Will Hunt

Will Hunt digs deep to understand his—and our—obsession with the subterranean. In his book, Underground: A History of the Worlds Beneath Our Feet, he explores everything from abandoned subway tunnels to Ice Age cave sculpture galleries, uncovering layers of meaning like some spelunker shaman. He’s drawn, he says, by a basic human need—life, according to some scientists, began not in the oceans, but the Earth. That the Ark of the Covenant, Navajo origin myths and aboriginal holy sites also lie there, may be related to this, just as may be the fact that we tend to bury our dead and to construct our literary narratives as deep dives. So let Hunt take you down now into the hidden spaces, the realm where our notes from underground are written.

steven lee beeber: Your book looks at “underground” in both the literal and the figurative sense. It also touches on your personal relationship with the subject. Can you elaborate a bit on how you tapped into this underground part of yourself?

will hunt: All of this begins when I was 16 years old and living in Providence, Rhode Island, and discovered an abandoned train tunnel that was ran directly beneath my house. It was this big sort of spooky, abandoned place that had been out of service for say 25 years and I just became fascinated by it for reasons I couldn’t articulate at the time. I would go down there with friends to hang out and poke around and then I started going down alone. I think what amazed me about it at the time was that it was the most unfamiliar, mysterious space I had ever encountered and it was hidden beneath the most familiar place in my universe at the time. I think that gave root to this lifelong fascination with spaces that were hidden underground and out of sight. A few years after Providence, I was living in New York and I encountered a whole community of tunnel geeks or enthusiasts called Urban Explorers. They were amazing because they knew all of the hidden secrets of the city, the subterranean rivers and the abandoned subway stations known as “ghost stations.” Through them, I started poking around underground beneath New York, and then I found there are communities like this all over the world, in Paris, Rome, everywhere. At a certain point, I stepped outside of myself and became fascinated with why I was fascinated with this—what was the root of this obsession, where is it coming from, why is it so visceral? I began researching and going back into time to understand the depths of humanity’s relationship with the subterranean, which is as old as we are, older than we are—we have been interacting with this landscape in visceral ways for longer than we’ve been human. So I began to see my small-scale fixation on tunnels and sewers and places like that as part of a much grander timeline, and in a much grander context. I could see that I was carrying with me this really deeply embedded story of humanity, every time I bored into a tunnel or a cave.

conduit: So the deeper you tunneled into the history behind this, the more you found that it connects not just to your own obsession but to that of all of humankind, that we have a subconscious need to explore and connect with this subterranean part of ourselves?

hunt: Yeah. I think we’re innately connected or preoccupied with hiddenness, with places we can’t see, and with darkness, and with the unknown. And the dark mouth of a cave is such a deep-rooted archetypal image. It’s like the ultimate embodiment of mystery, of the unknown, the unfamiliar. And there’s this duality where we’re repulsed by these spaces, frightened of them, yet also drawn to them, and it’s always been that way.

conduit: In your book you talk about the Ark of the Tabernacle and its connection to many shamanistic rituals and religious experiences. As you point out, all of these equate lostness with hiddenness, something unseen that the follower must embrace to be able to function in metaphorical as well as physical darkness.

hunt: Exactly. There was a moment in my research when I went to see a cave in the southwest of France that contains an extraordinary piece of Ice Age art. The cave sits on the property of this count, Count Robert Bégouën, who’s from an old aristocratic family. Against all expectations, he invited me to visit this very private cave which is seldom open to outsiders. He led me to the very back of the cave, almost a mile from the mouth, the deepest possible, most hidden part of the cave and then he did something very dramatic. He turned off the lights, had me turn around, then brought the lights back up so that I was face to face with it—this clay sculpture of two bison that had been made 15,000 years ago. It was so well preserved that you could see the fingerprints of the people who had sculpted it. I had this very intense, visceral reaction. I started crying, which was unexpected, and kind of mysterious to me, at least until I started reading about sacred spaces and religious rituals, which have this universal design where the most sacred and powerful force is always hidden in the darkest, most inaccessible chamber. We see it in the Ark of the Covenant of the Tabernacle, we see it in Hindu temples, in Egyptian temples, and in the Shinto temples of Japan—the God is always in a chamber and you always have to remove the obstacles and peer into the chambers. It’s consistent everywhere. I love that this cave perfectly reflected the entire history of the way we build places of worship and sacred spaces.

conduit: Can you talk a bit about the mysterious footprints discovered around the sculpture?

hunt: Basically the Bégouën family discovered the bison in 1912—the father of the count did. They were baffled as to why someone would sculpt this object so deep underground. Generations of archaeologists came and tried to theorize what had happened in the space. They noticed that in an adjacent chamber, there were hundreds of footprints, and that, weirdly, all of them were heel prints. They did all these tests trying to figure out why: were the sculptors walking that way because they had to stoop? No, it seemed they were doing it intentionally. But it was all theory, right? Then, in 2013, they brought two San trackers from Tanzania to France. These men are living in a society that still maintains its traditional hunter/gatherer ways and they are literally the best at reading footprints in the world because it’s part of their preserved knowledge. So they came to the cave and they looked at this array of footprints and analyzed everything. After a few hours, what they discerned was that there were two people in the deep chamber of the cave, a teenaged boy and a man in his 30s and they had intentionally walked on their heels. They pointed out moments where there were knee prints, which was interesting because it showed that the people who went into the cave were not wearing pants. Their hypothesis, which was again hard to prove since you’re talking about 15,000 years ago, was that it was part of a ritual dance. They also pointed out that in these smaller groups of the San out in the Serengeti, everyone can read each other’s footprints very easily—it’s like writing your name in the sand. So when you want to hide your identity, you walk on your heels. I thought that was so beautiful. Who knows what that means exactly for the people who made the bison, but it made a poetic sense to me. If they’d come to such a hidden place to create this sculpture, they’d want to hide their identity from any future visitors to that space, or maybe from some sort deity who was looking down on them.

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