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(More customer reviews)Usually I don't bother to review books I do not like, but I feel so strongly about the subject of Aczel's book--the prehistoric painted caves of Europe--that I feel I have to warn unwary readers about this book. It seems to be directed toward a general audience yet dresses itself up as a scholarly work. Its dogmatism is illogical and offensive.
In between narratives about his personal visits to caves (two of which I myself have visited, Niaux and Pech Merle) and to other places such as the northernmost native village of Alaska, Aczel tries to survey and pick apart earlier actual experts on the caves, of which he demonstrably is not, as well as to promote the outdated, neoFreudian, structuralist theories of André Leroi-Gourhan, theories which are based on a pseudoscientific reasoning that posits that each "sign [in the caves] has one of two meanings: male or female," as do the incredible, numinous depictions of animals and a few humans and human-animal figures. When you realize that for Leroi-Gourhan bisons are female and horses are male, with similar divisions for the other animals, you begin to understand how preposterous his ideas are.
Meanwhile, Aczel discredits the theory of today's foremost expert on the subject, Jean Clottes (with David Lewis-Williams), that the art represents shamanism. Like Leroi-Gourhan, Clottes and Lewis-Williams feel compelled to bolster their theory with science (in The Shamans of Prehistory: Trance and Magic in the Painted Caves), a fact Aczel conveniently ignores, just as he shows an egregious ignorance about shamanism (did he even read Mircea Eliade's great work, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, on the subject? There is no indication he did). Calling their theory "ludicrous," Aczel claims Clottes and Lewis-Williams maintain "the purpose of all Paleolithic cave art was shamanistic," yet they clearly say, "it would be naive to hope for one complete explanation of parietal art" (The Shamans of Prehistory). Sadly, Aczel is just that naive.
Aczel would have been far better off providing a survey of the history of modern exploration and ideas about European prehistoric cave art, a description of his own experience, and an explanation of his own original thoughts on the topic. Apparently he has none. His book has almost nothing of the cathedral of his title and not enough of the cave.
Having said this, I must say I agree that the Cro-Magnons depicted a dichotomist world of binary oppositions--archetypes in other words. I do not agree that these archetypes were all sexual, far from it. If you want a much better introduction to Cro-Magnon art, read Journey Through the Ice Age, by Paul G. Bahn and Jean Vertut.
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