Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

Between 45,000 and 10,000 years ago, human beings entered the deepest, darkest, most inaccessible chambers of limestone caves in Europe, Africa, and Southeast Asia, and created images on the walls that have survived to the present day. They painted with pigments ground from ochre, charcoal, and manganese. They used animal fat lamps for light. They sometimes crawled through passages barely wide enough for a human body to reach chambers where no natural light had ever penetrated. What they made there — the bison and horses of Lascaux, the lions and woolly rhinoceroses of Chauvet, the hand stencils of Sulawesi and Patagonia, the geometric signs that recur across sites separated by tens of thousands of miles and years — is not decoration. It is something else. Something we have no adequate modern word for, because it comes from a time before the categories through which we interpret art and religion had yet been separated. Woolly rhinoceroses, Chauvet Cave, France (c. 3...

Aboriginal Australian art is the oldest continuously practiced art tradition on Earth — stretching back at least 50,000 years, making it contemporaneous with the earliest cave paintings of Europe and predating all other surviving artistic traditions. But what makes it singular is not merely its antiquity. It is the fact that it has never stopped: the traditions of painting, carving, body decoration, and ground marking that were practiced before the last ice age are still being practiced today by communities who understand themselves as the custodians of the same knowledge, the same Songlines, the same relationship to Country that their ancestors maintained. This is not a museum tradition. It is a living transmission — one that survived colonial genocide, forced removal of children, and the suppression of language, and continues to generate new works in old forms as the knowledge moves from elder to student, from grandmother to grandchild, as it has moved for fifty thousand years. ...