💡 Digging into the cellar, part 2
Where we encounter deep time, birth, death, and a return to origins
Hello from Maryland. In the comments of last week’s intro, I was impressed by several readers who shared fond memories of childhood cellars as places of quiet, dreamy retreat, outfitted with shelves for homey preserves and plenty of cobwebs. I’m much more anxious in such below-ground places. Which may account for my lifelong fascination with the push-pull between the hidden and the visible, madness and reason. Let’s just say I have a healthy respect for all things inexplicable and unknowable. (Links to the full series are at the bottom of this post.)
This Sunday’s installment of “Talking Back to Walden” will delve into the generosity of trees. If you missed the first “Talking Back to Walden” you can read it here. Subscribe so you don’t miss the next one.
Dear reader, my first draft of this post was over 2,500 words, so I’ve opted instead for smaller doses. Instead of a fat slice of store-bought birthday cake, I’m offering a rich, artisanal truffle.
Last week, I made the audacious claim that the cellar is within us. What’s a shadowy, unpredictable chamber of horrors doing in my psyche, anyway? Let’s dig in and discover together.
In the U.S., basements tend to be regional. They’re common in the north, because you have to dig down below the frostline for the foundations, so what’s a few more feet for some cheap additional space? In the south, where foundations are much shallower, basements are rare. In those hotter, humid climates, traditional houses were elevated above the ground for better ventilation and whatever natural cooling was possible.
These practical, climatic considerations are only part of the story. Basements are an overbred show cat compared to the wild lioness of the cellar. Today’s basements, with their in-home theaters and workout rooms, guest suites and climate-controlled off-season storage, are even further removed—more like a photo of a cat. All the potency and symbolic associations have been “civilized” out, leaving only bland, empty space.
As the basement’s wild cousin, the cellar is more than a room of the house; it is a reminder, a tie to deep time and origins. To call it a basement or utility room is to erase all that rich history and ignore its potency. There’s a direct line from the Enlightenment belief that we can control and rationalize our environment. The Modernists said we’ve outgrown all the old ways of building and must look only to the future. Le Corbusier, champion of the machine age, had a lot to say:
“The roofs, those wretched roofs, still persist, an inexcusable paradox. The basements are still damp and cluttered up, and the service mains of our towns are invariably buried under stonework like atrophied organs. . . .”1
He proposed building houses on pilotis with steel, concrete and glass, to more accurately embody the values of the businessman or industrial leader who lives there. His projects for entire cities built this way, with all the services exposed to view at ground level, and multi-level highways left nothing buried or hidden—the ultimate rationalization of the environment.
Carl Jung would not buy what Corb was selling. To his mind, people can’t control nature, because we haven’t even learned to understand our own instincts, let alone control them.
“The rational intellectual does not yet know that his consciousness is not his total psyche. . . . We still complacently assume that consciousness is sense and the unconscious is nonsense.”2
A whole human being recognizes and connects not only with the rational self, but also the unconscious. Because a troubled unconscious can reveal itself in dreams of cellars, Jung calls the cellar “the basement of the psyche.”
Definitions and etymologies of the word, “cellar,” provide more clues. Most obviously, it is a store-house or store-room for provisions; a granary, buttery, pantry, or wine cellar. As a translation from the French cave, it is more precisely an underground room or vault. (Cave, the adjective, means “hollow.”) The dictionary lists an “obsolete” use to symbolize the grave: “I bequeath mi body to the colde seler.” (Lacy, 1550, Wyl Buck’s Test.) A sense of intimate secrecy comes out in this quotation: “A man . . . being brought by God into his inward cellars, may from thence obtaine the true understanding, and interpretation of the Holy Scriptures.”3
Another dictionary derives the word from the Latin cella, and defines it as a place of concealment, secrecy, retirement and seclusion.4 Applying these architecturally, the cellar plays an important role. This dark, underground place is capable of supporting a dialogue between polarities such as private and public, introspective and ceremonial, instinctual and reasoned, irrational and rational. It belongs in every project, however modern, even if vestigial or symbolic.
Creation stories of many cultures, including the Navaho and Zuni, depict Earth as a mother who gives birth to all beings, including humans. According to these and other stories, the first men lived in an embryonic state deep in the “cavern-wombs” of the Earth, “like larvae . . . a grumbling throng, moaning and reviling each other in the dark.”5
This purely instinctual, pre-thought stage of mankind emerged into the acquisition of consciousness and intelligence, symbolized by the discovery of an opening in the surface of the earth leading upward. Eliade again: “Their progression to the light is homologous with the emergence of mind.”6 The underground is a place for irrational beings, to be left behind as we evolve.
Layered on this is the belief in a cycle which requires a return of the dead to the Place of Birth, in order to ensure rebirth in the same manner. This is given built representation in the house, for many people “buried their dead under their floors or incorporated their bones in to the substructure of their houses.”7
Contrary to the modern interpretation, this is an optimistic view of death, regarded as a return to the Mother, a “temporary reentry into the maternal bosom.”8 Any negative association of the underground with death and burial is offset by this positive view of a return to origins and the expectation of rebirth, the linking of mortality with fertility.
Next time, we’ll explore the cellar’s associations with refuge, permanence, persistence, memory, self-sufficiency, and revealing layers of the past.
When I asked in the chat what room of the house you are, answers ranged from libraries to kitchens to “Medicine Room” (thanks,
) to a bedroom with books, a writing desk and window on the world. This week, I’ll start a new thread to ask what associations you have with cellars in literature, film, or painting.Thanks for reading and sharing your thoughts. It’s always the highlight of my week.
Read installments of “Digging into the cellar” here:
Part 3: Finding refuge, permanence and timelessness
Part 4: Leaving the known world behind
Part 5: Cosmos, chaos, walls and stairs
Part 6: Social hierarchy and the unconscious
Part 7: Knowing and transforming our darkness
Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, trans. Frederick Etchells (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982), pp.86-88.
Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols (Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday & Col, Inc., 1964), pp.101-102.
James A.H. Murray, ed., A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1893), vol.III.C.
Richardson’s New English Dictionary (London: Bell & Daldy, 1856), vol.1.
Mircea Eliade, “Mother Earth,” in Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries (London: Harvill Press, 1960), pp.160-162.
Eliade, “Mother Earth,” p.162.
Joseph Rykwert, “One Way of Thinking About a House,” in The Necessity of Artifice (New York: Rizzoli International, 1982), p.85.
Eliade, “Mother Earth,” p.191.
This is wonderful and obviously reflects a great deal of thought and work. Thank you for sharing it with us.
Contrary to the modern interpretation, this is an optimistic view of death, regarded as a return to the Mother, a “temporary reentry into the maternal bosom.”
A temporary reentry into the maternal womb is how I used to view a neolithic tomb I used work in. It was aligned to the winter solstice sunrise and be briefly lit, like a form of rebirth. It only partially went into the ground, but had all the feel of being in a cellar.
My last home had a cellar which was built during the late 1800s to be a functional fridge, with a large stone slab counter to keep meat and milk fresh for longer. For us, it was more a case of out of sight, out of mind (much like the cellars within us).