Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/447

Rh The variety of colours that could be used by Cro-Magnon artists was strictly limited; they had at their disposal earth colours only. In their animal pictures the artists had, for instance, to utilise blacks, whites and yellows without reference to the symbolism of such colours, or to the actual colours of the animals whose forms were depicted. Before and after the Cro-Magnon people had succeeded in producing more or less faithful representations of animals in colour in response to a developing aesthetic sense, they used colours just as modern black and white artists use crayons or ink. There is clear evidence, however, that people in Aurignacian, Solutrean and Magdalenian times attached a symbolic value to certain if not to all colours. As Osborn has noted in his Men of the Old Stone Age, the so-called Venus figures on rock and in ivory bear traces of red coloration; one of several Solutrean laurel-leaf lances which had been worked too finely to be used, and had been deposited probably as a religious offering, similarly retains evidence that it had been coloured red; the bones of the Cro-Magnon dead, as in the Paviland cave, are frequently found to retain traces of the red earth that had been rubbed on the body before interment. Evidence of the symbolic use of colour during the so-called "Upper-Palaeolithic period" is forthcoming in other connections. The Abbe Breuil informs me that the imprints of hands on rock faces are oftenest in red, but that white, black and yellow hands are not uncommon. I am further informed by the Abbé that small green stones were placed between the teeth of some of the Cro-Magnon dead interred in the Grimaldi caves near Mentone.

This latter custom is one of very special interest in connection with the study of colour symbolism, especially when we find that the ancient Egyptians attached a magico-religious value to green stones, that the Chinese placed jade in the mouths of their dead, and that certain of the pre-Columbian Americans placed green pebbles in graves and