Supernatural Caves of Dreams

We've caught on to Hoopla, the public library streaming resource which gives us access to some interesting feature films and documentaries from the comfort of our family room. Sometimes technology is delightful.

Last evening we watched a doc we meant to see when it was released in 2010, Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams. It is an exploration, both physically and psychologically of the series of caves discovered in the 1990's by French spelunkers. They cleared rubble from a narrow opening which led them into a world of wonders which had been sealed for centuries.

Inside these Chauvet caves, named after one of the discoverers, they found paintings of exquisite beauty and variety, as well as the skeletal remains of many of the creatures depicted on the walls. Carbon dating suggest that some are at least 30,000 years old, which I find mind-boggling. Perhaps the most familiar images are of horses, but there are bison, bears, lions and leopards, species nearly all long-gone from France. It seems that the works are "signed" with handprints, with recurring signatures from a painter with a crooked finger.



The film-makers were given rare and limited access to the caves, initially only able to work for an hour at a time. Early in the process the crew was invited by one of the team of researchers to stand in the silence, to absorb the ambiance of the cave and its witness to the past. Later they, the discoverers, and the researchers describe their sense that the paleolithic eyes of those who created these images are upon them, a permeability between this world and the world of the spirit.

Herzog employs his brilliance as a film-maker to move from the factual aspect of this discovery into an exploration of what the paintings mean for our understanding of what it is to be human. One of the experts muses that while we are described as homo sapiens, humans who think, we might be called homo spiritualis, spiritual humans.

Herzog segues to discoveries of ancient bone flutes in other locations to suggest that along with art, music was an essential aspect of the development of our spiritual identity. Interestingly, there is no evidence that humans ever lived in the Chauvet caves. They were a "chapel" (my term) for artistic expression, and the researchers speculate that rituals may have been part of what occurred there.

Music, art, rituals, silence, even unique smells. All these are aspects of spiritual and religious expression today. Extraordinary. Supernatural.

Have you seen the film? What are your thoughts about what I've described here?