The concept of a cave holds many strata of thoughts, sedimented deep in our genetic memory. A cave is a place of contradiction and conundrum. A mythological place perhaps more easily perceived by the senses and the subconscious, or experienced in a dream state, than approached with rationality. It is simultaneously a positive and negative space, at once convex and concave. We are unsure if it is the container, or the hole. Its a place to harbour and re-imagine myths - to cradle our dreams and hopes for new beginnings or an open grave to pour our fears into. The domain of the dead, the underworld; a place to decompose; to empty and re-compose our souls in meditation; an awkward rhyming bundle of room, womb, and tomb. A place to mature a small round cheese - a planet suspended in silvery blackness and peopled with bacteria, sitting out its adolescence, waiting for maturity.

Caves are places to deepen our connection with all our senses and to practice the art of darkness, expanding our consciousness. Many spiritual traditions use darkness as a way to deepen awareness, connect with dream states and the imagination. The Kogi people of northern Colombia select boys at birth and take them to a cave for the first 9 years of their lives to begin their training as priests, or Mamos, in order to forge a deep connection with the earth as a living and interconnected being. Its unimaginable how it must feel to step out into a world of blinding brightness after a decade in which your eyes have been overshadowed and humbled by the other senses.

A cave was the first home for early humans, with tallow and flint and the lucid calls of hyena and bears echoing deep in neighbouring chambers. Now its folded creases teem with undersized life. A fuzzy milky orb hangs precariously by a thread; beadily nursed by an improbably slender spider. A spore landing on an unknown residue of food or faeces, shimmers for 3 days as a beautiful filamentous disco ball of potential. Soprano Pipistrelles and sonorous rocks sing their strange arias to each other from above and below audible human frequencies. 

Caves teach us to embrace the long view, inviting us to plunge into deeper, geological time - the vast and unimaginable 4.5 billion years’ of earth’s history. A constant, yet constantly and imperceptibly changing, story embedded in sedimentary layers transcribed braille-like in relief over millennia. Within a single beat of time’s weird clock Persephone waits out the barren winter months and watches the unlikely birth of the first eukaryotic cell.

We bring ourselves to the cave. It waits in deep time, observing successive species come and go with a slow blinking eye; its blank expression offering us shadows of ourselves. A strange, sometimes unsettling and unnavigable negative space which offers our own reflection back to us in opaque hallucinations.  

Stepping into the shadows, we descend wondering what strange visions of monsters might meet us; and, going deeper, if the notion of the entirely hollow earth proposed by Edmond Halley in the late 17th century could in fact be true. We are met by the strange blackness of rock - a collective void and a colour like no other, thick with emptiness. Eigengrau is the peculiar tone you see when you close your eyes, unique to each of us. Cave blackness is darker; soft, benign; and at once communal and isolating.

In A Passage to India, EM Forster describes the Marabar Caves as “Eternally watchful”. They offer a benign void as a dark mirror revealing each character’s subjectivity, prejudice, and deepest fears. The caves are an echo chamber where “To shout is useless because a Marabar Cave can hear no sound but its own”. The cave leaves a mark on each of its visitors, but its visitors leave no mark on the cave. Over the centuries humans have scratched their names into the surfaces of rock only for them to be erased softly by calcite. Nothing yet everything attaches to the layers of sediment encasing the skin and bone of successive species.

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave invites us to imagine the consciousness of people imprisoned in a cave their entire lives, only able to perceive the shadows cast on the wall in front of them as the sign bearers bring objects into the cave behind them. They can only perceive the echoes of reality, distorted signifiers that are a step removed from the experience of the objects themselves; the shadows are the only reality for the prisoners because they havent experienced anything else. One prisoner is freed and turning away from the shadows the glare of the fire is blindingly bright. Slowly his eyes adjust and departing the cave he starts to perceive the realm of light with its solid seeming objects. Returning to the cave to convince the others to take the journey out into the other world, he struggles to see in the darkness. The others perceive this as blindness and dismiss his visions of the outside world as mere hallucinations. 

We too inhabit the shadows of many types of caves - our subconscious, solitude, ego and the unchartable caverns of grief and loss. Without shadow we are nothing. Kali the Hindu Goddess of time, death and re-birth  was made entirely of shadow, the black skin slewed from Parvati. Kali unlocks transcendental knowledge and in the shadows we can face the monsters that we are and be transformed. It is in the shadows too, that we build our own black holes to dwell in - a mobile phone shaped cave to put our head into; and technologies like Artificial Intelligence, weird, hallucinatory echo chambers made entirely of thin, unreliable shadows.

In Barcelona, visiting the crypt of the Sagrada Familia I marvelled at the upside down architecture of Gaudi’s suspended corks; gravity drawing the perfect arch. We have built our own upside down crypts; vertical caves and shrines to consumerism that tower over hollow foundations. They will tumble down, momentarily disturbing the gentle slumber of a cyclops, cosied in the gentle folds of rock. The earth will turn, Hades become heaven, and his single eye will blank-blink before turning over and nestling deeper into calcite creases and the dripping lullabies of stalactites. 

To leave the cave is to return to the world above and to ourselves, though somewhat offset and carrying a strange hallucination in our pocket. The things that made us different before we descended fade, the ego dissolved and we are more connected; have reconciled ourselves as solid objects, and ourselves as shadows. The one earth, above and below, both solid and shadow, in an ever-spinning embrace.

Musings by Clare Parker, June 2025

Permission is expressly NOT given for AI to absorb and refract these words in weird echo chambers. Intended only for human consumption - and any fungi or other some suches that may pick up its cosmic vibrations.