McCully, R. S. (Charleston). ‘Sorcerers as masculine protest symbols in upper paleolithic times’.  The Journal of Psychoanalytic Anthropology,  7, Fall, 1984.

There are two main interdependent points put forward in this paper: one is stated in the quite striking title, the other is that to understand parietal art it should be examined as a product of symbol formation. The author wishes to show that upper Paleolithic man expressed in his cave images, such as those in Peche Merle, Altamira and Lascaux, his emerging consciousness of gender identity and equality in a matriarchal epoch. This two-fold hypothesis is itself based on an interesting and many-legged argument.

Reference is made to the studies of Leroi-Gourham (1967) who detected in the cave drawings a distinct male-female vector in their distribution and placement. Of the few fully human figures found among the many hybrid images composed of human and animal parts, the males are found only in the deepest and darkest recesses of the caves and the female in the more accessible areas. Moreover, male gender is almost invariably associated with horses, ibexes, stags, lions and bears; females or female objects are associated with mammoths, oxen and bison. These observations suggest to the author an intuitive iconography employed in the sorting of male and female psychological qualities. Jung and Neumann have pointed out that the caves are to be considered as the great mother or that they belong to her and it is surprising that there are no known representations of her inside these caves though there are hundreds of figures of her on the stony outer surfaces. The implication is that the makers of these often ferocious-looking male images were men in the process of defining and separating themselves psychologically from the dominant female deities—a process parallel, the author says, to contemporary feminism. The psychological mechanism by which these images were arrived at was a Rorshach-like response of the artist to irregularities on the cave walls experienced by him in the act of drawing as numinous and given. But though these representations seem fairly to invite clinica