Folklore; Manners and customs; Mythology; Religion
The singular war-picture (Fig. 9) from a cave in South Africa, which
we copy from the _Cape Monthly Magazine_, probably represents a
magical ceremony. Bushmen are tempting a great water animal--a
rhinoceros, or something of that sort--to run across the land, for the
purpose of producing rain. The connection of ideas is scarcely
apparent to civilised minds, but it is not more indistinct than the
connection between carrying a bit of the rope with which a man has
been hanged and success at cards--a common French superstition. The
Bushman cave-pictures, like those of Australia, are painted in black,
red, and white. Savages, like the Assyrians and the early Greeks, and
like children, draw animals much better than the human figure. The
Bushman dog in our little engraving (Fig. 7) is all alive--almost as
full of life as the dog which accompanies the centaur Chiron, in that
beautiful vase in the British Museum which represents the fostering of
Achilles. The Bushman wall-paintings, like those of Australia, seem
to prove that savage art is capable of considerable freedom, when
supplied with fitting materials. Men seem to draw better when they
have pigments and a flat surface of rock to work upon, than when they
are scratching on hard wood with a sharp edge of a broken shell.
Though the thing has little to do with art, it may be worth
mentioning, as a matter of curiosity, that the labyrinthine Australian
caves are decorated, here and there, with the mark of a red hand. The
same mysterious, or at least unexplained, red hand is impressed on the
walls of the ruined palaces and temples of Yucatan--the work of a
vanished people.
[Illustration: Fig. 10.--Palæolithic Art.]
[Illustration: Fig. 11.--Red Indian Art: the Thunder-bird.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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