Wednesday, April 25, 2018

Caves




Caves were special places to the ancient Maya. The Maya connected caves with a number of things, including the underworld, mountains, water, and corn -- which the Maya thought the creator gods had taken from a mountain to make people. Caves were also also places for burial and for holding rituals. Some of the more famous caves that the ancient Maya used are Naj Tunich and Actun Tunichil Muknal (Cave of the Crystal Sepulcher.)


The Mayan Name for Cave
It's thought that the ancient Mayan name for cave is either ch'en or ch'een, though people studying ancient Mayan writing are still making sure – and you may also find ch'é'en. (To keep things simple, this post will just use ch'een.) This word doesn't just mean cave though. It means a lot of other things too -- well, rock shelter, cenote, canyon, hole, and spring, for example.

The word also seems to somehow be connected to the idea of location or community. One view on this can be seen in Tikal: Paleoecology of an Ancient Maya City. This view says ch'een’s meanings include "city center" and “water cave.”

Added Features
The ancient Maya often changed the caves they used. One thing they would do is paint images of animals as well as people in the caves. Another thing they would do is carve things like heads, skulls, footprints and geometric shapes into the cave. They would also build things in them like tombs, stairways, platforms, and shrines.

Functions
In the ancient Maya view of the way the world worked, caves had a lot of different functions. I've separated the functions I've come across below.

Source of Water, Rain, Corn, and Clouds
The Maya thought that water, clouds and rain, came from caves. (The idea of clouds from caves isn’t so strange as it may seem -- the Maya area has tropical locations, and it is in tropical locations that clouds can form and come out of caves.) You may also find the view that there was a belief among the ancient Maya that lightning came from caves too.

Place of Sacrifice/Burial
One use the ancient Maya had for caves was as a place to put the dead. And it wasn’t just people who had died naturally. The Maya would also bury people they had killed as sacrifices in caves -- in fact, they would also go to really hard to get to sections of caves to sacrifice people. (The Maya also killed animals in caves as sacrifices.) It may even be the ancient Maya had caves for burying the bodies of their sacrifices as well as caves for burying people who had died but hadn't been sacrifices.

Source of Formations
The Maya used cave formations in rituals and not just in caves. There was a practice where a tall stalactite or stalagmite would be taken from where it formed and set up somewhere else. The stalagmite or stalactite could be set up inside the cave it formed in, just in a different spot – or was taken outside to be set up somewhere else.


Supernatural Doorway
The Maya thought that caves were connected with the Underworld. There are different views on how exactly the Maya thought the two were connected. One view says they thought caves were doorways that connected the human world to the underworld.  (There's also a view that the ancient Maya thought caves were parts of the underworld, not just doorways to it.) They thought that gods from the underworld sent things out through caves. (There's also a different view that caves were ways to talk to creator grandparent gods – and that these gods were believed to control the sea. Yet another view says that the ancient Maya thought that more than one rain god lived in caves.) The Maya would give the gods of the underworld offerings in these caves. 

Possible Use: Period Ending Rituals
One specific ways the ancient Maya may have used caves as places to have ritual celebrations – archaeologists have found evidence that these ritual celebrations were celebrating other rituals for “period ending.” (Period ending rituals were rituals for when a certain period of time had become complete, like a b'akt'un – a period of 144,000 days.)

Consideration: Diphrastic Kennings
The ancient Maya had special phrases that you may see called diphrastic kennings. These were pairs of words that sounded close to each other – but meant two different things -- that when put together were a way of saying an idea.

For example, one diphrastic kenning that had ch’een in it was chan ch’een. This translates as “sky cave” but means "world" or "universe." That is, all of reality. (There’s a view that says it’s possible that when the ancient Maya wrote ch’een, they were just using a short form of the diphrastic phrases that had ch’een in it.)


References:
Mesoweb: "The PARI Journal" Volume 17 Issue 4: "A Carved Speleothem Monument at Yaxchilan, Mexico"; Christophe Helmke; 2017

YouTube: "How caves showed me the connection between darkness and imagination | Holley Moyes | TEDxVienna"; TEDx Talks; November 22, 2016

Google Books: "Tikal: Paleoecology of an Ancient Maya City"; David L. Lentz, Nicholas P. Dunning, Vernon L. Scarborough (editors); 2015

Google Books: "Maya Pilgrimage to Ritual Landscapes: Insights from Archaeology, History, and Ethnography"; Joel. W. Palka; 2014

Google Books: "Sacred Darkness: A Global Perspective on the Ritual Use of Caves"; Holley Moyes (editor); 2012

Western Oregon University: "From Out of the Earth: Water, Maize and Caves in Ancient Maya Myth and Religion"; Clara Scillian Kennedy; June 13, 2011

University of Central Florida: STARS: "New Perspectives On The Quatrefoil In Classic Maya Iconography The Center And The Portal"; Rachel K. Egan; 2011

Google Books: "Exploring Maya Ritual Caves: Dark Secrets from the Maya Underworld"; Stanislav Chládek; 2011
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