Wild Chapels and Ochre Scriptures
(Part 1) Encounters with the Deep Past
During one of my field trips to the prehistoric caves of Northern Spain, an elderly Australian tourist said the problem we have in Europe is that there is no living tradition between us and our earliest ancestors.
“We Australians know the meaning behind our cave art,” he said, “because the aboriginal people who painted it are still alive.”
I think, to a degree, he’s right.
Though the colonisation of Australia did a brutal job of suppressing the indigenous cosmologies, it didn’t completely succeed. And this land is now home to one of the oldest continuing cultures in human history.
Because the West has no remaining threads to our early ancestors who once worshipped their gods in the caves, we have lost our map to the meaning of their symbols.
And through a magical turn of events, I’m here. In Australia.
And I can say first hand that there is something very old here. Impossibly old.
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