THE MYSTERY OF PAVILAND CAVES: AN ANCIENT SHAMAN OF WALES

 

an artistic representation of the buriel of the 'red lady'

I like to believe that right here within the British Isles, we have traditions in shamanic work that go back as far as the very first people to walk these lands…and that’s long before the British Isles were disconnected from mainland Europe. One of the things I love to do is listen to the land to hear the story our ancestors have left us. Like many others, I’m searching for a personal understanding of how the ancient people accessed and used the same spirit world I’m able to ‘walk’ into today. 

In Britain, we hold one of the most wonderful discoveries demonstrating just how spiritual these ancient people were – the oldest known ceremonial burial site yet found in Western Europe.

Just under 200 years ago, a doctor called John Davies was exploring the cliffs near Worm’s Head on the Gower in South Wales. He climbed up to a small cave called Goat Hole, where he came across a skeleton. He quickly informed his friend William Buckland, an Oxford professor, who thought himself to be an expert on such things. He came to have a look at the bones in the cave, afterwards writing a description…

”I found the skeleton enveloped by a coating of a kind of ruddle…which stained the earth, and in some parts extended itself to the distance of about half an inch around the surface of the bones ... Close to that part of the thigh bone where the pocket is usually worn surrounded also by ruddle, about two handfuls of the Nerita littoralis [periwinkle shells]. At another part of the skeleton, viz in contact with the ribs, forty or fifty fragments of ivory rods, some small fragments of rings made of the same ivory and found with the rods ... Both rods and rings, as well as the Nerite shells, were stained superficially with red, and lay in the same red substance that enveloped the bones."

Early photo of William Buckland

Buckland believed this to be a Roman prostitute, which he named the ‘Red Lady of Paviland’ because of the ‘ruddle’ (actually a red ochre powder), covering the body, now known to have had huge significance in early times. Buckland assumed a red burial meant ‘profane’. It actually meant ‘sacred’ to the people who used it.

Buckland was also wildly in error over the age and sex of the remains. This person wasn’t Roman, but rather, the earliest Homo Sapiens skeleton we have ever found in the UK. And although still affectionally called the Red Lady, he was a tall, slender man in his early twenties.

Buried with him were shell necklaces, flints, stone needles and animal bones, including a mammoth’s skull. But most important of all, for me, are the mammoth ivory ‘rods’. These seem to be fragments of a beautifully carved wand. They were found together over his ribs, suggesting that this wand, ritually snapped into pieces during the burial ceremony and placed over his heart, was a shamanic tool.

Because of Buckland’s misunderstanding of the importance of the find, we’ve lost quite a lot of the remains,  including the mammoth skull, which went missing in the nineteenth century. However, the human skull was missing even at that earliest point and no one can work out whether it was simply taken by animals or if there is a more interesting reason for its absence. I cannot help linking this man’s sacred interment minus his head with the wonderful story of Bran’s oracular head, as told in the second branch of the Mabinogion, an early Welsh myth. 

I’ve been to the Goat Hole, where the Red Lady was found. To reach it we scrambled from the farmland above the cliffs down a gully towards the sea. Pink and yellow tufts of flowers grow out of the cliffside and there’s a constant sound of water trickling, accompanied by the gulls and the shush of distant waves. But the gully is rightly named ‘the devil’s path’. It is steep and difficult. If you don’t watch your footing, you can slip on scree as precarious as ball bearings, or twist an ankle on the loose and wobbly boulders.

Towards the bottom, the path narrows to a foot’s width, leading to a drop, the height of a man, onto the flat slabs of rock below. Here, the wind comes off the sea with a fast, sharp edge. Even at the vernal equinox, the tide is relentless, giving you bare hours to explore. The flat limestone expanse also needs care – it’s a mass of razor edges, like the sharp scales of some marooned sea-monster, ready to cut hands or knees. Between each slab there are gaps as wide as a stride. But it’s worth the risk of a scraped knee, because the rock pools are wonderful, a miniature world of sea creatures with seaweed resembling fresh lettuce and woodland ferns. We were on the coast of the Bristol Channel, but when the Red Lady was put to rest, his grave would have been 70 miles inland, overlooking a plain ripe for hunting and gathering, and, with a bit of a trek, fishing.

To reach the Goat Hole, we had to scuttle straight up the cliff side. There were ten of us on this outing, and we managed to squash into the cave together. We wanted to honour what happened here thirty-thousand years ago.

One of our party lay in the cot-like area where the Red Lady had been found. In the half-light, her still and silent body transformed for us, and we were able to step back in time. I was easily welcomed into the otherworld. The rocks were resonating with energy – I could palpably sense the spirit of the cave. Quietly, each of us stored our own impressions.

At the bottom of the cliff, at sea level, is a larger, more geologically impressive cave. We called it ‘the womb’, because of its internal structure and the tenor of our journey within it. The cave mouth gapes as you walk to it, but from a distance, it’s very like a woman’s vulva.

At the mouth of the cave, we all took off our clothes, leaving them folded in a dry spot. If we were to go into a womb as hallowed as this, we wanted to do it in full, natural reverence, as children of the earth. 

The first chamber is elongated with an uneven floor and a raised ledge to one side that leads away into darkness. One by one, we crawled onto this narrow ledge. Its outer edge was rounded and slippy, and a slick coat of slime and seawater, as precarious as wet ice, covered both ledge and wall. Below, the lower level was deep in icy water, trapped after the tide’s retreat. We inched our way in, unable to grip anywhere or trust the next move.

Some of us walked upright, but at a wearisome pace. Most of us, including me, crawled steadily away from daylight. Each movement seemed to take me an hour, as if my muscles were being glued together, and all the while, the booming waves echoed in my head. I crawled on and on, my knees and palms sliding against what felt like the very mucous membrane of the cave, until all light was lost. I was like a child in a dream, letting the earth take me into itself.

The middle section of the cave forms an hourglass, which opens into the final chamber, the rounded womb of the cave. The air here was chilled with an edge of salt, but it was slightly higher ground, with a dry shingle floor which was comforting for our bare feet. The place certainly felt like a place of safe lodging after a hard journey. There was total darkness this deep into the rock, but if we stood directly under a certain spot we could perceive at a far distance, a circle of dull light. At first I thought it was a crystal, embedded in the roof of the cave, but then I realised. It was a funnel, leading to the clifftop. 

We held hands in silence. Quite naturally, we began to chant, some singing tunelessly. This went on for a long time, until we left the perceived world altogether. As we finally came back into normal reality, one of our number exclaimed. “something’s cutting into my foot.” He bend to retrieve the item, and held it all through the perilous journey into the light. The thought in our heads, as we returned from the deeply profound moments together in the womb cave, was that of birthing, of coming out into a space newly transformed. I was sure we would all see the apparent world differently now.

Selection of found prehistoric flints

After we’d pulled our clothes over damp skin, we examined what our friend had brought out of the womb cave. It was a spear tip, perfectly knapped in flint. A gift from the spirits of Paviland, who have watched over the dead and the living for eons. 

We picnicked right there on the lip of the cave, looking out over the Bristol Channel.  The sea was like a steel mirror. A small fishing boat passed off shore and someone waved. We all waved in turn. 

 Later, back home, as dusk fell, we enacted the death of the priest-shaman, imagining how, as he was dying, he might have passed on his gifts to certain among his people, telling them which of his sacred artefacts were to be interned with him. We dramatised his burial, each playing our part, feeling our way back to bereavement 32,000 B.C.E. 

Finally, we journeyed individually to the beat of a single drum. In my journey, I returned to the Goat Hole. On my climb up the cliffside, I passed an elf-like creature who beckoned to me. But my spirit ally warned that this was a tricksy spirit and to keep journeying onwards. I finally reach the cave and ducked inside. There, sitting just where the light fell upon him, was a colourful figure, rather like a jester, who described himself as the Story Maker. He asked me to document my time at Paviland, and what it meant to me. 

When I returned, I furiously wrote a description of both my journey with the drum, and our physical journey earlier that day. The Story Maker had compelled me to think again just how essential this was. As I wrote, the entire day became more and more real to me, as if I was living it through again, in even more ‘mindfulness’ than I’d had at the time. When you’re travelling in a group, you’re bound to become one of them in so many ways…concerned for anyone who’s finding it tough…laughing at someone’s clever quip. But during my shamanic journey up the cliff and into Goat's Hole, I was alone, and every sensation, internal and external, was acute.

The writing made an internal shudder pass through me. I had been to the place where, over 30,000 years ago, people had buried, with honour and dignity, and in the presence of spirits they had called as witnesses, an early shaman of Britain. I feel honoured to have been part of that continued rediscovery.

A version of this blog first appeared in Indie Shaman Magazine in 2017 https://indieshaman.co.uk