Circa 1953, a farmer found a sink hole on his property. Thinking one of his goats had fallen in and not realizing that the hole was actually the mouth of a cave; he had two two friends lower him down into the strange opening to retrieve the animal. Suddenly the rope thrashed violently as screams of terror echoed up from the darkness below. When the farmer was pulled up, his arms and legs splayed like a rag doll in the makeshift harness, his lifeless head thrown back, his dead eyes still wide from the horror of what he saw. It was rumored that he had seen the face of Satan himself.
Now I have to tell you, this story (though supposedly based on a real event) was an early episode of the TV show Twilight Zone. I saw it as a kid and it scared me to the point that even today, just the thought of going down a, dark, unexplored hole in the ground, much less a cave, still gives me chills. Rod Serling, who wrote this and many of the Twilight Zone episodes, cashed in on the kind of collective fears that we all have. All fiction and horror writers do. Stephen King even admits it. They capture us with their tales of fear and terror and we can’t look away. We are drawn to it, mesmerized by it, like a moth to a flame, because that’s what we do.
One of those collective fears, fear of caves, is nothing new. The bible talks about the fallen angels and giants living deep “in the earth”. Admiral Richard Bird (a respected naval officer and recipient of the Medal Of Honor-the highest honor for valor given by the United States) while exploring Antarctica in 1947 on behalf of the US Government, claimed he had discovered an massive opening while flying over the south pole. An entrance that led down into the interior of the planet. Eventually, word of his discovery would become known, what we call today, the “Hollow Earth”and the theory that Planet Earth is actually hollow. He claimed he flew over a vast green forest with an ocean and prehistoric animals clearly visible from the air; a land he called Agartha. He recorded his experiences in a diary (discovered May 1996 in the Ohio University Archives). He also appeared before the United States Congress testifying as to what he had found. The story of his controversial discoveries can be found at: https://medium.com/the-weird-closet/the-strange-hollow-earth-case-of-admiral-richard-byrd-7469a62264fc
There has always been mystery surrounding caves for many people like me. Not the caves with lights and walkways and music like the tourist attractions across the country. I’m talking about the real unexplored caves, where the absolute darkness can hide anything...even Satan.
Even the Greek Philosopher Plato used the mystery of caves to illustrate his theory on what the true nature of reality is. He tells the story of a young boy, chained to a wall from birth, the only light is a torch burning behind him. All that the boy can see of the outside world are shadows on the wall in front of him. He can see nothing else, and that becomes his only perception of the world. Likewise Plato believed that everything we see and experience is only an illusion of a greater reality, like shadows on a cave wall.
To some extent that is what I thought of when I read about a real cave, steeped in mystery for thousands of years, just discovered in the last century. And what makes the story of this cave intriguing is, that the native inhabitants believed it to be “magic”.
September 1940--four teenagers looking for a lost dog stumble into a cave in the south of France and what they found there is truly intriguing. The cave is known as La Grotte de Lascaux and what made the discovery so unusual is that the walls, extending the entire length of the massive chamber, were covered with more than six hundred cave-art drawings; extraordinary in both detail and beauty. The drawings could easily compete with those of the most highly skilled artisans of today and yet, amazingly, they are not only old, even by today’s standards of what we consider old to be, these drawings are “ancient”. They predated the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Pyramids of Egypt by literally thousands upon thousands of years. In fact most experts now believe the drawings to be no less than 17,000 years old. So who made the drawings and why?
Anthropologists wrestling with this question for the last sixty plus years now believe that the creators of these amazing artworks were actually the early Paleolithic inhabitants of the area, a race of people that existed before the stone age. And what is even more interesting is, based on artifacts that were left behind, it has been suggested that the early dwellers considered the cave to be a sacred place; a place of ancient “magic”. But why?
When I saw the pictures the thought occurred to me, “What would make a cave, or for that matter, a wall of drawings--“magical”? Art commemorating historical events is not magical. If the intention of this art was to memorialize events of a people who had no written language, the cave and its drawings may have had a special significance, but it would not be considered magic. No more so than the art of medieval cathedrals depicting the gospels for a public that was largely illiterate.
Another theory is that when fires, used to light the chambers, allowing the artists to see while making the cave art, the drawings could “appear” to move, or more to the point, come alive. As interesting as the premise sounds, it is hard for me to believe that these accomplished artisans would really have mistaken the shifting light of a fire for anything magic.
The paintings on the ancient cave walls, like Plato’s Myth of the Cave, depict reality, but is it really magic? My thought is that something more sophisticated was actually happening. As I looked at the many pictures, particularly the ones depicting a tribal hunt, the light suddenly went on in my brain and in that moment, I saw it…the magic.
To understand this, you do not need to see the picture I saw of the drawings, or the cave itself for that matter, you need only imagine yourself, seventeen thousand years ago, standing in front of a picture of a successful hunt.
The first thing you would notice is the amazing detail. You can literally see everything in sharp relief: what the terrain looked like, the warriors crouching at their stations as a stampede of animals rush between them. And then the kill, every detail frozen in a single moment so deftly displayed that you actually see the methodology they used. And then the successful outcome, the harvested animals as they field-dressed them and carried them back to the village.
But where’s the magic you may ask? Consider now, as you stand looking at the drawing, that it is not the day after the great hunt, but the day before! The “magic” of the cave, I believe, was the belief that anything drawn on the walls would become “real”. But the great myth of the magic of the walls, is, the magic is not in the walls, or the in the paint, or even in the cave itself. It is in the hearts and minds (and the detail) of those who had made the drawings.
The magic is the “planning” that went into the picture. For the magic to work, it had to be accurate, it had to be thought through, each detail, even each moment had to be in the drawing in absolute detail. The more need for accuracy, the more it forced the artists to think through each step of what had to happen for the hunt to be successful. On the actual day of the hunt, they unconsciously followed a plan they had drawn on the wall, not realizing that it was the planning of the drawing that was the real magic--not the drawing. That same magic exists today though we call it by other names. In business they are called “business plans”. For non-business individuals it is the mapping out of something we want to accomplish, and when we commit it to another medium, rather than just being an idea in our thoughts, something almost magical happens.
There is a new age philosophy that says, until an aspiration or goal is written down, until it is committed to paper or something tangible like a blue print, or even a wall; it will remain just an idea. When we finally memorialize it in a tangible form, then and only then can it connect with something in the universe that is much larger and much greater than ourselves. And will the magic work for everyone? To be honest I don’t know. In a way, my blog and the articles I write are my drawings on the wall. I guess the real question is, what would be your drawing on the wall?... Something to think about.
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