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.The child had worn, also, a bracelet ofthe same material and a fine necklace of six octagonal and onehundred and twenty flat ivory beads, from which a birdlike orna-mental pendant hung.A second pendant, also in the form of aflying bird, lay in the grave, as well as two decorated medallions.One of the latter seems to have served as a buckle; the other,somewhat larger, showed on one side three cobralike wavyserpents, scratched or engraved, and on the other a stippled designshowing a spiral of seven turns, with three spiraling S-forms en-closing it the earliest spirals known to the history of art.We are clearly in a paleolithic province where the serpent,labyrinth, and rebirth themes already constitute a symbolic constel-lation, joined to the imagery of the sunbird and the shamanflight, with the goddess in her classic role of protectress of thehearth, mother of man's second birth, and lady of the wild thingsand of the food supply.She is here a patroness of the hunt, justas among planters she is the patroness of fields and crops.Wecannot yet tell from the evidence whether we are to think, withFrobenius and Menghin, of a plant-oriented people that hadmoved up into a difficult but rewarding northern terrain of thehunt, or vice versa, of a northern hunting race, some of whosesymbols were later to penetrate to the south.But what is surelyclear is that a firm continuum has been established from LakeBaikal to the Pyrenees of a mythology of the mammoth-hunters inwhich the paramount image was the naked goddess. 332 PRI MI TI VE MYTHOLOGYMoreover, an idea can be gained of the possible relationship ofthe shamanistic imagery of the mammoth-ivory birds to thecharacter of this goddess from a glance at the Eskimo mythologyof the "old woman of the seals."Whence the earliest Eskimos came, or when they reached theircircumpolar habitat, we do not know, but some part of northeastSiberia, strongly colored by the culture of the Lake Baikal zone,would now seem to have been their likely homeland, and circa300 B.C.would be about the earliest possible date for their arrival.In the walrus-ivory carving of the Punuk period of the BeringStrait and Alaskan Eskimo (c.500-1500 A.D.), where the nakedfemale form and a fine sense of geometric ornamentation areprominent features, likewise in the shamanism of the Eskimos,their stone lamps, bone harpoons, tailoring of skins, and half-subterranean lodges, we recognize what must have been a more orless direct inheritance of the arts and mythologies of the paleolithicGreat Hunt.The old woman of the seals (arnarkuagssak) sits in her dwell-ing, in front of a lamp, beneath which there is a vessel to receivethe dripping oil.She is known also as Pinga, Sedna, and the "fooddish" (nerrivik).And it is either from the lamp or from the darkinterior of her dwelling that she sends forth the food animals ofthe people: the fish, the seals, the walruses, and the whales; butwhen it happens that a certain filthy kind of parasite begins tofasten itself in numbers about her head, she becomes angry andwithholds her boons.The word for the parasite is agdlerutt, whichalso means abortion or still-born child.Pinga is offended, it issaid, by the Eskimo practice of abortion; but also, as Igjugarjukhas told us, "she looks after the souls of animals and does notlike to see too many of them killed.The blood and entrailsmust be covered up after a caribou has been killed." A seal orcaribou not returned to life through proper attention to the huntingritual is no less an "abortion," a "still-born child" of the oldwoman herself, than a human baby prematurely delivered.Andso, when these agdlerutt begin to afflict her, the people presentlynotice that their food supply has begun to fail, and it becomes the THE PALEOLI THI C CAVES 333task of some highly competent shaman to undertake in trance thevery dangerous journey to her dwelling, to relieve the old woman,the "food dish," of her pain.On the way, the shaman first must traverse the land of the happydead, arsissut, the land of "those who live in abundance," afterwhich he must cross an abyss, in which, according to the earliestauthors, there is a wheel, as slippery as ice, which is always turn-ing.Next he must traverse a great boiling kettle, full of dangerousseals; after which he arrives at the old woman's dwelling, which,however, is guarded by terrible beasts, ravenous dogs, or raven-ously biting seals.And finally, when he has entered the house it-self, he must cross an abyss by means of a bridge as narrow asthe edge of a knife.47We are not told by what art his deed of assuaging the oldwoman is accomplished, but in the end she is relieved both of theparasites and of her wrath; the shaman returns and, presently, sodo the seals.The title of W.Somerset Maugham's novel, The Razor's Edge,which is drawn from a verse of the Hindu Katha Upanishad, whereinthe mind is exhorted to enter upon the path to liberation fromdeath, yet warned of the dangers and difficulties of the way:Arise! Awake!Approach the high boons and comprehend them:The sharpened edge of a razor, hard to traverse,A difficult path is this: so say the wise!48should suffice to suggest something of the general context ofspiritual experience to which the Eskimo figure of a shaman cross-ing an abyss on the blade of a knife refers.We may think, also, of the gallant Sir Lancelot, in Chrêtien deTroyes' courtly twelfth-century romance, Le Chevalier de lacharrette, "The Knight of the Cart," crossing the very painful"Sword Bridge" to the rescue of his Lady Guinevere, the Queen,from the land of death."And if anyone asks of me the truth,"says Chrêtien, "there never was such a bad bridge, nor one whoseflooring was so bad: a polished, gleaming sword across the coldstream, stout and firm, and as long as two lances
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