About Ancient Icons

A FRESH LOOK AT ANCIENT ICONS

by Harvey Reid

Whenever I read explanations of ancient cultures based on interpretations of the artifacts found at archaeological sites, I always wonder if they don't take ancient cultures too seriously. They always use a religious story line to explain anything they find- the owl and dog statues they found in Egypt tells us that the ancient Egyptians worshipped owl and dog gods. Cave paintings always depict religious ceremonies of some sort, according to the experts, and there is never anybody around to offer a second opinion.

Now if you think about it, ancient cultures all the way back to cave men had basically the same size brains we have, and it is too easy to think that because they were primitive that they were also stupid. In fact, Cro Magnon man had a bigger brain than modern man. We tend to picture these people squatting around fires in animal skins, grunting and trying to discover the principles of addition with small pebbles. In truth, there may have been people as smart as Einstein, pondering deep philosophical truths and telling off-color jokes and making up bad puns while squatting around open fires eating charred meat. I have always wondered how much of cave paintings were just random art or graffiti, or perhaps the ancient equivalent of billboards. Why are we always so certain that ancient peoples were serious whenever they made anything? Maybe life was so tough back then that you had to have a sense of humor to survive? We don't know what their culture was like. The pictures of the guy throwing a spear at the wooly mammoth might have been an ad for a Rambo-type theatrical production that was being shown that week, and it might have been the kind of stuff that landlords evict their tenants for writing on the walls.

I can only imagine future cultures digging up the remains of our civilization, and finding our homes littered with Garfield the cat message boards, Snoopy artifacts, Santa Clauses, ET's and all the other "icons." They would have to conclude that we were a very religious society that worshipped dogs, cats and old men with long beards. Even if they could translate our language and knew that we "believed" in Santa Claus, they couldn't know that it is kind of a mock belief for little kids only. We put those plastic Santas all over the roof of our houses and dress people up at shopping malls, and it's all sort of in fun and pageantry that we do it. I bet even the Southeast Asian immigrants have a hard time at first wondering how seriously to take Santa Claus. How do we know that the icons the Sumerians worshipped weren't the same kind of stuff? Look at the billions of mass-merchandised products that would be unearthed- all the plastic Easter eggs and Easter bunnies and Halloween pumpkins and cartoon characters like Opus the penguin and Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. Would future scientists assume that we worshipped gods that were part man, part mouse? I can recall seeing stuff in a textbook somewhere about Egyptians worshipping composite Gods like that- men with bird's heads or something, and I can't help but wonder if it was the same sort of stuff, rather than intense religious objects.

Surely those plastic Santa Clauses are as durable as anything in our whole legacy, and will be around as long as any more serious remnant of our culture. Presumably so will the plastic statues of the Virgin Mary, and since there never seem to be as many statues of Jesus as of Mary, maybe the future thinkers will put Mary together with Santa Claus and figure that they were our main gods. I wonder if Snoopy or Garfield would win out and be considered the "honcho" of the animal gods we worshipped. There are an awful lot of Smurfs out there too, that might throw off all the theories when they are dug up.

©1987 by Harvey Reid

Harvey Reid has been a full-time acoustic guitar player, songwriter, traditional musician, and free-lance minstrel since 1974. He has recently released his 11th solo recording on Woodpecker Records. He lives in Southern Maine.