The ancient Mayans tell us that hiking through the lush jungle to a cenote brings you closer to Chaac, the patron of agriculture and the god of thunder, lightning, and life-giving rain. Chaac blesses farmers with a predictable cycle: dry winters leading to fiery springs, followed by wet conditions in early May. This cycle is essential for growing maize.
Many ecosystems nurtured early humans. Across the Caribbean, cenotes played a vital role in meeting the fundamentals of human life. Both the Mayans in the Yucatan and the Taíno people in the Dominican Republic built around cenotes because they collect drinkable water from rain seeping through porous limestone. This water source allowed people to quench their thirst. They could water their harvest in a harsh and unforgiving environment.
It is perhaps a given that throughout the Caribbean, cenotes hold a profound spiritual role, serving as gateways to mystical realization and providing a means to connect with, and even enter, the heavens and eternity.
For thousands of years, humans have found meaning in underwater caves, with experiences and interpretations varying across cultures and throughout time. Interestingly, our interpretations on underwater caves often fall at the end of two poles. On the one end, these caves provide liberation, life, and shelter. On the other, these caves are our oppressors, stirring nightmares in which the walls collapse and trap its dwellers in flooded darkness. Sometimes underwater caves are imagined as both these things at once as we hear the cave beckon us to enter and warn us to stay-out.
The Heavens and the Abyss
How can a natural formation exist simultaneously at these two ends? And why dive in? In the words of a dive partner: “When I first saw the cave I was scared. Then I entered the cave and I knew I loved the cave and the cave loved me.” An underwater cave is otherworldly. More people have been on the moon than in many of the underwater networks that sprawl beneath our field of sight.
A cave diver is always aware of her hand’s distance from the line as she dives the cave, not the line.
Such emphasis on touch, not sight,
The underwater cave is a dynamic and reactive
Video reveals what can be seen in the cave, but the cave diver explores the cave equally, if not more, through her feelings of touch.
On materiality, Maurice Merleau-Ponty states that by thinking through touch then “this domain, one rapidly realizes, is unlimited. If we can show that the [human] flesh is an ultimate notion . . . thinkable by itself, if there is a realization of the visible with itself that traverses me and constitutes me seer, this circle which I do not form, which forms me . . . can traverse, [and] animate other bodies as well as my own” [5].
The cave moves the cave diver
in-blog references:
[5] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible
shedivescaves.com 