Art of various kinds has been central to thinking about the origins and evolution of religion. Animals feature prominently in prehistoric arts around the world, including the oldest known representational rock painting, from Indonesia, which is dated to 43.9k years BP (Aubert et al. 2019).1 It depicts an anoa and eight figures, some of which are probably part-human, part-animal (Figure 1). It might be interpreted literally as a hunt, but does it have a more profound meaning? What can it, and other rock art, tell us about prehistoric religions, and relationships with animals in particular?
The earliest known “hunting scene” (Sulawesi, Indonesia). Photo: Maxime Aubert.
How, when, why, and where humans became religious beings is a question archaeologists have long grappled with. Identifying behavior consistent with religious awareness focuses strongly on the evolution of the capacity for “symbolic thought,” which is regarded as the prerequisite for language, religious consciousness, and “art.” Many researchers believe the capacity for symbolic thought was emergent, or in place, by at least 150–175 thousand years ago (e.g., McBrearty and Brooks 2000). Language, of course, cannot be excavated. Religious consciousness is inferred from various elements of the archaeological record, including intentional burial of the dead and the interment of grave goods with the deceased, implying belief in an afterlife (for an overview, see Solomon 2019a). What constitutes “art” is somewhat contested, but materials that have been central to thinking about the origins and evolution of religion include items of personal ornamentation, such as shell pendants and “marks”—of human making but not representational in themselves. Representational art is, one might think, the best evidence we have for ancient religion and relations with animals.
However, interpreting the materials is complex. In this article, I consider 1) the background to the presumed links between ancient arts and religion, with especial reference to European Paleolithic art, in which animal depictions predominate and human images are vanishingly rare; 2) theoretical positions and assumptions (including recent work invoking animism and relational ontologies); and 3) methods of investigation, including ethnographic analogies with more recent corpora of rock art, such as that of “San”2 hunter-gatherers of southern Africa.
Art and Prehistoric Religion: Making Connections
When European explorers encountered rock art abroad, Indigenous peoples were commonly regarded as relics of primitive times, with faculties to match. As Iain Davidson (2018) notes, rock art was encountered around the world by the beginning of the eighteenth century. This presented observers with a puzzle: “[S]ailors on the HMS Beagle, visiting Depuch Island in Western Australia, reported that ‘from . . . the accuracy with which many animals and birds are represented, they deserve great credit for patient perseverance, and for more talent and observation than is usually bestowed upon the natives of New Holland.’” Nevertheless, notions of primitive savagery, and the assumption rock art was decorative, or merely depicted scenes from daily life (such as hunting), were not easily displaced. It was only in the later nineteenth century that the idea emerged that these arts were somehow “religious.” Residual notions of rock art as some kind of documentary record persist in some research to this day.
Salomon Reinach’s (1903) paper entitled “L’art et la magie (Art and Magic)” was key to the acceptance of the idea that European Paleolithic art was somehow religious in nature. Since animals predominate in that body of art, they featured prominently in emergent ideas about prehistoric religion. It was speculated that animals were part of sympathetic magic (including sympathetic hunting magic), animism, sorcery or shamanism, and totemism (Figures 2a, b). These hypotheses have evolved but are still prominent in contemporary research in considerably revised forms.
Breuil’s reproduction of the “sorcerer” from the cave of Trois-Frères, France.
The Trois-Frères “sorcerer.” It would seem that Breuil’s copy is somewhat over-elaborated. Photo: J. Vertut, P. Bahn Collection.
In simple terms, animism, as initially outlined by Edward Tylor ([1871] 1913), postulated that spirit beings are active in human lives and that all things—animals, features of the landscape, and indeed almost anything—are alive. Totemism, as explored by John McLennan (1869–70) and later Émile Durkheim ([1912] 2008), refers to a system in which a kin group or clan identifies with an animal or plant as its emblem. Sympathetic magic, popularized in explanation by the French prehistorian Abbé Henri Breuil (1952), proposed that imaging animals might increase their numbers and/or enhance the success of the hunter. Ideas about the art as linked to shamanism also emerged around this time. The notion emphasizes the role of shamans and their experiences in states, which facilitate interactions with spirits and other beings. For example, it has been proposed “sorcerers” imaged animals in order to control or influence them (e.g., Hirn 1900; see Palacio-Perez 2013).
The test of these hypotheses is, of course, in their “fit” with the materials. Reinach found support for his hypothesis in the observation that food animals, such as ibex, bison, and deer, were very commonly depicted in European cave sites (Figure 3). However, the depiction of prey species could also be read as evidence for sympathetic hunting magic (or, indeed, literal depictions of the world of the prehistoric hunter). We now know that carnivores are depicted in some sites (cf. Davidson 2018). Since they are not food animals, it would seem the art was not just “about” hunting, though images of lions, bears, and the like might still support an interpretation in terms of magical control of animals in general or achieving protection from dangerous predators by magical means. Alternatively, images of carnivores might be clan emblems or, in shamanistic readings, some kind of spirit helper.
Bison, Cave of Niaux, France. Photo: J. Vertut, P. Bahn Collection.
It is in the nature of art that it is always ambiguous, and the diversity within prehistoric arts is such that “evidence” can be found for a variety of hypotheses. For example, images of animals apparently wounded by missiles can be interpreted in terms of hunting but, as Davidson (2018) notes, “the numbers were very small and the identification not very clear in most instances.” Similarly, a famous image from the French site of Trois-Frères has been interpreted as a sorcerer or “shaman” because it depicts a therianthrope (a part-human, part-animal being). However, again, the figure is ambiguous and might equally be interpreted as a mythical figure (see further later).
These interpretations were in part inspired by ethnographic analogies with religion in traditional societies; totemism, for example, was based on nineteenth century observations of Indigenous religion in Australia and North America. A novel, ethnography-free approach was developed by two French prehistorians in the 1950s. André Leroi-Gourhan (1968, 1982) and Annette Laming-Emperaire (1962) utilized formal analysis rather than considering subject matter alone. They looked at the placement and organization of images in caves, identifying presumed dualisms characterizing ancient religious thinking. So, for example, most deer, ibex, and mammoth were found at the entrances; bears, big cats, and rhino were in the more remote areas; and the central zones were dominated by horses, bison, and aurochs. This suggested they were differentiated and conceptually opposed in the artists’ minds.
Perhaps—but what kind of religious thinking that was is not illuminated by formal analysis, and it does not reveal more about the nature of human–animal relationships. This was nevertheless an important new approach, even though the conclusions have not stood up well to closer scrutiny; for example, it seems that the entrances to caves in the past were not necessarily where they are now.
Shamanism, Animals, and Rock Art
The claim that rock art could be explained by “shamanism” surged to the fore in the 1980s, particularly in the study of hunter-gatherer rock art in southern Africa and claims that this art derived from shamanic trance states. This placed the focus firmly on the figure of the religious specialist but was rooted in a study of the most commonly depicted animal in this body of art, the eland (Taurotragus oryx). J. David Lewis-Williams (1980) initially proposed that the eland was a symbol that had various meanings in different ritual contexts, later arguing that the relevant context was shamanic ritual and trance states and that the imagery depicted visionary experiences.
This hypothesis was later applied to rock arts around the world, including the much older art of the European Paleolithic (e.g., Lewis-Williams and Dowson 1988). The hypothesis has been popular, partly because its focus on the art as supposedly reproducing forms generated by the modern human brain in altered states has appealed to a desire to place rock art interpretation on a (supposedly) more “scientific” footing. It has also, however, been extremely controversial in multiple dimensions—not least because of its generality and inability to accommodate cultural/religious variation and change across space and through time (see Bahn 2016 for an overview). As Davidson (2018) has pithily observed: “As a consequence of a loose definition of the concept of shamanism, it would appear that it was a practice that was widespread across the world, but the appearance may be due to the looseness of the definition.”
This homogenization is relevant to the question of animal depictions and their significance to the artists. Even if it was apt to describe European Paleolithic art as “shamanistic,” it cannot explain why that body of art is so markedly lacking in depictions of people, while in others (such as southern African hunter-gatherer rock art), human figures are abundant. It is an anthropological hypothesis that is insensitive to difference and change. Similar problems apply to the analytical frame that has gained popularity in recent years known as “new animism,” although this trend puts animals closer to center stage (see further later).
Animal–Human Relationships in Focus
Before turning to new animism, it is necessary to consider a trend in French thought known as “post-animality.” This “tradition of radical anthropology dates back to the work of Marcel Mauss and George Bataille and continued in the work of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean Baudrillard” (Senior et al. 2015, 4). Bataille’s work is especially notable because he wrote extensively on the Paleolithic art of Lascaux (e.g., Bataille 1955). His thinking is elaborate, but Yue Zhuo (2015, 21) succinctly summarizes it as follows:
Lascaux, the emblem of the ages during passage from animal to man completes itself, should therefore not be understood merely as a historical site where archaeologists art historians go to carry out “scientific” studies. For Bataille, it is above all a fantasized time/space where art, play, and religion join each other in a single backward movement toward the recovery of a lost intimacy with animals and with nature, this “regressive” élan being a defiance of the principles that govern the modern world: reason, utility, and increasingly, in modern times, violence and war.
In a similar anti-(or alter-)humanist vein, critical of Enlightenment notions of human nature, Jacques Derrida developed the concept of the animot, a portmanteau word he uses to emphasize “the awareness of the animals’ capacity to respond by looking back, by addressing the presumptuous people who have named them” (Boisseron 2015, 105). The animot signifies “a heterogeneous multiplicity of the living, which cannot be separated from the human by a single indivisible line” (Derrida 2008, 399, cited by Boisseron 2015, 216).
New animism has been embraced by many in recent years. Led by researchers such as Philippe Descola, Eduardo Vivieros De Castro, Nurit Bird-David, and Tim Ingold, among others, this recuperation of Tylor’s notion of animism concerns “relational ontologies,” which go beyond subject–object distinctions (thereby re-examining the foundations of Western science), emphasizing instead respectful relations between humans and nonhumans—or in the preferred terminology, “other-than-human persons.” According to Descola (2014, 275), it concerns belief in “a continuity of souls and a discontinuity of bodies” between humans and nonhumans. It has been argued in recent years that materials formerly interpreted as shamanistic should instead be interpreted in terms of animism (Harvey 2010).
Clearly, these ideas have implications for the ways in which we understand animal images in rock art(s), as their application to a specific group of images illustrates (see Le Quellec 2017). The famous “shaft scene” at Lascaux, sometimes called the Dead Man of the Well scene, is probably about 15,000 years old (Figure 4). The key images are of a bison, apparently with spilling entrails; a crudely painted man with erect penis; and a bird, apparently part of a stick. A rhino to the left is not thought to be contemporaneous.
The “shaft scene,” or “dead man of the well,” Lascaux. Photo: J. Vertut, P. Bahn collection.
Breuil (1952) thought the images memorialized an actual encounter between hunter and prey. Laming-Emperaire (1962) linked it to myth. Mircea Eliade (1964) saw the bird-headed “stick” as a shamanic representation of an ongon (Siberian Tungus), or animal spirit helper, and linked the images to trance. Lewis-Williams (2002), who drew substantially on Eliade’s work, has similarly considered it in terms of shamanism, altered states, and alleged out-of-body travel experiences. Most recently, Robert Wallis (2013; 2019, 17) has interpreted it as depicting a “human-hybrid ‘shaman’ among a number of other-than-human persons, situated within a wider-than-human animic world.”
It may perhaps be concluded that the “meaning” of animal images in rock art, and what they might reveal about human–animal relationships, is merely in the eye (or the mind) of the beholder. Images are always ambiguous and the “meaning” of cave art is as much about how we think at different times and within different intellectual traditions as it is about past realities (see also Le Quellec 2017). Such pessimism is justifiable, not least given the enormous pitfalls present in attempting to understand how people thought tens of millennia ago. The alternative therefore is to model a range of possibilities and explore the questions in relation to bodies of rock art that are more amenable to interpretation. Southern African rock art is one such corpus.
Animals in the Rock Art of Southern Africa
Rock art, consisting of both paintings and petroglyphs (also known as “engravings”) largely attributable to San hunter-gatherers, is found in many thousands of sites in southern Africa. The oldest known parietal art (on rocks and cave/shelter walls) is securely dated to at least 3600 BP (Jerardino and Swanepoel 1999), with one more problematic date from Botswana perhaps indicating an age of 5,000 BP (Bonneau et al. 2017). The oldest known art is art mobilier, or portable art, made on stone slabs and pebbles; examples from a Namibian cave site date to 30,000 BP, though this is a rare early date, with other art mobilier dates to within the last 8,000 years (Vogelsang et al. 2010).
Southern African parietal art is of interest because there is a considerable body of nineteenth century ethnographic materials to aid in interpretation. Most of these texts were provided by former hunter-gatherers from the northern Cape region, speaking the |xam language (Figure 5). Though the materials are open to more than one interpretation, one thing is largely undisputed, namely, “religion” is the most appropriate frame for understanding the images. The usual problems apply, however. The ethnographic texts may provide insights into the later art, but how far back in time can such interpretations be applied? Is it ethical or sensible to model much older human behavior on recent groups? Nevertheless, these ethnographies are invaluable in attempts to understand images of animals, their symbolism, and the human–animal relationships they imply.
Map, showing the area occupied by the |xam, whose testimonies were recorded by Bleek and Lloyd in the 1870s.
Images of animals predominate, though human and humanlike figures are abundant. All kinds of animals are depicted—typically herbivores, and especially the eland—but there are also carnivores, insects (such as bees and one moth), fish, and a range of imaginary creatures. Part-human, part-animal creatures (known as therianthropes) are not a primary theme but are not uncommon. The animal most often imaged, which is known to have had mythico-religious significance, is the eland, the largest of all the antelopes (Figure 6).
A herd of polychrome eland, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.
It is notable that even before a religious motivation for European Paleolithic art was accepted, it was hypothesized that the southern African art (then of unknown antiquity) was not “the mere daubing of figures for idle pastime, but . . . an attempt, however imperfect, at a truly artistic conception of the ideas which most deeply moved the Bushman mind, and filled it with religious feelings” (Wilhelm Bleek in Joseph M. Orpen 1874, 13). Prior to the 1980s, when readings in terms of “shamanism” became popular, a variety of interpretations were offered, inter alia, relating the art to myth, ritual, rainmaking, and hunting magic (e.g., Vinnicombe 1976).
Myth
Above all, recorded myths provide clues to the significance of animals in San cosmology. The extraordinarily rich testimonies recorded in the 1870s by the German-born philologist Wilhelm Bleek and his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd have been especially important.3 The narrators, speakers of the now moribund |xam language, had formerly been hunter-gatherers but by the later nineteenth century had been forced to become laborers on white settler farms in the northern Cape region.
In myth, animals—or animal-people, to be precise—are center stage. The stories concern the origins of the world and its relation to the current order. In the beginning, it was in the process of being created by a being named |kaggen. The world was a topsy-turvy place, as |kaggen proceeded to fine-tune his creative work and correct the many absurdities that arose from its initial imperfections. Crucially, humans and animals had not then been separated and death had not yet come to the world.
|kaggen himself was both a person and a praying mantis. He was also a trickster, and, although he did good deeds, he was also often malicious and stupid, like all the other early animal-people. Among his immediate family members were a hyrax, a meerkat, a blue crane, and a mongoose (notably, all rare or absent in the rock art, indicating the link to myth is not direct but nevertheless by no means irrelevant). The stories relate the adventures, mishaps, and ironies of living in this world and are populated by a large cast of animal-people—baboons, lions, ostriches, hyaenas, and many more. Some, such as lions and baboons, are classic “baddies”—no doubt because of the potential threat or competition they posed to people. This world-in-the-making was preposterous, and accordingly, many of the stories entertaining and often humorous. Inevitably, this madness had to end.
One story about how the first order ceased to be is “The Anteater’s Laws,” in which the Anteater’s daughter, a springbok, marries a lynx. Clearly, and perhaps especially in hunter-gatherer thought, this marriage of carnivore and prey is utterly inappropriate. The angry mother anteater responds by burrowing around crazily underground, making the earth quake. Indeed, everything is shaken up. A new order is somehow instituted, and in it, “animals only marry their own kind. People too would henceforth behave like people, cooking food on the fire, using artefacts, wearing clothes and observing a long list of rules about food that could and could not be eaten” (Solomon 2019b). It seems that at the same time, immortality was revoked. This was because the young hare, whose mother had died, did not believe the moon when it reassured him that his mother would return, just as the moon waxes and wanes. As a consequence of the hare’s heresy, thereafter the dead did not return (Solomon 2019b).
These stories of the strange days when humans and animals had not yet been separated are centrally concerned with appropriate social and cultural behavior and morality, including accounts of the origin of hunting. The eland was the favorite creature of |kaggen, the trickster. In one narrative, |kaggen makes the eland from a leather shoe, but it is later killed by family members out hunting. The bile from the dead eland’s liver gets into his eyes, so |kaggen picks up a feather and wipes his eyes. He then casts it away, and it floats into the sky and becomes the moon (Bleek 1924, 1–9).
A similar story was recorded from the eastern mountains, 1,200 kilometers away, at about the same time (Orpen 1874). Cagn (an alternative spelling of |kaggen, as his name is rendered by Bleek and Lloyd) lovingly reared an eland, but it was killed by his sons out hunting. A distraught Cagn instructed his wife to churn the eland’s remains in a pot. The blood droplets that splashed out turned into snakes that slithered off; a second failed attempt produced hartebeest (antelope). Eventually, it all worked as intended, and the blood droplets became eland—ultimately vast herds of them. Cagn instructed his son to hunt them, but they were unsuccessful because “Cagn was in their bones.” A second attempt at hunting them was successful, and it was said that “[t]hat day game were [sic] given to men to eat, and this is the way they were spoilt and became wild” (Orpen 1874, 4–5). This is apparently another reference to the separation of humans and animals at the end of creation and the emergence of fully human people who have social nous and behave decorously, while animals are the opposite—untamed and uncultured.
Excavations (e.g., Maggs 1967) have shown that eland and other large herbivores are overrepresented in the art relative to their local abundance, and eland were not heavily relied upon as a food source. Similarly, few (if any) compositions can be seen as eland hunts, and “hunting scenes” generally are rare or ambiguous. The prominence of the eland in rock art apparently has everything to do with its mythical significance, even if the art does not depict scenes from mythology.
Rain
The myths and stories do, however, point to another significance—and it is one that could not possibly be deduced from observation of the images or analysis of associated excavation materials. There is another key figure in the |xam texts—the Rain Bull. His name, !khwa, means water or rain. He is the embodiment of the water in the waterholes, and he is the storm cloud that “walks” the skies—his body the rain cloud, his legs the columns of rain that stream from it (for an overview, see Solomon 2019b; see also Woodhouse 1992).
However, !khwa is more than just water or weather; he is principally the punisher of social transgressions, especially by female initiates who disobey the puberty rules, which included seclusion and food restrictions. A typical story is that of the girl who breaches the required seclusion in the menarcheal hut and goes to the water, where she kills a “water’s child” and cooks and eats it. An angry !khwa carries her off and deposits her in the waterhole (it appears that she is drowned). Her family suffers the same fate. Girls punished in this way by !khwa are seen as frogs around the waterhole. Belongings revert to an unworked state, so leather items become animals again, and arrows revert to being unworked sticks. This theme of reversion seems to hark back to the notions of the “primitive” first days when people and animals had not been separated; the bad old days before the evolution of fully human social beings (Solomon 2019b).
In another story, !khwa explicitly appears as an eland. Men out hunting shoot an eland, but when they try to cook the meat, it evaporates. It turns out that this eland was !khwa himself, and he soon takes his revenge. Like the female initiates, the men are whisked away by a whirlwind and dropped into the waterhole. Various stories describe violent storms as !khwa’s punishment for people’s bad behavior. In the shamanists’ reading (e.g., Lewis-Williams 1980), “underwater” is supposedly a metaphor for trance experience and a perceived sensation of drowning, but this is based on a single twentieth century testimony from a Ju/’hoan man in the Kalahari. This analogical method is flawed, not least since rain beliefs are virtually absent in Kalahari lore, rendering comparisons with the southern San cosmology problematic at best (Solomon 2023).
That rain animals are a theme in southern African rock art is well documented (e.g., Stow and Bleek 1930; Woodhouse 1992). Some may depict !khwa, the Rain Bull. Others may depict rainmaking (Figure 7). According to the nineteenth century |xam testimonies, this involved leading a female animal, which “rained gently,” to a high place and killing it. Where its blood ran, rain would fall. It was also stated that this was achieved by speaking to “the dead men who are with the rain.” (Bleek 1933, 303–4). One well known story, that of “the broken string,” relates how a man would ask a dead friend to make rain (Solomon 2019b). It seems undeniable that rainmaking was accomplished in the underwater world of the spirits. Various paintings of rain animals associated with fish indicate this was the location of the activity depicted.
Rainmaking, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Figures, some with animal heads, surround an ox-like “rain animal.” Note the fish skeleton (viewers right), suggesting that the activity is taking place in the underwater world of the spirits.
San Hunter-Gatherer Relations with Animals
Even with the aid of ethnographies, the nature of San relations with animals is not transparent, but the shamanistic reading is inadequate in multiple dimensions.4 It is claimed that shamanism was the form of the earliest religion and that of hunter-gatherer societies, but, even if a loose notion of shamanism as an early religion typical of hunter-gatherers is accepted, it does not mean relations with animals were identical in all those societies. In fact, the shamanistic reading of southern African (and other) rock arts does not attend to what relations with animals might have been but rather is inexorably focused on the figure of the shaman as “ritual specialist” and the role of altered states of consciousness.
It is tempting to assume hunting must have been an important template in hunter-gatherer thinking, but culture (the domain to which religion belongs) is not so simply or directly determined by economy. The |xam figure of the rain animal, for example, is only tangentially related to hunting (this seems present in the notion that sacrificing a female rain animal would bring rain); however, the character of the Rain Bull, as punisher of transgressors, bears no relation to hunting. Logically, such a dangerous figure might be conceptualized as a carnivore, yet !khwa is an antelope.
The |xam myths suggest the narrators were as, or more, interested in the behavior of animals, and the traits of different species as analogues for human behavior, than dealing with the hunter–prey relationship as such. As Claude Levi-Strauss (1964) famously observed, animals are good to think (with). Animal representations are used in the service of narrative and their aptness relative to the “message.” In this sense, animal characters in myth and art may be seen as products of the creative imagination rather than reflections of society or religion. This creativity is another facet of traditional religions shamanist readings ignore in favor of ideas about the neurological generation of visual images. Indeed, the artistry of rock art, and of myth, is often neglected in anthropological and sociological accounts. This may be borne in mind when considering the anthropological approach that attends most closely to questions of human–animal relationships and religious thought: animism. Therianthropic figures, beings with both human and animal features, are of interest in this regard.
Therianthropes in Rock Art
Therianthropes are a prime example of a motif that might best be interpreted in terms of (new) animism. Examples occur in European Paleolithic art, and indeed “the earliest figurative artwork in the world” (Aubert et al. 2019, 442), at the site of Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4, Indonesia, appears to depict a hunt with an anoa and several part-human, part-animal figures. Therianthropes have often been interpreted in terms of shamanism and their interactions with animal “spirit helpers” (“ongon,” in the lore of Siberian shamans). Researchers who have analyzed the Indonesian images have commented on the possible relation to either shamanism or animism. They note, with suitable caution, that “[t]herianthropes in prehistoric art are often attributed—though not uncontroversially—to shamanic beliefs and visions, such as representing ‘animal spirit helpers’. Whether such interpretations are appropriate in the case of Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4, or whether the apparent portrayal of therianthropes suggests that the image-makers perceived themselves as an indivisible part of the animal world, is uncertain” (Aubert et al. 2019, 2).
Shamanism and Therianthropes
Therianthropes in San rock art have been interpreted as reproducing the contents of shamanic experiences in altered states of consciousness and, echoing the notion of “spirit helpers,” interactions with creatures that possess supernatural power. The well-known images at the site of Game Pass, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa include a humanlike figure with animal hooves that seems to grasp the tail of a staggering eland (Figure 8). In an elaborate series of inferences, Lewis-Williams and Thomas A. Dowson (1989) interpret this as a series of metaphors for trance experience, in which a shaman believed he was “fusing” with an “animal of potency”; his supposed identification with the eland allegedly helps explains the figure’s animal features. However, the images are amenable to a less convoluted reading more closely tied to both southern San ethnographies and the images themselves. The therianthrope and eland may equally be interpreted in relation to rain and rainmaking and the control of a rain animal. As noted earlier, this was apparently accomplished by deceased kin (“spirits”) in the underwater world (Solomon and Bahn 2023). This reading also accounts for other features of the figure, namely its skull-like head, rib markings, and slenderness. However, this does not explain therianthropy in other rock arts, or even different kinds of therianthrope in San art (Figure 9).
An eland with a figure apparently grasping its tail. It is interpreted by some as depicting a shaman, but may better be interpreted as a spirit figure controlling a rain animal. Game Pass, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.
Therianthropic figures with antelope heads (compare with Figure 8, where the therianthrope has a human head, but antelope hooves). KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Photo: David Coulson.
(New) Animism and Therianthropes?
Proponents of the new animism may well feel drawn to the reading that interprets therianthropes as dissolving the subject–object bond and signaling qualitatively different relationships with other-than-human persons. However, the |xam texts do not seem to support such an interpretation. The myth corpus pivots on the idea of animals as the opposite of people, set apart by their social behavior and moral sense (see earlier). The first people were part-human, part-animal—and it is their animality that variously makes them behave in ways that are often ignorant, spiteful, and “primitive.” It would seem |xam may have regarded animals as other-than-human persons, but that does not necessarily imply a respectful relationship.
In myth, after humans and animals were separated, animals were just animals, given to people for food. There is no acknowledgment of animal personhood. It is nevertheless notable that recorded southern San stories suggest an awareness of the moral problem of killing animals that accords with a notion of animals as “other-than-human persons.” It is often cited (qua Laurens van der Post [1958] 1962) that the San hunter would apologize to the prey animal before killing it, explaining that his family is hungry, and thanking it for sacrificing itself for them. But is this respect for the animal or fear of annoying the being who created it?
Research by Rane Willerslev (2013) addresses this question. He describes relations with spirits and hunting observances among the Siberian Yughakir, who have elaborate bear-hunting rituals—yet they are aware that their foundations are untrue, and they were observed behaving “as if the whole ritual were a splendid joke” (Willerslev 2013, 51). “[The] hunters know that, in their activity, they are following an illusion, but still they go along with it”; they “are ironically self-conscious about not taking the ruling ethos at face value.” He concludes: “perhaps it is time for anthropology not to take indigenous animism too seriously.” Something similar seems applicable to San societies. In the Yughakir case, the spirits require hunters “to treat the animals’ bones correctly, so that their souls can be released” (Willerslev 2013, 54). San beliefs generally are very different, but here too killing is variously justified and showing “respect” to the prey similarly entails no more than treating the bones respectfully. (“Cagn was in their bones,” according to one of the eland creation stories—see earlier.)
Animism, like shamanism, surely cannot account for the diversity of ancient—and more recent—religious practices and relations with animals, and certainly cannot accommodate change through time. As Katherine Swancutt (2019) has observed, various studies suggest “the importance . . . of thinking about different animisms in the plural”; and as Davidson (personal communication) has written: “[These “isms”] describe different phenomena on the basis of superficial resemblances between instances.” As general categories, such classifications have a certain utility, but this is limited by their generality.
Religion or Just Culture?
Ultimately, ancient arts and animal images are receptacles for our own ideas about animals, people, and religion. In this regard, the very notion of early religion is also problematic, because it requires a notion of the secular to be meaningful. In the absence of the post-Enlightenment notion of the secular, religion is simply “culture.” It is not “false consciousness,” pre-scientific, or irrational (cf. Solomon and Bahn 2023b). It conforms to the often-complex cultural logic of any given group. Rather, it seems that ancient art, science, and religion were originally intertwined, not separable as we tend to see them now. In regard to animal–human relationships, such separations are challenged by new animism and French anti-humanist thought.
Nevertheless, it remains useful to retain some notion of animal images as linked to prehistoric religion and ritual. There is an old joke in archaeology that makes fun of the tendency to interpret any artefact or site that cannot be assigned a utilitarian function as related to “ritual.” Yet there are materials that certainly suggest animal images had some “magical” function. For example, at the French cave of Pergouset, there is a petroglyph of a horse’s head in a fissure so small the maker would not have been able to see what he was doing, and it was not made to be seen, at least by human eyes (Lorblanchet 2001). Two other French Paleolithic art sites, Tuc d’Audoubert and Montespan, contain clay animal sculptures (of bison and a bear, respectively); in both of these sites, a headless snake skeleton was found (D’Huy 2016). Is this mere coincidence? A “ritual” interpretation is plausible, even if the role the animals played in the makers’ thinking is not retrievable.
The Ethical Treatment of Animals
Among the foci of new animism is “a critique of modernity and the alienation produced by the separation of the human sphere of culture from the nonhuman field of nature” as well as a rejection of it in favor of “a non-objectifying . . . relation to the world” (Durrant 2022, 51). This chimes with broader concerns, including global environmental crises and the commodifications enacted by capitalism (as “the turning of souls into things, but also itself a modified form of animism, the turning of things into magical commodities” (Durrant 2022, 51)). Sam Durrant also draws attention to “the romanticisation of animism and dehistoricised models of animistic relations to ‘nature’” (Durrant 2022, 51). Nevertheless, new animism valuably emphasizes the dialectical nature of human–animal relationships.
Pleasing though it might be to think that early humans and premodern societies, arts, cultures, and religions can teach us about more respectful relations with animals, it might be argued that the story of our genus is that of the relentless commodification of animals, as subsistence strategies “progressed” from scavenging meat through hunting to herding and farming, culminating in the brutality of large-scale industrial farming and scientific animal experimentation in the so-called animal-industrial complex, which expanded hugely in the second half of the twentieth century.
And yet, vegetarianism and an insistence on the avoidance of meat-eating and animal slaughter as an ethical/moral imperative has long been closely tied to some traditions of religious thought—for example, in perhaps 2.5 thousand years of Jainism in India. The actual time depth of such moral consciousness is, regrettably, unknown. Moreover, the avoidance of meat-eating was apparently often related to asceticism and the rejection of gluttony rather than empathy with animals (e.g., Frayne 2016).
Prehistoric art does not easily provide historical data, but it may feed into allied questions about economies and religion. In this regard, pastoralism is of particular interest (bearing in mind that there are a number of ways to be a herder, and pastoralism is not a uniform entity). Hunters and gatherers live among animals, but those animals are wild. Keeping herds fosters closer relationships with the animals people care for. Hugh Beach and Florian Stammler (2006, 21) record that some contemporary (reindeer) herders “are often still upset when handing their animals over to the impersonal market” (as opposed to subsistence slaughter) and regard it as “a betrayal of the relationship.” Moreover, “[w]hen made to execute massive slaughter procedures of the reindeer themselves, some herders will habitually drink themselves into a ‘wild’ state” (Beach and Stammler 2006, 21).
Might this shift in people’s relationship with animals be reflected in both religious ideas and the art made by pastoralist peoples? Though notoriously conservative and resistant to change, religious ideas may nevertheless be adapted for changing circumstances. Beach and Stammler (2006, 12) broadly endorse Tim Ingold’s (1980) proposition that “the transition from hunting to large-scale pastoralism, a change involving two very different modes of relating to the reindeer, and which could not have occurred overnight, could nonetheless entail no major shake-up of the animistic belief system,” but they caution that “if the tenets of respectful reciprocity between animals and humans might span the hunting–pastoral dichotomy, they also might not” (not least because many pastoralist peoples hunt as well as keep stock). Pastoralist rock arts, such as those found abundantly in the Sahara Desert region, do not provide any simple answers. Nevertheless, rock paintings such as those from recently discovered sites at Laas Geel, Somaliland, of long-horned cows apparently with some kind of ceremonial adornments on their necks (Gutherz et al. 2003) seem to speak to the strength of the human–animal relationship in herder societies (Figure 10).
Human and cow with elaborate neck detail. Laas Geel, Somalia. Photo: Vladimir Lysenko (Creative Commons).
Animal images in prehistoric art do not provide us with hard facts about ancient religion, but they do provide us with much food for thought concerning relationships with species other than our own in other times and places. Prehistoric arts are evocative, rather than documentary, but are nevertheless a resonant testimony to lives that were once lived always in close proximity to animals.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Paul Bahn, Maxime Aubert, and David Coulson for permission to reproduce images. Thanks are also owed to Finley Lawson for inviting and facilitating my Science and Religion Forum conference participation.
Notes
- Since the initial delivery of this paper in 2023, an even older example, dated to 51,200 BP, has been reported (Oktaviana et al. 2024). [^]
- The name “San” has largely replaced “Bushman,” which is widely seen as pejorative. Though not without its problems, the term San is used here as a shorthand for later Holocene hunter-gatherers in southern Africa. [^]
- The testimonies recorded by Bleek and Lloyd are available online at https://digitalbleeklloyd.uct.ac.za/. [^]
- In my analysis, the shamanistic reading of southern San rock art is based on misinterpreting |xam accounts of spirits as referring to living shamans (e.g., Solomon 1997, 2008, 2018). [^]
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