolis (Egyptian Iunu), the greatest religious centre in Egypt, the creation of the world would have started with Atum’s masturbation, a de-miurge god that by ejaculating gave rise to the male and female principles or a divine couple (Chu and Tefnut) (Sousa, 2006, p. 324).

*e examples that we have explored aim to demonstrate the existence of images and scenes or descriptive compositions that translate aspects of con-ceptual matrices of the $rst modern men through metaphors. Some of these reveal comogonic thought that has survived through the ages and reached early historic times and even contemporaneity, despite some adaptions. *is

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important issue, which is ultimately the study of human archaic thought and the ability to conceptualise, trying to explain human existence in a time prior to the mother-goddesses, cannot be con$ned to the scienti$c contributions of archaeologists but should be extended to art historians, as well as psychologists and sociologists or those who are engaged in the study of the neurosciences.

It is, after all, a wise symbol manipulation found at the base of an intel-lectual and ideological structure, characterizing modern human, where horses and bulls had a preponderant symbolic role.

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