It Never Left

It is tempting to think we are past this sort of thing. But we aren't. We have "one holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church" comprised of well over a billion people (and growing) that proclaims the truth and reality of the doctrine of Original Sin. So, when we take one last sip of coffee, fold the paper, turn the lock, and head off to work, we don't worry about the statuary at the parish. Or our priest(s). Or how well the ushers might handle the breaking-in of disruptors during either a major feast celebration or even a Saturday evening "There's-that-guy-in-his-bermuda-shorts" Vigil Mass.

What we forget in our daily functional atheism are the anthropological realities that our Lord's Church defines so well in the Catechism; specifically, the symptomology of paganism of all those outside the sphere and protection of our Lord's sacramental "containment system" (if you will allow such a crass way of describing it).

Read through Paganism, parts 1-3. Girard and Satinover give the Church's Magisterium two excellent tools for understanding what we still face; indeed, at a growing rate.

Primitive Sacred and Oil on the Water

Mark Steyn lets fly with King Barack the Verbose.

One of the most salient and fascinating features of René Girard's mimetic theory is that it dispels the common - and wrong - notions that we humans (a) think for ourselves and (b) left behind all the mumbo-jumbo of our primitive ancestors who did things like ritual sacrifice of first-born children. Wrong on both counts, says mimetic theory.

We are hugely influenced by the desires of others and, therefore, at the whim of those who know this about ourselves and take advantage of it. Think Madison Avenue. Think all those sales flyers that fall out of your Sunday newspaper. Think about going to work, or to a class reunion, or to a dinner party wearing what is hanging in the never-touched recesses of your closet. Why is that? Not because you care what people think, surely.

The Gospel has indeed been hard at work in history freeing us from many of the superstitions of what Girard calls "the primitive sacred." But as the Gospel in general and the teachings of the Catholic Church in particular are abandoned and rejected, the pagan rises again. And one of the most prominent elements of the primitive sacred is the king/priest/shaman figure; i.e., one vested with the aura of the sacred. How that figure accrues this aura and power is important, but for now just realized that the vacuum created by the secular West's rejection of the Christian faith has opened the realm of this sacred human figure once again.

Enter Barack Obama. The adulation and "leg-tingling" of Chris Matthew, the Obots on street corners before the election, the fawning free-ride by the MSM (now showing a few signs of waking up and smelling the coffee grounds) all smack of the mystification of the primitive sacred's legendary divine figure come alive again.

Enter the Gulf of Mexico oil-spill disaster. Nothing seemingly can stop it. Not technology. Not bureaucrats' posturing and grand-standing. And NOT the king/priest/shaman of the Last Self-Help Administration.

His divine status, it would seem, cannot cap this catastrophic act of nature, and, while he is clearly not to blame for it, he clearly cannot do anything to stop it. His post-modern version of the primitive sacred leader - the only alternative to the Church's more realistic understanding of fallen, fallible human nature (even the Pope goes to Confession) - is beginning to look oil-soaked and - hmm - less than divine.

If ever there was a wake-up call from Heaven, in my opinion, this Gulf of Mexico fiasco is one. What shall it be? A modern recrudescence of the primitive sacred? Or a return to sanity in Catholic truth?

Is anyone else asking - or answering - this question?

Out You Go

A good reason to engage in legitimate defense, to protect our bishops, priests, and religious, and have able-bodied men ready for the bums rush and old heave-ho here.

The neo-pagan, like its primitive sacred predecessor, looks for new victims while feeling exceedingly self righteous in doing so. This Pentecost Sunday plot is nothing other than an endeavor to destroy the faith, reason, and morals of the revealed truth vouchsafed in the Catholic Church by fallen, depraved, and satanically-influenced humans gone to seed.

Show 'em the door and don't be gentle about it.

Truth, Myth, and the Passion Redux

Jimmy Akin dispells the wickedness of the accusers.

Now, peace, be still, and remember what is really going on.

If there is a lesson to learned here it is that each and every time the Gospel in general or, in this case, the Holy Father in particular is made the scapegoat of the howling, ravenous hoard, it is the structural re-enactment of the Passion that set us free from sin and death in the first place.

The Holy Father undoubtedly knows this. Now, pray for him, for the Church this Holy Week, and all whose faith make be shaken by the purveyors of mythological paganism.

Pagans Want Their Sacrificial Victim

The Scapegoat (1854) - William Holman Hunt

What I have learned from René Girard's mimetic theory is that when there is sufficient social and psychological turmoil, crowds start looking for a scapegoat. From the viewpoint of the Christian faith, we would say this is a primary piece of evidence of the Fall, a common blind spot rooted in our disobedience to the will of God thematized in the Doctrine of Original Sin.

In traditional societies, what Girard calls the "single victimary mechanism" was an extremely economic way of re-establishing peace and harmony in the community. It nearly always only took one victim; "unanimity minus one," as he says. Or, as Caiaphus said in John 11, 50: "Better that one should die than the whole nation be destroyed."

But, as Robert Hamerton-Kelly reminds us, the Gospel has been at work in history for about 2,000 years. We have to perform capital punishment behind prison doors in the wee hours now, lest sympathy for the executed rouse even more turmoil. Gone are the days of a good hangin' in the town square after a picnic and before the fireworks display.

Now, Hamerton-Kelly says, the sacrificial mechanism in fallen humanity tries to work by raising the number of victims, or the prestige of the victim: genocide or regicide.*

Enter our newest attempt at scapegoating; namely, the Holy Father. Ah, the ravenous wolves are circling via the New York Times and other liberal organs. Voices of reason notwithstanding, the ignorant taunts of the mob howl, wanting their victim.

Even if Joseph Ratzinger knew the abusive priest was re-assigned under his jurisdiction, note well that these accusatory voices are (a) illogical insofar as their own liberal, progressivist platform would not call intergeneration same-sex activity a "crime" but merely "alternative lifestyle;" (b) oblique to their own heroes' similar shortcomings. But they want their sacrificial victim.

Problem is, however, the truth does not matter to them. Nor ever does it to the sacrificial mob; whether it is street rabble in Iran or the op/ed offices at 620 Eighth Ave., NY, NY.

They want their sacrificial victim, and the Holy Father has the most prestige.

So far.

UPDATE: Gerald Warner: It's the Pope's turn

*This is so in western cultures influenced by the Gospel. In those not influenced by the Holy Spirit, individuals are still accused and indicted; i.e., "witches", "infidel", etc.

37 Years of Sacred Abomination

Fellow convert Francis Beckwith offers this on the 37th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. And Father Barron on, appropriately enough, apocalypticism.

New Pagans Within the Gates

Kevin Ryan at Mercatornet describes a recent visit to Paris:

As we walked out to the sidewalk, the streets literally exploded with roaring cars and trucks packed with young Algerians screaming at the top of their lungs at one another and at the watching bystanders. Horns were blaring at ear-splitting volume. Rockets and firecrackers flew from car windows. From at least every other car there was a huge Algerian flag or an Islamic banner with a green crescent and star. There were so many cars that quickly the traffic jammed and the young French Algerians ran from car to car shouting at one another in sheer joy.

The automobile caravans brought to mind the spontaneous celebrations I witnessed in my suburban New York village at the end of World War II (yes, I am that old!), but it was a sedate event compared with this outpouring of intensity and energy. Clearly, these young French young men and women have deep and alive Algerian roots. While the celebration was loud and long, going on for a good four hours, it was, by and large, joyous. The gendarme sat in their cars, observing, but ready. And as the honking motorcade roared past the older citizens, passively observing from cafés and a street side restaurants, these newer French seemed to be sending a message. “We are here. And here to stay. It is no longer your Christian France. Get used to it”..Read all ...

While this makes grim reading during the darkening days of Advent, I wish I might say it is merely the youth of the Scimitar who are acting out in such pagan fashion. Truth is, we are witnessing the death of a culture premised not on Judeo-Christian ethics and faith, but one posited on the Doric pillars of democracy - the result of the sacrifice of kings, as per the keen insight of Robert Hamerton-Kelly - but which harkens back much further to the sacrificial origins of democracy per se in ancient Greece.

The "bait and switch" took place in the 16th century during the rise of the pagan cloaked in the Enlightenment, so-called. With what Hillaire Belloc called "the new money" taking control of the lands, monasteries, and system of subsidiarity of the Catholic Church came the usurpation of any hope for the continuation of Christendom. The Counter-Reformation yielded huge harvest, but the "powers and principalities" of England, the Netherlands, even France would not willingly turn that Mammon once gained back to control of the Church.

They sowed the wind. We are now reaping the whirlwind of the downfall of the West.

All we can look forward to in the foreseeable future is shrinking outposts of truth, goodness, and beauty; the grandest and strongest is the Catholic Church, Peter's Barque, against which Our Lord promised the gates of hell shall not prevail (Mtt 16).

But alone and without recourse to Her sacramental grace, He warns, "Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters" (Lk 11,23).

Let those with ears to hear, hear.

The Scimitar - Primitive Sacred

An aspect of René Girard's concept of the primitive sacred involves the acquisition of certifiable sacrificial victims. The sacred needs victims to re-stoke the flames of what Robert Hamerton-Kelly calls the "Generative Mimetic Scapegoating Mechanism" at its heart.

Therefore, the primitive sacred needs trip-wires so as to alert its religionists that "they've got one!" like this.

The gods of the primitive sacred - regardless of all talk of "monotheism" - reflect a similar and recurring need: the need for victims. Girard's three primary characteristics of the sacred carry essential tasks to keep the victimary cult at the center of such conventional culture strong and able to maintain social and psychological cohesion. These three characteristics are ritual, myth, and prohibition.

Ritual re-enacts the founding slaying of the deity-troublemaker who "rescued" the people when they were engaged in the "war of all against all" (Hobbs). By his death, they became a people. To keep the chaos and tumult from returning, a priesthood establish a ritual that replays this victimary origin of culture.

Myth is the subterfuge that lends the once violent mob a self-justifying, self-congratulatory story that keeps them from seeing the actual, structural innocence of their original victim - as well as their on-going ritualized victims' innocence. We "had to" sacrifice him (her, them); it was our "sacred duty."

Prohibitions provide the "trip-wires" that show us who has "trammeled" upon the deity's will and, thus, provide us with a necessary cache of victims, should a dissolution of our cultural cohesion call for a sacrifice to surcharge it.

The point is, the Scimitar has all the ingredients of the primitive sacred in a viral and quite active way in the world today. And regardless of its claims of "monotheism", its structure is at-one with all pagan "primitive sacred" religions.

A Postcard, A Retreat, and Nietzsche's Man

I am back now from my all-too brief retreat at Holy Cross Abbey. Brief, but not without great benefit: Sacrament of Reconciliation, the Holy Eucharist on Saturday with Lauds, thirty minutes of Adoration before the Tabernacle (a plenary indulgence), and lots of silence, walking, and reading.

A book I am finding truly insightful for our times of tumult is Lucy Bennett's A Postcard from the Volcano – A Novel of Pre-War Germany. Historical fiction, yes, but historical fiction that shines a bright light on themes and structures of our own tectonic cultural fractures and violence.

Here is a choice tidbit from the protagonist's, Max's, grandfather: "It is good to be young, and capable of understanding that it's the hopes that need changing" (emphases added). Yeah, right.

An intuition from the Abbey Guesthouse: Nietzsche gave the West a double-barrel dose of his ennervating madness: (a) he described and affirmed a kind of man who accepted the 'eternal return' of the Dionysiac - vain, shame-based, vengeful, proud, bestial - while rejecting the Crucified One's way of forgiveness, mercy, long-suffering, and charity; and (b) that man whom he told Europe to imitate has strode menacingly and violently in the flesh onto Europe's stage in the flesh and in great numbers: the Scimitar's exemplar.

Our hero, Nietzsche's man! How can we, liberal, progressive, multi-culturalist, enlightened peoples, not accept him with arms outspread?

Europe and the West in agreeing with Nietzsche, yet possessed by the unacknowledged Spirit of Christ's concern for the victim and non-violence, quail before this swarthy, proud, "natural man." Would Nietzsche be pleased, I wonder?

The only - the only - hope for Europe and the West is not some finely nuanced revivification of sacramentality (that may come later on); rather, it is a sweeping and wholehearted return to belief God and in Jesus Christ as the true Son of God, the Word made flesh (Jn 1,14), rejection of Dionysus, and metanoiac affirmation of Our Lord's Church here on earth.

Anyone willing to give me odds on that likelihood?

Nietzsche's Victory

Even those for whom mimetic theory is a closed - or, more accurately, never opened - book can see that the accusatory gesture carries with it a near-insurmountable power. Conventional power of observation are no match for it. A sanguine, detached position if silent becomes a collusion.

Pam Geller shows the power of the accusatory - literally in Greek, the satanic - gesture here.

Perhaps the most disturbing feature of this is how mythologically blinding the sacred (speaking anthropologically) is on the self-proclaimed "progressive" minds, unregenerate as they are. Girard merely shines anthropological insight and data at the behest of the Catholic magisterium.

Discard the influence of the Gospel, and the conventional mind rapidly recrudesces to the pagan sacred, the so-called natural man, and the worship once again of the dark gods of blood (Lewis).

Chaput - Health Care Reform

Archbishop Charles Chaput:

God, or the devil, is always in the details. As Scripture says, “You will know them by their fruits” (Mt 7:20). The test of White House and congressional honesty about seeking “common ground” will be the details of the health care plan being worked on this summer and fall. The whole meaning of “health care” would be subverted by any plan that involves mandated abortion access or abortion funding. The reason is obvious. Killing or funding the killing of unborn children has nothing to do with promoting human health, and including these things in any “health care” proposal, no matter how shrewdly hidden, would simply be a form of lying. More>>>

Common sense has so long been rejected and subverted that sacrifice of unborn children is once more the characteristic of a conventional self-satisfied, pagan culture, anthropologically speaking. The influence of the the Church's gospel is reaching its lowest ebb. Family is nearly however you desire to define it. "Heteronormativity" is verboten in curricula. Down is up and up is down.

The good Archbishop Chaput is like the Baptist. A lone voice crying in a wilderness.

Marlin - Political Religions

George J. Marlin writes at The Catholic Thing:

In two remarkable books, Earthly Powers and Sacred Causes, British historian Michael Burleigh, has traced the clash of religion and politics from the French Revolution to our own times. Burleigh shows that modern materialist creeds – Jacobinism, Fascism, Communism, and Nazism – had these common traits: They viewed man, not as a person created Imago Dei, but as a speck within mass society devoid of freedom, self-responsibility, and conscience; and to supplant organized religions, these secularists portrayed themselves as pseudo-divine and elevated their revolutions to religious status.

The French Jacobins suppressed the Church (by 1794 only 150 of 40,000 churches were offering Mass) and replaced it with a civic religion. The Declaration of the Rights of Man was a political gospel. Baptism was redefined “as the regeneration of the French revolution begun on July 14, 1789.” Communion: an association of French people “to form on earth only one family of brothers who no longer recognize or worship any idol or tyrant.” Penitence: “the banishment of all those monsters. . .unworthy to inhabit the land of liberty.”

To eliminate the Lord’s Day, a calendar was created with ten-day weeks. Holydays were replaced with secular feast days called Virtue, Genus, Labor, Recompenses, and Opinion. Notre Dame Cathedral was converted into a “Temple of Reason.” An opera singer was worshipped as the “Goddess of Liberty.”

Mussolini described Fascism as “a religious conception in which man in his imminent relationship with a superior law and with an objective Will that transcends the particular individual and raises him to conscious membership of spiritual society.” More>>>

Secularism is one of the most insiduous heresies. Invariably as we have come to see, to paraphrase Our Lord's parable, secularism sweeps out the storehouse and seven demons come in to dwell. Old Testament prophets would spot our age's versions of paganism in a heart beat, replete with child sacrifice in all of its "legal" abortuarial splendor.

Inquire Within

Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful

And you were beginning to think that the tide of human hubris could rise no higher, eh? Well, as we say in the Midwest, take a gander at the following:

London, England (LifeNews.com) -- Women from around the world are traveling to clinics in various locations that are now offering face lifts and cosmetic surgery using tissue from babies who have been killed by abortions.

Pro-life advocates are strongly condemning the practice and saying the taking of human life is never warranted -- especially for such a self-serving purpose.

Women like Susan Barrington, a 52-year-old housewife from England, are heading to places such as Barbados, the Dominican Republic, Moscow and Rotterdam to obtain the treatments.

She has been given the final go-ahead form a local clinic to travel abroad for the treatment that promises to make her look 10 years younger and doesn't mind that lives have been sacrificed to enhance her beauty.

To produce the treatments, clinics are using tissue from babies killed in abortions from 6 to 12 weeks into pregnancy and stem cells obtained from destroying human embryos to inject into a client's face. The fetal cells then begin a supposed rejuvenation process that makes the skin look younger.

To obtain the cells, women in underdeveloped nations are paid up to $200 dollars to carry a baby up to the optimum eight to 12 week period when the fetuses are “harvested” for their stem cells which are then sold to exclusive cosmetic clinics. More>>

What Terry Gilliam's 1985 film, Brazil, so precociously foresaw was our present mimetic swirl of terrorism, bureaucracy run amok, human hubris, alchemical fusion of paganism and western rationalism, and a suffocating attempt of nearly everybody to get out of it (unsuccessfully).

Want to know how to find peace, joy, and holiness? Inquire within..

Seeing Clearly - Catholicism

Man, oh man. When Jeff Miller (the 'Curt Jester') is right, he is right. In his words, One of the joys of being Catholic is that you can see reality more clearly and don't have to pretend to not see the obvious. Though it is a bittersweet joy since seeing this reality is rather frustrating when so many are comfortably ignoring it.

Light shines above this present darkness

Recent events have left nearly all Christians flabbergasted by the swiftness of "progressive" moves against life and its sole remaining on-the-books supporter, the Catholic Church. It is a move to remove and silence the voice of faith and morals, as Cardinal Pell recently noted, or, in the case of Connecticut lawmakers, an attempt (pulled for the moment) to cede ecclesial control afforded bishops and priests to the (almighty) powers of state government.

More omnipotently, the president has now co-opted the federal income taxes paid by the faithful to do the work of Moloch, one or two steps removed from the Freedom of Choice Act he arrogated to sign into law before Planned Parenthood. His agenda is clear - to "do away with culture wars," because they are "so 90's" (read: silence foes of the "progressive" agenda once and for all). To what end?

The proponents are sincere. I do not doubt their sincerity. Nor do I doubt their thinking, their logic, their determination, or their belief that they are doing it all for a good reason, even for the good of all people.

What I beg to differ on with President Obama and all who are supporting and working so hard to enact against faith and morals that are NOT "so 90's" - they are so 32 A.D. - is this: their presuppositions.

What we as people of faith in general and Catholics in particular presuppose is diametrically opposed to their presuppositions. And the difficulty is that neither of us can prove our a priori first principles through which we view the same world, same evidence, same data: they are faith statements, and ever shall be.

What we as followers of Jesus Christ say, however, is that the vast heft and glorious weight of wisdom and Tradition vouchsafed in the Magisterium of Mother Church far, far outshines and outweighs the puny, proud secular and humanist knowledge, news and information recently garnered by the advocates of "progress", utopian change, and modern-day Gnostic pipe dreams.

We're in for a huge battle. Our enemies think, naively and proudly, their recent ascension to stately power make them nearly invincible.

We know differently. And that is why we practice the virtues, pray constantly, teach our children, and trust in the perichoretic power of the Most Holy Trinity in and through the sacramental presence of the Catholic Church which Our Lord promised would prevail against all attacks till He comes again.

Slaves to Choice

Moloch has a new name for these new and improved times. His name now is Choice. His minions are Legion.

Downward Spiral in Sacrificial Preparation

Part and parcel of the cultural degeneration embedded in the cycle of René Girard's "primitive sacred" is sacrificial preparation. The priest/shaman/kingship actively seeks the breakdown of social mores, intensifying the psychological and social agitation of the people, until the sacrificial denouement is reached in the ritual killing of the proscribed victim.

This was, as Gil Bailie notes, an "economical" method of restoring the peace and tranquility of traditional societies. When the single victim mechanism was working well, it only took one victim to bring about the cathartic release accrued in the sacrificial preparation. And, of course, the ritual was a re-enactment of the founding murder that lies at the heart of each and every culture; its memory, though in the hoary past, was preserved and guarded in the culture's myths, rituals, and prohibitions. It was a well-considered action choreographed to insure a return to a stabilized cultural milieu without getting out of hand and becoming a conflagration of total cultural destruction.

The haunting question is, do the so-called "progressives" who occupy the highest places of governmental power and influence know any of these anthropological realities? No, says

A renowned expert on the life and work of sex scientist Alfred Kinsey, widely known as the "father of the sexual revolution," is raising alarms over President Obama's pursuit of sex "education" for kindergartners and his plans to install a pornography advocate in a top Justice Department position.

Judith Reisman is a Ph.D. researcher and scholar whose exposés of Kinsey have appeared in several books, including "Kinsey: Crimes & Consequences" and, most recently, a new DVD called "The Kinsey Syndrome."

The new video documentary reveals dramatically the profound impact on American society from the “findings” of the famous sexual revolutionary, who succeeded in overturning most of the “morals” and “vice” laws of World War II-era America ...

(She) explains how Kinsey's campaign for extreme sexual permissiveness – many would say anarchy – now has resulted in aggressive demands for approval of alternative sexual lifestyles, rampant abortion, child molestations and even the kidnapping and killing of children.

Specifically, she explains (that) Kinsey's research was conducted intentionally to advance the agenda of a sexually promiscuous society, and the nation forever has been changed – for the worse – because of him.

Read all of the WorldNetDaily article here.

The key to understanding our cultural situation from a viewpoint of mimetic theory is to listen to the themes (economics, conservativism, liberalism, etc.) but observe carefully the structural aspects and how they relate to the anthropological realities.

In this case, Dr. Reisman is correct in seeing the dangers associated with the alarming naïveté and ill-informed choices of President Obama. Girard underpins her fears with structural understanding. The United States leadership is hell-bent on sacrificial preparation. Leading to what?

Swearing in the Puer

Well, here we go. America, having hitched its wagon to a puer, now gets what it so richly deserves, seeing that we must live with the consequences of our actions and decisions. Wait! Wait! But that is exactly what we wanted to get away with/from by electing the Big O!

Sorry, America. Oh, and by the by, you did know, didn't you, that Hopy Change-Day also brings its shadow, too? No?

The shadow of the puer is the senex (Latin for "old man"), associated with the god Apollo--disciplined, controlled, responsible, rational, ordered. Conversely, the shadow of the senex is the puer, related to Dionysus--unbounded instinct, disorder, intoxication, whimsy. (Marie-Louise von Franz, James Hillman)

Like all archetypes the puer is bi-polar, exhibiting both a "positive" and an "negative" aspect. The "positive" side of the puer appears as the Divine Child who symbolizes newness, potential for growth, hope for the future. He also foreshadows the hero that he sometimes becomes (e.g. Heracles). The "negative" side is the child-man who refuses to grow up and meet the challenges of life face on, waiting instead for his ship to come in and solve all his problems.

"For the time being one is doing this or that, but whether it is a woman or a job, it is not yet what is really wanted, and there is always the fantasy that sometime in the future the real thing will come about.... The one thing dreaded throughout by such a type of man is to be bound to anything whatever."

So, good luck with that four year thing. Remember puers and puellas don't like to be bound, say, by unborn children – such a drag on my freedom. Oh, and one more thing. My guess for today is that the inaugural "Festivity" will play-out nearly all of the sacrificial preparation, frenzy, exorcising scapegoating, and denouement so well explicated by René Girard's mimetic theory. But not on center stage - where the ever-smiling puer holds court - but off stage: at the over-crowded Metro stations, along the edges of the Mall, where lurking self-appointed "priests" of the primitive sacred will feel the call of the old gods of blood and mayhem.

Choose This Day

Jeffery T. Kuhner spells it out in no uncertain terms. For my fellow Girardians, we see one of the twin pincers of the primitive sacred: the neo-pagan with its current Gnostic coloration (the other pincer being the Scimitar). Please read the article in full.

The Vatican is the last line of defense against the new Dark Age ... No self-respecting, principled Catholic can or should support murder - regardless of who occupies the White House.

Power of Ritual

Archaeologists have found what seems to have been a geologic construct of Mayan myth, their ritualized highway through hell via sinkholes (cenotes). [ht: Spirit Daily]

Clifford Brown, a Florida Atlantic University archaeologist who has worked in the region, agrees that the Mayas saw the cenotes as a portal to the underworld.

"Everybody has heard of the cenote of sacrifice at Chichen Itza, but it's less widely recognized that it was part of a generalized cenote worship that existed at many sites," Brown said.

"There are a number of sites in the lowlands where there are caves right underneath the principal temples, palaces and pyramids, which are thought to represent a religious 'access mundi,' where you have the pyramid representing the heavens, and the caves representing the underworld underneath."