Published Monday, January 14, 2002
Sacred space to many religions The mythic power of caves
War plays out in underground places long symbolic of creation and destruction
By MARK C. TAYLOR
Los Angeles Times
In recent weeks, we have found ourselves lost in caves. While President Bush accuses Osama bin Laden and his followers of being cowards for fleeing to caves and promises to "smoke them out of their holes," Vice President Cheney retreats to a secure bunker many assume is underground. If this deadly game of hide-and-seek were a film or novel, the symbolic significance of caves would be unmistakable. In real life, the mythic power of the underground is no less important.
The complex image and long history of the cave are lending psychological depth and mythic proportions to our fascination with the search for bin Laden. In many religious traditions, caves are highly charged, sacred spaces. They are associated with life and death, creation and destruction, light and darkness. In religious traditions from France to Korea, Mexico to India, Canada to Australia, deities are worshiped in caves. Traces of these long-forgotten traditions flow through our collective memory in ways that transform the first war of the 21st century into a ritualistic repetition of ancient conflicts.
For the religious imagination, caves are a symbol of creation. In Zuni and Hopi as well as Aztec and Mayan myths, the cave is the navel of the universe, the privileged place of birth. The Aztec earth deity was actually called "Long Cave." In a sacred cave in Chalma, near Mexico City, Oztoteotl, the god of caves, was worshiped. As the locus of creation, the cave is nothing less than the womb of the entire cosmos.
But caves are also sites of darkness and destruction. Hades, after all, is also "the underground," a place where evil lurks. For Plato, the darkness shrouding the cave is the mark of ignorance, which we can escape only through the illumination knowledge brings. The demons of the cave embody psychological and cosmic forces that threaten to tear self and world asunder. Ultimately, the cave anticipates the tomb to which we all inevitably return.
So what does all this have to do with the war we find ourselves fighting?
Our current cultural landscape, which seems so new, really represents an age-old topography in which good and evil appear as the opposition between above and below ground. Make no mistake about it, we are engaged in a religious war, which both sides understand as an apocalyptic conflict between light and darkness. What the West regards as light, radical Islam regards as darkness, and vice versa. Certainty clashes with certainty, leaving no room for therapeutic doubt.
All too often throughout history, it seems that political solidarity is created by opposition to others deemed evil. On the one hand, for bin Laden and his precursors, America is the Great Satan, which must be destroyed through a global jihad. On the other hand, when the "Evil Empire" of the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, radical Islam took its place for the United States. The first President Bush gave evil a face in the person of Saddam Hussein and, having identified evil, sought to contain it in the Gulf War. Now the son follows in the father's footsteps by personifying evil in bin Laden and once again we find ourselves engaged in a war declared holy. When evil is the enemy, warfare inevitably becomes a religious mission.
And how appropriate that the final conflict may ultimately play out in the caves of Tora Bora. As places where good and evil repeatedly collide in the interplay of creation and destruction, caves are fraught with ambiguity. This shadowy realm in which gods and demons mingle is the point of transition between worlds. Those who venture into this netherworld enter a realm that harbors the threat of death, as well as the promise of rebirth.
The image of the cave plays an especially important role in the history of Islam. In one version of the tradition, the Prophet Mohammed retreated to a cave in Mount Hira, where he received his first revelation. When his life was endangered in Mecca, he fled to a cave that, according to legend, was concealed by a spider's web. When bin Laden hides in the latticed caves of Afghanistan, he ritually repeats the retreat of the Prophet.
Far from an act of cowardice or retreat, bin Laden's canny underground maneuvers replay a religious drama, which enhances both his spiritual power and his political effectiveness with his followers. The images he manipulates not only are those of modern culture but also religious symbols, which pulse in the psychic underground of our consciousness. Bin Laden's elusiveness and invisibility are actually sources of his strength. Indeed, his absence has become an overwhelming presence for those who seek him. This is why his death will solve very little. When placed in a ritual context, the sacrificial victim is reborn in the spirit of the community of his followers.
If the caves of Afghanistan have meaning for Muslims, so do they for Christians. Jesus was not only entombed and later resurrected in a cave; some believe he was also born in a cave. In Turkey last summer, I visited caves set in rock formations bleached white by the blazing desert sun. Carved in the walls and crevices of this soft volcanic rock are countless cave-like dwellings, chapels and monasteries, many dating to the time of the Cappadocian Fathers of the fourth century. In the seventh century, Christians, fleeing Arab persecution in Kayseri, sought refuge in these artificial caves.
In nearby Derinkuyu, I explored an even more remarkable hidden refuge - a vast underground city dating back to the era of the Hittites in 2000 B.C. If one could strip away the tourist booths and ticket window, this vast city would be absolutely inconspicuous. The subterranean complex has 18 levels and is 330 feet deep. Equipped with ventilation and water systems, latrines, storerooms, kitchens and stables, the structure could accommodate as many as 10,000 people for extended periods. During times of war, the local population would retreat below ground, and later, when persecutions broke out, Christians also sought safety in these caves. This city and others like it provide the prototype for the underground fortresses where bin Laden and his followers are presumed to be hiding.
While the inflated rhetoric on both sides invites us to see the strife now consuming us as a conflict between right and wrong, or good and evil, this is a dangerous way to view the situation. In the dark light of the cave, life is never so simple because everything is intertwined, interconnected, interrelated. Nor can we understand this conflict, as many are wont to do, in terms of a clash between ancient and modern civilizations. Ancient forces haunt the modern world and continue to circulate through latter-day warriors whose technological prowess masks the mythic powers they embody. While we no longer live in caves, caves still inhabit us. The cave dweller is both the other we oppose and the figure of dark forces lingering within each of us, to which we are drawn.
Forever caught between oppositions we can never reconcile, we long for a resolution to the conflicts tearing us apart. Though we might be reluctant to admit it, we will be bitterly disappointed if the fatal showdown with the contemporary embodiment of evil does not take place in a cave.
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Mark C. Taylor, author of "Hiding" and "The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture," is Cluett Professor of Humanities and Religion at Williams College, Williamstown, MA.
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