Associations With Natural Forces
Caves are linked with wind, rain, and clouds. The Zinacantecos of the Chiapas highlands even believe that lightning comes from caves. The Yukatek and Lacandon believe that caves and cenotes are where rain deities reside and the Yukatek of the sixteenth century sacrificed humans to appease these deities.
At Dos Pilas the Cueva de Murciélagos rests beneath the royal palace platform. After it rains heavily water rushes out from this cave signaling the beginning of the rainy season and the advance of the crop cycle. This artificial landscape showed that the king had control over water, rainmaking, and fertility, thereby legitimizing his authority.
Caves in art have also been used to legitimize authority and elevate status. Individuals in the mouth of a cave for example are endowed with authority that is often associated with shamanism. Scribal imagery is often associated with a skeletal jaw (maws are often likened to the mouths of caves), which may indicate that caves are where his craft originated. Perhaps this imagery "served to mystify and exalt the scribe's role."
Read more about this topic: Maya Cave Sites
Famous quotes containing the words associations, natural and/or forces:
“Wild as it was, it was hard for me to get rid of the associations of the settlements. Any steady and monotonous sound, to which I did not distinctly attend, passed for a sound of human industry.... Our minds anywhere, when left to themselves, are always thus busily drawing conclusions from false premises.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I’ve always been impressed by the different paths babies take in their physical development on the way to walking. It’s rare to see a behavior that starts out with such wide natural variation, yet becomes so uniform after only a few months.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)
“What if all the forces of society were bent upon developing [poor] children? What if society’s business were making people instead of profits? How much of their creative beauty of spirit would remain unquenched through the years? How much of this responsiveness would follow them through life?”
—Mary Heaton Vorse (1874–1966)