What is a Rune

by Collin Cleary

  Since the depiction of animals in the cave paintings is executed with such skill and artistry, we are compelled to ask why these artists depicted the human form so “crudely.” This is a mystery of great significance. Couldn’t they see their own bodies as clearly as they could those of deer and bison? Couldn’t they have admired and depicted their own sinewy musculature as finely as they depicted that of, say, the lion?

  But such questions miss the point. Remember: art depicts essences. And there is no more “essential” art than that of the cave. The essence of man is to mirror nature. What the stick-figures seem to be saying is, “We view ourselves essentially as a framework on which the Being of other things can be hung.” And, of course, this is what we find happening in the therianthropes, like the sorcerer of Trois Frères: the Being of the animals hung upon the stick-figure framework that is man.

  Take away the essences that man absorbs, and he is nous, an empty vessel, nothing. A few simple lines are enough to indicate the sketchiness of man’s essence. This was obviously not how our ancestors literally saw themselves. It was what they felt themselves to be. (And I am not saying that our ancestors consciously conceived of themselves in this way, or that they had theories about human nature—though I am inclined to think that they were probably much more thoughtful than they are usually given credit for.)

  All the aforementioned figures are clearly male, by the way. The alleged stick-figure “shaman” of Lascaux seems to have an erection; and the sorcerer of Trois Fréres has a penis (opinions differ as to whether it is erect). Perhaps someone will correct me if I have missed something, but I can’t think of an example of a complete female figure from any Upper Paleolithic European cave painting or sketch.126 As everyone knows, however, numerous carvings of female figures from this period have been discovered. Most are portable art. However, one—the so-called Venus of Laussel (perhaps the most interesting of all)—was carved into a rock wall.

  All these female figures lack faces,127 and the anatomical features suggesting fertility have been grossly exaggerated. It has been claimed by some researchers that these figures might be realistic, and could depict steatopygia. A glance at the so-called Venus of Hohle Fels (dated to 35,000–40,000 years ago—making it the oldest undisputed example of representational art), or the Venus of Lespugue (26,000–24,000 years ago) is enough to refute the idea that realism was the aim here. (And the theory that the figures depict steatopygia may be yet another instance of trying to understand early Europeans on analogy with later, radically different humans from other parts of the world—in this case Africa.)

  As Bataille writes, these appear to be “shameless caricatures of the human [female] form.” But in fact they are yet another illustration of how the art of the Upper Paleolithic aims at the expression of essence—a clearer illustration than the male figures, in fact. These female images express what male artists saw as the essence of womanhood.128 For them, this was giving birth to and nurturing the species. The male essence, by contrast, was giving birth to essence—and this was a purely “spiritual” act, not a physical one. Hence, the female figures are physical through and through. The male figures are stick men—their physicality is de-emphasized—precisely because what preoccupied the (male) cave artists was their ability to open to Being, and to bring it to a stand in their art. Alternatively, the male figures are bedecked with animal essences—the therianthropes. In either case, as I have discussed, it is the male’s ability to identify with the Being of things that is depicted.

  The most famous of the female figurines, the Venus of Willendorf (28000–25000 B.C.E.), is undeniably grotesque. But some of the others are quite beautiful. This is certainly true of the Venus of Lespugue. The Venus of Dolní Věstonice (29000–25000 B.C.E.) could be taken for a very good example of modern abstract sculpture. But perhaps the most fascinating and thought-provoking of these carvings is the Venus of Laussel, which is about 25,000 years old. It was carved into a rock wall in southwestern France, then hewn out for display at a museum. It is bulbous and “fecund” like the others, but with significant differences. The woman’s left hand is placed on her abdomen. In her right hand she holds what appears to be a bison horn. Her head, with what appears to be long hair, is also turned in the direction of the horn.

  Obviously, the Venus of Laussel is saying something to us, and there have been a great many speculations as to what it might be. There is a very ancient mythic connection between animal horns (usually a bull’s) and the moon. Thirteen lines are etched into the Venus’s horn, suggesting the (approximately) thirteen lunar cycles in a year. And, as a number of scholars have conjectured, by placing her other hand on her abdomen she may be connecting the two. The idea that there is a link between the cycles of the moon and the menstrual cycle is very old. The words “menstruation” and “menses” come from Latin mensis (month), which is related to Greek mene or “moon” (both terms being derived from an Indo-European root meaning “moon”).

  If this interpretation is correct then what we have in the Venus of Laussel is another microcosm-macrocosm correspondence, but purely on the chthonic level: the nature of woman reflects or mirrors the order of nature itself. Unlike man, however, this reflection or mirroring is purely on the level of physical correspondence. Nevertheless, what we may have here is a recognition that the human as such mirrors nature—with men and women doing this in different ways. Man is the nothingness, the nous, through which nature comes to know herself. Woman is nature itself, Mother Nature.

  I know of no examples of carved male figurines from the Upper Paleolithic that are not therianthropes. What we do find, however, is some phallic images—though they are few and far between. A notable example was found at Dolní Věstonice. Once again, matters have been pared down to essentials: the male, as physical being, is bearer of the phallus, fecundator. Of course, in physical terms that is not all that the male is. He is also hunter and warrior—indeed, this was the primary male role in the Upper Paleolithic.

  The curious thing is that these artists (who likely did double duty as hunter-warriors) must have been surrounded by lean, healthy men with well-developed bodies. Yet they chose not to depict them, even in stylized form. What this suggests to me is a curious, and really paradoxical lack of self-awareness on the part of these men. On the one hand, they intuited the metaphysical nature of man in a way that prefigures the deepest philosophical insights of the West. And yet they did not see themselves. They saw the woman, all right, though they exaggerated and stylized her features.

  It would be many thousands of years before the male would discover and wonder at his own physicality, in Greek sculpture. (And then the element of phallic masculinity would be deemphasized almost to the point of absence.) It was the symmetry and musculature of the athletic male body that fascinated the Greeks. But they did not neglect the spirit either, for by this point the beautiful male body was thought to contain a beautiful and perfectible soul, open to Being and to the Ideal.

  7. THE AIM OF THE UNIVERSE

  I have argued that man’s nature is to be the mirror of nature, and that this begins in the European caves. As Aristotle and Pico have taught us, man is, in a way, nothing—and everything. In his very body he recapitulates the natural forms that surround him, in their essential nature (as vegetable and animal). And in his mind the essences of any and all things come to be, detached from the individuals that embody them. This doesn’t just happen to man—he strives to make it happen; he desires it. As Aristotle famously said at the beginning of the Metaphysics, “All men by nature desire to know.” (Or as one recent translator gives it literally, “All human beings by nature stretch themselves out toward knowing.”129)

  It is clear that man occupies a very peculiar place in nature. And it is quite reasonable for us to see nature in the same way that philosophers as different as Aristotle and Schopenhauer conceived it: as a scale or hierarchy of forms, with man at the top. However, this sort of conception is likely to provoke some skepticism. Alan Watts once en
tertained the amusing hypothesis that all animals think that they are human, meaning that every creature, at some level, thinks that it is the be all and end all of existence. (Certainly cats think this.) Perhaps theories like Aristotle’s are just an expression of human vanity.

  But I don’t think so. It is quite reasonable to set man apart from the rest of nature, and, in fact, to see him as the “highest” natural being; the completion or perfection of nature. To understand this, however, one has to see man’s place in the whole. And that means that we must have some kind of “theory” of the whole—of the nature of nature, or existence itself. “Theory” derives from the Greek verb theorein, “to see, or behold.” A theory is therefore a “seeing,” or better “a beholding.” This is precisely what we must attain: some new way in which to behold the entirety of existence.

  I earlier raised the question of whether science can explain the origin of ekstasis, and this is the issue we must now return to. We can explain ekstasis, we can explain why men began to paint and to practice religion and to do philosophy, and we can solve many other mysteries as well (such as the “Cambrian explosion”) if we adopt a new scientific paradigm with greater explanatory power than the materialism we have been saddled with for the better part of four centuries.

  I can only briefly sketch out this new paradigm here. But the essential points are the following:

  1. The universe is a whole, not a heap. It is an interconnected system, a One, in which everything is related to everything else. (This is the basic claim already made by scientists committed to “deep ecology.”)

  2. The whole is tending toward completion, which is achieved when, to speak figuratively, it folds back on itself and gives an accounting, a logos, of itself. The end or telos of the universe is its own self-understanding.

  3. The universe’s self-understanding is achieved through the coming-into-being, within the universe, of a creature who recapitulates in himself all the “lower” forms of nature, and who is driven by the desire to know the whole. Through this creature, who is both a product of the whole and its embodiment, the whole confronts itself, and the telos of the universe is achieved.

  4. This creature is man.

  These ideas are generally attributed to Hegel, who was the first philosopher to clearly and explicitly formulate them. However, as we have seen they have older roots, and Hegel’s theories are heavily indebted to those of his friend F. W. J. Schelling. In truth, these ideas are perennial, and one finds them—or at least a glimmer of them—appearing throughout the history of philosophy and mysticism, often in surprising places. For example, C. G. Jung (no admirer of Hegel) writes in Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious:

  “But why on earth,” you may ask, “should it be necessary for man to achieve, by hook or by crook, a higher level of consciousness?” This is truly the crucial question, and I do not find the answer easy. Instead of a real answer I can only make a confession of faith: I believe that, after thousands and millions of years, someone had to realize that this wonderful world of mountains and oceans, suns and moons, galaxies and nebulae, plants and animals, exists. From a low hill in the plains of East Africa I once watched the vast herds of wild animals grazing in soundless stillness, as they had done from time immemorial, touched only by the breath of the primeval world. I felt then as if I were the first man, the first creature, to know that all this is. The entire world round me was still in its primeval state; it did not know that it was. And then, in that one moment in which I came to know, the world sprang into being; without that moment it would never have been. All Nature seeks this goal and finds it fulfilled in man, but only in the most highly developed and most fully conscious man.130

  Errol E. Harris, a recent exponent of Hegel’s philosophy, has argued that developments in modern science (especially physics) both confirm Hegel’s views, and are only fully intelligible in the light of them. I will very briefly summarize Harris’s views here, which he develops in several volumes.

  Following Hegel, Harris argues for a certain type of teleology at work in the universe, though it is quite different from the type that is almost universally rejected by today’s scientists. The older teleology essentially held that creatures have ends or purposes that are established by a transcendent God, pulling the strings from outside nature. The sillier version of this amounted to saying that God had designed things for human convenience: horses exist to be ridden on, wheat exists so that we can make flour out of it, etc.

  The reaction against this view began in the early modern period, with thinkers setting themselves against “Aristotelianism.” In reality, what they were attacking was a corruption of Aristotle’s teleological views. The Philosopher had never held that a transcendent God “designs” purposes into things. However, he did claim that the behavior of things in nature can be explained by the fact that all are acting for one end: the realization, by each thing, of its nature or form. And what prompts them to do this, ultimately, is that all things are unconsciously imitating God, the universe’s only fully-actualized being.

  Hegel, by contrast, rejects the idea of a transcendent God. He argues that the “God” people have imperfectly approached through myth and theology is actually what he calls “the Absolute,” which he identifies with the universe taken as a totality. However, Hegel does not see the universe as a collection of loosely-related (or unrelated) particulars, but, in effect, as an organism. An organism is a unity, a One, made up of parts, but the parts all serve to advance the ends or interests of the whole. Every part is, in some way, necessary, and every part is related to every other, as we find in the individual organs of the human body. Every part or organ derives its being or identity entirely from its place within the whole, and none may be excised or omitted without some possible damage or diminution of the whole.

  To press the analogy between the universe and the human body a bit further, Harris (interpreting Hegel) argues that teleology operates on two levels. First, each of the organs in the body “pursues” certain ends. The heart acts so as to pump the blood, the liver so as to detoxify it, etc. But in fact each acts for a further, higher end. The pumping of the blood and the detoxifying of it happen so that the organism as a whole can live, and thrive, and pursue its larger ends.

  Now, by analogy, each individual thing (or species of thing) in the universe pursues its own individual ends, but in doing so each thing is also serving the ultimate ends or purposes of the whole.131 (No creature in the universe is aware that it is doing this—just as the liver is unaware of its larger purpose—save the philosopher, or the scientist whose horizons have been expanded by philosophy.) “Teleology” is thus no more and no less than, as Harris puts it, the “determination of the parts by the whole.”132

  There is, however, a point where the analogy between body and universe breaks down, and understanding this will allow us to take a major step forward in the argument. In pursuing its ends, the body cannot make or create a new organ when one happens to be needed. The universe can and does do this. The reason is that unlike the human body, the universe is not a static, completed whole; it is actually in process of completing itself. With this observation, Harris actually goes beyond Hegel (while remaining true to his spirit) because Hegel—and Aristotle, and Spinoza, among others—all viewed the various forms of nature as eternal (i.e., they thought that they had always existed). The only “development” that Hegel himself allows is the development exhibited by human history; all change in nature is, for him, merely the reduplication of the same species over and over again.

  Unlike Hegel, Harris does believe in evolution, and he explains the coming-into-being of new forms over time as part of the process of the universe (or nature) completing itself and moving toward its telos.

  Now, to say that someone believes in evolution is not the same thing as saying they believe in Darwinism. The idea that life has evolved, that forms have come into being progressively over time, goes back at least to Empedocles (5th century B.C.E.). Recall that Darwinism, via
the theory of natural selection, can explain why certain forms have proliferated and others have not—but it cannot ultimately explain the coming into being of novel forms. Harris’s neo-Hegelian theory does offer an explanation of this: new forms come into existence as part of the whole’s self-completion, in its progress towards its ultimate end.

  If there are apparent “leaps” in evolution, sudden changes, or sudden appearances of new forms, as in the “Cambrian explosion,” we should not be surprised. There is a “pull” involved in evolution, which is the self-development of the whole. In accomplishing this end, the universe brings things into being in ways that may seem sudden and mysterious—so long as we fail to understand “the big picture.” In moving toward its goal of self-completion, the universe gives rise to myriad forms, in a process that Schelling likened, quite plausibly, to artistic creation. (To get a feeling for the truth of this idea, I advise the reader to simply flip through any of the several books that collect the remarkable illustrations from the works of the biologist Ernst Haeckel.)

  But what exactly is the telos of the universe? How does it “complete” itself? I have already stated this, of course: the Hegelian position is that the universe is “seeking” awareness of itself. (It is an unconscious seeking, of course, since consciousness—self-consciousness—is the universe’s aim, not its beginning point.) This is certainly a grand conception. But why should we believe it? It has an undeniable power to explain the whole—but many pure myths have such a power as well.

  Hegel’s argument for this theory is laid out in his Logic, which maintains that the world around us is intelligible as an expression of certain objective forms or ideas.133 These ideas form an organic system, however, which is only truly complete if it “comprehends itself,” via an idea that is the idea of idea itself (which he calls the “Absolute Idea”). The “system” that is nature is, for Hegel, an expression or embodiment of this system of ideas. Hence, to be complete in reality (not just in idea) it must issue in a being that is self-comprehending, a living embodiment of Absolute Idea: a being who is a self that knows itself, a physical incarnation of the self-related abstract idea that is idea of itself. Such a being is man, the only being who seeks knowledge of the whole and, through it, knowledge of himself. Man is capable of knowing nature, but man himself is a natural being. Hence, in man’s self-knowledge, nature confronts itself—and completes itself.