"Himmelszelt" - 'Celestial sky tent'

Ivar Lissner in his book Man, God and Magic describes the bear cult of the Manchurian tribes, who he had encountered in his travels in the 1950's. Lissner was so taken by the deep spiritual beliefs of these reindeer herding nomads, particularly by their belief in a superior formless God, that he set out to prove that the belief in such a God was the most ancient of mankind, pointing us back to those days when people and God still met in person.

I sympathise with Lissner in this attempt. I, too, wonder about the state of God, and how ancient and significant human awareness of such a realm may be.

However, I am not sure Lissner managed to 'prove' what in the end is a matter of spiritual awareness or insight. Nonetheless, he recorded some of the most ancient cults of the Northern Hemisphere, which at the time, was already in a steep decline: the Bear Cult.

In this, initiates set out with their tribe to corner the only animal which in their belief held a soul like man and therefore could communicate with God like us. It was obvious to these people that the bear would be resurrected, providing it's bones were left intact and complete where other animals would not get to them. Thus they were hung from trees or buried with stones piled on the top.

The bear was eaten, and prayers were made to the soul of the bear to carry their plight to the God of Creation (often also the God of the Mountain). The bear would do this, as long as it was not aware that it were the people making the plight who had killed it. This is why the meat was often given to a neighbouring tribe to eat and the blame for the death given to a third tribe. Each tribe would then take turns in eating the meat, making the prayer and taking the blame.

To kill the bear, the tribe had to corner it first. The bear in question in Manchuria used to be a Kodiak bear, after the Polar bear the second biggest carnivore in the world. However, the bear fossils found at Chauvet ( ~30,000 BC) were that of the extinct Cave bear who could reach 3m in height when standing on its hind legs.

The bear has an acute sense of smell and can sense a group of humans over vast distances. To corner a bear therefore takes great effort and skill, and probably an element of surprise. When the bear is suitably cornered, it is intimidated fist by stones being thrown at it, similar to the bull being stung in a bullfight. This gets the bear into a rage and will help to make it act rashly, which is the only way to predict it's next move. The chosen hunter then steps forward with a short wooden spear hidden behind his back. The bear in it's rage and fear then rushes forward to tear him to pieces, but just at that moment the crowd raises their arms and yells at the bear so that the stunned bear rises on it's hind legs. This gives the hunter a split second to leap forward and to ram the short spear into the heart of the bear. He is the only one who gets the blood of the bear on his body. The rest of the tribe take great care when preparing the bear not to do so.

It is obvious that this sort of hunt bears great risks and that it is not always the bear who is the victim. Whatever we may think of such a Cult, it's oldest evidence is a cache of bear bones found in the Drachenloch Cave in Switzerland with one bear skull having the femur (upper leg bone) inserted through the socket of the skull, which can only be done via a twisting motion. The bones in question are seventy thousand years old, indicating that this Cult was first practised by the Neanderthal people, thus also indicating a possible strong cultural link (and not the only one) between the Neanderthal Culture (~125,000-30,000 BC) and the culture of the Aurignatians (~30-25,000 BC) which began about thirty thousand years ago, replacing all evidence of the presence of the Neanderthal where they appeared, and who in turn were replaced by the Gravettian culture, followed by the Solutrean, the Magdalenians and finally the Azilian (8,000 BC). This of course reflects merely how we interpret often sudden changes in the manufacture of stone implements and changes in bone structure. Europeans today are still Europeans despite the Industrial Revolution and the consequent rapid changes in our environment, size and appearance. This is because with our culture our lifestyle has changed, meaning we will appear (rightly) like a different kind of people from our ancestors to an archaeologist of the future.
 

In the recommendable book Journey through the Ice Age, by Paul G. Bahn and Jean Vertut, features an infra-red photo of a painted tectiform which is located at Bernifal in the Dordogne, France (probably Magdalenian10-15,000 BC). I have traced this tectiform above to show more clearly what it depicts: There is a line at the top which leads down to a central pole. From it are suspended two bars with three semicircles attached below.

The central pole ends in a horizontal bar which supports two semi circles above.

In between the semicircles above and those below emerge another two lines on each side from the central pole.

Lissner mentions in his report on the Manchurian tribes that their dwellings had sacred sky poles which served as ladders, the entrance being at the top. These poles were sacred because they were connected to the earth and stretched up to the sky, the path on which the soul travels. Similar beliefs may also have been attached to sacred trees.

In Manchuria powerful shamans had magic staffs, usually with a birds head carved on its top, as the bird is symbolic for the flight of the soul when it leaves the body of the shaman. To create a sacred space, and a link between the world above and below, the shaman would draw a circle with his staff and ram it into its centre. Thus it would become the symbolic centre of the earth and all spirits that would come down from heaven or up from the earth would be confined to the space set by this circle. This was important, for a spirit could come, and disown a body of its soul. According to Lissner it is the importance of protective amulets to protect the bearer from wandering souls or spirits to possess them and disown them of their body.

Lissner was convinced that one example of such a magic staff and its shaman could be found in the 'shaft scene' in Lascaux.

(probably 14,000 BC)

However, according to the Manchurians the sky was a tent that revolved around the Earth / Sky poles, where the souls moved up and down. The medium that transports the soul is water, as it rises up from the earth in the form of mist and descends again from the clouds in the form of rain.

When we look at the tectiform from Bernifal, we see that it quite adequately reflects such a view. We see the water drops sitting on the earth base in the underground and we see water droplets hanging from the sky tent. The dividing line in between is our plane where life manifests and where the soul passes on its journey from the Under to the Upper world.

A possible reason for why mountains in certain cultures are considered to be holy, may be due to the mist that shrouds their summits in form of a cloud. To the animist mind it is here were the earth and the sky meet to form a highly potent point of creation. It is here that the Manchurian tribes believed the soul of the bear to meet God.

The tectiform of Bernifal is probably a quite complete or complex depiction of such a belief system. Usually it is shown only as the upper part, showing the Earth / Sky Pole with the Sky tent attached to it and its water droplets. These depictions are often blurred and are therefore referred to as 'enigmatic spade signs' by Bahn such as the sign at Le Portel in the Ariege in France, shown here on the right. The red line shows my attempt to show its original outline. The faded red background is as it appears today.

Interestingly, according to Bahn and Vertut the sign is above a phallus like stalagmite which has the figure of a human (probably female) drawn on it. The combination of a sky tent sign above and a phallus like stalagmite below evokes the image of the holy heavenly mist (the seat of the superior god of creation in ancient belief - Wotan, Zeus, Jupiter) meeting the mountain of the earth. Bahn also points out that the presence of water seems to be one common denominator to caves containing cave art. Indicating the importance of spirit presence in a cave to the culture of the cave artists.
The image on the left is another example of a 'Tectiform' painted on a polychrome bison at Font de Gaume in the Dordogne, probably Magdalenian (Bahn). I have traced the bison to show the composition more clearly.

This is an interesting sign because it seems to suggest a link between the image of the bison and the path of the soul that leads up and down the Earth/Sky Pole as suggested by the sky tent sign

. If we accept that these signs depict such a symbolical world view then this would suggest that these signs were a sympathetic magic in the underworld to help guide the soul (perhaps to find its way 'up' to reincarnation) and that the image of the bison (i.e. its spirit) was involved in such a quest, either by being guided itself or by

being a sympathetic spirit helper to guide the soul in question. I will discuss the Red Signs in another essay but it may suffice to point out that Red markings, signs and drawings probably have their own special significance in so much, that they often occupy their own spaces or often appear to relate to other drawings, some very abstract in nature, suggesting that they had great symbolic significance for their creators (who were probably women - I'll try to make this point in the Red Signs essay).

I feel strongly that these signs depict a sky tent (or as we still say poetically in German "Himmelszelt") in variation of detail and that this is the basis for the animist beliefs expressed here. Furthermore I feel that we should study very carefully the beliefs of such European folklore that express such beliefs. Especially significant seem the beliefs held by the people of Manchuria and the Sami of northern Europe, as well as the indigenous people of North America. We should accept that there may be foundations to these beliefs which can be traced across vast spans of time, and which may survive hidden in our culture even until today.

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