The primitive religious ideas
Primitive art show about the development of human consciousness, his life in the distant future. They talk about the beliefs of primitive man. For fantastic views out of which arose the most ancient religious beliefs of Stone Age, hunters should include the beginnings of worship of the forces of nature, and especially the cult animal.
The origin of the cult of coarse animal and hunting was due to witchcraft hunting value, as the main source of livelihood of the ancient people of this period, that the real role that belonged to the beast in their daily lives. Animals from the beginning occupied an important place in the mind of primitive man and of primitive religion.
Transferring the world animal relationship, characteristic of primitive tribal communities are inextricably linked to each other by marriage alliances and exogamous rules, primitive thought and the animal world as if in a second, and it is equal half of their own community. It developed totemic, t. E. The idea that all members of this genus are descended from a certain animal, plant or other “totem” and are associated with this type of indissoluble bond of animals. The very word totem, which became part of science borrowed from the language of one of the North American Indian tribes – Algonquin, in which it means “to his family.” Animals and humans, according to the totemic representations had common ancestors. Beasts, if they wanted, could take off his skin and become men. By providing the people of their own accord their meat, they died. However, if people save their bones, and performed the necessary rites, animals come back to life, “providing” so plenty of food, well-being of the primitive community.
The first faint beginnings of the primitive beast cult can be found, according to the findings in Teshik-Tash and in the Alpine caves, perhaps as early as the end of the Mousterian period. Its development clearly demonstrate the monuments of the Upper Paleolithic cave art, whose contents are almost exclusively images of animals: mammoths, rhinoceroses, bulls, horses, deer, predators, like the cave lion and bear. In the first place, naturally, are those animals, hunting on which was the main source of food: ungulates.
To understand the meaning of these cave paintings are important, and the conditions in which they are located. By itself, the preservation of cave paintings is determined hygroscopic stable regime in the caves, and isolated from the influence of temperature fluctuations occurring on the ground. Drawings are usually located at a considerable distance from the entrance, for example, in Nio (France) – at a distance of 800 m Permanent human life at such a distance from the entrance to the cave, in the depths, where reigned eternal darkness and dampness, of course, it was impossible.. To get to the most remarkable repository of cave art, and now sometimes have to wade in the dark depths of the cave through narrow pits and fissures, often crawling, even swim through blocking the further way of underground rivers and lakes.
Especially expressive discoveries in the depths of the cave of Montespan (France) stucco figures of animals, including bears, around, which survived on clay floor covered with stalagmite crust prints of bare human feet. The head of a bear image was missing, in its place was a deep hole, and between the paws of the bear’s skull was lying, should be attached to the first clay figures by means of a wooden rod inserted into the hole. Strikingly similar picture opened, and the researchers first infiltrated into the depth of the cave Bale d’0dyuber (France) in 1912. It turned out to be made of two clay figures of bison and around them just survived prints of bare feet – places the entire foot, and sometimes alone heels. These were to be the traces of primitive hunters who performed some kind of ritual dance around a buffalo figures with a view to enchant and bewitch the living, true buffalo, making them easy prey for hunting.
What thoughts and feelings are guided by primitive sculptors and painters of the Stone Age, at least clearly show their drawings. It depicts a bison sinking them darts or harpoons, animals, covered with wounds, dying predators, whose wide-open mouth of bloodshed flow. On the figurines are seen schematic drawings of mammoths, which may represent the trapping, which served, as some researchers believe, to catch these giants of the ice time. In the cave of Lascaux are shown figurines of animals, which stick out on 7 and 12 darts. Next to the animals painted conventional image javelin thrower, hunting fences and nets.
On the specific appointment of cave drawings and shows, the overlap of some characteristic patterns on the other, their large number, indicating that the images of animals were made, apparently, not forever, but only for one time, for a particular individual ceremony. More brighter than seen in the small smooth tiles, which overlap each other figures often form a continuous network of intersecting lines and totally confused. These shingles must be each time anew covered in red paint on a figure and scratched. Thus, these drawings were made only for one specific moment, “live” only once.
With hunting magical rites largely linked were believed to be female figurines and Upper Paleolithic. Their value is determined in accordance with these views, views of ancient hunters, who believed in a kind of “division of labor” between the men, killing animals, and women who, through their witchcraft had supposedly “attract” animal under the blows of copies hunters. This assumption is well grounded ethnographic analogies.