Lion Man, Germany
Sekhmet, Egypt
We Homo Sapiens are the only animals on the planet that have the
ability to envision something that is not seen or has not yet been
created. Imagination is considered to be
the ability to think of what is not.
In the introduction of her book on The Lost Art of Scripture,
Karen Armstrong introduces Lion Man. He
is a small ivory figurine that was found in a southern German cave just before
World War II. The cave did not appear to
have been lived in and may have been used only for rituals, given that the
figurine was found in a remote chamber and had the body of a man but the head
of a cave lion. He is considered to be
40,000 years old and may be the earliest evidence of human religious activity.
Armstrong notes that “The imagination has been the cause of our
major achievements in science and technology as well as in art and religion…neurologists
tell us that in fact we have no direct contact with the world we inhabit. We have only perspectives that come to us
through the intricate circuits of our nervous system…We are surrounded by a
reality that transcends—or ‘goes beyond’ or conceptual grasp.”
That insight prompted me to validate something I had learned
years ago that less than one percent of all light that passes through our
eyes can be processed by us. Our eyes
are miraculous, containing 100 million cells called rods and cones inside the retina,
but the cones can only see a very narrow band of wavelengths on the light
spectrum.
And I was also reminded of the Egyptian pyramid wall art that
most of us have observed over the years which is still being recovered in the
vast desert sands. In that culture over 4,000
years ago gods and goddesses were represented as all of the fundamental
necessities required for sustaining life.
The goddess Sekhmet, daughter of Ra, was believed to lead and protect the
pharaohs during war. She is depicted with
a lioness head and is known for her fierce character.
Hybrid creatures depicted on cave walls and in other art forms over
the millennia “seems to reflect a sense of the underlying unity of animal,
human and divine”, as Armstrong observes, “and shows that from the very
beginning men and women were deliberately cultivating a perception of existence
that differed from the empirical and had an instinctive appetite for a more enhanced
sense of being, sometimes called the Sacred.”
We occasionally have these inspired moments of joyful euphoria in music,
dance, poetry, nature, love, and religion—especially when we experience something
beyond our experience—something heretofore that is not.
