Caves are interpreted as portals where humans call animals back into the spirit world, completing the cycle of life and death through ritual art.
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Caves
Caves are interpreted as portals where humans call animals back into the spirit world, completing the cycle of life and death through ritual art.
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Key Notes
Jiang treats caves as womb-like portals to the spirit world, which explains why animal images and rituals occur inside caves.
Caves were sacred portals but not settlement sites because they were dark, cold, oxygen-poor, and unlivable; mountaintops and rivers could serve as livable sacred portals around which communities settled.
Jiang says agricultural settlements formed around mountaintops and rivers, not caves, because caves were sacred but unlivable.
Timestamped Evidence
"...does the spirit world connect with the material world? Well, through caves, right, through portals, rivers, caves, mountaintops. And that's why these places were..."
"...Okay, so this is another religious depiction. All right, so these cave paintings, there's always three questions associated with these cave paintings. The first..."
"The stars, the caves are portals into the spirit world, and that's why you celebrate them, okay? And how are they painting the caves?..."
"...in nature most resembles a womb a mother's womb like a cave right you understand a cave so we can think like okay we..."
"the cave celebrating animals why are we doing that why are we animals why are we doing that why are we animals why are..."
"But you can't live in a cave though. Right? You can't live in a cave. You can only go there now and then. There's..."
"...did so around rivers. Okay? Does that make sense? But not caves because you couldn't actually live in caves. Does that answer your question?..."
Relevant Lectures And Readings
A source-grounded reading of Jiang's dawn-of-humanity lecture: Darwinism becomes a rival theology, cave art becomes a portal, speech begins as song, and modern society is accused of socializing people out of empathy.
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