‘That’s
the
essence
of
religious
experience. There’s little difference in that respect between a shaman having visions in front of a cave wal and a worshipper in a church transfixed by a statue of the Virgin Mary. Neither of them needs hal ucinogenic drugs to get there. Or as in my case, you can real y believe in the power of your own mind and your ability to control it.’
‘This lab you worked in,’ Costas said. ‘Let me guess. You did most of their analytical work for them too?’
‘It came out as a paper in the Journal of Cognitive Archaeology. My name isn’t in the author list because I wasn’t official y part of the team, being merely a guinea pig.’
Jack stared at him. ‘ That paper? That was your work?’
‘I was in the lab one evening and saw the garbled manuscript they were working on, so I rewrote it until it actual y made sense. It was sent off the next day with each of the authors assuming the others had fixed it up. They were hardly on speaking terms anyway. My first publication, anonymously.’
Jack turned to Costas. ‘That paper’s become the launch pad for exactly what I’ve been pondering, the mind-state of people in the late Stone Age.’
Jeremy pul ed a battered old book out of his pocket. ‘I’m not a neuropsychologist, but I do like poetry,’ he said. ‘What you’re describing, the religious experience, we tend to think of as rapture in the face of God. But you don’t have to believe in a god to experience rapture, to have the same sort of visions and pleasure as the believer contemplating the Virgin Mary. In deep prehistory, the experience of rapture may have been the preserve of the shaman or seer. In the West today, I’d argue that the shaman’s role is largely taken by the poet and the musician and the artist. In fact, you could say that the mark of a true gift in a poet, the poet as shaman, is whether we can see rapture in the process of creativity, and whether we can experience something of that when we read the work.’
He flipped through the book and found a page, and Costas leaned over to look. ‘Ah. “The poet who had drunk the milk of paradise”.’
Jeremy nodded. ‘Samuel Taylor Coleridge, his poem Kubla Khan. And for milk of paradise, read opium.’
Costas glanced at Jack. ‘While we were working on the ROV, Jeremy and I went through his undergraduate dissertation on Homeric imagery in the poetry of W. H. Auden. There’s al that dark imagery of the fal of Troy and modern war in “The Shield of Achil es”, and for relief we went for some eighteenth-century romantic euphoria. That meant Coleridge. This poem’s good because of the watery imagery, and I can relate it to the experience of diving in the way you were just describing.’
‘Coleridge wrote the poem one night in 1797 after what he described as a “sort of reverie” brought on by two grains of opium,’ Jeremy continued. ‘So in this case, drugs were used, but it’s the effect we’re interested in, and that fits closely with what you’re talking about. Coleridge had just been reading an account of the Tartar emperor Kublai Khan’s pleasure palace by the sea, and that seems to have made him think about creative power that works with nature and creative power that doesn’t. That’s also what made me think of the poem, the idea of a tension between two Neolithic belief worlds, the one of the shaman and the one of the gods, the one attuned to nature and the other to man. But just now I also thought of Coleridge’s dream images, and how they were like the ones Lanowski was describing. A lot of them have to do with with rivers and the sea.’ He read from the page:
‘ In Xanadu did Kubla
Khan
A stately pleasure-dome
decree:
Where Alph, the sacred
river, ran
Through
caverns
measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.’
Costas fol owed from memory:
‘ Five miles meandering
with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale
the sacred river ran,
Then
reached
the
caverns measureless to
man,
And sank in tumult to a
lifeless ocean.’
Jeremy put his finger on some handwritten notes under the poem. ‘Coleridge wrote a letter to a friend of his, John Thelwel , about the same time he composed the poem. Listen to this: “I should much wish, like the Indian Vishnu, to float about along an infinite ocean cradled in the flower of the Lotus, and wake once in a mil ion years for a few minutes.” And then he writes: “My mind feels as if it ached to behold and know something great – something one and indivisible.”’ Jeremy paused. ‘The metaphor of flowing water as a vehicle for the imagination is pretty widespread, and images of water are common among the Romantic poets. But this is one case where we can talk in neuro-psychological terms about altered consciousness, because Coleridge tel s us himself that he’d taken opium.’
‘Coleridge
himself
cal ed
the
poem
a
“psychological curiosity”,’ Costas added. ‘He also writes of a mighty fountain, spewing out huge fragments, spoken of almost as if it’s a volcano: it comes from a deep chasm, a savage place. The poem’s like a cosmology of the earth and the underworld combined with visions that come from an altered state of consciousness, visions that are familiar to us because they’re hard-wired into our brains just as Lanowski suggested.’
Jeremy shut the book and pocketed it. ‘I think it’s another way of understanding what we’re looking at in early prehistory. For too long archaeologists have assumed that ancient belief systems are somehow beyond their reach. Many early archaeologists were dogmatic about their Christianity, and shamanistic religion was regarded as the least accessible of al , a primitive, il -formed system of spiritualism that existed before God revealed himself. But I’d argue that’s precisely where we need to go if we are to understand the origins of religion today, to look at neuropsychology. And most fascinatingly, what Coleridge was describing shows how that experience could have been intense and rapturous without the worship of gods.’
‘It’s not just in modern poetry,’ Jack said thoughtful y. ‘You get the same kind of imagery in the earliest literature of al , in the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, where long voyages are taken over water and there’s that same juxtaposition of the world of nature and the world of men. And the Epic of Gilgamesh may preserve an actual memory of the spiritualist world of the early Neolithic, a world just before the gods came into being.’
Lanowski got up, put the blackboard resolutely back on the chair and whipped out his piece of chalk.
He drew a spiral on one side of the board, then turned back to them, his eyes gleaming. ‘Here you see the vision of a tunnel, a vortex. It’s the most common altered consciousness vision, and also the most common early Neolithic symbol. You find it everywhere, from the megalithic tombs of Ireland to Atlantis. The vortex can be surrounded by animal images, like Jack’s image of Costas repeatedly on the edge of his vision, but here it’s empty. You could cal it a vision of pure rapture. But then something changes.’ He flourished the chalk, then drew two circles beside the first, the same size but without the spiral. ‘Think of Stonehenge. Think of the Neolithic temples. They’re circles. But what do they have inside them?’ He slashed a T shape and a pi shape on the top of the board. ‘What you’ve got, gentlemen, is gods. That’s what the trilithons at Stonehenge are.
That’s what the T-shaped pil ars of Göbekli Tepe and Atlantis are. And how do you depict this new type of temple, this new religion, as a symbol?’ He put the chalk in the centre of the second circle and drew a series of straight lines radiating out, turning each line sharply to the left. He swivel ed back to them, his arms held out questioningly.
‘The Sonnenrad,’ Jack said quietly. ‘The ancient sun symbol, used by the Nazis as the SS symbol.’
Lanowski flourished the chal
k. ‘The old vortex, hijacked. Now you see not a swirl, but the wal s of the tunnel lined with these images of gods.’
‘And there’s another ancient symbol,’ Jack said quietly.
Lanowski turned and drew inside the third circle, this time only four lines intersecting, the ends turned left. Jack stared at it. The swastika. But now he saw it not as a cross at al , but as a symbol of the ascendancy of the gods; the gods who had taken over the old religion ten thousand years ago. And a horrifying modern symbol, a symbol of gods reborn, not in the depths of prehistory but in the cauldron of Europe eighty years ago.
Lanowski tossed the chalk, pocketed it and marched back to his computer workstation. ‘Just a little more time, Jack. Then I’ve got something more to show you.’
Jack looked to the ROV screen, which was stil blank, and Jeremy glanced at the monitor where he had left his program loading. ‘Okay,’ Jeremy exclaimed. ‘We’re in business. This is going to completely change your view of Atlantis.’
Jack and Costas fol owed Jeremy, who sat down in front of the monitor and glanced at Jack. ‘As soon as you surfaced from the dive, Costas emailed me the photos from your helmet camera, the ones you’ve already seen as raw images. The beauty of that camera pod is that it incorporates a miniature thermal-imaging device and GPR, ground-penetrating radar, al owing us to see beyond the visuals. It’s going to revolutionize underwater archaeology, because it’l enable nearly instant transfer of the processed images into the diver’s helmet monitor, al owing a kind of X-ray vision. A few glitches, but Costas and I are nearly there. Meanwhile, look at this. What you’l see is what Jack actual y saw when he poked his head into that chamber, minus the reflections from his headlamp off suspended particles, which I’ve removed.’ He clicked the mouse, and an extraordinary image came on the screen, taking Jack back to that heart-pounding moment in the depths of the volcano only a few hours before.
‘Holy shit,’ Costas murmured. ‘It’s like a charnel house. Like something out of an Aztec nightmare.’
It was the image of the human skul Jack had been looking at before Jeremy and Lanowski arrived, visible in sharper detail so that they could clearly see the finger marks of the ancient sculptor in the plaster that had been formed over the bone. But behind it were rows of other skul s, far more than Jack had seen before. Jeremy opened up a toolbar and sharpened the contrast. ‘I count at least twenty-five.
About half are deliberately plastered like these ones, and the rest only look as if they are because they’re covered in calcite precipitate that formed over them after they were submerged. The anoxic environment of the Black Sea accounts for the amazing preservation. Our osteologist at Troy thinks the plastered skul s are mostly older people, men and women who may have lived a ful lifespan and died natural y, some of them very old. They’re perhaps the skul s of venerated elders. But the other skul s are widely varied, adults of different ages, teenagers, children. The plastered skul s are al upright in the floor, set in a layer of burnt lime. The other skul s are scattered around as if whatever ritual was happening here was abandoned partway through, as the flood waters were rising.’
Jack stared at the image that had been inches away from him underwater, seeing how the plaster had been moulded to form high cheekbones and bedding in the sockets for cowrie-shel eyes. He could see how the plastered skul s had been careful y sunk up to chin level in the lime floor. He remembered the most striking images from the Neolithic town of Çatalhöyük, of bul s’ skul s embedded in house wal s, almost as if they were caught at the moment of coming through. In the cave paintings of the Palaeolithic the animals seemed to be emerging from the wal s, sometimes floating in front of them, alongside haunting imprints of human hands; the plastered skul s here seemed the same, as if they represented bodies emerging from a chthonic spirit world, emissaries between the world of the living and the world of the dead.
Costas tapped Jack’s shoulder. ‘You said plastered skul s like this had been found at other sites?’
‘At early Neolithic Jericho in Palestine,’ Jeremy interjected. ‘I was researching it on the way here. A famous skul found by Dame Kathleen Kenyon in her excavations in the 1950s.’
‘And at Çatalhöyük,’ Jack added. ‘They’re usual y interpreted as evidence for a cult of the dead, for ancestor worship. But I worry about that. Worship is the wrong word, a modern word with misleading connotations. To me, this image from Atlantis suggests that they should be seen in the same way as the bul s and the other animals, as travel ers between our world and a spirit world, a world entered through the rock of the volcano, through caves, through house wal s. Maybe the ancestors could do this if their remains were properly treated. They were venerated, just as elders would have been when they were alive, but I don’t think they were worshipped. I don’t think the ancestors were seen as gods: that’s an idea I don’t see any clear evidence for in prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies.’
Jeremy nodded. ‘The ancestor theory fits in with what our bones lady thinks. The plastered skul s are al disarticulated, right? There are no neck bones attached. There’s no evidence of trauma injury. These skul s were taken from bodies that were already skeletonized.’
Jack reached for his tablet computer, dragged his fingers over the screen and showed it to Jeremy.
‘There’s a lot of vulture imagery from Atlantis and the other Neolithic sites. Look at this one: a painting of a vulture pecking at a headless corpse from Çatalhöyük. And here’s a vulture from Atlantis, from one of those stone pil ars above the skul s, another image taken by my helmet camera. You can see a carving of a great bird of prey with a human arm clutched in its talons. It looks like a Mayan thunderbird, a spirit bird, but is probably meant to be a real bird of prey. I’m convinced we’re looking at evidence for sky burial – for excarnation – with bodies being exposed to be consumed by vultures like Zoroastrian sky burial today in India. That sanctum at Atlantis was original y partly open to the air beside a platform on the flank of the volcano, and I believe that sky burial was one of the functions of these temple sites before the pil ars were erected. The birds may have been seen as spirit birds, and by consuming human flesh they may have been able to transport the spirits of the departed to the other world. Seeing this now, I think the Atlantis symbol may not have been an eagle as we supposed, but instead a vulture, a spirit bird.’
Jeremy nodded. ‘Now for that X-ray vision I was talking about. Prepare to be amazed.’ He zoomed in, tapped a key and sat back, and they watched while the screen repixel ated. ‘This is a composite CGI of what you just saw, using the GPR data.’ The screen transformed into an image showing far more than was visible with the naked eye, shapes and artefacts that were buried beneath the lime encrustation. Costas whistled, and Jeremy pointed at the skul in the centre of the image, one that had been visible only in vague outline before. ‘This is one of the unplastered skul s, a child about nine or ten years old. Look closely and you can see that four of the neck vertebrae are stil attached. You wouldn’t get that if you’d taken the skul from a properly skeletonized body, with al the ligaments gone. And then look over there, beneath the lime accretion on the floor.’
‘Holy cow,’ Costas exclaimed. ‘It’s a complete skeleton.’
‘Nearly complete,’ Jeremy corrected. ‘And that wasn’t just dumped there. Look, you can see dark rings where the wrists were lashed together, probably copper wire. There’s a little reed flute in one of the hands. This was a ful y articulated fresh corpse, with musculature and sinews intact when the waters rose and it was encased in lime. I said nearly complete.
The head’s missing. And it isn’t another body. It’s the same body. The number of missing neck vertebrae match those on the child’s skul .’
Costas looked at Jeremy aghast. ‘Do you think this child was kil ed by being beheaded?’
‘That’s what I thought at first. But then I emailed this image to our bones lady. She zoomed in on the skul , and pointed this out. You see? It’s been bashed in on one side. An
d look at the shapes of the objects buried in the lime just below it. There’s some kind of mace, a stone-topped wooden hammer. And that leaf-shaped thing in the foreground is a chipped stone knife, ripple-flaked, almost certainly obsidian. You see what I’m getting at? What Costas said about the Aztecs might not be that far off the mark.’
‘That child was sacrificed,’ Costas whispered.
Jeremy zoomed out from the skul to reveal a panorama of the chamber, showing the circle of pil ars and the stone basins rising up between the skul s. ‘Look at the relationship between the skeleton and the skul and that stone basin. It makes sense of the basin, don’t you think? It was an altar. A sacrificial altar.’
Jack wondered whether the basins were windows into the depths, into the underworld, some kind of visionary device. He remembered the dark red stain on his glove when he put his hand into the basin. ‘We know they sacrificed bul s, because we found the remains of one five years ago spread over a large stone table at an entrance chamber into the volcano.
But this is a revelation. It’s horrifying. Human sacrifice.’
Jeremy leaned back. ‘I think that child was kil ed by being bludgeoned with the mace. Then it was bled from the neck into the basin, and the knife was used to behead it. Separate the head from the body, and maybe you dispatch the soul to the spirit world.
Maybe the blood in the basin was a conduit, a river, fitting in with those altered-consciousness visions we were talking about. Maybe the sacrificer also travel ed that river, a portal to the spirit world opened up by the act of sacrifice.’
‘With implements specifical y designed for the purpose,’ Jack murmured. ‘Obsidian blades like that one have been found in caches in houses at Çatalhöyük, and have long been suspected to have symbolic significance. And those stone basins look much older than the pil ars, carved out of the living rock. They were part of the ancient function of this chamber way before the flood.’
‘Wasn’t there a tradition of child sacrifice in the Near East?’ Costas said. ‘I mean the Old Testament account of Abraham and his son Isaac. And the Phoenicians, and their successors in the west Mediterranean, at Carthage. When we’ve been at the IMU museum at Carthage I’ve often walked around the tophet, where the children were supposedly sacrificed.’
Gods of Atlantis Page 15
