Marie EP King

Marie EP König (born as Marie Emilie Paula Schwager; born September 10, 1899 in Forst , † October 5, 1988 in Güdingen ) was a German self-taught prehistoric , cave researcher and coin researcher . She devoted herself primarily to the symbolism of paleolithic cave paintings and carvings as well as the worldview of prehistoric people.

biography

Marie Emilie Paula Schwager completed her Abitur at the Oberlyzeum in Aachen in 1918 and then attended the teachers' seminar in Aachen, where she passed the examination for the higher teaching post in 1920. She then worked as a teacher until 1923, first in a children's home in Poblotz, Pomerania, and from 1921 at the forest pedagogy in Bad Berka , Thuringia. She married the businessman Heinrich König (* 23 September 1899, † 21 February 1983) in Bad Berka on March 31, 1923 and moved with him to Saarbrücken in the same year . She has two sons, Rainer (* 1926) and Dietmar König (* 1928, † 2004). Her husband Heinrich König took over the Sanicentral company in 1935, which was family-owned until its bankruptcy in 2009. The housekeeper Hedwig Diesinger (* 1917), who worked for the König family for 54 years from 1934, also played an important role in Marie König's private life.

Even as a teenager she was interested in prehistory during the First World War , triggered by her own finds of stone tools in the valley of the Inde near Aachen. She later explored numerous caves in France, one of which was even named after her. Marie König became known through several popular science books in which she developed a controversial theory about the symbolic language of prehistoric people, which, however, found little recognition on the part of established research on prehistory.

Her main work At the Beginning of Culture (1973) received the book prize of the Working Group for Advertising, Market and Opinion Research (AWMM) in Luxembourg in 1979 . However, this award ceremony later turned out to be very dubious, as the lender of the award had selected numerous award winners, all of whom had to pay their travel expenses to and in Luxembourg themselves in order to generate profits through commission payments he made for the occupancy of an expensive hotel in Luxembourg received.

Prehistoric theories

Marie König vehemently contradicted the doctrine of the time, which she called “ evolutionist ”, that prehistoric people were only capable of primitive, magical thinking and that all Ice Age works of art and symbols should only be interpreted in the context of fertility magic and hunting magic . Instead, she postulated that many representations represent a symbolic view of the world that primarily served as orientation in space and time . A lunar calendar was used for orientation in time , while the path of the sun enabled orientation in space. Marie König also interpreted the Paleolithic female statuettes and symbols interpreted as vulva as moon symbols. She interpreted these symbolic representations of the lunar cycle of the “renewal” of the moon after the three dark new moon nights as an artistic expression of a pronounced belief in rebirth .

König's theses are based on her long-term investigations into incised images in the approximately 2000 quartzite cult caves of the Île-de-France and the painted pebbles from the Mesolithic cave of Mas d'Azil as well as on late Celtic coinage. She also studied Paleolithic and Neolithic artifacts and works of art, such as B. the cave paintings of Lascaux and Altamira , stone carvings from Sweden and Valcamonica , the megalithic systems of Newgrange and Malta ( Hypogeum of Ħal-Saflieni ) as well as the Neolithic settlements in Anatolia ( Çatalhöyük ) and the Bronze Age palaces on Crete ( Knossos and Phaistos ).

Marie EP König received important suggestions for her theses, among others, from Karl Jaspers ' Philosophy of World Views (1919) and the depth psychology of Carl Gustav Jung . Marie König, along with Jaspers, also believed that prehistoric man saw himself surrounded by a circular horizon in nature , over which a hemispherical sky spans, the stars of which appear cyclically on one side and disappear on the other, which in turn constitutes the existence of one suggest invisible hemispherical " underworld ". This directly experienced hollow sphere world view should be visualized in two ways: Either in an objective way, i.e. viewed from the outside as a sphere, which, according to König, was already represented by Homo erectus (or Homo heidelbergensis ) by spheroids , or in a subjective way, that the prehistoric man with the skull, according to King so from the perspective of a man who thinks he is the center of a hollow spherical universe dome and the cave was symbolized, which explains the numerous stone Age skull cults and cult caves.

Despite later appropriation by feminist matriarchy research, Marie König has always resisted that her findings are reinterpreted as evidence of a primordial matriarchy . In the chapter about the book Woman and Power. 5 Million Years of Prehistory of Women (1979) by linguist Richard Fester et al. contributed, the word matriarchy can be found just as little as in her other works. There are also significant differences between the views of Marie König and those of the important archaeological representative of matriarchal research, Marija Gimbutas , who always vehemently rejected König's interpretations.

Examples of pictorial symbols according to König

• The circle: stands for the horizon or horizon.
• The Sphaeroid (possibly divided into two hemispheres): stands for the heavenly vault and the (imaginary) underworld. The Paleolithic stone balls from the Acheuléen , which Dr. H. Jouillie in the valley of the Aisne, as well as the sintered loess balls from the lower Moustérien , which were discovered by Dr. Paul Wernert near Achenheim in Alsace.
• The wheel cross : reflects the world as the field of view that is divided by the sun orbit as an east-west world axis. Due to their imaginary right-angled correspondence (north-south axis), the world is subdivided into four regions through the four cardinal points. The central intersection (5th point) of the world axes is your own location in this world order. The oldest known representation of the wheel cross was discovered in 1964 by L. Vertes in a Middle Paleolithic site near the city of Tata in Hungary. It was made by a Neanderthal man in Moustérien and shows a carved cross on a polished case (21 mm diameter) of a fossil unicellular of the species Nummulites perforatus .
• The world square: was created as a symbol by connecting the 4 cardinal points and is divided into four triangles by the cross of the cardinal points (i.e. 4 * 3 = 12).
• The "mill board": symbol for the world order by nesting three squares, the 12 corner points of which were connected by lines, but which did not meet in the middle (13th point).
• The network: stands for the general ordering principle of space.
• Spiral: the ascending and descending spiral represents becoming and passing and thus the cycle of rebirth of all life.
• The labyrinth: primordial symbol for life and change, with a lunar reference (the “primordial labyrinth” had 7 conversion points).
• The female lap triangle or generally the triangle: the graphic symbol for the alternation of the three shapes of the moon, thus a lunar symbolism for the lunar cycle.
• The vulva: the depiction of the vulva in Paleolithic works of art is also a symbol for the belief in rebirth in connection with the female creative power and the lunar symbolism of the lunar cycle, embodied by the female womb triangle.
• The bull or the bull's head: lunar symbolism through the shape of the horns, which resemble the two crescent phases, while the eye is seen as the equivalent of the full moon.
• The horse: solar symbolism, according to Marie König perhaps because of the waving mane, which is reminiscent of the sun's rays. Wild horses only have one mane, but this also fits in with König's interpretation. Later this solar symbol was replaced by the symbols of the solar boat or the sun chariot.
• The moon chariot pulled by bulls:
• The sun chariot pulled by horses: The most famous archaeological find is the sun chariot from Trundholm from the Nordic Bronze Age, which, strangely enough, is not mentioned by Marie König.

Examples of number symbolism

• The moon number “3”: stands for the 3 moon phases and thus for the ordering principle of time.
• The sun number "4": reflects the 4 cardinal points and thus stands for the ordering principle of space.
• The number “7”: the sum of the ordering principles of time (3) and space (4).
• The number “9”: the multiplication of the ordering principle time (3) with itself results in the duration of one of the three phases of the moon.
• The number “12”: the product of the ordering principles of time (3) and space (4), or the number of corners of the world square divided into four triangles by the diagonal cross of the cardinal points (see above). Also corresponds to the number of months in a year. The remaining 13th full moon, which quasi "disturbs" this order, is another reason for the number 13 to be an unlucky number, according to Marie König.
• The number “24”: twice the number 12. Also corresponds to the number of hours in a day (Marie König herself did not mention this, however).
• The number "27" or "28": exponentiation 3 * 3 * 3 (or the product of 4 * 7) gives the duration of the lunar month, which also roughly corresponds to the average duration of the female cycle.

reception

The work of Marie EP König was not only not recognized by academic archeology in Germany, it was almost completely ignored, so that to date there have been no critical scientific treatises on her theses.

C. Peyre from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris praised the king's work.

Jean-Baptiste Count Colbert de Beaulieu from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris wrote extensive forewords

1.) to the French edition (1975) of their publication “The Riddle of the Celtic Coins” (1975). In it he also deals with her ideas, which she presented in her work “At the Beginning of Culture” (1973). In doing so, he determined the importance of these theories in explaining the themes of Celtic coins.

2.) to the book: “Our past is older” (1980). In it he discusses and confirms the essential new theories of Mrs. König in detail.

On the German side, Eric Voegelin (Munich) contributed to the publication of the work.

On the Canadian side, Prof. Barry Cooper from the University of Calgary took up Marie König's ideas and in his work '' The First mystics? Some Recent Accounts of Neolithic Shamanism ''.

In Washington, DC, the Eric Voegelin Society was founded, which takes up the ideas of Marie König and works on them.

Archaeologists criticized König's working method as unscientific for picking confirmatory evidence of her theses from the prehistoric finds without verifiably proving whether these cases are representative at all. This applies in particular to the painted pebbles from the Mesolithic Azilia of the Mas d'Azil cave, which she sees as an important confirmation of the historical significance of the symbolic numbers "3", "4" and "7", but does not explain whether these numbers are of the approximately 2,500 stones found have a higher proportion than would be expected on the basis of a purely random distribution. There are also independent archaeological investigations of the same finds, which came to very different conclusions than Marie König.

Another problem is with the Île-de-France cult caves, which play a very central role in Marie König's work. As Marie König freely admits, the geometric figures carved into the rock of these caves cannot be dated and obviously come from a wide variety of epochs, from the Paleolithic to modern graffiti . Older scratches are usually more weathered than younger ones, but a reliable assignment to certain epochs is usually hardly possible.

Finally, it must also be critically questioned whether the rejection of the alternative interpretations of the established sciences, which Marie König devalued as " evolutionist " and " positivist ", is really plausible and justified. It is at least strange that none of the well-known indigenous peoples of today shows any correspondence in their traditional culture with the worldview postulated by König and the associated symbolism. Cultic veneration of the vulva as a symbol of rebirth is just as unknown there as is the relationship between belief in rebirth and lunar cycles .

The reconstruction of a prehistoric view of the world, as attempted by König, is in any case highly speculative, especially since such theses are hardly verifiable or falsifiable , at least with the current state of knowledge - but at least the latter is usually considered a necessary condition of scientific research. On the other hand, König's approach of thinking into earlier cultures corresponds entirely to the working principle of hermeneutics, which is recognized in the humanities . Therefore, Marie König's theses cannot be rejected across the board as unscientific or pseudoscientific , but a critical weighing of existing evidence and conclusions drawn, as well as a plausibility comparison with alternative explanatory approaches, is necessary.

Fonts

• The world view of the Ice Age man . Elwert, 1954
• At the beginning of culture. The sign language of early man . Mann, Berlin 1973; Ullstein, Frankfurt / Berlin / Vienna 1981, ISBN 3-548-36061-0
• Our past is older. Cave cult of ancient Europe . Krüger, Frankfurt 1980, ISBN 3-8105-1015-7
• Basic ideological terms . 1991, ISBN 3-7165-0658-3
• (with Richard Fester, Doris F. Jonas & A. David Jonas): Woman and Power. Five million years of woman's prehistory . Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1979, ISBN 3-596-23716-5

literature

• Friederike Schneider: In search of the truth. Life and work of the prehistorian Marie EP König. In: Annette Keinhorst & Petra Messinger (eds.): The Saarbrücken women . Contributions to the history of the city. Röhrig, St. Ingbert 1998, pp. 295-302, ISBN 3-86110-176-9
• Gabriele Meixner: In search of the beginning of culture. Marie EP King. A biography. Women's offensive, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-88104-318-7 Weblinks

• Berry Cooper: The first mystics? Some Recent Accounts of Neolithic Shamanism, University of Calgary, presented to Eric Voegelin Society, Washington, DC, September, 2010
• Berry Cooper: Marie König, University of Calgary, Canada 2017.
• Literature by and about Marie EP König in the catalog of the German National Library

Web links

• Literature by and about Marie EP König in the catalog of the German National Library
• Works by and about Marie EP König  in the German Digital Library
• Search for Marie EP König in the SPK digital portal of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation
• Marie EP König in the digital German women's archive

Individual evidence

1. ↑ http://www.radio-sb.de/lokales/Saarbruecker_Firma_Sanicentral_ist_insolvent-1956.html
2. ↑ H. Jouillie (1963): Les spheroides de la Vallee de L'Aisne aux environs Vailly-sur-Aisne . Bulletin de la Soc. Preh. Francaise 60: v. 12
3. ^ FE Zeuner (1952): Loess Balls from the Lower Mousterian of Achenheim (Alsace) . The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol. 83, No. 1: 65-70
4. ^ Claude Couraud (1985): A study of Azilian painted pebbles; the patterns and their association with each other; their distribution; their relation to other aspects of Palaeolithic art . Supplement to Gallia Prehistoire 20: 176 pages, 37 plates.