Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
The Archaeology of Emotion with Tirtha Mukhopadhyay - Rock Art 100
1k Plays1 year ago
Episode 100! A centennial celebration for the Rock Art Podcast. We bring back one of our most noted, and most popular guest scholars! Dr. Tirtha Prasad Mukhopadhyay. He's back to discuss his revolutionary discoveries regarding rock art. He calls this the "Archaeology of Emotions".
Transcripts
For rough transcripts of this episode go to https://www.archpodnet.com/rockart/100
Links
Contact
- Dr. Alan Garfinkel avram1952@yahoo.com
ArchPodNet
- APN Website: https://www.archpodnet.com
- APN on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/archpodnet
- APN on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/archpodnet
- APN on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/archpodnet
- Tee Public Store
Affiliates
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to the California Rock Art Foundation
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Hello out there in archaeology podcast land. This is Dr. Alan Garfinkel. I'm the president and founder of the California Rock Art Foundation. And what we do is we identify, evaluate, manage and conserve rock art both in Alta, California and in Baja, California.
00:00:21
Speaker
We conduct field trips, we have trainings, exercise, we do research, and in every way possible we try to preserve, protect, and coordinate treasures of Alta and Baja, California rock art, of which there are many, and diverse. We also work closely with Native Americans and partner with them to recognize and protect sacred sites.
Supporting the Foundation's Mission
00:00:42
Speaker
So for more info,
00:00:43
Speaker
about the fabulous California Rock Art Foundation, you can go to carockart.org. Also, I'm open to give me a call, 805-312-2261. We would welcome sponsorship or underwriting, helping us to defray the costs of our podcasts, and also membership in California Rock Art Foundation, and of course, donations since we are a 501c3 nonprofit scientific and educational corporation. God bless everyone out there in podcast land.
00:01:16
Speaker
You're listening to the Rock Art Podcast. Join us every week for fascinating tales of rock art, adventure, and archaeology. Find our contact info in the show notes and send us your suggestions.
00:01:34
Speaker
Hello out there in archaeology podcast land.
Archaeology of Emotions in Rock Art
00:01:36
Speaker
This is your host, Dr. Alan Garfinkel, ready for episode 100. It's the centennial. We're going to hear from Tirtha Okahabadi, one of our most popular guest scholars, and we'll be talking about the archaeology of emotions and how that relates back to the imagery within rock art. Fabulous program.
00:02:01
Speaker
Well, hello out there in archaeology podcast land. This is your host, Dr. Alan Garfinkel. And this is episode 100, the centennial. How exciting. We've been doing this for about three years. And one of our most popular and gifted scholars is on with us this evening, patching in from Mexico. His name is Tirtha Mukhabadai. He's a Fulbright scholar and an excellent researcher. Tirtha, are you with us?
00:02:30
Speaker
I'm right here with you, Alan. Thank you very much for having me on this show. Well, it's a pleasure. So give us a sound bite as to what the focus of our effort is going to be today.
00:02:42
Speaker
Well, I'd like to talk more theoretically today and explore some of the cognitive perspectives regarding the structure and appearance of rock art. And I would like to call this session the archaeology of emotion.
00:03:02
Speaker
And I think this is something that's rather distinctive in terms of our efforts together. I did not realize before we spent considerable time together to write our book and do our articles that the images on stone are evocative. They have an agency or a sense of an emotional intensity.
Communicating Emotion through Rock Art
00:03:25
Speaker
Do they not?
00:03:25
Speaker
He has that was precisely the foundation for the series of articles that we developed on rock art and especially of the rock art in this region and this part of the world as elsewhere and I have been studying rock art elsewhere as well. And the most important aspect of rock art research seemed to me to lie in this.
00:03:47
Speaker
phenomenon of the rock art figures, the configurations, the geometrical representationals, as they are called in the literature, that they all have emotional impact on the viewer. And the most interesting conclusion that we could already draw, or rather the inference that we could draw from this kind of methodological epistemological posturing about the rock art figures
00:04:18
Speaker
is that the rock arts are somehow indicative of the human ability to depict emotional figures or emotional objects and that this would stand contrary to the received theoretical
00:04:38
Speaker
opinions regarding rock art images in the traditional, academic, cultural, anthropological, familiar and scholarship? Sure. So I think what you're talking about is sometimes when, typically, traditionally, when archaeologists and even rock art scholars are looking at the imagery that exists within rock art
00:05:05
Speaker
They call them static, static anthropomorphs, or they call them images that are, they don't have the vitality or the power or communicative elements to them, but I think they're somehow missing the content, are they?
00:05:25
Speaker
Yes, some scholars have called them the invisible elements of rock art. And archaeologists and even anthropologists, when those studying visual culture, for example, have not gone as far as to suggest that these images, or even if we consider the history of sculptures and
00:05:52
Speaker
those Gravitian, Upper Paleolithic sculptural figures, that these representations do not have any intrinsic communicative or semantic value. In other words, the anthropologists of the last 100 to 200 years
00:06:14
Speaker
including the great anthropologists of the German Anglican anthropological traditions, including Edward Taylor, Franz Boas, and you name the Karl Lumholz, those pioneers in cultural anthropological studies have
00:06:34
Speaker
always tended to consider the images as static symbols to which humans have attributed meaning in a consensual way, but that this meaning is part of a collective consensus, that the image does not intrinsically have any meaning.
00:07:00
Speaker
And so what the revolution is, or what the novel discovery is, is their intrinsic power, communicative ability, and emotions agency in some way or other almost that comes from the images. Am I correct? Absolutely. I mean, we are trying to restore some subjective value, some subjective validity.
00:07:25
Speaker
to the creativity of the ancient shamans, the ritual artists. Give us some examples of exactly what you're talking about so that we can sort of have a three-dimensional understanding of this type of communication. That's the way to move forward, really. And I would like to set up a kind of chronological map of the early prehistoric
00:07:52
Speaker
depictive traditions and we could well begin with the early Holocene rock art and gradually try and consider the meanings inherent in some of the rock arts of the more later air books in history. For example, some of the most elemental images
00:08:18
Speaker
that we discern on the surfaces of rocks, for example, in the great rock art traditions of the American Southwest and California, for example, or the rock art traditions of Central India, or the rock art traditions of the Central Asia, the Great Central Asia. Yeah, and the Great Basin, of
The Impact of Geometrical Patterns
00:08:44
Speaker
course. Yes, the Great Basin in North America, of course, and everywhere.
00:08:48
Speaker
The most elemental signs are geometrical. They have geometrical orientations. They are either squares, quadrants, and with crisscross, rick-rock patterns, zigzagging patterns, and some kind of ritual patterns. And we do not know the meaning of these rakas. The people who made them
00:09:12
Speaker
are no longer there to communicate that meaning to us to pass on. But they did pass on that meaning to us.
00:09:20
Speaker
And that meaning is, it's not a meaning which we could perhaps represent verbally, but it's a meaning that we start to feel at the rock heart. Recently I'm beginning to understand, even to feel that there is a gap, a hiatus between the emotive power of those representational geometrical shapes,
00:09:48
Speaker
and the visible shape itself. In other words, that there is an aura of psychological meaning to those geometrical shapes in rock art.
00:10:03
Speaker
to return to that earlier point, that chronological evolution of rock art figures, rock art images. So what we see is that when we look intently at a representation, we begin to see that this image is a very different kind of pattern. And some of the effects
00:10:26
Speaker
How does the rock art maker, the hypothetical rock art maker, the shaman or the priest or however we might call this person, this man or woman who depicted that pattern on the surface of the rock, what was he or she thinking at that point of time? And how was he or she trying to secure those emotional effects?
00:10:55
Speaker
Empirically, there is a set of indicators for these emotions. And this is where we could try to understand scientifically how the emotional effects are really secured in the more elemental geometrical patterns. And maybe in these representations, there are, for example,
00:11:22
Speaker
Glow effects are secured with outward shooting lines from a certain central figure or a central configuration. There may be frill effects or embellishments.
00:11:36
Speaker
And then there is, of course, that very strange, the recurrence of the Fibonacci circles. There are concentric circles. There are matte patterns. There are diamond shapes.
00:11:54
Speaker
with parallel concentric diamond patterns. And the other interesting aspect of this, that when we consider the metrics, the distance between one point and another point in that visual continuum,
00:12:16
Speaker
We begin to identify perhaps a kind of appreciation, a preemptive understanding of how the proportions, the ratios would impact the viewer.
00:12:31
Speaker
and the prehistoric shaman already had an immersive understanding of the way in which these emotions could be evoked through a very consensus and very informed knowledge of geometrical ratios. And this would take an enormous amount of research and recognition
00:13:00
Speaker
an enormous amount of literature for us in order to understand how these effects were really secured. But there is no doubt that the geometrical patterns that we see on the surface of rocks in the rock arts
00:13:17
Speaker
for example, in the patterned torsos of those anthropomorphs, those spirit entities, or whatever, those human shapes, those humanoid expressions, they seem not just to be an accident.
00:13:37
Speaker
There is logic, there is thinking, there is historic, even evolutionary contemplation ingrained in the way the shamans depicted the rock. So there's a structure and there's a method to their effort. Yes. And what are they trying to communicate or what is the emotion that
00:14:03
Speaker
the perceiver, the people that view these images, are intended to process. This is an interesting, interesting question. And to understand this, we have to, again, depend on
00:14:19
Speaker
our ability to respond to emotional or emotive signals. Emotions, the very etymology of the word emotions suggests motion or movement and even in various other Indo-European languages, for example, emotions are
00:14:41
Speaker
always associated with a sense of movement or a sense of, could we call it shock effect, which would impact physically and corporeally as much as internally our states of feelings, that is.
00:15:03
Speaker
So they move us. So if we fall back on this very traditional idea of what the emotions are, even as we try to wade through the theoretical ideas of the theoretical definitions in the cognitive science of emotions,
00:15:22
Speaker
If you look at the definitions of emotions, we would see that everywhere from some of these great scientific research on the emotions shows us that the emotions are somehow connected, that they are reflexes, that they express themselves through our body, that the emotions are visible on the face, for example, that there are certain basic emotions, but the basic emotions are connected to basic
00:15:52
Speaker
behavioral reflexes. Well, let's stop it there and we'll pick it up on the next segment and we'll delve a little bit further into the archaeology of emotions. See you in the flip-flop, gang. Welcome back all you folks out there in archaeology podcast land. This is Dr. Alan Garfinkel with segment two for your Rock Art podcast.
00:16:16
Speaker
Tirtha, we were just discussing the emotions, the archaeology of emotions, and how that may relate to the theme of and the substance of the particular elements of the religious and cosmological elements of an indigenous culture.
Emotional and Trance Effects in Rock Art
00:16:36
Speaker
How would that work?
00:16:38
Speaker
Absolutely, that's where our discussions would lead us towards. The emotions are of essence because in archaeology, neither in archaeology nor in anthropology, has the emotions been considered to be an important tool for the understanding of these rock art patterns. In fact, archaeologists, as we just said,
00:17:04
Speaker
have not ventured out to explain what these figures mean. But yes, the emotions, the basic point here is that the rock art's geometrical representationals, and then as we would be inclined to follow this argument and apply it to the anthropomorphic figures, that the rock art
00:17:31
Speaker
always essentially, indispensably, has emotional, emotive impact on the viewer. What this means is that, and then the question that follows is, what kind of emotional impact? The emotional impact is that of essentially one associated with wonder. It's all inspiring when you look at those
00:17:55
Speaker
those images. It's mysterious. It also has a transcendental element to it, as you and I have said in the past. You get this tether between the terrestrial and the celestial
00:18:17
Speaker
Absolutely, the cosmology, the largeness, you are connected to the entire universe, to the stars. It creates an integral or integrated aesthetic sensory experience, you know, the landscape and the rocks and the images they grow in together.
00:18:45
Speaker
But I would suggest, and I would, I mean, I humbly suggest here that in every experience of rock art figures, there is somehow, even if it is unrecognized, a feeling, a grain of fear, a grain of a primal,
00:19:10
Speaker
fear experience in what cognitive science now calls the flight or fight response. Yeah, the fight and flight. So I think what you're saying, and I do understand, I think appreciate this, as we view these figures, there's a suddenness, a surprise, a sort of guttural feeling of sort of revelation or
00:19:38
Speaker
or trying to understand and somehow conceptualize what we're seeing. And sometimes it's monstrous and mysterious, sometimes it's just overwhelming. Am I at all correct?
00:19:54
Speaker
These are absolutely the terms that have been used in the psychology of aesthetics and emotions and artistic emotions. Psychology is still trying to to grow up with this question of ritual or artistic or religious emotions. There is no clear-cut definition.
00:20:16
Speaker
But all these emotions that you just mentioned are associated with that state of responses, those states of responses, that set of responses, like awe and fear and mystery and wonder. Now, if we jump on to the analyze the anthropomorphs, the human stick figures on rock art surfaces, there's a sense of immediacy.
00:20:41
Speaker
the figures seem to jump out at us, that they seem to be floating. They have what, you know, Maringer, whom both of us have been fascinated with, Maringer's position on the numinous experience of rock art figures. Right, right, the numinous. They have a floating experience. It seems as though they are
00:21:04
Speaker
embellished upon the rocks almost as an envelope or a curtain or a particular, how would you put this, some sort of an ethereal envelope. Appearing, and then yes, the numinous figures, the numen. It's like most of the rock art human figures, they don't stand on their feet
00:21:34
Speaker
As such, I mean, visibility, they seem to have avian feet. The example of avian feet, the count of avian feet features bird-like feet.
00:21:47
Speaker
features in the kosher rock art, in the... And they're floating. They're not stable. They're in some sort of a... They're smack dab looking at you, almost peering face forward and almost causing you to be riveted and directing your attention at them.
00:22:10
Speaker
Yes, absolutely. True. That's the way they behave. And this is very common. I've seen it in the great mural rock art of Baja. I've seen it in Koso. And we, of course, see this throughout the world, don't we?
00:22:24
Speaker
We see this throughout the world. We see a whole layer of Fibonacci circles and concentric circles all across the continents and the prehistory of migrations. And another very far-fetched theory of mine, which it's really like a baby theory for me, but I believe that the notion of the numinous
00:22:53
Speaker
anthropomorph which is fundamental to the birth of religions, to the understanding of how religions evolved in human culture.
00:23:03
Speaker
the sense of death, fear, mystery, a spiritual revelation associated with these images, the human stick figures. This somehow explains how human cultures have developed such complex narratives of religions and
00:23:25
Speaker
in the more written literate phases of the cultural evolution. But speaking of these numinous figures, these figures with raised arms jumping at us or even blessing, these figures do not evoke sexual emotions. No, they don't.
00:23:49
Speaker
Hardly, hardly. I mean, there are references to copulation, to birthing, but somehow these anthropomorphs appear to us to be childlike characters. And I think the Fibonacci, there is a way of looking at the Fibonacci just as there is a way of the Fibonacci looking at us. What I mean is
00:24:20
Speaker
The Fibonacci creates an effect of dizziness. It creates an effect of trance, if you would call it. A very mild and embedded response, trance response. But the Fibonacci is a forerunner of the numinous anthropomorph because
00:24:44
Speaker
The Fibonacci, if you look at the Fibonacci as a circular image which stems or comes out of the center towards like a cone, if you consider it as a moving cone from a center outwards, expanding and extending outwards in an aspiring way, it evokes motion, emotion, emotive,
00:25:14
Speaker
responses or reflexes, and it's just as if it drops down towards us. I think back to that image that we have in our book that I've used often in a number of my publications, and it has, I think, what you're talking about, a Fibonacci spiral, and it depicts the post-mortem animal ceremony where they're revering the skull of the animal.
00:25:42
Speaker
And it shows how the spirit, I believe the spirit of the animal would go down to the underworld and then in turn return to the hunter.
00:25:54
Speaker
and be transmogrified. That's how I've always seen it. I don't know if that's how you see that image or not. Of course, that's how we have seen it. Isn't that how we have discussed, not the Fibonacci per se, but the anthropomorph generally? Now, there's sort of a traditional way there showing the anthropomorphs, and yet the animals are shown differently.
00:26:23
Speaker
Instead of a face-forward, full-frontal, static, numinous figure, often they're shown in a side view and sometimes with great emotion and vitality and movement. Am I correct? I agree with you on that. And animals would comprise the other great chapter of the archaeology of emotions.
00:26:52
Speaker
How do these animals, different animals, from deer to sheep to bigger game animals or smaller game animals and all sorts of animals which were hunted, animals of sustenance, human sustenance, these animals are
00:27:14
Speaker
They always seem to be under a kind of power, an external, extramural terror or power, and that these animals are dying, they're giving up, that they are victims. I wouldn't call them victims, but that they are objects of sacrifice. Yes. And the power that belongs really to the hunter.
00:27:43
Speaker
which is the power of debt. This feeling of debt, again, the feeling of that primal fear, that feeling of being or standing on a frontier of life and non-existence or debt or whatever, that fear, that power is transmitted to the posture of the animal in a way which to me is unbelievable. I mean, the simplicity
00:28:11
Speaker
and the raw power with which such depictions appear in the oldest strata of human art.
00:28:21
Speaker
this is unbelievable and even those great horses, you know, those great traditions of painting in the Western tradition or in the animals in other cultural expressions. I mean, they tend to lack that
00:28:45
Speaker
that unmediated simplicity of the rock art shamans and the manner in which they created the effects of the animal as being an object of sacrifice and nourishment and vitality and abundance.
00:29:06
Speaker
Yes. And I think we're on to something very central, because you're talking about the cosmology, the religious metaphor, the heart and soul of what the native peoples believe. And if you look closely at rock art again and again, and you did hit the nail on the head, the nexus of death and life is portrayed in a transparent, authentic way
00:29:35
Speaker
that you see before your very eyes. How's that? This is the most riveting, the gaze which has endowed rock art. And we will continue to be fascinated by its power throughout the ages. Very briefly, I would just like to mention here that
00:30:00
Speaker
What makes me wonder is that there are not much evidences of practice, of rock art practice. I mean, could you eliminate me on that front, Alan? We see examples of rock art. We are fascinated by rock art. But where did these shamans practice their art?
00:30:25
Speaker
Did they just make these images out of no prior training, artistic training? I know of nothing that I've read in my 50 years of study that mentions anything about how these shamans or ritual adepts learned to do their rock art. I have nothing.
00:30:54
Speaker
I mean, not a word has have I heard of any sort of practice or training or anything along those lines, which is interesting, actually. Let's let's call it a break here and catch on the flip flop, gang, and we'll wind it up for segment three. Welcome back, gang. This is Dr. Alan Garfinkel with your Rockard podcast. Turthamukha Habadai from Mexico talking about the archaeology of emotion.
00:31:24
Speaker
and the nature of indigenous religions.
Narratives and Emotional Communication
00:31:27
Speaker
So Tirtha, how does this translate into the religious canopy? How do we deconstruct or get something regarding the cosmology and the structure of the religious metaphors from our rock art? Yes, the question that we just raised in our discussions on the archaeology of emotions,
00:31:54
Speaker
And I do not think really that other scholars have dealt exclusively with the theme of archaeology of emotions in the way we have done in our book on the U2S second religions, the iconicity of emotions, the iconicity of the religions,
00:32:17
Speaker
of the U2S Tekken peoples of the entire Great Basin and the greatest American Southwest and Mesoamerica.
00:32:27
Speaker
and the great religions which evolved over time, the religion of the snake, as we have called it in the book. And I think there are more unanswered questions here, rather than questions to which we have definitive answers. I think one of the themes, an overarching theme, and something that's critically important, I think, is the nature of an indexical animal
00:32:57
Speaker
and the animal that communicates emotions. I mean, if you look at- The animal master narrative that you have- Yes, yes. You have been writing about the animal master theme for a long time, Alan. How do you explain the narrative? I mean, how do you think there's a narrative being constructed out there? So this animal master narrative is something that's
00:33:26
Speaker
that's available and characteristic of cultures throughout the world. And there's something within the cognitive software of the human mind that appears to consistently identify a super mundane being
00:33:45
Speaker
that is going to be responsible for the transmogrification of animals. There is some sort of an emotional tether for killing beasts and some need to allay or sympathize or deal with the emotional turmoil one is under when one is killing animals. That is absolutely necessary to survive
00:34:12
Speaker
And this may have been a seed for some of this cosmological nexus. Am I at all correct? This is precisely what the religions are dealing with, you know, a provider. A spiritual provider. Yes.
00:34:32
Speaker
And it's an intuition of someone of a provider who transcends human abilities, supernatural, the notion of a supernatural provider, the notion of an omnipotent God, a provider God, a sustainer, a giver, the confidence that the presence of such a provider entity evokes in the
00:35:00
Speaker
participant and the member of that collective. The faith that it generates and a state of feelings or emotions which are conducive to better performance.
00:35:19
Speaker
mental health, to try to deal with the peculiarities of life, the uncertainties and the tremendous challenges that one faces just to conduct their affairs to this day and in the past. There's a tremendous connection, I think, between
00:35:42
Speaker
looking at those visual prayers emblazoned on the rocks and thinking about the same issues that we face today just has to do with longevity, sustainability, life, death. They're all there, aren't they? Yes, this is a religion. We don't know if we have transitioned beyond religions.
00:36:08
Speaker
but the doctrinal elements of religions, but religion may be a system integrated in our very cognitive nature itself and does not lie beyond it in some ethereal, speculative space of our discourse.
00:36:33
Speaker
There's something within our physiology, our neural structure that consistently yearns for some sort of a super mundane being to reassure us, to give us confidence, to give us the ability to face adversity and also the disconnects that we have in terms of attempting to live, attempting to procreate and
00:37:01
Speaker
and have a family and to abide on the planet. Yes, disease, natural disasters, all those great fears, the primal fears that nature evokes in us. To this very day. Yes.
00:37:22
Speaker
Yeah, to this very day. Just the natural engineering of it all is amazing. It just overwhelms. I've thought about this a little bit, and I don't know if this comes out of the blue, but after 9-11, and I think I've mentioned this to you before, one of the things that occurred was
00:37:49
Speaker
this tremendous angst that people had and the need to identify symbolically as a nation. And so they ran out of flags and flags were one means of symbolically identifying a signature or hallmark of the unity and identity of the United States. Now, isn't that
00:38:15
Speaker
somewhat analogous? Of course, of course. I mean, this is exactly how religions were preparing us for the last two millennia, for the last several centuries. What's interesting is the simple elemental, primeval, primordial nature of rock art enables us to appreciate how this
00:38:46
Speaker
humans are also competitive, combative, humans are willing to destroy each other and how can we sustain ourselves in a nature which is so unforgiving.
00:39:05
Speaker
Right. Right. Absolutely. And this is not just between this is not just interspecies. No, but this is intraspecies and and
00:39:19
Speaker
When we look at the more detailed history of the classic Aztecs, for example, if we take it as a case study, we could take any period of history from any region of the world for that matter. But in the Aztecs, in the Aztec belief of the supernatural, their preparations for war, this vision that death
00:39:48
Speaker
and life are intertwined in a continuum and that these deities are somehow enabling us, empowering us to contemplate on this paradox. And the natural, emotional,
00:40:08
Speaker
propensity or tendency has to be acknowledged at the root of any kind of theorizing about human societies and beliefs, I guess. Don't you think, Alan? And it looks like, in some ways, this particular perspective has not been really
00:40:34
Speaker
emphasized or it has not been part and parcel of our discussion of rock art, has it? No, not really. There is still so much to explore in the rock arts. Rock art has to be studied in an interdisciplinary way. It's not just a field for archaeologists who are refining on the physical existence of rock art clusters.
00:41:02
Speaker
and exploring the relations of rock art to time layers, but also the very narratives of rock art, like the animal master narrative, for example. How far can we probe into the possibility of this engaging and looking at narratives from the visual clues in rock art?
00:41:30
Speaker
How does that translate into the images? How do we read the images? How do you interpret those images? The animals, the availability of horses in America, the dates of the extension of Arteodactyls, the availability of sheep, the scarcity,
Transformative Power of Rock Art in Cultures
00:41:54
Speaker
transitions in climate, climate changes, and the changes in the biome. You know, it's interesting, Turtha, that I thought of, we're talking about emotions and rock art. When I've looked at the very robust record of the Yahuera figure for the Kauai'asu, Southern Paiutes, it's always about someone, a native person,
00:42:21
Speaker
troubled emotionally who somehow searches out the animal master and visits that animal master and comes away with a song or some sort of a medicine that transforms their life and allows them to continue in the face of adversity. Isn't that interesting? That is how humans have lived for
00:42:50
Speaker
hundreds and thousands, millions of years. We cannot even scratch the surface of that. So we're creatures of the sacred narrative, the oral tradition. Yes. We're creatures also who want to perceive and see and taste and feel the super mundane, the supernatural, the transcendence and connection to a higher
Ancient and Contemporary Religious Emotions
00:43:18
Speaker
power. And this is how it's been done.
00:43:21
Speaker
Even though we can compare the contemporary way we do this compared to hundreds and thousands of years ago, there are similarities in that particular vein, are there not? These similarities, Alan, as you mentioned them, and this would be a nice way of looking at the continuity, especially from a visual perspective. The rock arts have taught us
00:43:47
Speaker
to appreciate or rather it has unknowingly perhaps inspired humans to create the great arts of the Byzantine churches. Those compelling eyes of the Virgin Mother. The same naturalistic technique
00:44:12
Speaker
this primordial technique of negotiating with death and a sustainer, a possible hypothetical sustainer is evident in the fear on the eyes of the masks of all the great traditions, culturalizations. And I think if we jump, if we try to draw a line linking these
00:44:43
Speaker
discreetly available expressions on the human timeline. The Kwak Kirtul mask, the great power of those animal human masks, those eyes of the Kwak Kirtul,
00:45:00
Speaker
the fisherman masks, the, you know, the bird eyes. Yes. Yeah. It has an emotional tenor. It's something that takes us through fear, through connection, through transformation, through the ethereal plane. And I think with that, we'll close and perhaps we'll connect again.
00:45:22
Speaker
in a couple of weeks to continue this discussion. Thank you, all you listeners out there in archaeology podcast land. See you soon. See you in the flip flop. Thank you, Adam.
00:45:43
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Rock Art Podcast with Dr. Alan Garfinkel and Chris Webster. Find show notes and contact information at www.arcpodnet.com forward slash rock art. Thanks for listening and thanks for sharing this podcast with your family and friends.
00:46:15
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.