If these features were carved into the rock, who did it, and when? This question is not easily answered, but then the Sphinx is supposed to keep us asking questions. Perceval should have asked more; Oedipus asked too many - it seems a balance is required, an Aristotelian ‘mean’. The fact that we could easily reel off a list of usual suspects at least attests to the richness of cultural history in this area. Such a list might include the French Freemasons (the American Gutzon Borglum, creator of the Mount Rushmore monument where faces were carved into a mountainside, was a Worshipful Master in a New York Lodge, and had studied sculpture at the Académie Julian in Paris, France); it is also traditional for the Knights Templar to appear in such speculative lists of usual suspects (and they did after all have commanderies in Aix and the nearby region, for example at Rousset, a village whose territories stretch to the foot of Sainte-Victoire, and this Rousset later passed to the Knights Hospitaller (i.e. of Malta), who also had a commandery in Aix, while the first mention of Rousset is in a document from 1050 in which it is called Rosselun – a name with a somewhat familiar ring); speaking of peoples who set up locally, next on the list are the Romans (Aix was a Roman city); back in time a little further and we come to the local Celto-Ligurians (just up the hill from the spot affording this view was formerly the site of their capital prior to Roman conquest (the archaeological site is now called the Oppidium of Entremont), and apparently they held the mountain sacred to Ventour, the god of winds); the Greeks, masters of sculpting stone, come next on the list (nearby Marseilles was a Greek city from around 700 years BC); the Phoenicians are also on this list (Marseilles was formerly a Phoenician trading post prior to the arrival of the Greeks); then come the Egyptians (these Phoenicians at various times were under the rule of the Egyptians, who employed them for their shipping skills and would through them have been aware of the places they traded with, and we know the Egyptians were capable of massive carvings out of rocky cliff faces, and out of bedrock, as with the Great Sphinx of Giza); and while we’re at it, why leave out those legendary Atlanteans? (This Provencal region bordering the Med falls into that which in Plato’s story was under Atlantean rule. Atlantis, according to Plato, had warm and cold springs, while Aix is the site of thermal springs, used for example by the Romans to supply a system of pleasure baths. Today many natural fountains are to be found in the streets of the old city.)
Is that everyone? Egyptians, Atlanteans...oh, we’re nearly forgot extraterrestrials. According to sources such as Murray Hope and Barbara Hand-Clow, the feline/leonine and the canine forms resonate morphically with beings in the Sirius star-system. According to Hand-Clow’s channelled Pleiadian Agenda, these Sirians are masters of the 6D morphic fields that govern manifestation in 3D, just as a strong Idea can result, through the principle of synchronicity, in significance arising out of apparent chance, the shuffling of tarot cards, throwing of the I Ching, or indeed the mutation of DNA. Cat, dog, lion, panther – these biological forms have evolved towards Sirian morphogenic blueprints, by synchronicity. Why shouldn’t geology be subject to the same synchronicity principle?
Cats are great teachers...stop moving, freeze, and hold a posture....I, Anubis, lie with my back stretched out...with my back haunches pulling my spine back, which raises serpentine energy in my body. With my paws forward, I stare out through time and hold geometrical forms in space.
The Pleiadian Agenda, Barbara Hand-Clow
Plato’s Atlantis, if we go by the dates in the story, existed in this region back in the period we call the Late Palaeolithic. At this time there was in fact an intriguing culture in this region. It is known to archaeology as the Magdalenian Culture. This was, in archaeological terms, a very long time ago, and so above ground indications of the nature of their culture are scant to say the least, but they left astounding artwork preserved in caves underground. For the purposes of writing it seems to me best to pick a favourite candidate and follow through on that possibility, and, interstellar multidimensional influences notwithstanding, I’m picking the Magdalenians, for reasons I shall outline below.
First of all, let’s briefly ask if it is possible for people prior to the technological age to achieve such a feat. When the presidential faces were carved into Mount Rushmore, the process was laborious, despite the use of dynamite. Large amounts of stone were removed, but in the case of Sainte-Victoire we are probably not talking about a task on that kind of scale, and the mountain is limestone, obviously not nearly as hard as the granite of Mount Rushmore. If we assume the leonine angles of the forehead are just a happy coincidence, then we are just talking about a few well placed incisions into the limestone, rather than a complete re-sculpting.
Besides, we know that, long before the use of dynamite, hours of labour could produce similarly impressive results. Witness for example the colossal statues of the seated Ramses II carved from the cliff face at Abu Simbel.
In a considerably earlier period the Egyptians had carved the Great Sphinx from the Giza bedrock, giving it a well sculpted human face. (Exactly when is not entirely clear, though most Egyptologists would go for the Fourth Dynasty, and few would suggest later, while there are also, famously, a whole complex of intriguing indications of an earlier date, perhaps putting it way back to the time of the Late Magdalenians.)
Ancient objects, such as the Sphinx or Parthenon, are especially wonderful places to see these fields because they have remained in 3D for so long....This is why great art often portrays sacred places and ancient artefacts.
The Pleiadian Agenda, Barbara Hand-Clow
So why have I chosen the Magdalenians as my favourite candidates? Geographically, it works better than an Egyptian theory, but there is more to it than that. The possibility first occurred to me when, while visiting Aix, I read in a local guide book that there is a cave up in the side of Sainte-Victoire which “shows evidence of Magdalenian cultic ritual.” I don’t now have a record of which guidebook that was, but from reading another book Sainte-Victoire Cezanne 1990 produced by the Granet museum in Aix in conjunction with one of their exhibitionsI have learntthat the cave in question is La Grotte du Petit Chanteur, and that it is located half-way up the southern slope, at an altitude of about 700m, and that it was found to contain flint tools such as burins (stone chisels used for engraving stone and bone) and vestiges of fauna such as ibex and chamois, which G.Onoratini attributes to the Upper Magdalenians, who occupied regions to the west of here but are attested elsewhere this far east into Provence. Why “cultic ritual”? Well I suppose several hundred metres of sheer rock would have been a hell of a long way to climb every time they wanted to pop out to the shops and back. In other words, it’s unlikely that they used the cave as a living space. It is also this southern side of the mountain on which the lion’s face was engraved.
I also knew that the Upper Paleolithic cave painters were appreciators of simulacra – natural formations that look like an intelligible form. There is a well–known example in one of their caves, namely Peche Merle, where a natural jutting outcrop of cave wall in the shape of a horse’s head – Category 1 - has been used as the starting point for a painting of a horse – Category 2.
The art of Peche Merle cave is attributed to Upper Paleolithic people in the region prior to 20000BC, known as the Gravettian Culture, while it is thought that some of the paintings may be from the period around 16000BC onwards known as Magdalenian. I’ll be honest, I’m not familar with all the minutiae of the differences between one European cave painter people and another – they’re all Arcadians too me (in the sense of ἀρχή, “very old”, “original”)- but it’s quite obvious that traditions were handed down right across both periods. In the image above first spots were added to make a horse which had the natural horse-headed rock shape as its head, then later a smaller horse was placed over the top of this, one whose solid black neck tapers to a strangely small head inside the bigger one. Our lion, too, has a head disproportionately small by comparison with the rest of the body, and from this evidence it seems such things were accepted by the Gravettian/Magdalenian eye.
If they used this mode of perception below ground – letting simulacra come to life - chances are they used the same mode above, and since they and lions were both simultaneously in this region for thousands of years, they would surely have been aware of, appreciated and wondered at the leonine profile presented by Sainte-Victoire from this direction. (Panthera leo spelaea, a little bigger than a modern African lion, lived from 370,000 to 10,000 years ago in regions ranging from Western Europe to Eastern Asia.) Enhancing the natural endowment with the addition of the features of the face is simply the same activity that they carried out underground, just on a larger scale.
The painting of a second horse over the first has implied to archaeologists that this part of the rock wall was associated with this animal over an extended period, and, fitting with this view, the recently published (October 2008) results of uranium/thorium comparison dating work of European cave art has lead to the conclusion that individual cave art images often evolved over several thousand years. This reminds us of what we know of the Australian aboriginal rock art used for initiation into the Dreamtime. Sites were accorded a long-term mythological association, with the artworks expressing this being touched up and added to over long periods of time. The stories about these totemic ancestral figures were told to the initiate in conjunction with seeing the art at the mythologized site, and this process was treated with care and reverence because it was felt that it could have a potent effect on the consciousness of the initiate, so these are Mysteries in the true Greek sense.
Painting, whether on cave walls or bark shelters, is one of the ways in which the order of the Dreaming is presented to humans [in Australian Aboriginal culture]. Another way is through their observation of the landscape itself, created as it was through ancestral activity.
The Perception of the Environment, p.118. Tim Ingold
Kurunba [numinosity] is a metaphysical expression denoting the presence of a cultural layer within the landscape form itself that has been inspired by mythological contact with the Dreaming.
The Mysteries of the Dreamtime, James Cowan
Executing and maintaining rock painting was a key part of the ambit of rituals and responsibilities vested in those responsible for particular sites – an inseparable component of the cycle of myths, songs, and rituals through which Aborigines interpret , invoke and harness the powers of their physical and spiritual environment....Painting skills, subject matter and clan designs were handed down patrilineally as a type of apprenticeship, with degrees of symbolism and subject matter deepening with advancing age and respective stages of initiation.
Ancient Ochres, p. 51,Roberts and Parker.
In the special learning process of initiation, boys are often taken to sacred places which are often secret places. Their sacredness is sometimes marked by art of one form or another, whether portable objects, stone or earth arrangements or rock pictures....A Ngarinyin elder says: “I take the Mandangarri boy to the place. I say, this is your totem: you belong here.”
Rock Paintings of Aboriginal Australia, p.23. Godden and Malnic.
The nature of true initiation is universal and independent of the particulars of culture. It is the activation of resonance with ancestral or at least earlier cultural morphic fields because “the beauty held in form through time by caring humans centers you in 3D and expands via 6D morphic fields. You tingle and feel awestruck....This helps you to feel that you are free, that you are in harmony.” Sainte-Victoire would not have been just an image of a lion or lioness without some accompanying myth, poem, song, dance. Perhaps it was a story explaining how he/she was turned to stone. We can guess that the character was imbued with the qualities of magnificence appropriate for such a vast scale. Quite possibly he/she was seen as the first ancestor of a lion clan. Intellect alone, however, is not sufficient to reconstruct the story, leaving us little choice but to fill the gap with something else. Enter Aslan.
I also knew that European “Arcadians” carved stones, a fact essential to my arguing their case as the sculptors of Victoire’s leonine countenance, but at first I was only aware of the fine portable works. Later on, however, I learnt something that struck me as being enormously significant: the Magdalenians are known by archaeologists to have carved animal forms into the rock of limestone cliffs on a monumental scale. In Cap Blanc, in the same region as the amazing Lascaux caves, i.e. the Dordogne, there is a limestone cliff onto which were carved images of horses, bison and reindeer, around 15000 years ago. Some of these carvings are as much as two metres long, and the total amount of sculpting work at Cap Blanc is considerable. When the area was first excavated several typical Magdalenian tools were found, along with large stone objects which archaeologists are confident were of the type that had been used to carve these figures out of the rock. Perhaps it was the work of these Stone Age Michelangelos that was the clincher for me. If a cave up in the side of Victoire evidences their presence, then they were certainly scaling the faces of Victoire; if their underground work shows that they liked natural animal simulacra then here, in the form of Sainte-Victoire, was one they would have adored, and if they were capable of carving into limestone cliff-faces, nothing was to stop them from carrying out this awesome work of art, of sacred landscape enhancement: the lion face of Sainte-Victoire.
