The year was 1940. A tense Europe descended reluctantly into WWII. Autumn encroached on the remote French countryside, where young Marcel Ravidat was leading a few friends to his strange discovery. Just a short while ago, he had uncovered a hole in the ground. This hole opened to a series of caves whose walls were adorned with thousands of drawings. Simple but intricate, these depictions of animals, people, and undecipherable signs spanned several cave chambers. What he had discovered was the Lascaux cave of Paleolithic paintings, eventually estimated to be 20,000 years old.

Removed by so much time, can we even begin to imagine what inspired these prehistoric people to venture deep into dark and stifling caves to make their mark? In the decades since the caves’ discovery, several studies have drawn compelling comparisons between the arrangements of these cave paintings and ritualistic motifs. These works seem to be an early example of spirituality and rituals manifesting in images.

Hans Belting, an art historian attuned to anthropological engagement with images, offers a crucial insight: images are not primarily aesthetic; they are cultural technologies. Before art as a discipline existed, image-making was already a practice embedded in social life the world over. In medieval Europe, Orthodox churches were not viewed through a critical lens; they were part of daily devotion, believed to mediate divine presence. In Hinduism, murtis – or sacred statues – represent tangible symbols to connect with the omnipresent divine and abstract divine qualities, such as strength and wisdom. In the ritual world of Tibetan Buddhism, thangka paintings and mandalas are not decoration – they are tools for meditation and spiritual transmission.

Belting’s triadic model consists of image, medium, body, and shows that images gain potency only when these elements align: an image is required to be the symbolic construct, a medium is required to transmit the image, and a body is required to perceive the image and sustain its relevance. A painting in a drawer has far less effect than a painted image in ritual space surrounded by light, incense, and movement, whose veneration is enforced by an entire temple complex. An object of devotion carved in stone obtains authority only when worshippers gather, pray, and chant at its feet.

Religious history is replete with examples. In medieval Europe, the cult of saints demonstrates this vividly. Saints’ relics – bones, clothing, fragments purported to belong to saints – were encased in elaborate reliquaries and paraded in processions. Saintly images adorned altars and pilgrims traveled hundreds of miles to touch them. In some Buddhist traditions, the Buddha Tooth Relic is believed to be the Buddha’s left canine, retrieved from his funeral pyre. While primarily associated with a temple in Kandy, Sri Lanka, no fewer than 32 museums and temples worldwide claim to possess the artifact.

During the Byzantine Iconoclast Controversy, iconoclasts and iconodules clashed bitterly over whether the use of relics and physical representations of holy figures was sacrilegious. Iconoclasts – “icon destroyers” – subscribed to strict adherence to the Biblical commandant “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image,” forbidding the making or veneration of images. Iconodules – “lovers of images” – argued that veneration is distinct from worship and that icons strengthen faith by making the divine visible, touchable.

Belting’s anthropology of images suggests that humans have always used pictures, statues, and symbols not to represent reality, but to produce experience. In his view, an image does not possess inherent power, only that which is bestowed in it by the consensus of perceiving bodies. In this way, viewers are made active participants in the creation of icons, not passive receivers. Their ritualistic acts of gazing, remembering, and responding create the icon, and thus, authority and meaning are produced socially, through embodied repetition.