The Deer Cult and the Origin of Normativity in the Upper Paleolithic Religion.

The empirical data for an analysis of normativity in the origin of religion can be found on the one hand (since the late Middle Paleolithic) in the burials and their symbolism and on the other hand (in a more pronounced form since the Upper Paleolithic) in the religious pictorial stories of cave painting and mobile art. In principle, three forms of normativity can be distinguished. First, there are commandments and prohibitions concerning representation itself: who may be buried and who may not, what is to be depicted and what is not. Secondly, there is a rule of language of representative contents: the burials and their grave goods follow precise rules of staging (grave form, posture and orientation, symbolic language of the grave goods). The same applies to cave painting and mobile art, whose typification reveals a grammar of rules. Finally, the symbolic forms of representation can also be considered as laws for the real individual and social behaviour of people. Thus the pictorial stories of cave paintings and mobile art can be understood as a policy that regulates the moral principles of hunting ethics, cult ethics, sexual ethics and social ethics. Burials also have a normative influence on reality by defining the anthropological image of mankind. Especially on the basis of the stag symbolism this paper will attempt to establish a classification of the different areas and different forms of late Middle and Upper Paleolithic religious normativities in order to explore their structural grammatology – the rule behind the sets of rules – of this normativity. Since this is a constitution of the genealogy of normativity it might present new perceptions for the Conditio humana. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]