Cosmology of the Late Palaeolithic

It seems to me that the attempt has to be made because "archaeoastronomy" and ethnoastronomy are "in", because the publications, symposia, congresses are accumulating, without being able to find any approach to understandable questions. That makes: there are 1) a number of highly interested and certainly honourable astronomers, astrophysicists and geodesists involved, 2) social anthropologists are also involved, 3) of course Velikowsky fans and Danish worshippers, not to mention the detrimental journalists, who smell a big pasture, in short: only people who have not the slightest idea of cultural history, and worse, who don't want to have it...don't confuse me with facts. The historical ignorance and, of course, the ignorance of our regulations, especially the ignorance of technical jargon, must have fatal consequences, as you will understand immediately after I have given you a few references.

The stone has been set in motion, i.e. the public interest in prehistoric astronomy, mainly by three people, among whom Gerald Hawkins of the Harvard Observatory is the most popular, because he has spuriously made his way into American television with his "Stonehenge Decoded" (to have as delta paperback); but not all experts agree with his methods and interpretations by far. The Scot Alexander Thom has dealt with all British, partly also French megalithic systems more thoroughly, longer and more comprehensively and continues to do so undauntedly.

A readable summary of Thom's older works together with additions fresh from Germany can be found in Rolf Müller: Der Himmel über dem Menschen der Steinzeit (Heidelberg: Springer 1970, Verständliche Wissenschaft). Hawkins, Thom and Müller deal with partly Neolithic and partly Bronze Age stone settings. Alexander Marshack has dealt with the oldest period, i.e. our Late Palaeolithic, in several articles and in his main work "The roots of civilization. The cognitive beginnings of man's first art, symbol and notation" (New York: McGraw Hill 1972), which is characterized by unsurpassable illustrations. For an impressive bibliography by Elizabeth Chesley Baity, see Current Anthropology 14 (1973) 389 449.

I suppose you are beginning to understand my boundless aversion to language decay - "astra events" is not even the worst thing, and you can see how silly it is to talk about "early man's astronomical interest" if you don't ask about the reason for this interest, which has been burning for thousands of years. Of course, it is most gratifying and grateful that Marshack probably did it, that in Magdalenia they kept books on the phases of the moon and the like, and that countless works on the orientation of cult sites, graves, etc. are published, but where are graves oriented or meridionalized or borealized or occidentalized? In other words, to whom does the establishment of the fact of being orientated, especially of graves, piously serve and what is the point of it, if at the same time the unswerving continued chattering about a realm of the dead in the interior of our planet, which on top of that the scribes call a pancake, since the spherical shape is said to have escaped our ancestors?

But beyond that: rock paintings, excavated bone carvings on so-called batons etc. cannot be read from the tip of the nose what they mean; interpretations are more or less arbitrary, which is not to say anything against Marshack's lunar notes, he is probably right. Meanwhile: do we really need to frown over excavated Paleolithic remains and guess what they want to tell us? Or are there not, or have there not been until recently, populations that have not been affected by the Neolithic revolution and the Near Eastern urban culture and their heirs at all or only minimally, i.e., the so-called wild prey in Australia, in northernmost Asia, in parts of North America, in the South American jungle and on Tierra del Fuego, in the South African steppes and deserts? Should we not question these peoples at all costs to find out what our own European Paleolithicists might have thought?
One must be familiar, at least superficially, with the methods and results of cultural-historical ethnology in order to know where one can legitimately obtain the relevant information. So our totally ahistorical, if not antihistorical entrepreneurial group "Archaeoastronomy" cannot play along. Since they are never prepared for technical jargon and, in accordance with our modern categories, carefully separate the keywords "astronomy" on the one hand and "religion and mythology" on the other hand, they do not get the idea to look for "astronomy" where it is: in the myths and rites of the wildcat hunters. And that's exactly why I can't help but consider the, in itself gratifying, activity of the many hobby archaeoastronomers as rather fatal than beneficial: God protect me from my friends, from my enemies I want to protect myself.

In earlier centuries, it was self-evident that the tradition of Stone Age people living far away was used to explain their own early traditions. As an example, I will quote you a passage from the four-volume work of the arch-missionary Joseph Francois Lafitau, published in 1724, "Moeurs des Sauvages Américains, comparées aux moeurs des premiers temps11 (after Schmidt Koppers 20):

"I have not been content to know the character of the savages and to inquire about their customs and habits. Rather, I have sought the traces of the most remote antiquity in these habits and customs. I have carefully read those of the oldest writers who have dealt with the customs, laws and practices of the peoples of which they had some knowledge. I have carried out the mutual comparison of these customs, and I confess that, if the ancient authors have provided me with enlightenment to support some happy suppositions concerning the savages, the customs of the savages have provided me with enlightenment to make some things found among the ancient authors easier to understand and better to explain".

Admittedly, in those days it was even easier, and even more so as a Jesuit priest: whoever is forced to believe in the one regular couple, Adam and Eve, cannot help but be a diffusionist. Lafitau and his peers only had trouble with the extremely tight schedule, i.e. with the question when the Indians could have come to the new continent, because that must have happened after the biblical Flood. (Sometimes, as you can see, false assumptions can lead to correct results). Since Lafitau, at the latest, apart from the independent inventionalists, of course, there has been no serious doubt that elsewhere on our planet what belonged to prehistoric Europe was still alive, and the problem was only what had continued to live where, which would have brought us back to cultural circles.

Dame Baity's assertion that recent or historical hunter-killer cultures showed no interest in celestial phenomena is downright wrong, even more wrong than her assumption that no one before Marshack had yet agreed to assume astronomical interest among Mesolithic people. Leo Frobenius suspected such a thing, but he just threw the idea out and did not pursue it further. In his "Cultural History of Africa" published in 1934 he asked with regard to the Magdalenian rock paintings (p.146): "Was it so that these Mesolithicists, when they carved their pictures into the walls of their certainly pious consecration serving underworld, painted pictures of animals, but carried the essence of the stars, the stars, the moon and the sun in their hearts? Shortly afterwards he (ibid.) speaks of the " 'First Art Period' of humanity, in which the artists... let the animals play the role of the stars", later (187, p.a.188) of the "Gestalt world of astral animal painting and animal sculpture... in the middle stone age. The environment of the cult of that time, however, was the underworld, the cave the natural home of the night roll of the starry sky". Frobenius was not on intimate terms of friendship with the German language, but he sensed that the painted animals should not be taken "at their word", not with their zoological form. It remains a mystery to me that nobody but Frobenius apparently came up with this idea, because the researchers involved in Stone Age art have often asked themselves the question as to why the pictures of the polychrome, so-called Franco-Cantabrian large animal style were found in the most inaccessible, dusky parts of the Spanish and French caves, where nobody could look at them and where the sheer act of painting must have been an enormous physical effort. Leakey's explanation (Adam's Ancestors 154) that it is a manifestation of the magico religious is pure blah-blah; it is not without reason that our rules of the game forbid the use of such words, which promptly appear where terms are missing. But let's leave the rock paintings to themselves for now and look around to see what wildlife hunters have to tell us about their most important and oldest representatives, the South African Bushmen, Hermann Baumann said (Vkde 85): "It is amazing how much better the Bushmen know the stars than the negro planters. But even there, neither ethnologists nor historians of natural sciences are able to make sense of the stories and to measure what they indicate.

A model case: the South African ethnologist I. Schapera presents the views of the German missionary Wilhelm Heinrich Immanuel Bleek, who was our most reliable and knowledgeable guarantor for the now completely extinct Kham Bushmen of Cape Province. Khoisan Peoples 174 f.

In Wischnewski's dissertation "Africans and Celestial Phenomena" (p.51) we read
"The names for stars and constellations in the Bushmen, and to some extent in the Hottentot, often refer not to the form and shape they take in the sky, but to the time of appearance. Then the constellations also seem to have been named by these natives in reference to the creatures (animals) surrounding them, which are particularly common at the time of their appearance". With regard to South American Guyana tribes, Zerries (Paideuma 222 f.) says: "If in the course of the year a constellation appears in the sky, the species in question multiplies. According to Roth (1924,715 f,), the appearance and position of different constellations in Guyana are associated with special seasons, and each such star is the permanent home, i.e. the spirit of the same animal ... into which it transforms at that time". (see also Wild Spirits 130).
This all sounds quite harmless so far, and not as if one really has to pay attention, except that you are so casually informed of the important fact that when constellations were minted, similarity, i.e. a depiction of animals, was not intended at all; in fact, Scorpius is the only constellation that bears great resemblance to the animal whose name it bears.
"Many stars", it was said with regard to the Bushmen, "many stars and constellations owe their names only to the fact that they are seen at certain times". And then, sometime later, imagination and the urge to personalize are said to kick in and "just so" produce poetic stories set in the sky. The bare fact, however, which here is thrown away with "only", namely that the rhythm of life of the animals was linked to the rising of stars, should make you listen attentively. Think a little bit concentrated: if you name asterisms according to animal species which have their breeding or reproduction time at the time of the rise of these asterisms, then you must not only have known beforehand about the life cycle of the animal species, you must also have already determined which asterism rises heliacally in the course of the year and when, and that means: You must in any case be familiar with the length of the solar year as well as with the fact that every month other stars are visible before sunrise.
It is precisely this fact that has been discovered that must necessarily have caused those who first observed it to reflect on it at length and to come to the decisive conclusion that life on earth is regulated by the stars. Thus the rising of the constellations became the cause, and earthly events the effect. In order to express the insight gained into the connection between the rising of the stars and the reproduction times of animals, not only were stars and asterisms named according to animal species, sometimes also according to plants, which was a relatively non-binding statement and did not yet allow us to draw any conclusions about the preponderance of celestial phenomena. So we would have to rely on speculation if the wildlife predators had not given us clearer information. Fortunately, they have done so by leaving us numerous myths and rites which revolve around the master of the animals, a central idea of all game predator cultures, which until recently has remained alive and kicking even among those peoples who have come under strong high cultural influence, but where hunting and fishing still play an important role.

The so-called "Lord of the Animals", who in literature also circulates under the name Wild Spirit or Bush Spirit (master, lord, owner, guardian of the game, maître des animaux, genie des bois, Paulson in Supernatural Owners) has, in order to put the so-called 'practical' at the beginning, the function to revive the killed animals from their bones. This can only work if the bones are unharmed, which is why all hunter folks make sure that the bones of the game are returned to the game master intact and bundled, they hang them in trees, bury them in certain places and the like. "Otherwise", say the Bushmen, i.e. if you break game bones, "otherwise the light of the starry sky will fade" (Leo Frob. Cultural History 130). Less catastrophic, but still bad enough: otherwise the master of the game deprives the hunter of hunting happiness, he does not send "new" revived specimens down to earth or he makes the hunter sick". The lord of the game determines which individual animal must be hunted, sometimes it is also said, e.g. among the Abkhazians in the Caucasus, that a hunter cannot hunt an animal that has not been killed and eaten by the lord of the game and his daughters (Dirr, Anthropos 1925, 140). That the gamekeeper himself eats animals, is the owner of the bones, and that "heavenly" bones turn into earthly animals, is also clarified by the statements of the North Australian Murngin (W. Lloyd Warner: A Black Civilization. London 1937/1958, 542) about her "Great Father up there in the sky", who belongs to both halves of the tribe (Dua and Yiritja) equally: "He looks like an ordinary man but he is much bigger.Everything everywhere, fish, iguana, kangaroo, opossum, when he eats them he puts the bones in a pile and does not let them drop down to earth.if a fish bone dropped down it would make plenty of fish, or if a kangaroo bone dropped down it would make many kangaroos. In fact, any animals bone that fell to earth would multiply its species.
The ethnological experts on hunter cultures make a distinction between "individual" and "collective animal protection spirits" (Paulson 92), because often such an animal lord is not responsible for all animal species, but only for a certain species, in which case each species has its own lord of protection. These lords of the individual animal species are usually a specimen specimen of this genus, expressly described as giant, while those responsible for several or all animal species have a different being, sometimes anthropomorphic, sometimes not. In the most important model population for us, the Bushmen, it is the Mantis religiosa, the God-worshipping locust, Kaggen, the so-called Bushman God, and Mantis does not shy away from any trick to save his fosterlings from hunters. For example (Bleek: Mantis 12, Übers.16): "People say that Mantis first created Elentier; it was Hartebeest who created Elentier after his Elentier died. That's why he not only loved Elentier and Hartebeest a little, but loved them tenderly... It was Gemsbok that he did not love so much, but he liked Gemsbok. For there are hares which we see when we shoot gemsbok, and these hares do not move because they want us to kill them. We look for them because they are his hares. He wants us to kill the hares so that Gemsbok may live. And Gemsbok recovers when we kill the rabbits because he feels that it is Mantis that we kill. He becomes a rabbit because he feels that we kill him so that Gemsbok will recover." And then it is said: "Our parents used to say that Mantis is between the horns of Elentier.

As far as the masters of the individual animal species are concerned, which, as already mentioned, are usually regarded as huge specimens of their genus, there are some uncertainties that have crept in, according to which the term "big-animal cult" has come into being, to which our first homo sapiens ancestors are said to have paid homage, first and foremost the much-discussed cult of the bear. Extensive bear rites can be traced back to the Upper Palaeolithic, the editors of the Time Life series "Early Man" date the bear cult without pious shyness into the year 40,000 and can be found among almost all peoples of the northern land masses, starting with the Lapps in the west, up to the Tungus, Kamchadalen, Ainu, up to a large number of North American Algonquin tribes, up to Kwakiutl, Tlingit and Nutka on the northwest coast and some prairie tribes; Traces of bear rites could even be found in the Pueblo Indians and the Maidu of California (Hallowell 77 f., Koppers 1933, 48. no Samoyed and Eskimo, Hallowell 74, Koppers 48). In southern countries, other large hunting animals have taken the place of the bear.

In 1945 the American ethnologist Frank Gouldsmith Speck was able to establish that the bear, honoured and sacrificed by the Canadian Munsee-Mahican with solemn rites, is the messenger and representative of the heavenly bear, of Ursa maior (The celestial bear comes d.own to earth. Reading, Pa. 1945). As is to be expected in our acceleratedly degenerating century, little or no attention has been paid to Speck's results. Rather, 16 years later (1961) a collection of studies on animal lords and bush spirits appeared under the title "The Supernatural Owners of Naturel", which was otherwise very useful as a collection of material. In it the Swedish editor Ake Hultcrantz (60) commented on the unique meaning of the bear: "It cannot in and per se be the bear's dangerousness and strength that has given it this individual position...The cause of the special position of the bear cult is rather to be sough in deep lying historical conditions". The persistence with which one sticks to absurd words like "supernatural" and searches for "deep lying historical conditions" instead of changing to constellations is astonishing, but makes you rather understand in which way your view of cosmology is continuously obstructed. The persistence is all the more astonishing since other relevant works had appeared in the meantime, especially those by Otto Zerries, who has compiled all available South American, and some Central American material on constellations as lords of the species. (Constellations as expression of hunter's mentality. Paideuma 5,1951,220 35; Wild and Bush Spirits in South America; Wiesbaden 1954; Wild Spirits and Hunting Ritual in Central America. Mitt.Mus.Vkde Hamburg 25, 1959,144 50).

There we learn, for example, that the bush chickens are subject to the Orion Belt, the bees to the Pleiades, the ostriches to the Southern Cross, the tapirs apparently Taurus; the Toba (221) see in two stars of Canis maior or Lepus the lord of all armadillos, in the Taulipang the wasps have their master in a Centaurus star, in the Paressi and Bakairi it is generally said that the animals in the sky are the oldest there are (according to vd. Stones, Zerries Paid.222, Bush Ghosts 355). From Guyana. tribes we hear more about these lords of the game and plants, who are also Kuyuha, i.e. father or mother of the genera, the Kuyuha travels at the appropriate time from his star to earth, to a breeding place where he joins others of his kind, "ready to take temporary residence in the newborn or fertile organisms, which he thus endows with life and activity and leaves only with death when he returns to his home in heaven" (Wild Spirits 130) We also learn that "the breeding places of the animals on earth, where the Kuyuha... meet", are given names "which are identical to those of the stars", so that a breeding place of the ostrich Crux australis would then be called usf... There we encounter a kind of "Uranian" geography, which one would actually be inclined to attribute to the Mesopotamians and Egyptians.

Long before such relatively new news could be found in the already mentioned Jesuit missionary Lafitau from the early 18th century (1,360 f. at Hultcrantz 60 A.29), Canadian Algonquin tribes are of the opinion, que chaque espece a dans le ciel ou dans le pays des âmes le type et le modele de toutes les autres, qui sont contenue dans cette espece: ce que revient aux idées de Platon"; "that every species has the type and model of all conspecifics in heaven or in the land of souls, which amounts to the ideas of Platon". The latter comparison is misleading, but not quite as wrong as it sounds.

Also an old German traveller named Lintschotten felt reminded of Plato's theory of ideas in view of the opinions of the Peruvians, i.e. opinions that originate from a pronounced high cultural area (Bastianian; Culturländer des Alten America 1,490,_603,s.a.Zerries: Wildgeister 131 f.).

The Peruvian constellation chuqui chinchay in Quechua language means "excellent jaguar" (Zerries 131), Robert Lehmann Nitsche (ibid.) has declared to be identical with scorpius, additionally some stars in Ophiuchos, Sagittarius, Ara and Triangulum australis, which I do not buy from him for the time being. In addition, however, Lehmann Nitsche indicates (1928,160 f.), "that apparently in some parts of Peru a really living tiger is meant of course a jaguar was held as an earthly representative of the sidereal chuqui chinchay for cult purposes.

Under high-culture influence also the Pawnee and the Cherokee and other populations which will still be to be mentioned stand, but high-culture influence does not mean that everything and every what in such a way influenced tell, originates from the import package, therefore, you are not worried.

Stansbury Hagar reports about the Cherokee: (Boaz Festschrift 354 f.):
"According to the Cherokee, every living creature on earth is the offspring of an ancestor in heaven, represented by a star or a group of stars. on this ancestor it has received all its characteristics; in fact, the ancestor is definitely considered the only real representative of its kind. His earthly descendants are considered only as his shadows or mirror images or, perhaps more appropriately, as his emanations. It follows naturally that the heavenly prototype has unlimited power over his children, to whom he is bound by irresistible sympathy based on similarity. Whoever wants to achieve anything concerning an animal must first overcome the magical power inherent in every species, which the animal has received from its celestial ancestor as its birth right. This can only be achieved by appeasing the invisible ancestor... The bear hunter, for example, must first appease the heavenly bear before he takes up the pursuit of an animal, because all bears remain invisible to the hunter when they are lying on their backs, their paws in the air, unless the hunter has learned the hunting magic that is valid for their species. There is little doubt that this interesting doctrine of the celestial prototype was common property of the American Indians.

Well, this doctrine was not only common property of the American Indians at all levels of culture. This is well illustrated by the impressive spread of the so-called animal reconciliation rites, which were by no means only for the bear; the bear rites are only best known because good publications have been dedicated to them, first and foremost those by Hallowell (Irving H.: Bear Ceremonialism in the Northern Hemisphere. American Anthropologist 28,1926, 1 175).

Without going into the detailed description of such cults, let us highlight the following points. Especially in Northern Asia, people like to capture very young bears (Hall 121) and raise them in the settlements. (You had heard earlier that a living jaguar was kept in Peru for cult purposes). On the main day of the bear festival the reared bear, or elsewhere the freshly caught bear, is killed, whereby one talks him constantly well into it. The dead animal, or only its stripped fur with head, is laid out in the festival tent on a place of honour in an upright position, served with the best food and then covered with long apologies. It was not the generous hosts who killed him, it was quite different people, if the bear was not to blame for everything. The Giljaks accuse the toad of killing the bear, the valleys in Kamchatka "the violent Russians", the Lapps call the Poles and Finns, the Algonquin Ojibway accuse the "Englishmen". We heard the same from African hunter peoples in Baumann (Nyama 216, Wild Spirits 232 ff.): "one shifts the blame on others, calls the killing an accident, emphasizes, for example, that 'only the ivory of the elephant is needed as a commodity', that the animal itself gave cause for the killing, etc.". Also "one reproaches the leopard that he had to be killed because he had broken the law. Not differently the Guarayu in Brazil deal with jaguars that have fallen into the trap; they ask the dead jaguar not to take "revenge on our little one because you have been caught and killed by your own ignorance. For it was not we who deceived you, it was you yourself. Our men only set the trap... they never thought to capture you." (Zerries 139) From the Bugre (=Shokleng = Kaingang) tribe in Eastern Brazil, which has remained purely hunting, there are reports of tapir ceremonies which, according to Zerries (Paideuma 8,1962,106), "are a perfect reminder of the bear ceremonies of the Ainu and other northern Eurasian peoples. The body of the killed tapir is erected, i.e. placed on its hind legs (!), sprinkled with 'tapir grass', the animal's preferred food, and its soul is appeased with kind words, so that it does not keep the other tapirs away from the hunter. Among the Selknam on the large Tierra del Fuego island (according to Gusinde 1931, 280,707, near Zerries 1962, 105 6), an impeccable population of hunters, the hunter says to the hunted fox, whom he skins: "Dear fox, I am not ill-disposed towards you. I like you and do not want to harm you. But I need your meat because I am hungry, and for my children I need your soft fur. Don't be angry with me. One day I will surely catch one or the other of your relatives, I will skin them as well. With that I will put together a nice coat and we will eat the meat when we are hungry. Don't be angry, dear fox, I'm usually very fond of you."
Such reconciled animals return home and tell heaven how well they were treated. "The ritual of reconciliation", Baumann said about the African material, "the ritual of reconciliation is often almost tied to the request to bring other animals to the hunter." The bear is addressed: "You must not get angry. Free from your troublesome body, hurry joyfully to the Lord of the mountains and the forest"(ef. Hallowell 121,Ainu); "Tell your brothers how well you have been with us and tell them to come to us too. The Finns, who first of all made the bear believe that it was all its own fault (Holmberg 426), bid farewell to the dead bear with the words (ibid.443)
Say, when you left here, when you returned to the forest, no one maltreated me there, honeycombs were given to me to eat, sweet honey potion to drink.

The Lapps are of the opinion that a properly reconciled bear, whose bones have been carefully preserved, "stands up again and can be shot again", and. Rasmussen reported of the Eskimo (in Friedrich 31, n.1): "The fur and the head of my first seal was hidden outside on the ice, so that I should later be able to catch the same seal again ... Water is trickled into the mouth of the dead seal. When he becomes a seal again, he likes to be caught again by the hunter who gave him water. When moving to new hunting grounds, the skulls of the seals should be laid down so that the eye sockets point in the direction of the travel route. Then the souls of the seals you have already caught will follow you, and you will catch them again in the new hunting ground". The Yuracare' in Eastern Bolivia collect all the bones of land animals, birds and fish, "so that the animals of the killed species do not become angry and allow them to be killed again" (Zerries 169).

The bones, as emphasized at the beginning, must be carefully stored, "otherwise," the Bushmen had said, "the light of the starry sky will fade" or the heavenly gamekeeper will not be able to revive them. In North Asia, bear skulls are still sometimes laid out in a special way, yes, the Giljaks lay out real bear cemeteries. And this fact has made experts like Hallowell, Koppers, Friedrich think. (Hall.161 f., A.696, Koppers 52, Friedr. ). Friedrich remarks: "Prehistory in Europe shows remarkable parallels to such bear burials. The Dragon's Hole in the Tamina Valley and other Swiss and Southern German caves //Mixnitz Steiermark, Koppers, Anthropos 27,1932,978 ff.11 from Middle if not Early Stone Age times contain skulls and bones of bears, partly well ordered behind artificially erected walls and embedded in real stone boxes. Among the rock paintings of southern France there are bison, boar, mammoth, wild horse and often the bear, among them a painting in the cave Trois Frères, Arriège, which shows the king of the forests pierced by many arrows and spitting his blood. Let us consider that traces of bear worship can be traced back to Roman times in Gaul and Helvetia...so we cannot exclude the possibility that the culture of hunting and the cult of the bear flourished in Stone Age Europe". Nobody has closed his mind and, as already mentioned, a chronological table in the Time Life series "Early Man" lists the bear cult under the date of 40 000. Among the images of bears carefully counted and described by Othenio Abel (Abel + Koppers: Ice Age Bear Representations and Bear Cults, Palaeobiologica 5,1932, 7 64) in Les Combarelles alone, 20 (p.14), a peculiarity is added in the cave of Montespan (Haute Garonne); one sees there "a bear's trunk modelled in clay (without head, while a real bear's skull was found between the forefeet of this statue), with numerous smaller and larger holes", as if the figure had been shot or struck (Koppers 52). Frobenius later found a similar body made of clay in West Sudan, where a lion or leopard had its fur and head stripped off and slipped over the clay figure. Even later, Jensen heard of a headless animal figure in southern Ethiopia, with which rites that had been kept secret were anxiously linked, but the local farming tribes there had, or had converted the animal: the skin and head of a young bull, i.e. a domestic animal, were slipped over the clay calotte. Amazingly enough, even in East Africa this not very obvious custom has been preserved, even if it is disfigured.

I hope that you will respect the importance of the bear's calotte in Montespan and the burial of bear skulls and bones in Swiss, southern German and Austrian caves; in particular, you give us the authority to derive the recent bear ceremonies and their corresponding rites in honour of other animals straight from the Upper Palaeolithic. One could answer the incessant scepticism with Ljungman (in Hultcrantz 83): "To find a direct proof that the bear festival of the Swedish Laplanders was moved to the Stone Age is certainly too much to ask for.
The material about the animal reconciliation rites could be multiplied at will, and other testimonies could be given for the unwillingness of the old hunters to kill, or to commit to the acts of killing that they nolens volens organized. This is most clearly seen in the custom, which is widespread in the hunting area of Africa, of rushing animals to death in the barrel, which in some tribes is part of the initiation of the boys (HB Vkde 31,80,91, 132:Ila). Still at the beginning of this century Siegfried Passarge stated (Buschm.d.Kalahari 71 f.): "Some bushmen...today still accomplish the feat of rushing a large antelope to death all alone". When the already mentioned missionary Bleek, to whom we owe almost all news about the extinct Bushmen of the Cape Province, visited one of his last guardians, Kabbo, in prison, he was told what Kabbo would do after his release, and he said the following: "In the morning I would hunt the rabbit. I would make him ... jump up from his camp and drive him away until he fell down dead. So I would shoot rabbits, so that I would bring death to them while hunting, at the same time as the sun. Therefore I hunt him in the sun, that the sun may kill him with its fire for me, that I may eat him killed by the sun."

So the sun should kill the hare for Kabbo. And there is something else to report, an experience that Frobenius had with pygmies in the Congo jungle, and which possibly first caused him to think about "astral animal painting". (cultural history 127 f. archetype 16 18).
Frobenius says (128 30): " This measure must be based on a very essential and meaningful idea, which is not easily interpreted. It is clear that sun and blood play an important role. The image of the animal is obviously equated with the animal itself and so is the arrow shot with the sunbeam. Here seems to me the solvable part. For a reference to what has been said about the cult of the bear shows that the anxious striving of these old cult beliefs is directed towards shifting the action of killing on to another. The Giljaks hold the toad responsible as a murderer", etc. "So the desire to switch on another force should be assumed to be the determining factor in the morality here, too. Of course, such an interpretation need not be exhaustive, for the explanation follows that the 'blood of the antelope would destroy the hunters if the image were not erased at sunrise'. So the image does not simply have to be destroyed, but destroyed at sunrise. Thus, with a first ray, the sun takes the life of the animal, and with a second ray it turns the danger of blood revenge from the hunter away, which probably means that the sun gives back the life of the antelope.

I don't want to throw this interpretation to the wind, but we still have to look for other game lords, those who are not giant specimens of the species, like the aforementioned Bushman God, Mantis, who is so cunning in its creatures, first for his beloved eland the male eland is to be looked for in Procyon (alpha Canis minoris), the corresponding eland cows in alpha beta Geminorum (Wischnewski 71) then for Hartebeest: the male specimen is found in Taurus, the female is marked by Betelgeuse.

We have information from various continents about human-shaped animal lords, about dwarfs, males with feet turned backwards, mixed creatures or insects, e.g. with the Naskapi on Labrador a certain biting fly is the mistress of the fish; animal lords also appear in whirlwinds, fire and other phainomena, and it is almost never possible to tell at first glance who or what it might be.

Among the pleasant exceptions are the Chukchi of Northeast Asia, where the North Star is considered the master of all game (Bogoras:Chuckchee Mythology, 1912, 91). It has boxes (trunks, 96) filled with seals, white whales, walruses, grey and blue foxes, squirrels, rabbits, reindeer, and wolves, and it boasts: " I am ...(a possessor of) the Game Substance. I distribute it among the Lower People... I always look to (the wants of) the Lower People" His oceanic colleague among the Giljaks, the ruler of the sea, whose heavenly location is unfortunately not indicated, is an old man with an ice-grey beard who lives with his wife in a yurt on the bottom of the Sea of Okhotsk. "In the yurt there are a lot of c a s t e n filled with the most diverse fish roe, which he throws into the sea from time to time in handfuls. At certain times he sends out unmissable troops of salmon, without which the giljake would not be able to survive; it is also he who sends out the killer whales to establish order in the sea and to drive all kinds of animals of the sea towards the giljake.11 (Sternberg, ARW 8,253).

Apart from the general owner of the animals, Polarstern, we also hear from a certain Pic vu'cin, a "special owner" of wild reindeer and of land game in general. He is not longer than a finger, and his footprints are those of a mouse. He insists on the strict observance of all old hunting rites and sacrificial rites. The thumb rides on a tiny sled of grass; the sled is sometimes pulled by a reindeer, sometimes by a mouse, and what bears are to man, lemmings are to him: he hunts them down and loads them onto his sled (Paulson: Schutzgeiste 19611 61 f.). Among the Tungus in the Baikal region, a white-haired old man is responsible for the game, and some say that he uses a white stallion to move around, others say that he uses a tiger (82 f.), while the Yenisei Tungus only know that the Lord of the animals lives on the "third cloud" of the upper world (85 f.). During a hunting ceremony the shaman goes on a so-called soul journey to this "Lord of the Taiga and animals" in order to "ask for different game (i.e. the 'souls' of the animals), which the Tungus need for their food" (86). Also with the Yukagiris it belonged to the tasks of the Shamenen, "to travel to the Owners of the Mountains, of the Earth, the Rivers, Lakes, the Ocean, and to the Keepers of the separate species of animals, and, beg them for a plentiful supply of animals during the hunt" (Jochelson with Paulson 56 f.). The Yakuts' aged animal master is considered to be particularly funny and noisy, and the mistress of the fishes accompanying him is said to be characterized by cheerfulness and loquaciousness (91 f.). Among the Buryats the horses have their special lord and protector, called Solbon, and that is the planet Venus (Holmberg, FFC 125, 197 ff.). As we hear from Holmberg, it is said that "the star is a great horse lover who rides across the celestial region with a lasso in his hand. He owns a large group of horses which a servant keeps watch over".

In Central America, that is. in Honduras and Nicaragua, the Tepehuana say of the master of deer and fish that he is a dwarf who rides on a stag; among the Cáhita the chief of the animals is a black dwarf, among the North American Shoshone a dwarf who screams like a toddler and carries bow and arrows, of the Ute only a "little man in the mountains" is spoken of (Haekel, Mitt.Mus.Hamburg 25, 68). With Maya descendants in southern and central Honduras "as the actual patron saint of hunting and fishing, but at the same time also of agriculture ... Xulab, the morning star. One imagines him as a bearded, ugly man... He was the older brother of Kin, the sun, and later became Venus. According to a tradition, Xulab /Venus is the owner of all animals in the world. He keeps deer, peccari, antelope, turkey, in short all quadrupeds and birds in G e h e g e n. so that people can come to him for meat. For his protégés he has planted a large cornfield. The following myth is told about him: Once, at the instigation of a magician, his wife lit up his ugly face at night and laughed along with it, he jumped up and all his animals broke out of their enclosures and scattered in all directions. Enraged, he decided to leave and become the morning star. Before that... he gave the lords of the mountains and valleys, Mam , the dominion over the animals and said: "People can no longer have tame animals. But if they obey my laws, I will give them meat, corn and other plants. My law is this: Before the hunt, people must keep night watch and in the hours before dawn they must burn copal resin for me and ask me for some of my animals. This shall be done when I am still at home and I have not yet risen above the horizon. At the place of the hunt or before they plant a field, they have to smoke copal and pray again, but this time to the Mam's. For the Mam's will now do what I have done so far, namely release the animals from their enclosures into the forest so that they can be easily hunted down by the hunters". As ordered, the hunters pray to Venus before the hunt; one prayer is: "O God, holy star, my grandfather, my grandmother, I will now disturb your heart, I will now disturb your children. As it is your wish, you must give me some of your animals."

"Among the Cuna in Panama, the planet Venus, called Pugsu, is considered a great hunter. "If the Cuna find an entire whale landed on the cliffs, they believe Pugsu killed it... Pugsu is left-handed, therefore left-handed people harpoon best" Zerries, Paideuma 5, 229).

In the Ge tribe of the Serents in Eastern Brazil, "the planets Mars and Venus appear in human form to the chosen ones, first at night in a dream, then during the day in the forest or in the steppe, always in the same place, calling them to themselves and teaching them to become a good hunter or medicine man, as we hear from Curt Unkel, called Nimuendaju', (1942, 85 f.The hunter eats as much as possible of the game he captures after the first vision, but then abstains from eating meat for the rest of his teaching. But it was during his time of instruction from the planet Venus (which lasted 12 days, see Zerries: Spirits 21) that Nimuendajú's guardian killed a surprising amount of game. "The planet Mars personified in the demon Hieparowawa, appears... "usually appears to a lone hunter on decency. His disciples paint the entire body black except for the face, hands and feet, which are painted red, for that is the appearance of the demon. If they wish to meet him in the forest during the six days of instruction, they swing a plywood called 'Roar of the Hieparo wawal, and the demon immediately appears' (Zerries: Spirits 21).
Nimuendajú (Zerries:spirits 21) also tells us how Mars and Venus came to their profession and on whose behalf they are said to act: "In the days when the Waptokwa, or sun, was still on earth, all animals were human (Nimuendaju Lowie 1944, 183 f.). As a result, there was no hunting, and people ate each other. One day the people offered Waptokwa roasted human meat, and he ate it, but he was annoyed. He called all the people together and walked along a liberated path right through the gathered crowd. On one side, everyone was turned into animals, but those on the other side remained human. Since then, the latter no longer eat human flesh, but hunt and eat the game. But Waptokwa, the sun, went up to heaven with the moon. In today's hunting ritual, the sun and moon are in the serentee... the sun and moon are not directly related. For since their departure from the earth, no one has seen the two deities (they are not identical with the celestial bodies, which also have another name). (Nimuendaju 1942,85 f.). All the connections between Waptokwa and Wairie (the moon) and the human being in the serents are made through the stars. They grant knowledge and power to man not only as agents of the two great deities, but also in their own responsibility." (Nimuendaju 1942,85 f.)

The Serents are suitable for an exogamous two-class organization, and as many phenomena as possible are classified into these two classes (or moieties). The moon and night people paint their bodies with series of longitudinal stripes, but the day and sun class with circles (16 f.). The Sun's followers include the planets Venus and Jupiter, the Orion Belt and kappa Orionis, " who, strangely enough, is identified with Adam". The Moon's "most important companion" is the planet Mars; in addition there are the Pleiades and the vultures, "considered celestial animals".Where these vultures could be found is unknown, as unknown as further assignments of stars and the remaining planets to one or the other class, and Nimuendaju explains (83):"the bulk of their ancient faith has dropped out of the memory of the present generation', meant is the pre-war period, today the case is anyway hopeless-specifically thanks to the vigorous tutoring of missionaries, who nevertheless could not prevent that Christian personalities were incorporated into the dual system; Christ is identified with the sun, Peter with the moon, "and a tailed black demon, who lies in ambush for the souls of the dead, not with the devil, but with the Pope."
We find the sun, or rather the sun god, as animal lords among others with the Guarani tribe of the Mbwiha in Paraguay (Zerries 18): "Namandu, the god of the sun, strictly speaking, the spirit of the rising sun, not the star itself, is invoked by the hunters in a prayer before the start of the hunt: 0 Namandu, allow us to kill an animal on your way. Bring the animals to us." The Selknam on Tierra del Fuego apparently consider the sun to be the lord of the fishes (20 according to Gusinde 1931,711), for other animals the fox seems to be responsible, to whom the only animal reconciliation ceremony of the Selknam is also dedicated, which we have already heard about. Not directly with the Selknam, but with the Haush living nearby in the southernmost Patagonia, the fox, "which usually appears in the disguise of a trickster" (cf. 122 in Toba), takes on a very similar role as the sun god insulted by the human meat dish with the Serente. Once upon a time, all animals were tame and lived close to the dwellings of men. This happy state came to a sudden end when someone put something foul-smelling under the fox's nose. He immediately went wild and invited the other animals to follow him into the wild, which they did. If we could rely on the fact that the fox of the Patagonians is exactly the same as the fox, the Aguara Runpa of the Chiriguano, we would at least know where he is "at home": in Scorpius, more precisely, in a group of stars in Scorpius and Ophiuchos; but the stars kappa lambda ypsilon are his spade, which he had won by means of a bet from the Lord of the Armadillos (Nordenskiöld:Indian Life 269 f.(Nordenskiöld: Indian Life 269 f.; Zerries 119); but he himself, the Zorrodios, can be seen as little as the tapir god, who lives in neighbouring Sagittarius stars.

There is only so much to say about the most frequently treated animal lord in literature, the Corupira of the Tupi languages speaking Indians of Brazil and the Amazon region: He usually appears as a small man of 3 feet height; he is "bald, but at the. He is "bald, but all over the rest of his body covered with long hair, with only one eye, with blue or green teeth, large ears, legs without joints, feet always bent backwards and of extraordinary physical strength" (Teschauer, Anthropos 1,1906,26, Zerries 9). Sometimes he rides on a stag, also on a rabbit, but mostly on a bush or wild boar. He always wields a whip or riding crop, with which he chastises the hunters' dogs if necessary, and then ties them up until they die of hunger. What Korupira, just like the Central American Mam, the representatives of Xulab / Venus, particularly resents is that hunters only wound animals instead of killing them properly, allegedly because he, the Korupira, then has the arduous task of finding healing herbs to heal the wounded game. (Zerries 11). He is always receptive to tobacco: if the hunter gives him some, Korupira makes him happy, whereas the gamekeeper of the North Asian Yukagiri prefers brandy (Paulson 60).

In the Sipáia-Tupi (on Xingu. Central Brazil), it is not the camaphari himself who rides a wild boar, but his cousin, who had once taken hold of Kumaphari's huge herd of wild boar, or rather wanted to do so. Originally, all these wild boars had been human, but they had aroused Kumaphari's anger, so he transformed them and locked them into a rock. Said cousin wanted to get hold of these private wild pigs and let them all out of the rocks. As a punishment Kumaphari put him on a wild boar (made from a basket) and appointed him master of this species. "He is a small male that rides on one of the animals of the herd. If you shoot a wild boar, you often hear him warning the others by an alarm call" (Nimuendajú, Anthropos 14/15 (1919/20, 1013 f , Zerries 93) Without drawing hic et nunc conclusions from this, it should be noted that the Sipaia call the Milky Way "wild boar path" (hozabapa,Nimuendaju 1012).

Conclusion

If one cannot help but admit that the "real" animals, the huge generic specimens to which the souls of the terrestrial animal species return between their incarnations, are constellations, then I would like to know what the animal lords are supposed to be who sit or ride on these animal constellations, if not planets, especially since we have already encountered Venus and Mars as game and hunting guardian spirits, in Central America, at the Serents in Eastern Brazil and in North Asia. The animal constellations they prefer could be precursors of what were later called "houses" or "hypsomata/exaltations" of the planets.