Cave art materialized the supernatural as a real, traversable realm beyond death
Evidence
By making the long and often circuitous journey into caves and viewing the arresting images there, perhaps assisted by singing or chanting, Lewis-Williams argues, our ancestors “invested [the supernatural] with materiality and precisely situated [it] cosmologically; it was not something that existed merely in people’s thoughts and minds.” By visiting these caves, people “traveled” through time and the cosmos and experienced supernatural realms beyond death. — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 315
Categorization
- DEFINE: Explains the mechanism by which cave art worked: giving the supernatural physical presence and cosmic location rather than leaving it as mere mental belief.
- XREF: Resonates with the reader’s earlier notes on creative thought requiring entering a different mental state; caves as a literal descent into another world.