Yesterday was (one of, there are several depending on the calendar in use and the specific communion) the Orthodox commemoration of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, one of the stranger—to modern ears at least—of the lives of the saints, their story one that has all the elements of legend and fabula, and is not even exactly obviously hagiographic (while in way the men die for their faith they are far from being traditional martyrs, in fact outright avoiding martyrdom). Yet whatever unease we might now feel with the story of seven young men (and their dog!) sleeping for a few centuries in a cave, only to awaken, walk around outside long enough to register their existence, and then promptly die, their story and cultus had incredible purchase in the premodern world, almost without parallel. The story of the Sleepers- who would become ‘the Companions of the Cave’ in Islamic tradition- spread rapidly far and wide in the late antique world, its traces still visible from the oasis polities of Inner Asia to the furthest western reaches of Afro-Eurasia out on the edges of Ireland. Syriac, Greek, Latin, Coptic, Armenian, Arabic, Sogdian, Old Irish, Old French—the list of languages in which the tale was told goes on for quite a while.
What gave this story such incredible staying power? Why did- as I discuss at more length elsewhere today- the names, memory, and reputed physical traces of the Sleepers come to be viewed as such powerful devices? How is that out of all the vast common heritage of late antique Christianity it was this story almost more than any other that captured the imaginations and attentions of so many different peoples of so many different confessional affiliations and languages? There are various routes of historical contingency that help to explain things, though they only go so far; eventually we must make room for the way in which the story connects with deep elements of human imagination and experience, the way it, in the unintentional, emergent fashion so typical of ‘folk’ hagiography and the like, brings up truths and realities that tend to linger submerged, or buried, otherwise. Perhaps it is because of the many truths and possibilities that lie latent in this strange and wonderful tale that it has persisted, why in divine providence it did not fade away like so much else that emerged in the foment of late antiquity. Let’s explore a few of these possibilities, starting with one of the most central motifs of the story, the cave.
The space and the meaning of the cave has been a recurring theme in these digital pages (this essay pairs especially well with the present one), precisely because it is so resonant across human history, the geology and natural dynamics of the underground world crossing into human culture and imagination again and again, from quite literally the beginning of the archeological record down to the present, as places of power, ambiguity, preservation, continuity, of sanctity and of danger both. The cave is a place of sleep, but particularly for premodern peoples this does not necessarily entail a lack of activity or of meaning: for sleep is also the space of dreams, it is where encounters with other worlds can take place, a sort of wild and unpredictable ritual space, in which normal expectations can and are inverted. Indeed for humans the underground world is itself a space of inversion, in which up and down appear the same, the movement underground akin to a return to the womb, to the condition of floating in the maternal dark, a prefiguring of the all-containing dark of the grave, of the great return to the earth of all flesh.
But contained within that movement underground is the idea of temporality: we do not remain in the cave, but emerge. The dark and the depths have their vital role, as incubators, as wombs of dreams and ritual and of the articulation of sanctity and power, but there is always the hope and the promise of return. The story of the Sleepers embodies this quite literally: the cave is a place of protection, of the suspension of time, but only for so long. Their story is not finished, but will unfold above ground (albeit in their case only temporarily). At the back of all bright darknesses of underground sojourns there is hope of resurrection, of rebirth, coming forth from the cave and into the light of morning.
There are a lot of reputed original caves of the Sleepers: if they have often been appended with the modifier ‘of Ephesus,’ this did not stop the proliferation of caves in the medieval and early modern worlds, with caves ascribed to them appearing all over Eurasia (there may well be some in North Africa as well, I would not be surprised!). On the face of it there is something a bit absurd, if charming, about dozens and dozens of subterranean chambers being heralded as the ‘true’ cave of the Companions of the Cave, and to be sure plenty of premodern observers noticed the mutual incompatibility of such claims, and sometimes sought to critically evaluate those claims so as to arrive at the historical reality (though, interestingly, the Qur’an pushes back against attempts to resolve some of the ambiguities of the story). Others, such as the early modern Syrian sufi shaykh and author ‘Abd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī, made their peace with competing claims of saintly physical trace and presence by explaining it as a matter of pious intention: it was enough that local people wanted a place to be the resting site of holy people, and directed their devotion towards those sites. The result was a kind of materialization through devotion and intention of saintly presence and baraka, regardless of the verity of the claims in historical terms.
More speculatively, I’d like to suggest that the proliferation of claimed caves of the Sleepers picks up on something more inchoate and chthonic in human experience and thinking, in the lived phenomenology of place and space: the folk sense that all underground spaces are somehow connected, that the cave down the road really goes on for Lord knows how far, that if you kept on crawling you’d reach the next cave system over. At a certain level I suspect we want such ideas to be true, and in a certain way perhaps they are: the crust of the earth does in fact extend over the entirety of the planet, and all geological formations on earth are in some way ultimately all connected, as none float on water or hover in the air. Perhaps if only at the level of capillaries and faults, thin cracks and stratographic series, all underground spaces are connected, all underground roads lead to one another. Every underground portal in some way opens in to the cave of the Sleepers, opens into the cave of Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc, opens in to the cave of the Holy Sepulchre. To take refuge in the womb of the earth is to take refuge in the accumulated experience and ritualized sanctity of untold generations of humans at work and at rest underground, a hidden symbolic economy coursing below our feet.
Sleep. Caves are, or at least can be, soporific, and indeed while our distant ancestors were not really ‘cave people’- they entered the dark zones of caves for very specific reasons and generally not for sustained periods of stay- it is the case that from the Paleolithic forward people have made ample use of cave entrances and the twilight zones of caves as shelters, as places of sleep and rest. Fleeing the city and the ‘civilized’ order of the emperor, the young men return to the rest of the cave, of the shelter of the living stone. There they rest in suspended animation, living yet not living, anachronistic when they emerge from their sleep, preserved. For caves are a place of sleep for other things, as well: they are sites of preservation, of a degree largely unparalleled in other environments. There are caves here in the Cumberlands in which- if you had the gall!- you could put your footprint in clay beside Pleistocene jaguars, or Archaic period native peoples, their traces suspended in time for thousands, even tens of thousands of years. By comparison the hibernation of the Seven Sleepers seems short, a blink of the geological eye.
The subterranean world moves at a different pace, it is more akin to geological time, even as human time runs on relentlessly, changing, changing, changing. When the young men awaken from their sleep, they are only awake for a short time, and then must return to their chthonic resting place. For it is only the Final Resurrection of the dead that can truly wake them. Until then they must return to the embrace of the earth, the suspension of up and down and night and day, the space of waiting, of repose, in which time exists but is slowed, anticipating, but at peace, even when the world above ground is not.