Bird on a Stick: Is it the oldest surviving symbol in the world?

A waterbird perched on a pole.

The first picture above is about 15,000 years old, painted on the cave wall in Lascaux, France. The other photographs are of what the Koreans call ‘sotdae’, and I took some of them a few days ago in the Onyang  Folk Museum in Asan.

In my last post, I shared photos of wild geese arriving here, and it’s possible that the sotdae bird is based on such geese, although more likely, it’s meant to be a duck. Sotdae were traditionally erected at the entrances of villages alongside wooden anthropomorphic totem poles called janseung.  They were the protective spirt guardians who watched over the village, keeping it secure.

 A special side interest of mine is Upper Palaeolithic cave art, and for some time I’ve been wondering about the similarity between the Upper Palaeolithic image and these Korean sotdae.   I’ve also  wondered about the humanoid or ‘theriomorphic’ or ‘therioanthropic’ figure near the bird on a pole, which, compared to the bison nearby that seems to have its innards falling out as a result of a spear wound, is so un-naturalistically rendered. It is indeed a fact that human figures are rare in paintings of the Upper Paleolithic, and when they do appear they  are surprisingly abstracted when compared to the amazingly life-like depictions of animals. 

Several theories have been advanced concerning this ensemble, ranging from the possibility that it is a straight narrative record of an encounter in which the human figure was killed by the bison and buried below, to shamanic vision-quest imagery, and cosmological diagrams.  At the Onyang Museum  it suddenly occurred to me that maybe the humanoid figure on the cave wall at Lascaux isn’t meant to be a human at all but rather is a very ancient image of a ‘janseung’, a totem figure. That would explain its curiously rigid torso, its prominent phallus, and strange  bird-like head. 

 Is it really possible that the  Korean sotdae and jamseung are derived from symbolic figures that first were invented tens of thousands of years, and that have travelled across vast geographical distances, sustaining  a broadly similar meaning?  An obvious difference between the people who painted the images at Lascaux and those of the Bronze Age, like those of much later, the Koreans who set up the sotdae and jamseung, is that the former were hunter-gatherers while the latter were agriculturalists. That means that there were no villages for the Upper Palaeolithic people to protect with totems and birds on sticks, set in the ground. Those humans were nomadic. But it may be possible that these symbols were portable for them, and that they set them in a location temporarily, wherever they made their home.  That would mean that their function was basically the same: to protect the tribe. 

 But why a bird on a stick and a fierce theriomorphic totem? Perhaps because humans have always needed is to be reassured that when they establish a habitation   that the environment in which they find themselves will provide optimum conditions. And what are these? In an influential book the British geographer Jay Appleton asked what is it humans prefer most about a landscape, and why. A primary consideration, he concluded, and one that is firmly grounded in evolutionary necessity, is security. He summed this up by saying that they want  ‘to see without being seen’. [1]

 It seems to me that this could be the origin of these two very ancient symbols. The waterbird represents the ‘prospect’, and the totem figure represents  the ‘refuge’. The bird, by its ability to see so far through  a capacity to be airborne and move on water, is almost the paradigm of  the maximum prospect – certainly a prospect denied humans, but  one which they could imaginatively colonise as a possibility, an ideal. The totem figure, meanwhile, was intended to instil fear, to act as a deterring guardian. In this sense,, it guaranteed that the tribe’s location was also a secure refuge. 

It seems plausible to me that this dual necessity –  to be seen without being seen, or to have  a prosect and a refuge – means that  a naturalistic, biological basis for what otherwise might seem to be  magical or metaphysical  symbolism  can go some way to explaining the amazing cultural longevity of the duo that the Korean call the sotdae and jamseung.

What the disembowelled bison in the Lascaux painting means, is anybody’s guess……

[1] Jay Appleton, The Experience of Landscape (1975)