The Magic of Caves
by Walter Wright Arthen
When I die
I'll Sleep in your Heart
Like a Bear in a cave
and come Spring
I'll leap forth
from Shadow
the loving grave.
by Kelly Cherry1
If magic is the art of creating change according to will,
then "setting the scene" is one of the most important magical acts.
Where an action occurs, its time, place. and circumstance, will have
a great (perhaps even determinative) influence on how that action
turns out. The same act performed on a crowded city street, on the
deck of a sailing ship, or in the desert may actually be very
different in its consequences and meaning, But perhaps no settings
are as powerful for doing magic as are places in nature: a
mountaintop, a forest meadow. a seashore. Even in trance work, we
most often move through natural landscapes and scenes, and each of
them has its own particular qualities. Some may evoke fear and awe:
others may evoke calm, humor, or excitement.
One such setting, a cave in the bank across the river from a
privileged private school, is the meeting place for The Dead Poets
Society in Robin Williams's recent film of the same name. Here a
group of students, inspired by Williams's example, assemble in a
candlelit circle to release the inhibitions of their regimented prep
school existence, read the works of dead poets, and create the shape
of their own lives. At first, the cave is a threatening place. To go
there is to break the rules - leaving their beds at night, traveling
through a misty wood, and going into a dark hole. But the magic of
caves is evident in the changes and confrontations that result from
what they do there - changes which include death, maturity and
personal courage. Caves are powerful places. To enter them is to
enter another world, but it is also to go to the heart of things.
The students in this film set out to recover a space for their own
development as individuals - a space which the pressures of school,
parents. and society all wish to deny them. Their school mottos
invoke the values of tradition maintained rather than of
individuality affirmed, in the cave, these values are reversed, as
the students confront the fundamental questions of meaning, renewal,
fear, death, and life. While their experience reflects only some of
the possible meanings that caves can assume in magical settings, it
also serves to remind us of the primal power of caves.
The Original Cave-Sheltering and Threatening
We have, for the most part, lost touch with our origins. The primal
experiences that laid down the base layers of meaning in our
languages and symbols are remote from our present.2 But by tapping
those origins and primal experiences, we can recover and deepen
meanings that have grown thin. This is as true of caves as of
anything else - both of the word itself and of the experienced
significance of caves for our ancient ancestors.
The word cave comes from the Latin root "cavus." meaning "hollow."
It names an absence, an empty space. From an Indo-European root keu-
which means "to swell, vault, hole."3 cave is linked to such cognate
words as cage. excavate, accumulate, and church. All of them carry a
sense of placement, opening, and bounded space. For us, though, the
cave is an opening in the Earth, usually extending horizontally,
although it may also go down and in.
The cave itself enters human awareness as soon as humans are aware
of anything. From Palestine through Europe and even to Siberia,
almost from the beginning, whenever human remains are found
anywhere, they are found in and around caves. Large, open caves are
nearly perfect homes: they require little in the way of modification
to be habitable: they are the original temperature and humidity
controlled environment - warm in winter, cool in summer's heat; they
offer protection from weather and foe; and they are everywhere. As
perhaps the first human habitation, the cave mouth tells us much
about our early ancestors. We find evidence of what they ate, the
tools they made, how their dead were buried, and even (from skeletal
remains) what diseases troubled them. And the deeper caves of
Aurignacean Europe also tell us much about prehistoric mental and
religious lives.
But the "original" cave was more. Caves were a safe physical home
for more than just humans. They also were home to other animals,
from lizards, snakes, and bats to the great prehistoric cave bears.
Fierce predators and our rivals for cave space, cave bears play a
major part in the mythology and ritual of early cave-dwelling
peoples. Joseph Campbell talks about the cave at Drachenloch
(Dragon's Den), excavated by Emil Bichler in the 1920s, in which he
discovered stone slab cabinets containing bear skulls. This and
other similar caves were not necessarily the home of cave bears, but
of cave bear hunters who treated these animal remains with religious
respect.4 Artifacts from many other sites (especially in Germany and
Switzerland) also serve as a witness to the significance of the
great cave bear for early humans: these beasts were powerful foes to
be propitiated, and symbols of a terrifying power. In this respect,
the "original" cave was not only "sheltering" but also "dangerous."
Moving into the deep darkness of the interior, one could easily
encounter death, and one certainly encountered something shadowy,
risky, and other. The risk was real.
This aspect of caves is familiar to us as well in fairy tales and
legends that show the cave as inhabited by threatening creatures. In
Tolkein's stories, for example, caves are never innocent and never
entirely safe. Although hobbit holes are dry, comfortable, and full
of food, caves are different: they contain dragons, orcs, Balrogs,
slinking Gollums, loathsome giant spiders, the shades of the dead,
goblins who leap out to drag off sleeping victims, and other
dangers. Indeed, dwarves, as the only one of the great races of
Middle-earth who chose caves as a home, show in their greed and
xenophobia that they reflect the negative qualities of their
setting. While this might be taken as evidence of Tolkein's
preference for shallow, domestic comfort over the dimension of depth
and of the inward journey, it is also a theme that we recognize from
other sources. For Tom Sawyer, the cave contains "Injun Joe," a
strong, dangerous enemy who is certainly "other" to Tom's normal
daylight world, and who will, in fact, try to kill him. And when
Luke Skywalker enters the cave on a small swampy planet in the
Dagoba system during his training as a Jedi, he meets Darth Vader -
the "dark father," who is his own other side. The cave is dark. To
enter it is to meet the jungian shadow side: our fears, the parts of
ourselves we refuse to recognize in the light, the dark places of
the soul. This perception of the cave as danger persists in our
thought of caves today.