In LATH we find: " a path winding through a
great forest where a last auroch had been speared by a
first Charnetski under John III ...". The aurochs were first
mentioned in the closing lines of "Lolita" ( "I am thinking of aurochs and
angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art.
And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.").
Aurochs are the extinct "Urus" from which the
present "Bos taurus" descend. Nevertheless in my eyes such a clear link was
not enough to explain VN's inclusion of them close to "angels and
durable pigments" ( but it made some sense in relation to "being
speared") and I built my mental image using the bulls of Paleolithic cave
art ( and this has very probably been already mentioned at the List).
Today ( using Google) I found an
article that connected this art to the stars.
Most recent
developments about this link bt. aurochs and constellations were made
in the late nineties and in our present millenium, but there were speculations
about it in the early 20th Century.
I wonder, would VN have mentioned aurochs
inspired in their a zoological classification ( as "extinct"), by
the Lascaux cave paintings or might he have had any intimation of
their astronomical correlations ?
The material below was partially
extracted from what I copied from copyrighted information .[Copyright ©
2001-2007 by Gary D. Thompson]
"Some of the most splendid Paleolithic
cave art locations are Lascaux (discovered in 1940), Altamira (discovered
in 1879), Chauvet ...The Lascaux cave contains some 600 paintings and 1500
engravings dating from the Palaeolithic Period. The very few symbols are
limited to isolated or grouped dots (mostly black) and to variously
coloured dashes. The "Hall of Bulls" mural is dated circa 15,000
BCE...Several researchers have offered an astronomical interpretation of
Great Bull #18. (The bulls are actually aurochs, a large species of wild
cattle.) There are 2 sets of painted dots closely associated with
this bull. One set of dots is placed above the shoulder of the bull and the
other set of V-shaped dots are located on the bull's face. Also, there is
a row of 4 painted dots to the left of this bull.Some people believe that
the #18 Lascaux auroch with the two associated sets of dots represents the
constellation Taurus. Interestingly, during the first decades of the
20th-century the French prehistorians Marcel Baudouin and Henri Breuil
speculated about the possibility of constellations being represented in
prehistoric art. To date none of the arguments attempting to show the
existence of some sort of Palaeolithic astronomy can be considered convincing."