Erdstall

[zellerzone]

“By all evolutionary logic, humans should not burrow. We are oversized, upright, long-limbed; our livelihood depends on abundant air and light. Physiologically speaking, there is no environment so intolerable as a tight, dark, underground enclosure, where oxygen is scarce. To burrow is to experience claustrophobia in its most crystallized form, like enclosing yourself in a tomb. And yet, throughout history, in every corner of the world, we have burrowed.” 

Will Hunt

[zellerzone]

The Erdstall is a mystery. There are at least 700 of them in Bavaria. They are man-made tunnels to nowhere, incorporating narrow passages you can barely squeeze through. Very little has been written about them. There was a piece in the German publication Der Spiegel about ten years ago: “The farmer sometimes feels a sense of reverence when he goes into his tunnel. ‘You feel like a Hopi Indian inside,’ he says. ‘They too used to sit in caves in the hope of finding answers.’...He loves his Erdstall, particularly because of its mysterious aura. Sometimes he crawls into his sandy private cave for half an hour in the evening and meditates.  It’s ‘completely quiet’ inside, he says, dark and distant like a womb. “And when I climb back up again, the stars seem so bright you feel you could almost touch them.’”

[zellerzone]

“When we drop through the mouth of a cave, we do not believe, in any rational horizon of our mind, that we are departing the earthly realm and entering the spirit world. And yet, we fall directly into step with those who did believe. We follow precisely the same footholds as our ancestors, we stoop and crawl and twist our bodies at the same angles, hear our voices echo, and feel our breath against the stone walls in the same way. On our way into the dark, we perform an unwitting shadow performance of the old rituals, sometimes following the ancient choreography down to the last gesture. Having the same bodies and minds as our ancestors, we undergo the same sensory experiences, which are just as bewildering and upsetting and thrilling to us today as they were in antiquity.”

-Wil Hunt

[zellerzone]

I believe the Erdstall had a psychological and a physiological purpose. It fulfilled a psychological wish to be enclosed, and a physiological need for carbon dioxide. Our bodies produce their own CO2, of course. We have been gifted by evolution with many ways of getting rid of excess carbon dioxide. They serve us well when we are young and active. As we age, we become less active, so we don’t produce as much CO2. The mechanisms that get rid of it are still functioning, though. The Erdstall trapped its visitors’ CO2, and they were thus able to stave off many of the allegedly inevitable effects of aging.

Not everyone could take advantage of them, however. Some people were afflicted with claustrophobia, and were simply incapable of entering the Erdstall. The watched the Erdstall users remaining robust as they aged and sickened.

The twentieth-century’s most notorious genocide was originated by people from Bavaria and Austria. Perhaps they had done it before.

[zellerzone]

On Tuesday, November 3, 2020 at 10:24:41 AM UTC-5, zellerzone wrote:

The twentieth-century’s most notorious genocide was originated by people from Bavaria and Austria. Perhaps they had done it before.

 This picture of an American gas chamber was once posted to a holocaust-denial website, next to a picture of the gas chamber at Auschwitz. The caption asked something like “How can THAT be a gas chamber? THIS is what a gas chamber looks like!” 

Both did the same thing, but with different purposes. The prison gas chamber door is well-sealed, the one at Auschwitz wasn’t. The door seals are for the benefit of the people outside, not the ones inside. Executions are no longer public, but law and tradition require witnesses. The whole point is to publicize the execution, both for the deterrence of some, and for the satisfaction of others. The “final solution” was never meant to be a public act. It was designed so as not to leave any witnesses.

[zellerzone]

Erdställe: Bavarian yoga tunnels.