Cave and cosmos, a geotopic model of the world in ancient cultures MICHAEL RAPPENGLÜCK Abstract The existence of caves gave people an excellent reason where to locate the celestial bodies at the time of their invisibility: They moved through secret realms under the ordinary world, somehow at the "backside" or the interior of the customary perceptible landscape. Caverns made accessible this "subterranean" space-time, wh ich ancient people regarded as a special lounge of the celestial bodies, and other beings. Thus, it is obvious why caverns fascinated people from Palaeolithic epochs to Jules Verne's "Voyage au centre de la terre (1864)": Going into the underground galleries, and following the mighty celestial bodies on their course through the subterranean area, offered a unique possibility to explore the inner structure of the cosmos. Moreover, at another level of understanding, ancient people interpreted the entry into a cavern and the passage through the inner space-time ofthe world as a voyage to the generative interior of an enormous female, representing the Great Mother of the World. They thought that the cosmos and the cave, the outer and the inner structure of the world, run parallel to the physical body and the psychonoetic essence of a human being. Going into a cave then meant not only to travel to the creative realm of the cosmos, but in a figurative sense also to undertake a voyage to the innermost person. It isn't surprising that since Palaeolithic time caverns had been regarded as sacred places, were often used as shrines, cult places, or for burials and served as a model ofthe world. The cave as a cosmic womb - place of creation and transformation People often identified the features of the landscape with the body parts of the Great World Mother organism, representing the creative cosmos. They especially equated the structure of the female genitals with the geo-top and topography of a cave (Krupp, 1997: 104; Rappenglück 2005). In both cases an opening - the portal and the vulva - permits the passage between two worlds related to each other, an outer and an inner one, an ordinary and a miraculous, a profane and sacral sphere. In Upper Palaeolithic cave art side galleries, small chambers, niches, and deep vertical shafts frequently are unusually decorated, indicating that they were considered as a special kind of places (Rappenglück 2005). Moreover, animals and signs are often arranged and concentrated around small fissures and big crevices in the rock faces and shafts: Probably man wanted to show living beings ascending from the cave and descending into it. Both movements may have been related to the function of a female genital - being fertiIized (going in) and giving birth (coming out). Sometimes the crevices itself were recognized as female genitals and the entrance into a cave as a huge vulva. Such ideas, related to creation myths, are known e.g. from North American natives (Krupp 1997: 100-110). The Maya used the topography of the cave similarly (Stone 1995: 118-130). Often paintings, engravings, or bas-reliefs of a woman's body or her genitals, mostly vulvae, 241