ARCHIVE #04 — The Origins of Art and the Sacred Imagination with Professor Paul Pettitt

In this evocative and intellectually rich episode, I’m joined by Professor Paul Pettitt, leading archaeologist at Durham University and expert in Ice Age cave art, for a journey into the primordial origins of human creativity. Together, we descend into the shadowed depths of Paleolithic caves—vast, echoing sanctuaries where our ancestors painted animals, symbols, and spirits upon the stone walls tens of thousands of years ago.

Professor Pettitt offers a rigorous yet imaginative exploration of these early artistic expressions: how they were made, why they were hidden deep within the earth, and what they might have meant to the people who created them. We speak about funerary rites, animism, totemism, and the philosophical theory of mind—probing the earliest stirrings of the sacredin human consciousness.

This conversation reveals art not merely as decoration, but as invocation. These painted caves, often dangerous and remote, may have served as ritual chambers, dream portals, or sites of communion with the unseen world. What emerges is a portrait of early humanity as already symbol-makers, already metaphysicians—already reaching toward the ineffable through image and myth.

This is one of my favorite episodes, as it touches something elemental: the artistic impulse as a sacred act, the moment the human being became the imaginal animal.

This episode was originally released under the podcast title Sacred Wisdom, the precursor to The Cosmic Codex. It now resides within The Sacred Wisdom Archives.