Pagan ex-votos
We can say according to the previous chapter that these signs can be connected only with a survival of heathen rites inherited from the Celts. But such an inheritance having crossed the centuries of romanisation and of christianization has been transformed reinterpreted by the local populations before appearing no more except than in the legends. This progressive disappearance of the inheritance does not mean that the heathen rites lost significance and complexity, but new rites of the new faiths, arisen from the cultural confrontation which occurred, doubtless mixed with it, what complicates formidably the interpretation of such carvings. Indeed, the fragments of Celtic mythologies which we possess are not enough and we would be forced to base ourselves on the legends and the traditions which reached us, of which we should identify the underlying religious ideas, the basic faiths. Such attempt being with difficulty practicable and time consuming, we shall here restrict to notice that two of the present symbols are attributable to the Celtic religion.
The first one of these symbols which I shall highlight is the tree-shapep symbol which I really interpret as the representation of a tree; we saw in the previous chapter how much the tree had of importance in the Celtic religion because we find certain of them entire, roots to the highest branches in sacrificial wells. Do we have to see in this renewed use of sacred trees a resurgence of the rite of the cosmic tree or the tree as axis mundis that we find for the neolithic people?
The second important symbol is n°23 who calls reminds a wheel with beams which would escape from it, and which thus reminds TARANIS, the terrible god. The wheel had a very important ritual purpose as representation of TARANIS himself : a story of martyr of Saint Vincent, dated the fourth century tells us a religious ceremony in which an ardent wheel was thrown from a sanctuary situated on the hilltop, dived into a river to raise to a temple.
I would attribute the other symbols to other original or added faiths, either, to the desire of people of the time to engrave a sign in the cliff in honour of such or such god so that this one assists him; a kind of heathen ex-voto in a sense. I join here the explanation advanced by J. Abelanet about the linear carvings of Pyrenees or the Val des Merveilles.
Finally, it is interesting to notice that this cliff is near the shelter with neolithic paintings and that we are confronted here also with the obstinacy of the sacred character of a very precise place, as certainly the Valley of the Miracles is a case. As if to knowing if this sacred character which is recognized by the hill comes because of the presence of the decorated shelter (exempt from graffiti in this period) which could fire the pre-middle-age imaginations, or of a much more intrinsic and deeper reason, there is a still opened problem and which will doubtless receive never a satisfactory answer.
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linear engravings":
