Cave Art, the Primal Hero and the Origins of Mythology | Bernie Taylor, Finding the Face of the Hero
Bernie Taylor spent years identifying previously unrecognized animals in 40,000-year-old cave paintings, and argues that a complete hero's journey encoded in Paleolithic art became the blueprint for every human mythology that followed. His book Before Orion lays out his case.
Covers Bernie's case for pareidolia as the evolutionary origin of religion and all human mythology, the Paleolithic cave art hero's journey he sees as the original template for Hercules, Orion, and Perseus, his view that constellations began as pareidolia found in mountain rock faces before being mapped to the night sky, Jebel Toubkal as the real Mount Atlas and origin of the Atlantis myth, and cave art he says links Iberian Spain to South Africa 36,000 years ago as evidence of prehistoric global connectivity.
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In this episode
Core themes
From Salmon Clocks to the Teacher Panel
Bernie Taylor came to cave art as a naturalist asking how salmon and geese keep time without following one smart leader, then looked for that timing in Upper Paleolithic art about 40,000 years old. In a cave in Spain he spotted an elephant and a maned lion he reads as African, and with a friend he met while living in China he says they identified forty or fifty previously unrecognized animals. On one panel he saw an older man speaking into the ear of an apprentice, and asking what story was being told led him to Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung's common dream elements of mountains, rivers and bears.
Why Bernie Thinks Pareidolia Made Us Human
Bernie Taylor's hypothesis is that what separates us from chimpanzees, Neanderthals and Homo naledi is pareidolia, the capacity to find a pattern and project the psyche into it. There is no bear in the night sky, he says, only a pattern we named and wrapped a Mother Bear story around, and the same instinct finds faces in mountains. Before there were myths, he argues, there was pareidolia, and uniting around shared patterns became a foundation of religion. When Chance Garton notes the skill needs no substance, Bernie agrees: mushrooms give everyone a different vision, while pareidolia gives a group one common image.
A Hero Raised by Mother Animals
In the panels Bernie Taylor reads, the hero leaves his mother and travels among animals that are mostly mothers guarding their young, a giraffe, a bear, an elephant, and by joining with the young he is protected and taught by them. He slays a lion whose pelt, Bernie says, becomes part of the Hercules myth and whose form becomes Leo. Orion, Perseus and Hercules, Bernie argues, are one character at different stages, with Hercules at the journey's end holding the female animals within his form, anima and animus together. Chance Garton adds that pantheons from Greek to Chinese resolve into mother, father and child, and then into one being.
Bernie's Route From Cave Walls to Ptolemy
Bernie Taylor lays out three sources for the Greek constellations: their own oral history, around a dozen from the Mesopotamian Mul.Apin, and the bulk from Egypt, carried back by Eudoxus, who studied among the Egyptian priests at the same time as Plato. Bernie says the Paleolithic inventory often paired two asterisms heading north and south, such as a dolphin and a whale the Greeks split into Delphinus and Cetus, and that the International Astronomical Union later separated stars that sat in two constellations at once. Chance Garton recommends a planisphere and H.A. Rey's The Stars; Bernie adds Stellarium.
Where Bernie Locates the First Star Maps
Bernie Taylor argues that astronomy began on terra firma: people found animals in the rock faces of particular mountains and then placed them in the night sky, which he says is why most constellations make little sense as pictures. He identifies the mountain the Greeks called Atlas as Jebel Toubkal, whose people, today's Amazigh, the ancients called Atlantes, citing Herodotus and a Phoenician account of astronomy being discovered there. Chance Garton adds a linguistic tie between rock and father. Bernie also says a recently publicized South African engraving is exactly the same as one in Iberia, which to him means a culture linked about 36,000 years ago without boats.
Quotes
“How far back in time can we identify who we are? And if we can go so far back in time to find an identity, is that the same person that we still are today?”
“What kind of people would have had the powers required to look at the scripture of stars above and recognize their own stories and that of nature's harmony in them?”
“There is no bear in the night sky. There is no Orion in the night sky as a man. They don't exist. They're pareidolia.”
“If I was the first mind, I would want to lead the minds that came after me or help them, teach them, so that they would understand how to not get stuck.”
“When was the last time we went out to sit on the lawn or sat in the forest and look at the squirrel to see how the squirrel operates?”
“Having the multidimensional approach is much more helpful than trying to take our current version of the constellations projected back in time and assume that we can make any sense of what our ancestors thought.”
“Astronomy doesn't come from people first looking at the night sky and say, "That looks like a bear, and that looks like a horse."”
“What we're talking about is trade and communication of prehistoric people who were highly intelligent. Now, they didn't have iPads, and they didn't wear eyeglasses, and they certainly didn't have podcasts.”
Bernie Taylor is a naturalist, author, and cultural astronomer whose book "Before Orion" traces how Paleolithic cave art encoded the origins of mythology, constellations, and the hero's journey.
See all Bernie episodes→Kyle and Serena Denton are community herbalists creating wild-crafted and organic plant medicines out of Milwaukee since 2015. I have used their teas and tinctures on an almost daily basis for years now. Kyle is a great friend of InnerVerse and has appeared on the channel more times than I can count. These products work, not in the allopathic "pharma-medicine" way, but in a terrain-support, consciousness bolstering plant-teacher sort of way.
