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Introduction

Mythology, implies a belief in supernatural forces, that is to say in beings who are both different from and superior ‘to living men in that they exercise, either directly or through the intermediary of natural phenomena, a benign or harmful influence. It is the function of ritual practices or ceremonies to encourage the former influence and prevent or neutralize the latter.

As an introduction to the study of the varied forms and the often-poetic embellishments which these beliefs as­sumed among different peoples throughout the ages, it is appropriate to inquire into their origins: when in the life of mankind did such beliefs first appear?

Supernatural beings, the objects of these beliefs, can be divided into two categories that, though in principle distinct, overlap in a number of cases. On the one hand there are the dead, ancestors or manes, who have been known to their contemporaries in the form and condition of normal men. On the other hand there are the divinities, strictly speaking, which never existed as ordinary mortals.

Our information about the religious beliefs of peoples known to history can be derived from written documents; about primitive peoples who still exist we have the oral reports of travelers and ethnologists. But for prehistoric ages both of these sources of information are entirely lacking, and we never find ourselves in the actual presence of prehistoric religious beliefs. The materials we possess are either physical traces of what appear to be vestiges of ritual practices or else pictorial representations of such practices from which can be inferred — with the aid of ethnological parallels — a belief in the existence of the supernatural beings to whom they were addressed. One cannot, therefore, insist too strongly on the hypothet­ical character of conclusions based on such material.

We shall confine ourselves to the study of those people we call Paleolithic because of their industry in chipped, not polished, stone, and who lived during the Pleistocene geological epoch. We shall retrace our way cautiously through the course of time and, ignoring facts that are too ambiguous, try to discover what may reasonably be conjectured about their religious beliefs.

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