THE SAN ORGY
In the granite caves of Zimbabwe is an image of a homoerotic orgy which is the earliest known depiction of these practices in human history. It shows male on male group sexual activity with the participants displaying prominent erections. It comes from drawings of the San rock art in Zimbabwe by Peter Garlake. His black and white image is the basis for generative AI images that bring them into the context of contemporary image creation. Garlake states of the specific image below that it is “apparently of men engaged in egregious sexual practices.” [Peter Garlake — The Hunter’s Vision]
The controversy attached to this image centres around the absurd proposition that this form of sexuality only existed in Africa after the arrival of white colonists. Robert Mugabe, the late Zimbabwean president/dictator, notoriously denounced all sexual activity that was not between a man and a woman. Any divergence from this sexual model was described as an import into Africa from decadent Europeans.
Therefore the image is loaded with controversy because it shows sexual activity that does not fit within these norms of male on female procreation. It reveals the presence of alternate sexualities millennia before the arrival of European colonists and before the arrival of Bantu migration from the north. The image is also loaded with significance because it appears to be the world’s first known depiction of male sexual activity outside the framework of male/female procreation.
However the image is interpreted it is clear that the group of figures, many of which have obvious erections, are engaged in male to male sexual arousal. As such this is the first known depiction in human art of homoerotic activity. In these figures the phallus is drawn as if it was an extra limb. These phallic limbs bind the figures together in an extended orgy in which the contemporary viewer is an interloper and voyeur. It appears that the depiction is of a group act amongst males, emphasized by the interlinking erections that visually bind the group together.
In the Matopo region of Zimbabwe fragments of painted granite fell into the organic debris below and rested in layers that included charcoal fragments. The charcoal was dated to between 13000 and 5000 years ago. “Further, one of the sites with paintings had been virtually abandoned as early as 8500 years ago. Even more surprisingly, a cave with the most technically and artistically complex of all the paintings in Zimbabwe last saw any substantial occupation some 6000 years ago. These dates suggest that the art is a great deal older than previous authorities had assumed.” [Peter Garlake — The Hunter’s Vision]
At Diana’s Vow in eastern Zimbabwe is a cave containing a great recumbent figure that appears to be an archetypal deity. The great recumbent figure is surrounded by many much smaller human figures enhancing his status and suggesting that this is an image of a primordial god. He features the head of a sable antelope with an elongated torso covered in massed white dots. A prominent erection is displayed, protruding above the myriad white dots of the torso and a large oval shape that is attached to the back of the torso.
Get david bennett’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
White dots that are painted over the whole of the elongated torso are a consistent feature of other San rock paintings. These dots are related to the numerous oval shapes that accompany the hunting scenes and trance states that are depicted. They are suggestive of seminal forces that pervade the scenes and unite the human figures to the deity.
In another San rock art site a human figure with an erection is depicted next to images of rhinos. This is not a classic hunting scene as the figures are not carrying the hunting weapons that are present in San hunting depictions. An equivalence between the shape of the phallus and the shape of the rhino horn is made explicit in this scene.
Here an association is drawn between the sexual potency of the human figures and the symbolic potency of the rhino horns. Humans are equated to the magical virility of the rhino which unlike other animals has a singular prominent horn. A symbolic comparison is established between the horn of the rhino and the erect phallus of a human male. The singular protruding erect phallus of the human male in these depictions is similar in form to the main rhino horn.
The juxtaposition of human figures displaying erections and rhinos links the San rock art images to those of Lascaux in France. Despite the vast distance between these southern African and European sites they were united by the presence of rhinos. An ability by the human brain to recognize the similarity between the form of the phallus and the horn of the rhino is evident in both San art and the art of Lascaux. The pattern recognition systems of the human brain establish a commonality between San rock art and the Palaeolithic artists of Lascaux.
In the shaft at Lascaux, a cave embedded deep within the complex, a stick-figured human with an obvious erection lies before a wounded bison. His position is the same as that of the primordial figure at Diana’s Vow in Zimbabwe, with both figures recumbent and displaying erections. Next to him is an image of a rhino. In Lascaux the juxtaposition of the bison’s horns and the erect human phallus emphasizes their equivalent form.
Located in this deep subterranean space the prone figure with an erection is a seductive image of the relationship between sexuality and death. Significant levels of carbon dioxide that are present in this cave would have been capable of inducing an out of body trance experience. The bird-like form of the figure’s head is reinforced by the bird emblem on the head of the rod that lies next to the figure. The image alludes to phallic flight where the erection symbolizes flight from terrestrial reality.
A relationship between sexuality and death is also evident in the San rock paintings. The figures occupy a space that is beyond the living and exist in a magical world in which they interact with the animals around them. This also relates to the human figure in Lascaux which, unlike the animals which have naturalistic concrete shapes, is a stick-figure. It has an almost ephemeral presence lying between the material and spiritual planes. The figure is the only human depiction within the Lascaux caves giving the image a sacred dimension.
Both the Lascaux and San rock art images are not merely the prosaic recordings of human lives. They have the quality of a painted veil existing on the boundary between the sacred and profane. The San rock art figures become the depictions of spirits or of resurrected humans in an afterlife which they cohabit with magical beasts.
The San orgy participants therefore exist in a liminal space where the boundaries between sexuality and death are dissolved. Bataille expressed the enigma of the infamous Birdman of Lascaux as an accord between death and eroticism. The sexual element is much more pronounced in the orgy of the San in the granite caves of southern Africa.
“Thus, in this barely accessible crevice stands revealed — but obscurely — a drama forgotten for so many millennia: it re-emerges, but it does not leave behind its obscurity. This essential and paradoxical accord is between death and eroticism.” [Bataille — The Tears of Eros]
