What Does The Sorcerer See?

"The Sorcerer"

Around 15,000 years ago someone painted upon the walls of a cave in France a puzzling image of a creature made up of part horse, part lion, part stag, part owl, bear feet and hands that look human. This famous cave art became known as The Sorcerer. The image is found in the Cave of the Trois Frères (Three Brothers) named after the three brothers (Max, Jacques, and Louis Begouën) who, along with their father, discovered the cave in 1912.

The Sorcerer (see graphic) was reproduced by Henri Breuil, who studied cave art and was well versed in archaeology, anthropology, and ethnology. Since Breuil’s rendition other scholars have questioned whether the antlers are truly part of the painting or just appear so because of the rock the painting is situated on. Alternatively, it may be that the paleolithic painter deliberately included cracks in the rock as part of the image.

The painting has been surmised to depict shamanic ritual and as evidence of a Horned God in paleolithic times.

If the Sorcerer was meant to depict a shaman when painted, then it would be unusual for it to have been so, as most paintings in the cave, and other caves in the area, do not depict humans at all, although human form does seem to exist in a few places, for instance in the form of a man-bison.

Thus, the painting is interpreted through the eyes of the beholder. When you look at the painting, what do you see? A shaman? The various animals? A blend of all the animals?

Perhaps the most striking facet that you see is the eyes.

The eyes are looking directly at you. They look out of the wall of the cave, straight at the viewer. The eyes are not looking at other animals or objects on the cave walls. They are looking clearly at us (the viewer). The painter is interacting with us.

Why?

What was the painter of The Sorcerer looking at through those eyes? Was the painter so immersed in the painting that they were painting as if they were The Sorcerer? Were they painting as if it was their own eyes looking out at us (now viewing the painting 15,000 years later)?

If so, then what were they looking at? What did they see?

We don’t know how long these caves had been hidden from human view since the time the art was painted.

Yet, eerily, and perhaps unnervingly, those eyes seem to peer across the centuries and regard the viewer with disdain. It is as if the paleolithic painter 15,000 years ago was peering at us, and asking, what have you done?

Since the painting of The Sorcerer global human population has exploded from an estimated 1 – 10 million people to 8.3 billion this year (2026). That is an increase of 8,000 to 80,000 percent!

Since the painting of The Sorcerer, woolly mammoths, sabre-toothed cats, giant sloths, and cave bears have all gone extinct. Plant biomass has been halved, and wild mammals have been reduced by 85%. 15,000 years ago the Earth’s ecosystems were characterised by high density and a wide diversity. This density and diversity no longer exist, except in parts of Africa.

Is The Sorcerer scrutinising us with an accusatory look?

You be the judge. In this case, culpability may be in the eyes of the beholder.

Five Best Inventions

Coffee and art
combined

Last week’s blogpost was entitled Five Worst Inventions. So, this week I am offering my thoughts on the Five Best Inventions, lest I be accused of negativity. I did not go through as rigorous a process as last week; I came up with the five without previously determining the criteria by which I would decide. The only similarity with process was that I was walking on the beach again when I came up with these five.

What I found interesting when I arrived at my top five was that three of them related to our creative and artistic endeavours. That’s appropriate, I thought, because it is our creativity, and artistry that contributes hugely towards our sense of well-being and our pleasure in life. That last sentence may sound intuitively, and logically, correct, yet the connection has been studied by researchers. As an example, this study from Malaysia ‘demonstrates that creativity is beneficial to subjective well-being.’¹

Here are my contenders for Five Best Inventions, in no particular order.

Painting. One of the favourite activities of young children at home, in pre-school, or primary school is drawing. There seems to be something innate about the activity that young children are drawn to.

The earliest known example of a drawing/painting by a human is that of a red hand stencil in Maltravieso Cave in Spain and was made by a Neanderthal more than 64,000 years ago. The earliest known figurative paintings are in caves in Indonesia and Borneo and are dated at more than 40,000 years old.

All cultures appear to have invented painting in one form or another – whether on rock, on wood, or on our own bodies. Painting allows us to be creative and expressive, as well as being a medium for the communication of a thought, idea, or story.

Painting was possibly a precursor to carving which was initially etching like depictions upon rock – petroglyphs being the technical term. The oldest of these are found at Murujuga, Western Australia and are dated at 40,000 to 50,000 years old. The site was declared a World Heritage Site in July 2025.

Painting and carving have undergone many changes and evolved differently in different cultures. It has given us the elaborate masks of New Guinea, the beauty of the Sistine Chapel, and the intricacy of Māori wood and greenstone carvings.

Painting is a marvellous invention, and we don’t have to be children to continue to enjoy viewing it or creating it.

Writing. Writing may well have evolved from painting. Writing enables us to tell stories and keep accounts. In the last few millennia it has provided the means to some of the world’s great literature. In western cultures, would we have a Shakespeare, an Emily Brontë, or a Tolstoy if not for the invention of writing?

Sumerian is thought to be the oldest written language, dating from about 3400 BCE. Early writing from this culture was of a book-keeping style, and then the writing down of poems or sagely advice from one generation to the next. The world’s first written fictional story appears to be the Epic of Gilgamesh written probably about 2100 BCE and, in poetic form, tells the tales of a Sumerian king.

Today our reading options are immense; somewhere between one million and four million novels are published each year. All thanks to the invention of writing.

Drums. When we think of arts, then not only does painting, sculpture, and literature come to mind, but so too does music. The first musical instruments to be invented were undoubtedly percussion instruments. The first membranophone (a drum constructed using a stretched membrane) can be traced to China in the period from 5500 – 2350 BCE and using alligator skins. Because skins tend to degrade, earlier drums may well have been invented without leaving a trace in the archaeological record.

Drums and drumming greatly enhance one of our other (human) artistic forms – dance. Today, the variety of types of drums is immense. There are the drums of the symphony orchestra, conga drums, the many drums of Africa, and in our modern age the drum kit of rock bands.

Drums continue to beat out the rhythms of dancing, marching, and are used in various shamanic and in other ritualistic settings.

Bicycles. As a means to assist us getting around, the bicycle surely cannot be beaten. Its environmental impact is insignificant, and it enables us to keep fit.

In 1817 the Dandy horse was invented – a two-wheeled machine that could be sat upon, steered, and propelled by pushing along with the feet. The first bicycle to incorporate a mechanical crank drive and pedals came into being in the 1860s.

Today, there are more than one billion bicycles in the world. It is a popular form of transport and gave rise to the sport of cycling. The Tour de France cycling race (lasting three weeks) is considered to be the world’s biggest annual sporting event, and certainly the most watched cycling event.

Coffee. After water, coffee vies with tea for the second-most consumed beverage in the world. The number of cafés in the world reaches into the tens (or even hundreds) of thousands. Shanghai is believed to be the city with the highest number of cafés, with over 8,530 in 2024. Australia is home to 27,000 coffee cafés.

The exact date of the invention of the coffee drink is indeterminate. Legend tells of an Ethiopian goat-herder in the 6^th century, named Kaldi, noticing that his goats took a liking to the bean. By 1000 CE Arab traders were bringing the bean back and cultivating it. By boiling the beans they created a drink they called qahwa which meant that which prevents sleep. Qahwa appears to be where we get the word coffee from.

Today more than 2.25 billion cups of coffee are consumed every day globally. For many, coffee is one of the world’s most pleasurable inventions.

So, get on your bicycle, bike down to your local café for a coffee, perhaps write a letter or poem whilst there, draw or paint a picture of your surroundings, or listen to a busker playing the bongoes on the pavement outside the café. What could be better?

Notes:

1. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8305859/#sec15-ijerph-18-07244  accessed 21 October 2025

Poets and Politicians

As I write this it has been two days since the Canadian election and in two days time the Australians go to the polls.

We have seemingly had elections and politicians for aeons. We have had definitions for politician ever since Samuel Johnson’s first edition of Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755. In that first edition the second definition Johnson gave for politician was ‘A man of artifice; one of deep contrivance.’ Many would argue that the definition still adheres.

With antecedents in the Roman Republic and in England in the 13^th century, it is only since the 17^th century that electoral democracy began to become the standard form of government throughout the western world. Just two and a half centuries.

During these last two and a half centuries where has electoral (aka representative) democracy (and its attendant politicians) got us? Much of the research into politics has shown that political representation greatly favours affluent sectors of society to the detriment of the population as a whole. Hardly representative. When one looks at the make up of politicians who do become elected, in most cases world-wide they are from the wealthy elite. Very few are those we would meet whilst out walking the dog or pushing a baby in a pram. (Although we will find them queuing up to pat the dog or kiss the baby come election time.)

Furthermore, with politicians at the helm over the past two and a half centuries the world has become a lot messier. Environmentally it is in a mess. Socially and culturally, it is in a mess. Individually too, we are in a mess. Politicians do not appear to have the willingness to tackle much of this, and some even exacerbate the mess.

Yet, we continue to vote for politicians, we continue to vote for a flawed system. Whitmore, we continue to listen to them. We continue to allow politicians to speak on our behalf, notwithstanding that most do nothing of the sort.

So, who could we listen to instead?

The avant-garde filmmaker and poet Jonas Merkas once quipped that, ‘In the very end civilisations perish because they listen to their politicians and not their poets.’ Maybe he is correct.

Another artist, the science fiction author Ursula K. La Guin enlarged upon Merkas’ remark. The author of the very popular Earthsea fantasy series emphatically suggested that;

‘I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. And even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality. Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art.’

Merkas and La Guin could be onto something.

It may be as simple as William Blake reminding us of our connection to the cosmos: ‘To see a world in a grain of sand/ And heaven in a wild flower/ Hold infinity in the palm of your hand/ And eternity in an hour.’

Perhaps it is the Bard’s love sonnet that begins with, ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?/ Thou art more lovely and more temperate;/ Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,/ And summers lease hath all too short a date.’

Or Mary Oliver suggesting advising a quietude of mind: ‘Every day I see or I hear/ something that more or less/ kills me with delight.’

These and dozens of other poems and poets have us asking the simple question, as Mary Oliver does; ‘There’s only one question/ how to love this world.’

I doubt that this is a question politicians ask very often.

I hear them answer it very rarely. If at all.

I think I’ll go find a book of poetry to read while the Australian elections are on.

Miracle Of A Smile

Spike Millagan penned a delightful poem titled Smile. In the first line of this poem Spike declares that ‘smiling is infectious.’ (The first stanza of the poem is quoted at the end of this blogpiece.)

Infectious – yes. Miraculous also. How so? You may ask.

It is miraculous through language. The words smile and miracle are etymologically linked.

Both words derive from the Latin mirari meaning “to wonder at, to marvel, to be astonished.” From this verb comes the noun, miraculum, meaning “an object of wonder.”

Prior to the Latin, the Proto-Indo-European word smey (or smei) can be translated as smile, or laugh. It can also be translated as wonder.

Looking at these etymologies the connections between the words smile and miracle can easily be seen. Other common English words that share this etymology include; admire, mirror, mirage, and marvel.

Often the word miracle gets attached to events associated with divine intervention. However, the word miracle simply means an inexplicable event, an even that cannot be explained by natural or scientific laws. However, attributing (or explaining) the event to a supernatural, or divine, cause does not follow. That is a logical fallacy. A miracle is simply something to wonder at, to marvel at. Explanation is not required.

A more common use of the word miracle is that of a statistically unlikely event occurring. Instances of this use are such things as; someone surviving an air disaster, or emerging from a blazing building hardly scathed. A statistician may describe such an occurrence as “falling outside the third standard deviation from the mean.” In common parlance, it is much easier to say, “a miracle.”

Miracles, and so-called miracle-workers, have been with us for millennia. The Roman god Hercules, and the Egyptian goddess Isis, were both believed to have been able to perform miracles. The Greek philosopher, Pythagoras (in the 6^th century BCE) is said to have been able to accomplish miracles.

Of course, in western culture, and specifically within Christianity, Jesus is attributed with having the ability to perform miracles. Within other religions too, miracle-workers are proclaimed. Muhammad and Gautama Buddha are both said to have performed miracles.

But, let us return to smiling.

Science can describe how our facial muscles work to shape a smile upon our face. Science can also describe the neuronal messages in the brain of someone else perceiving the smile of the other person.

But, science cannot explain a smile and it cannot explain how it becomes infectious.

A smile is a miracle.

Smile (Poem by Spike Milligan - first stanza)

A smile is infectious

You catch it like the flu

When someone smiled at me today

I started smiling too.

Vita Brevis, Vita Continuus

Cueva de las Manos,
Argentina

How long is your life? Many would answer that life is fleeting. Indeed, there is a saying – Ars longa, vita brevis – claiming that art is long, and life is short.

Well, yes, it is, when viewed in cosmic terms. Three score and ten (70 years) is the supposed appointed human life expectation. That is just a blink compared with the age of the Universe.

Compared with how long Homo sapiens have been treading the Earth (200,000 – 300,000 years) 70 years is fleeting. Suppose you visualise your allotted 70 years as 7 cm – the average length of a man’s thumb. Then the first Homo sapiens began striding across the Earth some 200 to 300m away from us. That’s a lot of thumb lengths.

Measured like this then, our human lives are short and fleeting.

And art is long.

Speaking of art. There is another perspective with which we could look at our lives. And, there is no need to change the timeline with which we considered life’s fleeting nature.

All around the world there is art from millennia ago – cave art.

No matter who we are, or what part of the world we come from, it is likely that an ancestor of ours was responsible for (or witnessed the making of) one or more of these paintings.

One of the oldest sites is the cave of Maltravieso in Spain. Uranium-thorium dating gives a date of 64,000 years ago for a hand-stencil in that cave. It is thought that the creator of this hand-stencil was possibly Homo neanderthalensis. Since modern Europeans have around 1% - 3% Neanderthal DNA then, if you have European ancestry, were the paintings in this cave created by an ancestor of yours?

Or, further East. Hand-stencilling found on a cave on the island of Sulawesi, in Indonesia, are dated to 39,900 years ago. What is of further interest is that paintings of an almost life-size Sulawesi warty pig, found in 2021, has been dated to at least 45,000 years old. This makes it the oldest figurative cave art in the world. Perhaps your ancestor caught the pig, or painted the pig, or cooked and ate the pig around a fire with companions?

In the Cave of Hands (Cueva de las Manos) in Argentina there are hundreds of hands stencilled on rock walls in a number of collages. The earliest of these paintings were stencilled around 9,000 years ago, and the youngest just 1,300 years ago. Perhaps a hand from an ancestor of yours is amongst them?

The final example in this blog of cave art comes from Australia. At a site known as Nawarla Gabarnmung (Hole in the Rock) in Arnhem Land, far north Australia, the walls are covered with paintings of fish, crocodiles, wallabies, people, and spiritual beings. These depictions are at least 44,000 years old, and could be as old as 60,000 years. These paintings were created by the ancestors of someone alive today.

The purpose of the above examples is to show that we are all part of a continuous life. We may not know the name of those wo created these cave art pieces, but we can be sure they were ancestors of ours, or of someone we know.

So, yes, our individual lives may be fleeting, but our lives are part of a continuing cycle of life. A life cycle that has been in existence for at least 300,000 years.

Let us amend that Latin phrase then:

Ars longa, Vita brevis, Vita continuus.