If you enjoy this content, if you find it meaningful to you, we encourage you to become a paid member for $3/mo! With a paid subscription, you get access to all of my FIVE published and award-winning books (digital and audiobook versions) and so, so much more! It may be a cup of coffee for you, but it is the nourishment that keeps up alive and makes conversations like these possible, and we are so very thankful!
Listen on Apple or Spotify (but come back here to converse about it all…)
Trigger warning—this conversation has the potential to make you mad. It also has the potential to wake you up. It carries great medicine, if you let it. If you are uninterested in such an affair, move on. If you are open and your heart is willing to see the many-selves dancing about, take a gander.
…
Taylor Keen returns for the fifth installment of the God is Red series to explore indigenous mythology, storytelling, and our cosmic origins carried in ancient rock art and cave paintings.
This is Part B of a two part sub-series :D
Catch up on the God Is Red series!
Episode 1: Stewardship or Sovereignty?
Episode 2: Sacred Indigenous Agriculture
Episode 3: Why The Mother Will Live On
Episode 4: Sacred Indigenous Mythology
Transcript
D. Firth Griffith: 1:56
The interesting thing about some of my work over in France, in the Dodorov Valley and Lascaux and other caves, there's this individual, he wrote a book no Brotage Lat, lascaux and other caves. There's this individual he wrote a book no Brotage, a Lot Lascaux. What is it? Les gestes, le pays et les temps. So that's it's translated very poorly, but Lascaux, space, movement and time, I think. And he makes a really interesting argument which I couldn't help but agree with when I was in the cave and got to spend some time there working with a biogeomedical engineering graduate school in Nantes, in Nantes, france. But he writes that the artwork in Lascaux to some major degree is divided in two different categories. You had a calendar which I can speak to, and then you had the sacred ceremonial ritual interesting space.
D. Firth Griffith: 2:46
The calendar is of interest, I think, in one side of this conversation. I won't really dwell there with much time, but to give you a couple of examples, like there's Orak bulls. They're donning a thick head of hair which at that time, during the Aachen retreat in the Paragordian or Gravettian period of geological history, if you will, really represented summer. And the horses they were painted as red and brown, with tails that were very long and reaching the floor. That was representative of autumn and, I'm sorry, spring. And then you had stags or red or roe deer that are painted, uh, that are still carrying the red, so the red coat of summer, uh, but they still had their antlers, indicative of the early autumn, I'm sorry, the late autumn, or the winter period. And they had bison that were painted, uh, that were very thin and gaunt, so, like bison are one of the few species, as you know, that during, during the winter period, actually need to lose a lot of their body weight, and so that represented winter. And so you had this calendar on one side, but just thinking about population Y, like I said earlier, and the Principia Theologica that we were talking about even earlier than that, there's this bison bird man of Lascaux that I've written about.
D. Firth Griffith: 4:01
I was hoping you were going to get here. Oh, I really I'm pushing myself. We have to get here. I'm not letting this go without it, and I want to be very clear. I am not here saying that the ancient Paragordian people or Gravedian people that painted in Lascaux 21 to 35, 36,000 years ago, are the Lakota or plain peoples? I'm not making that claim. However, the imagery, the symbols and the location of the imagery and the symbols within the cave system speaks to an ancient source. And another conversation we can have is the idea of, like, the evolution of a single humanity and the evolution of culture underneath a singular creator right. So we all look to the stars. Do we look to the stars because we all come there or is that where our connection comes from? Like there's so much conversation that could happen there. So you know, I'm not saying the Lakota are the one that painted the Lascaux caves, but the bison bird man is so interesting.
D. Firth Griffith: 4:59
So deep into the cave system is a vertical shaft. To my knowledge, it's 25 feet tall. This vertical shaft and and and, dangling halfway down the shaft is is this very small image? Now I should make the claim that the cave, at this point, is completely walkable. You enter the cave, it's walkable, there's the you know panel of the imprint, and then this, this huge aura cathedral I forget they have a name for it as well and you walk in and there's all these things above your heads and you keep walking and all of a sudden the cave gets very small, it gets very different. It's not as cathedral-esque, it's more like a worm tunnel at this point. And then there's a 25 foot vertical shaft, just a natural water created shaft, and at the bottom of that shaft, like the underworld. So this shaft is connecting both this world and then you have the underworld below it.
D. Firth Griffith: 5:50
But this bison is standing over this bird-headed man. Okay, that looks back to its stomach. The bison is looking and turning back to its stomach, which is hanging out of its body, indicating death. A spear has been thrust through the bison's spine it could also be its anus, there's some debate there and emerges as its penis, its sexual organ, below. So the spear, its death, is its sexual organ. Its stomach, ripped open by the spear, spills down, you know, its hind legs. It's clearly indicating death.
D. Firth Griffith: 6:12
A second time, the bird man is wrapped in a shamanic trance, but he's also dead or symbolizing death, and a lone bird is perched just below the scene on a staff and looks away from the story. The most interesting part, although the most uncomfortable for many people, is that the bird-headed man who's lying there in the shamanic trance underneath the dead bison that's also very alive to the scene but dead in the general idea of the thing, also has an erect penis. So you have the bison and his co-creation, the two erect sexual organs. You have the death of both, a bird looking on on the pole, and I would imagine you know 100 times more of the sundance ceremony than I do. But the symbolism, the shared symbology of these two things to me are very, very interesting. That this is the transitionary path between this world and the other world.
Taylor Keen: 7:05
Yes, I mean, that's a very famous image. I'm just trying to. There is something very similar in picture cave, but I'm not finding it directly, but I was looking at it last week. But there's definitely sort of a shaman figure in picture cave with an erect penis and it has to be somehow tied, if not just symbolically. I always laugh at the puritanical nature of America because it affects me as well. Why can't we talk about penises and vaginas? It's where we all come from. We all have one. Yeah, back to the bird man of Flasco.
Taylor Keen: 7:53
To me those images have to be examined in the vicinity of one another, but they don't have to occupy the same space or story. The bird on a pole is an axis mundi and we have similar references in Native America, in the ancient, ancient rock art. You said axis mundi, yeah, just the center of the universe right, the center pole, right and um. That's what you found in a lot of the mississippian cultures, for example that's interesting at the grand mound at cahokia. That's interesting.
Taylor Keen: 8:31
The Grand Mound at Cahokia had a massive cypress tree. When the anthropologists were studying it they brought in an expert who could look at the wood fragment remains, which was cypress in this case, meaning cypress trees floated westward from somewhere down in the south, because the Mississippian complex went all the way down to Florida. And when they were experimenting with understanding how tall they thought that this cypress tree was, the expert that they brought in used a telephone pole as sort of a proxy to begin to magnify the dimensions of it. And during the summer months the telephone pole structure was struck by lightning so many times that they had to take it down for their own safety and that, you know, just like with caves, you know a lot of the plains tribes have used the term where the lightning strikes, pointing towards a sacred place but, the, the center pole, the bird on the top of the pole, at least from an indigenous perspective, we have the tripartite universe of the upper realm, the middle realm and the lower realm.
Taylor Keen: 10:03
Cahokia is built in the floodplain of the Mississippi and other rivers feeding into it, and so that center pole, if being struck by lightning, was touched by the upper realm. Um exists in the middle realm and atop of the lower watery realm. So there seems to be and I'm looking at the, at the bison from lasco and it's kind of hard to see, but there's multiple types of imagery there it seems to be that there is a womb-like structure as well and some sort of spear-looking thing.
D. Firth Griffith: 10:45
Yeah, yeah. A lot of the times that's been interpreted as really a dual symbology, which is the spear indicating its death, death, but also the spear coming out right where the penis should and standing erect with it. Um, and then it's either a womb or and so that's pretty interesting if you go that direction or it's its bowels, the bowels spilling out very similar symbology and picture, cave and other rock art. The idea of cross fertility, I think, is something that really stands out to me that's the point.
D. Firth Griffith: 11:17
Yes, fertility is the most powerful thing we have is humanity is to goes back to the, uh, you know, during the aachen retreat, in this, you know, perigordian period. So you, you know, when lascaux was being painted, we suppose that the climate was ameliorating, so the climate was getting warmer. It was also a time of great change. So the mastodons and the mammoths and everything else right, these are disappearing. The aurochs, the bison, the diminutive mammals, the smaller mammals are thriving, and so it was a very different period where you had I mean, to some degree you had a keystone species change based upon the last maybe 100, 125,000 years of human to ecology relationship and kinship, of the last glacial maximum, or leading up to the times leading up to the last glacial maximum. And now we're on the other edge, we're falling down.
D. Firth Griffith: 12:11
So obviously, the species are changing the forest, you know the forests are changing the boreal forest and moving north, the deciduous forest, the oak forests, which, uh, obviously, are sacred and occupy the consciousness and mythology of many of the cultures that occupy this land today, western europe and uh, and so you see this, this huge keystone shift and this idea of cross fertility, occupying the interchange between the underworld and this world, or the middle world, coming right after this calendar of rutting, right. So when were the bison fertile? When were the horse fertile? When were the aurochs fertile? Uh, when were the stag at in their rutting state? All of the images that surround this are calendars of fertility. And then, when you look at this and you see cross-fertility and that cross-fertility is the sacred transitionary space between this world and the other world. It's near Gobekli Tepe, but have you ever looked into the information surrounding Katal Hoyuk, another city, a little bit?
Taylor Keen: 13:14
And Andrew Collins writes extensively on all this stuff and I recognize the term. I think it was his book on Karahan Tepe.
D. Firth Griffith: 13:23
Yeah, it's very close. Qatal Hoyak is interesting because I think it was the 1990s. A gentleman named James Mellar did a lot of work there that I studied. And there's this hall. It's called the Hall of the Shrines.
D. Firth Griffith: 13:34
Catalhoyak was settled 9,500 years ago. The Natufian culture is the first permutation of the Natufian culture of Palestinian hunter-gatherers to some degree to actually create a place of habitation, a static place of habitation from the archaeological record, whatever that might mean, and we know that has faults. But around that general time is what we see in this hall of the shrine a lot of the times when you find non-cave painting paintings, to some degree the paintings are graffiti. When an anthropologist finds, I should say, paintings that are not in caves, paintings that are on city walls, ancient city walls adorning certain buildings, studying both uranium, thorium dating or the carbon dating or whatever you're going to be looking at, um the age of the paint, the ochre, the earth pigment, whatever it was made from, it's always much older, I'm sorry, much newer than the building. Ie it's graffiti. It's not the original purpose of the construction, it's all holy. It's interesting because the hall of the shrine, so this, this building was created about 7 7500 bc and there's this huge three-sided, uh, shrine, I mean it's just massive hall, but the date of the building is equal to the date of the graffiti upon it. So this entire room, to some degree, was created. It was created for the artwork that sat upon it. So this is a very serious thing, for Natufian culture erected a building to just put art on that building.
D. Firth Griffith: 14:56
So this art is very important. There's two characters that occupy it. You have hunters and you have gatherers occupying the same mural. There's hunters with stag and there's, you know, bipedal humans that we depict as hunters, I should say, that are red, they're painting in a red ochre paint, and then there's agriculturalists who they literally are farming. We have this early farming symbology and the figures are painted black.
D. Firth Griffith: 15:22
The mix between agriculture and hunter, gathering is also, I think, this mix between this cross fertility element we see in cultures exponentially much older right. So a lot of indigenous cultures, as you know, here in the Western Hemisphere, both North, central and South, right, they were both hunters in certain periods and they would also, you know, have agriculture in certain period. The ancient Tufian cultures, right, they celebrated the hunters, they celebrated the agriculturalists. They were both right. So they had cities to some degree, but they also didn't leave hunting at the door, and so that takes a very particular way of living that I think moderate hunters, especially Western ranchers, can figure out. Figure out how do we coexist with wolves but still have domesticated species, be them plants or be them animals? I think there even is a book here one day for somebody to write not me, somebody else this idea of cross-fertility being that intermediary between the hunter and the husbandman or the hunter and the agriculturalist.
Taylor Keen: 16:27
Speaking of Andrew Collins and some of the ancient ancient sites in Turkey. A lot of the stories there that Andrew Collins has resurrected all have to do with the central theme that you see across all the Mississippian cultures, which is the journey of the souls into the Milky way. And getting back to our conversation about a principia theologia, the center pole, the bird on top of a pole, the shaman with an erect penis, trance-like state, maybe plant medicines, important animals all of these symbols seem to be the foundation of storytelling and, um, I'm very curious about how we can all have such powerful symbology that's so similar all across the world. You have the journey of the souls going into the ancient Egyptians. It was the celestial river how the souls traveled to the realm of Osiris, the god of the afterlife. We have it in ancient Turkey 11,000, 12,000 years ago. We have it still practiced amongst the plains peoples today.
Taylor Keen: 17:51
And we talked earlier about the great serpent. The great serpent has many forms and it also has a celestial form and that is the becomes the Milky Way itself. And on, the great serpent is how the souls return to our home in the seven sisters constellation the Greeks call Pleiades, and then this is something that really fascinates me and I I've become obsessed with trying to understand. But how do we have such similar symbols across the world? Trying to understand that can only aid our mutual humanity. I wanted to share with you the image that I was looking for. This is in Blood Run, where the Omaha were around 1500, and it's been digitally enhanced, but you see the bison, the serpentine penis in the womb, there's thunderbirds and water spirits, and this symbol, I believe, is the symbol of Morningstar, whose celestial form was Venus. So we have all these similar I mean, that could almost be the same Birdman Bison from Lascaux.
D. Firth Griffith: 19:15
The womb and erect penis together makes me think that what's happening in lasco is is quite different. Seen from this lens. It's always been taken as a spill spilled entrails. I hate to be so iconoclastic, uh, to a bunch of much more smarter people than I am, but these two wombs look identical to me. I feel like joe rogan. I don't know if that's good or bad. I mean, they do the wombs look identical, do you know how old this is?
Taylor Keen: 19:47
That's a good question. I don't know if the tablets can be radiocarbon dated or not, because they were etchings and I'm not sure.
D. Firth Griffith: 20:00
We got to get our friend Scott scott walter do an episode on it. I feel like all he does is I can talk him into that.
Taylor Keen: 20:08
We've. We've been to the site together. He was, uh, very interested in um, I'll show it's a cupule stone. We passed by it once already. That's what he was interested in. Scott thinks it's a star map.
Taylor Keen: 20:34
I don't know, one of the things that strikes. To use the language of Charles Mann from 1491, had indigenous peoples not been so susceptible to the ravages of smallpox, there might have been a very different world here in the Americas today. But that's not what happened and many of the Europeans who came here did not see the indigenous people as kin and they were nearly successful in the eco side of bison and wolves and elk, in many places beavers. But somehow today you and I are still talking about the ancient stories of our ancestors and that gives me hope that if you and I can share these stories and enjoy them with amazement and wonder why can't everyone else? And conversations like this, it ignites something in all humans to become kin again.
Taylor Keen: 21:42
I've taken the notions of what I wrote about living and thinking red from my first book and now describing, hopefully, an evolution of that to what I call post-colonial indigeneity, and it begins and ends with decolonizing one's thought and actions. I want to move past the colonial settler paradigm. We've talked about this a little bit, but because it it it creates divisions of us and them and that's never, never the right answer. But to get past that and to return back to mythology and to study what we can and to reawake and ignite in our blood memory the depth and complexity of these stories and to try to retell old stories that have been forgotten because of colonialism and to tell them with passion and our own personal truth. I think that's one of the reasons Creator and Spirit put you and I on this world, and I hope our or at least I speak of my own, my own blunt efforts can be an inspiration to those who have yet to come.
D. Firth Griffith: 23:09
I think it's natural to look at our own mythology as it's given to us, and mourn and grieve for its state.
D. Firth Griffith: 23:16
Not only is it written in the colonizer's tongue, as you very well know, in your own way, with your own stories, it's been bastardized and changed and malformed in a way that we can't heal from, doesn't live anymore in the real world, and so I believe we have to access the other world in order to reacquaint ourselves with it, which is a bigger conversation, I realize.
D. Firth Griffith: 23:37
But something that pertains to your as an eyes relationship, which I find to be very true, is, the more I meet your stories, I also then meet myself, and I don't think people really understand that when we talk about, you know, reawakening the indigenous worldview, or traditional ecological wisdom, or indigenous place-based knowledge and all of these terms that people are familiar with because they're used, obviously their truth is manifold. To some degree it's the manifold of life, but it is definitely manifold as well. But part of that truth is if we do have this Principia Theologia, if we do have this singular story that lives in my blood memory as it lives in your blood memory, but if I am going to, as a modern wandering Irishman, for instance, meet my stories in their truth. I think we also can learn a lot about what we've lost too. So I think what the indigenous among us still have the ability to do is not just teach us how to be agriculturally solvent, holy or sacred, but also from the storytelling perspective as well. I think that's a power that's never really discussed.
Taylor Keen: 24:45
May the old stories always be retold.
D. Firth Griffith: 24:49
That's right. That's right. Well, I appreciate you telling what else, uh, is there anything that we you wanted to talk about in this that we didn't get to jump into?
Taylor Keen: 24:58
I don't think so. I'm sure as soon as we get finished and I put some lunch in my belly, I'll start thinking of things. But uh, um, I don't think we should stop here. I think we should think on it a little bit and let it stew some and go on. See if we want to go on, I'm in, All right.
I adore these conversations you are doing with Taylor Keen.
I wonder if you could provide a reading list (perhaps you have and I have missed it?) from all of the episodes, as many great books have been mentioned!
I would be very happy for Unshod to become God is Red, and it's yourself and Taylor discussing great topics, and also bringing in excellent additional guests...
I appreciate your conversations. Thank you for sharing. I find great value in contemplating the things both fantastic authors share. I am learning so much.