Witnessing the unseen: why cave art captivates us

Iwan Russell-Jones recounts the discovery of stone age art that still connects 30,000 years after its creation.

Iwan Russell-Jones

Iwan Russell-Jones is a Cardiff-based filmmaker and theologian.

A cave wall drawing of wild animals galloping across other images of themselves.

Animals on the wall of Chauvet Cave.

Late on a winter’s afternoon in December 1994, a group of three French cavers received the kind of Christmas present that most spelunkers can only dream of. They were exploring a cave system that they had just discovered in a deep gorge in southeastern France, and were already delighted by some of the natural geological formations that they’d seen. Suddenly they emerged into a large cavern and found themselves standing in front of a series of wall paintings that took their breath away. In the feeble beams of light from their torches the three explorers were stunned to see huge painted panels swarming with vibrant, beautifully crafted images of animals, including species like mammoths, lions and rhinoceros that had long been extinct in Europe.

The only way in and out of the cavern was through a series of narrow passageways and shafts. So, these experienced explorers understood immediately that the paintings must have been created in the Stone Age and that they were probably the first people in tens of thousands of years to see them. They had made a spectacular archaeological discovery and Chauvet Cave - named after the group’s leader, Jean-Marie Chauvet - quickly took its place alongside Altamira and Lascaux as one of the most important sites of prehistoric art.

Although the cavers were very much aware of the historical and scientific value of their discovery, what really overwhelmed them was the nature and quality of the images. In their book, The Chauvet Cave: The Oldest Known Paintings in the World (London: 1996), Chauvet and his colleagues described their feelings in this way:

“During those moments there were only shouts and exclamations; the emotions that gripped us made us incapable of uttering a single word…. Everything was so beautiful, so fresh, almost too much so. Time was abolished, as if the tens of thousands of years that separated us from the producers of these paintings no longer existed. It seemed as if they had just created these masterpieces. Suddenly we felt like intruders. Deeply impressed, we were weighed down by the feeling that we were not alone; the artists’ souls and spirits surrounded us. We thought we could feel their presence; we were disturbing them.”

These modern explorers felt strongly connected across an almost unimaginable chasm of time to the people who had once frequented the cave, and at the heart of this vivid sensation was the images they had created. This is a remarkable thing to consider. ‘Presence’ is certainly a quality that contemporary lovers of art look for and admire in paintings. When viewers stand in front of an original work by the likes of Caravaggio or Van Gogh or Chagall, they often experience a very powerful connection with them. They see their brushstrokes, marvel at their distinctive technique, and get a strong sense of their personal investment in the work, their individual genius and vision. It’s as if the artists are very much alive and kicking and still making their presence felt. Jean-Marie Chauvet and his colleagues had an electrifying sense of that on their first encounters with the cave paintings.

Many of the painted caves discovered across France and Spain have a shrine-like quality and contain evidence that rituals of one kind or another were practised in them.

But the notion of ‘presence’ in art goes way beyond the artist’s personal charisma and touches on an even more profound matter - the feeling that one is somehow being confronted by the mystery and reality at the heart of life. It’s an understanding of presence that modern people, in their enthusiasm for the individual brilliance and skill of artistic superstars, can sometimes overlook. But it’s an important dimension of palaeolithic art which cannot be ignored. The painters of Chauvet Cave were clearly captivated by the multitude of creatures who shared the world with them. Their imaginations were stirred by the grace of the ibex, the power of the bison, the dignity of the horse, the inquisitiveness of the bear, the ferocity of the lion, and their close observation of these animals is striking. There can be little doubt that the behaviour and characteristics of these fellow creatures led them to reflect on the meaning and significance of their own lives. And underlying all of this is a quality of wonder in their paintings, a sense of what the Jewish philosopher, Abraham Heschel, called ‘radical amazement’ at the sheer fact of being alive in such an extraordinary and beautiful world.

Of course, we’ll never know exactly what was in the minds of these ancient artists as they were busy creating their masterpieces twenty thousand years before writing was invented. But archaeologists and anthropologists are convinced that the cave paintings are intimately linked with the beliefs and rituals of Stone Age peoples, and that this was their way of connecting with unseen spiritual realities. Many of the painted caves discovered across France and Spain have a shrine-like quality and contain evidence that rituals of one kind or another were practised in them. It seems that when these people went deep underground to create their images, it was in the belief that they were immersed in, and surrounded by, spiritual power and meaning. As scholar David Lewis-Williams puts it, ‘Every image made hidden presences visible’.

Art still has this power. In the modern world it is rarely produced for overtly religious or ritualistic purposes. Nevertheless, art of any era cannot but bear witness to the unseen, sometimes in ways of which the artists themselves are not aware. Whatever their own philosophical and religious convictions may be, artists who labour in the fields of truth and beauty and meaning cannot help but create work that is allusive and open to transcendence. They cannot avoid the untameable and disruptive presence of their Creator. This will come as no surprise to anyone who has read the Psalms:

Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there also…

The understanding of reality found in the Bible leads to a recognition that wherever people may be on the face of the planet and at whatever point they stand in the long, long history of the human race, they are always in the presence of, and confronted by, the Great I Am, who is the Lord of all times and places.

The spelunkers of Chauvet Cave received an extraordinary gift at Christmas 1994, and through their discovery the rest of the world has been its beneficiary too. It’s a truly wonderful thing to have been given this glimpse into the lives of people so long ago, and through their creative endeavours to recognise our common humanity and the abiding power of art and the imagination. And at the heart of this present to us all was a presence that Jean-Marie Chauvet and his friends felt so vividly. But they were only partly right in linking that sense to the creative artists. For beyond those ancient cave painters is the object of their concern, the One who, as the Welsh poet, Waldo Williams put it, stands before us all as ‘Each witness’s witness, each memory’s memory, life of every life’ - the Presence behind all presence.

Molly Worthen on the charismatic leaders of America's cosmic drama

The plots and plotters that hold us spellbound

Nick Jones

Nick is the senior editor of Seen & Unseen.

Viewed from behind, Trump raises a fist.

Trump on the stump.

White House via Wikimedia Commons.

What happens when Americans lose faith in their religious institutions—and politicians fill the void? In Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump, Molly Worthen sweeping history helps us understand the forces that create leaders and hold their followers captive.

Everyone feels it. Cultural and political life in America has become unrecognizable and strange. Firebrands and would-be sages have taken the place of reasonable and responsible leaders. Nuanced debates have given way to the smug confidence of yard signs. Worthen asks just how did we get here?

Worthen, a historian argues that we will understand the present moment if we learn the story of charisma in America. From the Puritans and Andrew Jackson to Black nationalists and Donald Trump, the saga of American charisma stars figures who possess a dangerous and alluring power to move crowds. They invite followers into a cosmic drama that fulfils hopes and rectifies grievances—and these charismatic leaders insist that they alone plot the way.

Author and historian Tom Holland loved this book.

“The great story of charisma in American history, from the Massachusetts Bay Colony to MAGA, has never been more thrillingly told, never more learnedly explicated.”

In this extract, entitled Plotlines, Worthen introduces her four categories of charismatic leader: Prophets. Conquerors, Agitators, and Gurus.

Plotlines

Over the past several years, whenever I told friends or family that I was writing a book about charisma, they responded with a reasonable question. Which charismatic figures would I include? They peppered me with suggestions: What about Elvis Presley, or Dolly Parton? Michael Jordan or Muhammad Ali? Surely I had to say something about Taylor Swift, right?

None of these fascinating people appears in this book. As you read it, you will probably think of a dozen others whom you wish I had included, and I’m sure you’ll have a point. I have mostly stuck to individuals who worked to build a movement in organized religion or politics, rather than musicians, artists, or athletes. Even within the spheres of religion and politics, I’ve been selective in order to craft a manageable story and bring into focus the patterns and transformations of charismatic leadership over the course of American history.

Sometimes this is an inspiring story, because charismatic leaders often turn up—and people decide to follow—out of a desperate response to alienation and injustice. People in anguish seek a savior. Yet charisma has no fixed moral standing. It can carve a path to freedom or to enslavement; it can lead people to embrace the rule of law or to sneer at it. Charisma causes problems for democracy as well as for authoritarian regimes. Without a sustained analysis of charisma over the long haul of American history since European settlement began, we are doomed to bumble along, blandly observing that ordinary people declare many allegiances that seem to contradict their own material interests and sabotage democracy—but never understanding why.

Over the past four centuries, five types of charismatic leaders have surged to dominance, each offering a variation on the great paradox, a different way for followers to hand over control while feeling liberated. I use these categories both to classify leaders and their movements, and to chart historical change: each type reacts to the type that came before, and responds to the pressures and anxieties of its own era. Like all typologies, this one maps imperfectly onto real people. Almost no one is a “pure” example of these categories, and some leaders are interesting precisely because they react against their age’s dominant type. But these categories have compelled even leaders who defied easy labels—that’s most of them—to respond to the ascendant charismatic style of their age.

The Prophets take us from the end of the Middle Ages into something beginning to resemble our own world. They drew on ancient patterns of contact with the divine to challenge authorities and captivate followers with the terror and ecstasy of God’s presence. They hewed close to tradition, operating in a time when Old World strictures still constrained life in the New World rather tightly. But some used those traditions to undermine reigning institutions, whether by violent rebellion or illicit gatherings—and so provoked a backlash. If the Prophets conceived of freedom in terms of divine salvation, they often harnessed mystical power for this-worldly ends. Usually this meant dismantling any structure that stood in God’s way.

The Prophets were, essentially, destroyers. In their wake they provoked an age of builders.

The Conquerors rose to prominence in the early nineteenth century—an age of mythology, mass media, and frontier enthusiasm in the European American imagination. They swung away from the age of the Prophets, who had so much to say about how powerless humans are.

Some of the Conquerors wielded military power, but all of them pursued what we might call metaphysical conquest. They fought to control spiritual forces. As the predestinarian Puritanism of earlier generations lost its appeal, more people placed an almost fundamentalist faith in the power of free will. It was tempting to think of spiritual forces—perhaps even the Holy Spirit— as a kind of technology, ready for manipulation. The stakes in these campaigns were high at a time when new advances in science impinged on everyday life. Waves of immigration made the country more religiously and ethnically diverse. Americans felt both freer and yet more confined than ever before.

The Agitators gained sway at the turn of the twentieth century, protesting modernity as a raw deal and democracy as tyranny in disguise. The Conquerors had, overall, expanded government authority over Americans’ lives and advanced a golden idea of progress. Now the pendulum swung back toward calls for destruction. The Agitators found a market for attacking the state and denouncing so-called progress as a lie. They defined themselves as outsiders whether they were or not, and discovered that gaining material power does not mean that one must stop telling a story of exile and affliction. This proved to be an important lesson in an age of world war and economic disaster: global crises have a way of transfiguring an outcast dissenter into a credible threat tot he standing order. Meanwhile, Christians grew wilder in their displays of New Testament charisma—because, paradoxically, it was easier to grapple with what Max Weber called the “iron cage” of modernity by embracing ever more outlandish signs of divine power.

The Experts were, on the face of things, the Agitators’ opposite in charismatic style. They were builders. In the wake of World War II, they capitalized on a backlash against the nightmare years of fascist demagogues, embraced the zenith of traditional institutions’ authority across Western culture and politics, and nurtured Americans’ faith in the power of technology and bureaucracy to solve large-scale problems.

They claimed the mantle of reason and procedure and did their best to relegate the political or religious clout of charisma to the distant past or primitive cultures.

But in fact, the three decades after World War II witnessed an explosion of religious revival in America—led by Christians who spoke in tongues, looked for the end times, and claimed to heal through the power of the Spirit. Even in the domain of credentialed and supposedly secular healing, the line between medicine and spirituality grew fuzzier. These years were the Experts’ apogee of cultural prestige, but Americans’ long- standing ambivalence about intellectual elites persisted. The most successful leaders capitalized on those mixed feelings. They nursed the tension between the Cold War celebration of science and freedom and, on the other hand, the lurking sense that technological leaps obscured eternal truths and needed the organizing power of a good story.

By the end of the twentieth century, as Americans lost faith in established media, churches, government, and nearly every other bulwark of modern society, the destructive strain of charismatic leadership re-surfaced in the form of the Gurus: preachers of self-actualization and get-enlightened-quick schemes, promoting God’s new temp job as personal assistant. Old-fashioned Pentecostal revival persisted too, but its leaders struggled to prevent the culture wars from capturing the Holy Spirit.

The Gurus looked, at first glance, like the Prophets and the Agitators. But in the generations since those earlier eras, it had become harder to pay obeisance to tradition—which was just fine, since the erosion of institutions had weakened traditions anyway, and opened a path for Gurus to achieve more influence than their destructive predecessors. Religious and philosophical tradition, in the hands of the Gurus, was no longer a firm guide but a palette for painting illusions of independence. Sometimes they used it to depict a new reality impervious to fact-checkers.

“Guru,” which means “remover of darkness” in Sanskrit, was originally a religious term. But in the third decade of the twenty-first century, the most prominent guru in the country was a businessman named Donald Trump. Trump was not, personally, a paragon of conventional religious devotion. Yet his political career depended on a hunger among his most dedicated supporters that can only be called spiritual. Like so many relationships between charismatic leaders and their followers, it stumped and angered those on the outside. Against the backdrop of the American charismatic tradition, however, his success makes perfect sense.

How, then, did early modern mystics and Puritan heretics who heard the voice of the Holy Spirit give way to devotees at a modern presidential rally, jostling toward the candidate iPhone-first, praying for a selfie? By the early twenty-first century, most religious institutions in the West had declined into husks of their former authority—at least by the usual measures. Today commentators turn more than ever to materialist explanations for political dysfunction, polarization, and the culture’s general crisis of confidence. They cite growing social inequality, impassable disagreements on policy, persistent racism and xenophobia, evil automated forces lurking on the internet. All true—yet all insufficient accounts. If we define the religious impulse as a hunger for transcendent meaning and a reflex to worship, then it is a human instinct only slightly less basic than the need for food and shelter, and Americans are no less religious than they have ever been. They will always find a way to satisfy these desires, even if charisma carries them down strange and costly paths.

Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump, Penguin Random House, 2025.