Antrosophy

I

THE perennial attraction of caverns to the curious has always struck me as a peculiar phenomenon, deserving of inquiry. In fact a wholly new word has been invented for those who probe the depths of mountain fissures — they are called ‘ speleologists ’!

But I prefer a more mellifluous word, if we must resort to the Greek, and instead of ‘speleology,’ cumbrous and ugly abortion, let us call it ‘Antrosophy,’ which has all the elegance desirable and a hint of the mystic qualities of the pursuit itself.

I suppose we are drawn to caves and prompted to their investigation by the working within us of some very ancient instinct. Take a party of children to the rocky seashores of Cornwall or Scotland; give them the choice of making sand castles on the beach, bathing in the sea, or crawling into the nearest and most grisly cave that looms afar in the rocky wall of cliff, and the decision will always be the same. They will rush to the cave.

For the cave, after all, was the first solid and permanent abode inhabited by man. After a wigwam period, and a previous and even more loathsome period of lying curled up in damp hollows, like any beast of the field, his genius led him to establish the first ‘imposing residence’ in a cavern. Here he had, for the asking, walls, roof, door, and a relatively dry floor, and here for the first time in his history he could defy the elements.

Now we always look with affection upon the earliest house that we can remember: —

and so forth and so on. The house in which I lived at the age of five was an immense embattled mansion which towers above me in my infant memory. All the mysteries of early life were in it — the awful chamber into which I dared not enter, that home of the gods which my father alone held inviolate, or the vast be-china’d and be-Chippendaled room where nectar and ambrosia were shared by great companies. And then there were all the hidden dangers of a garden in which infinite horrors lurked.

And when I saw it twenty-five years later it was a simple red house in a small English country town, the study of my father, the family dining room, and the rest, pathetically shrunk in size, painfully ordinary. And yet, despite all disillusion, mystery clung to that house, the horrors and awes of childhood still hovered over it intangibly, and I came away refreshed but solemn, pained only to see the strangers that were within my gates, the parvenus who had invaded my sacred grove. Even now I am drawn again and again to go to sec that simple house with its complex memories. No other quite gives me the same awful thrills, no other has the same fascination, entrancing and compelling. The house I lived in at ten years of age is flat and uninteresting in comparison, while that which held my youthful energies at the age of fifteen is a house and nothing more. The house I left last year is but a dead shell. It is my first house that draws me.

That, I think, is why caves in the hillside have that indefinite but unspeakably powerful magnetic quality. We may hide our inability to resist the attraction under solemn names and give our excuses for penetrating those cavernous depths some semblance of scientific rectitude, but into those caves we go willy-nilly as fast as we can. We may call it archaeology or palaeontology that draws us; we may call ourselves speleologists and the rest; but all the time it is that ancient call that drags us — the Lure of the First Abode.

Myself, I am the easiest drawn. For I make no resistance. Everything that is cavernous and cavelike attracts me. I like to probe to the ultimate depths, to hear about the adventures of others in their caves, to see pictures of caves and cave hunters, and to speculate upon the life of those who lurked and hid in the bowels of the earth from generation to generation. I never pass a cave by unentered, or leave a report of a cave unverified. I give myself endless excuses for seeing them. If they contain but the bones of palaeolithic bears and lions, I become an enthusiast for pakeolithics; if they contain the bones of prehistoric man, I become an anthropologist ; if they hold but Roman or Greek or British remains (mere moderns these), I become an archaeologist at once. And even if they hold nothing but the memories of rum and smugglers, revenue men and brandy, I forthwith become a simple tripper, twist my neck to the appropriate bend, and admire open-mouthed.

But the original mystery remains. We see it in some of the names which are given to caves. ‘Wookey Hole’ — what more magnetic name could a cave have than this mighty tunnel in the rocks of Somerset? Why, even as I write, there is being organized a choir who shall sing next week from the innermost recesses of this fearsome hole, in order that the ghastly echoes that they create shall reverberate over the wireless into the ears of a million shuddering listeners. We are broadcasting to a million ears the thrills of two-score centuries. Wookey Hole — I often wonder who gave it that ghastly name. Who was Wookey? He can hardly have been a human, for who has ever been born with such a name and been of human origin? Whoever Wookey was, he was ancient indeed, for from palæolithic times without cessation man has lived and died in that ancient cellar.

In caves man first found Art, first discovered the secret joys of invention, of using the great reservoir of his mind. For in their dark recesses he had time to think, undeflected by the perpetual distractions of the open air. When the herds of buffalo and deer swept past him he could not stop to think or to admire or to ponder. But, alone with his torch of resin in his innermost sanctum, the figures impressed upon his retina emerged again in his mind’s eye, and he drew and painted as he never did again for thousands of years. After cave man came neolithic man, the agriculturist. lake all agriculturists he lived in wretched houses, wherein was no sanctum, no innermost recess in which to take refuge from the family chatter. And all his life of work was spent in the open, his face to the soil, his hand to his wooden plough. So his imaginative powers fled, he could not ponder or ruminate. And Art passed him by. Neolithic men were not artists, because they had no studios.

Caves provoke art by their amenities. And in the memory they provoke the arts of the imagination. ‘You say that you are interested in caves,’said a Thracian sea captain to me once in Greece. ‘Then listen to this story, for the truth of which I can vouch implicitly; more, I can swear as to its truth upon the head of my mother.

‘A few years ago I was in Little Asia, at Smyrna. One day I wandered inland up into the hills for a day’s walk. Among the stony ravines I suddenly came across the narrow entrance of a cavern. Naturally I entered, and found myself inside a long narrow passage hewn in the rock. I passed for some ten yards or so down the passage until the light from the entrance became dim. Here the passage suddenly turned sharply. As I turned the corner a dim light, as of fire, showed faintly. For fear that this meant the presence of robbers, I walked very cautiously and quietly. The passage turned gently to the right, and suddenly before me opened out a great chamber, brightly lit with the glare as of a petrol flame. I moved gently forward until I could see all, and there from the floor rose a jet of flame, lit from natural gas. In front of it was seated a huge figure of a man, silhouetted against the light. I stepped forward three paces in complete silence and in great fear. As I took the first step, the man rose to a standing position. As I took the second he swung round toward me, and as I took the third he lifted above his head an enormous axe. There he stayed with his axe poised. Quietly I retraced my steps, but with my face to him. As I took one step back he lowered the axe; at my second step he swung round again to his former position. At my third he sat down and resumed the position in which I had first seen him, with his head between his hands.

‘Now, sir,’continued my sea captain, ‘what would have been your explanation? I am no man for fairy stories. I believe in hard facts. That man in the cave was a mechanical figure. He had been placed there long ago to guard some great treasure. In stepping forward I had trodden upon the secret mechanism by which he was worked. And this must be so, for all his movements were precise and certain, and each movement corresponded to a step that I took, backward or forward. Who knows how many thousand years he had sat there, or how often he had risen from his seat? All I know is that I slipped out of that cave in the shortest space of time that you can imagine, and I have never been back again. Oh, yes, I can tell you exactly where that cave is. But if you go to see it you must be very cautious.'

I have long wondered over the old Greek’s story. Quite certainly it is untrue. Yet he was blending with a real experience a very old tale which I believe is not uncommon. Probably he had entered such a cave and been frightened. Then, later, the old story had revived in his memory and he mixed the two. He never saw any ‘Guardian of the Treasure.’ All he saw was the inside of a cave. But imagination and the stories his mother had told him did the rest. For the very thought of caves will stir the dullest imagination.

II

Plato was an ‘antrosopher.’ He went to a cave for one of his most impressive similes (in the Republic). And I always feel that he chose a cave because a cave had chosen him: for we are told in the extant Lives of Plato that have come down to us that he, when a newborn babe, was laid by his parents for a time in a cave on the slopes of Mount Hymettus, sacred to the Nymphs, and that, as he slept, a swarm of honeybees settled upon his lips.

The cave is there and I have seen it. There is only one cave on the slopes of Mount Hymettus and that is a cave venerated long before the time of Plato and indisputably a cave sacred to the Nymphs. It was excavated many years ago by American archseologists and in it were found lovely marble reliefs on which Pan or Hermes and the Nymphs were depicted, while on its walls were old writings cut in the living rock a full hundred years before Plato was born. These old writings are various. Some record t he doings of an ancient hermit who seems to have iived in or near the cave for some time. His name was Archedemos of Thera and he calls himself ‘the Nympholept’ (‘seized by the Nymphs ’), which we can interpret as ‘nymph-bound,’ their life servant and lover. All over the ancient rocky walls he left his traces. Here is a carving of himself, hammer and sculptor’s tools in hand; there is just his name; in another place is a rhyme in which he tells us that he ‘made a garden for the Nymphs.’

This was no ordinary cave: it was a place of pious pilgrimage for peasants, and Plato’s parents placed him here that he should imbibe all the grace and beauty that the Nymphs could give him.

It is an odd cave. I have been to it twice — once this year, once sixteen years ago. It is harder to find than any cave I know, for its entrance faces vertically upward, in a stony hillside, and in consequence you cannot see it until you have reached it. Down this vertical hole you go, by a precarious broken flight of steps, and below opens out a double chamber to right and left. The rocky ridge that holds the steps is between the two. Once inside you see all around the strange carvings and writings on the walls, and in the soil you still find broken fragments of lamps which the ancient devotees had used. This is Plato’s cave right enough.

Good old Archedemos the ‘Nympholept’ and Plato in company keep this cave for themselves. The one has been forgotten by history but remembered by the explicit memorials which he left of his own self. The other has moulded the very course of humanity and yet left us no record of who he was or what he was like in character or appearance. But both are living men to those who have seen their cave.

Greeks, like ourselves, never let a cave pass unnoticed. And Pan was the god to whom in the main all caves were sacred. I know of no large cave in Southern Greece which does not hold some trace of Greeks, to show that they had lived there or visited there or left some offering in passing.

Away opposite Hymettus is the range of Parnes, overhanging Athens. There too is a cave. It is even harder to find than the cave of Vari on Hymettus. It lies in a river gorge far up under overhanging rocks. Here were found endless records of Greek cults, particularly of Pan and the Nymphs.

But I must not diverge into a guidebook on caverns. My proper subject is antrosophy, even if I happen to be the only living antrosophist!

III

I have pondered long upon the reasons which make caves so perennially attractive, and I have wondered why it is that these reasons are always equally cogent and compelling. But one must have practical experience. So this spring I went to a cave, an old friend of mine, and made a full inquiry into its secrets. Eight years ago I was wandering in Eastern Macedonia, and in the course of those wanderings I climbed the lovely mountain of Pangæus. It is more like a mountain than any that I know. That is to say, it has a summit, usually snow-covered, steep ravinated sides, and a profusion of trees at its lower levels. Moreover it rises abruptly from a plain that is as nearly flat as a plain can be, and it enters into no entanglements with other mountains — in other words, you don’t find that one part of it suddenly develops another name or merges into some other ridge or system. This excellent mountain stands alone, cheerfully selfsufficient. In ancient times it was famed as the mountain sacred to Dionysus, and its sacred slopes were guarded by a tribe of simple and religious savagery. It was the ancient counterpart of Mount Athos, its immediate neighbor. I feel convinced that Mount Athos was chosen by Christianity as its stronghold largely because the pagan sacrosanct it y of Mount Pangreus was far too strong an obstacle to enable the pious monks to follow the usual methods of adoption and conversion. Possibly, too, paganism lingered longer than might have been expected in its vast ravines and forests, and the descendants of the Dionysian guardians may have been too forceful in their defense to suit the conveniences of pacific proselytizers.

I climbed the mountain and explored as much of it as I could. And I spent a night at the delightful and out-of-theworld monastery that lies hidden in a hollow some thousand feet up from the plain. Here the monks told me that there was a cave, another three thousand feet up, given a name that at once can be classified as antrological — ‘Monk’s Hole.’ So up I went with a guide and found it; nor was it too easy to find, for it had a narrow entry on a precipitous slope. Once inside I saw that it was a good cave, and not a mere rock shelter. By the aid of a few small tapers I found that it opened out into incredible internal distances and hollows. And there I left it.

At last this year I found occasion to return, and one of my many stored ambitions was realized. But this time I returned in state, with mules, tents, friends, workmen, shovels, picks, compasses, and drawing instruments. I was determined to find out what had gone on in that cave and to rest happy at last with the intimate and personal knowledge of at least one cave in every possible detail.

Since the slopes outside the cave were far too steep, we were compelled to spend most of our time living in the cave itself as cave dwellers. Two tents we pitched precariously on the entry itself, just clinging to a small flat of earth, and one we put inside the cave.

Here we lived for nearly two weeks exploring the possibilities of the cave, learning in detail the life of a mountain in its daily vicissitudes. Every day the affairs of this lovely mountain were conducted upon the most rigid routine. Two hours after a clear and crystalline dawn, the mists of the plains were drawn from their marshes and sucked up, as though by mechanism, along the deep chasms in the mountain side, until at last they congregated upon the summit, two thousand feet above, and capped it for the rest of the day. As we ate our breakfast we saw the great masses of white fog and mist go sailing past us below where we sat, like some long procession of phantoms. At last, about noon, the procession ceased and we were left just below (but sometimes just in) the canopy of cloud.

Around us was one enormous rock garden of flowers, such as I have never seen in Greece before. Great clumps of purple saxifrage, fairy-like fritillaries, peonies, and in the sheltered places carpets of lily of the valley. I will not weary you with the conventionalities of description. Imagine yourself free to pick or to smell all the choicest blooms in an expensive flow er shop.

As night fell we could hear the deer calling to each other from peak to peak across the valleys, and far below us sparkled the lights of the few villages that clustered round the mountain roots. In the main all was complete and unspeakably soothing silence. Once, to our amazement, we heard clearly the voices of people speaking from a village, and even the raucous tones of a gramophone playing ‘Yes, sir, that’s my baby.’ But otherwise the mountain was untcnantcd by hints of modernity except for the strange wild woodmen who came from day to day cutting wood. They were Greeks, recent refugees from the innermost parts of Turkey, and their only tongue was Turkish. One would shout across the valley to another with strange cries that echoed and rang. They were shy men, incurious as Turks themselves, and infinitely patient.

But we were practically alone, and had the whole mountain to ourselves after nightfall. Not even birds broke the silence, for they (mostly nightingales) lived among the wild chestnuts and plane trees far below.

IV

Our cave had one vast entrance chamber. At its far end was a neat passage which turned abruptly and led down a steep slope to a much deeper cavern. On the roof of this part, which was in complete darkness, were clustered hundreds of bats, in great thick clumps. As night fell they came scurrying out and swirled about our heads as we sat round a blazing fire.

We explored the inner chambers with acetylene lamps and found them to number in all three, the last being rather a long corridor. Further rooms were visible through cracks in the walls of the last, but clearly no man had ever passed through, for the cracks were too small. Recent men had explored the very end of these inner rooms, for we found the names of monks, probably from the monastery, who had reached the final stalactite and scribbled on it. Some of the names belonged to the early years of the war of Greek Independence, over a hundred years ago.

There was no earth at all, except in the first and entrance chamber, so it was there that we decided to investigate. I was certain that a cave so cavernous as this, despite its extreme remoteness and the height at which it was situated, would inevitably produce traces of man. In this my antrosophy had told me right. But what we found was curious. No paheolithic man had ever lived there; indeed, as yet, there are no traces of a Paheolithic Age in Greece. But at a dim and remote age, perhaps in the third millennium B.C., neolithic hunters had paused there and lived exactly as we were ourselves living as we dug. But they had been few and they had stayed but a short while. We found the bones of sheep and wild boars which had been their meat and small trifles that they had made, fragments of their pots, and a small axe, rubbed laboriously out of the stone of the mountain. And there were needles of bone which they had fashioned after their meal to sew up the skin garments they wore.

In the centre of the cave was a hollow, like a vast cup, in which they had collected the water that dripped continuously from the roof, just as, in the same way, we collected it ourselves in petrol tins. For a source of water was far off, and climbing about these slopes is thirsty work, so that every drip from the roof was of value.

After these aneient men was a pause when no one came. The men of the Bronze Age passed it by. Greeks themselves did not live there, and at last came Romans, from Philippi below in the plain. Countless fragments of small drinking cups and small cooking pots showed that the Romans’ needs had been no more and no less than ours. These, like the neoliths, had been hunters. We found the tusks of many a fine boar, whose flesh had been roasted in that rocky residence. And also there were some of the largest teeth of either wolves or dogs that I have ever seen. Perhaps it became during Greek times a den of wolves and was therefore left unvisited. Romans, more courageously, used it as a huntsman’s house. Wolves arc not uncommon even today, though in fact we saw none.

In such a place every small minor object from the hand of man has an increased value for the inquirer. Just as every object we had brought with us we had brought because it was essential, and had left the merely luxury objects behind, so everything the ancient hunters had brought had a very specific purpose. Men who carry but small cups, flint or stone or iron weapons, and leave behind them the broken bones of wild boars and sheep, whether Roman or prehistoric — those men are hunters. Thus by the tools we had brought, had we left them behind, we should have been judged as excavators, with a weakness for acetylene.

So now I really feel I know what life in a cave is like, I am a practising antrosophist and proud of it. Anyone can spend a day here and a day there poking about in a cave. Even a thorough-paced speleologist can scrape his ancient bones from the cave earth in a day. But unless he live in the cave itself, and be thankful for it, especially when the rain comes down in sheets outside, no one can understand the realities of everyday cave life. I feel no little pride now in being able to sympathize on equal terms with the ancient cave dwellers. Like them I have tried to fashion tools and instruments to replace what I had lost or forgotten to bring up from below. Like them I have stirred a dish of steaming lamb’s flesh over a blazing fire and made the roof of the cave black with smoke. Like them I have dipped my cup into the accumulated waters that so munificently dripped from the roof. Like them I have watched the strange distorted shadows that danced upon the cave walls and finally flickered off to sleep almost at the same time as I did myself. It is a ruminative life, in which one has all the dark evenings for pondering and for invention.

No wonder cave men took to being artists, for the shadows and colors on the cave walls stimulate the eye and the memory. No wonder that, once emerged from the cave, men took to inventions immediately. The growing of grain, the use of the plough, the making of pots, those amazing discoveries that are almost as complicated, if you think them over, as the making of a motor car, soon came to the men of the postcave period because they had contemplative ancestors. But put a university graduate of average intelligence to grow a field of corn or to make a pot without any previous experience, and I guarantee that he will give up the task because of its immense complications. Our earliest inventions were our most difficult simply because we had in our immediate past ancestors who had thought long and deep in winter evenings in caves, with their minds flickering like the flames of their fires and their imaginations keyed up by what the dark shadows suggested to them.

How lucky for us all it was when the first explorer found a cave and decided how nice a permanent residence it would make for him and his family! For he might not have made that decision. Gorillas still foolishly live in trees and so remain gorillas. Chimpanzees live in nests on the ground, I believe, and therefore they remain as chimpanzees. But Neanderthal man,

apelike and hideous, went into the first cave that he saw and remained there. And Neanderthal man, and his like, have ended as you and I! It was but a step from those ancient antrosophists to the philosophy which, as Pericles said, coupled with a love of beauty, distinguished the ancient stronghold of Athena.