Paganistan: Notes from the Secret Commonwealth
In Which One Midwest Man-in-Black Confers, Converses & Otherwise Hob-Nobs with his Fellow Hob-Men (& -Women) Concerning the Sundry Ways of the Famed but Ill-Starred Tribe of Witches.
Ocher and Antler
Out of Deep Time
The Glaciers were gone. The Big Game was gone.
During the European Mesolithic, humans were thin upon the ground.
Even so, across a vast swathe of the Continent, two common features characterize Mesolithic burials, from Scandinavia to Portugal.
Ocher and antlers.
Again and again, the dead of the Middle Stone Age were laid to rest with a pair of antlers framing the body or head, sprinkled with red ocher (Miles 202).
The Why here is clear enough: protection, rebirth, new life.
But do we also see here a Who?
One bears in mind that in the art of the European Old Stone Age, from Spain to Siberia, two human figures—in an Age of Animal Art—nonetheless emerge repeatedly, sufficiently often to make us think that perhaps we may well be seeing into some primal ancestral mythology: the Fat Lady and the Guy with Horns.
When I die, lay me in the Earth as the ancestors did, with ocher and antlers.
Any witch could tell you why.
David Miles, The Tale of the Axe: How the Neolithic Revolution Transformed Britain (London: Thames and Hudson, 2016)
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