by Peter Watson
Among the items excavated from this period were distinctive pieces of apparatus known as vase supports. Sherratt said it is ‘tempting’ to interpret these as devices of cult apparatus. They were perhaps narcotic burners, ‘an interpretation which would also explain the remarkable character of the Gavrinis engravings [the ornamentation] as entoptic images produced under the influence of drugs’.5
Are we seeing here, then, the beginnings of yet another move away from shamanism pure and simple? (If, that is, shamanism was ever pure and simple.) In the change from exterior symbols to interior ones, and the use of stone to create an enclosed ritual space, is this an attempt to recreate, above ground, and at convenient locations, the caves that were the original shamanistic centres? Chris Scarre, at Durham University in the United Kingdom, has pointed out that many of the huge stones in megalithic structures have been taken from sacred parts of the landscape, ‘places of power’ – waterfalls, for example, or cliffs – which have special acoustic or sensory properties, such as unusual colours or textures. This, he says, helps explain why these stones are transported sometimes over vast distances but are otherwise not modified in any way.6
These ‘caves’, if that is what they were, would have been brought above ground so as to be associated with the ancestors.7 (The incorporation of astronomical alignments may suggest that such ceremonies had a regular calendrical occurrence, calculated by phases of the heavenly bodies. It is a not uncommon ethnographic observation that such ceremonies may employ mind-altering drugs which are consumed by certain individuals in the context of these rituals, and whose effects are interpreted in terms of communication with an ‘other world’.)8 A further development, especially in Brittany and Britain, were the henges, which had no roofs, and in which the ceremonial aspect was more important than the funerary.
What ideas lay behind the worship in these temples? Colin Renfrew, emeritus professor of archaeology at Cambridge, has shown in his researches on the island of Arran, in Scotland, that the megalithic tombs there are closely related to the distribution of arable land and it therefore seems that these tombs/temples were somehow linked to the worship of a great fertility goddess, which was adapted as a cult as a result of the introduction of farming, and the closer inspection of nature that this would have entailed.9
It does seem to be true that several megalithic circular alignments were prehistoric astronomical observatories. Knowledge of the sun’s cycle was clearly important for an agricultural community, in particular the midwinter solstice when the sun ceases to recede and begins to head north again. From the mound, features on the horizon could be noted where the midwinter solstice occurred (for example), and stones erected so that, in subsequent years, the moment could be anticipated, and celebrated. Sun observatories were initiated round 4000 BC but moon ones not until 2800 BC.
Moreover, there may be a further layer of meaning on top of all this. A number of carvings have been found associated with megalithic temples and observatories – in particular, spirals, whorls and what are called cup-and-ring marks, in effect a series of concentric ‘C’s. Elsewhere in Europe, as we shall see in just a moment, these designs are related to what some prehistorians have referred to as the Great Goddess, the symbol of fertility and regeneration (though not everyone accepts this interpretation). In Germany and Denmark, pottery found associated with megaliths is also decorated with double circles and these too are linked with the Great Goddess. Given the fact that menhirs almost by definition resemble the male organ, it is certainly possible that the megalithic cromlechs were observatory/temples celebrating sexuality/fertility. The sexual meaning of menhirs is not simply another case of archaeologists reading too much into the evidence. In the bible, for example, Jeremiah (2:27) refers to those who say to a stone, ‘You have begotten me.’ Belief in the fertilising virtues of menhirs was still common among some European peasants at the beginning of the twentieth century. ‘In France, in order to have children, young women performed the glissade (letting themselves slide along a stone) and the friction (sitting on monoliths or rubbing their abdomen along certain rocks).’10
It is not difficult for us to understand the symbolism. The midwinter solstice was the point at which the sun was reborn. When it appeared that day, the standing stones were arranged so that the first shaft of light entered a slit in the centre of the circular alignment, the centre of the world in the sacred landscape, which helped to regenerate the whole community, gathered there to welcome it. A good example of this is Newgrange in Ireland.
In the great megalithic ceremonial centres, therefore, we perhaps see the beginnings of a new religious complex. In the enclosed ritual space, a space surrounded by the remains (and the spirits?) of the ancestors, narcotic burners were lit so that the shamans, and others perhaps, could enter altered states of consciousness and visit other worlds for divinatory purposes. However, in societies that were dispersed, where each family or clan had its own herd of cattle and/or sheep, the fertility of the land, and the animals, and the community would have been doubly, triply, important. Hence the importance of the woman and the bull, by far the most impressively fertile male and powerful living force anyone had ever experienced.
And in such a dispersed society, with each family tending its own herd or flock away from others, the role of the shaman would have been more and more confined to communal ceremonies and rituals, held only a few times a year. Under these conditions, most of the time the shaman would have been present much less often than he was in village communities and his services less available.
THE DISTURBED SKY OF THE BRONZE AGE
The second theory about megaliths takes us back into the realm of natural disasters and catastrophes. In an earlier chapter the phenomena of the Toba eruption, at 74,000–71,000 years ago, and the three great floods – at 14,500, 11,000 and 8,000 years ago – were explored, together with their effects on mythology, and the distribution around the globe of potentially menacing weather patterns (the monsoon and enso), volcanoes, hurricanes and earthquakes. We now need to consider another realm of natural catastrophes involving disturbances in the heavens – comets, meteorites and asteroids – all of which would have been visible to ancient peoples and some of which impacted the surface of the Earth.
This aspect of our deep past has been in and out of intellectual fashion since the Second World War. One reason for this was the work of Immanuel Velikovsky who, in a series of books, Worlds in Collision (1950), Ages in Chaos (1953), and Earth in Upheaval (1955), made a number of sensational claims, that several of the planets of the Solar System had threatened Earth in historical times, in particular that Venus had caused major catastrophes by passing close to Earth at a time corresponding to the end of the Middle Bronze Age and that Mars had done much the same a few centuries later.11 Despite the fact that several reputable scientists, such as Albert Einstein, found Velikovsky’s work convincing, and despite the fact that a number of his cosmological predictions subsequently were confirmed, many scientists were outraged by his claims and in America there was an attempt to suppress publication of Velikovsky’s books.
As a result of the controversy, the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies was formed in 1975, devoted to the scientific study of catastrophes and their role (if any) in prehistory and history. The 1970s were themselves a period of change in fashion (or in intellectual climate), one reason being that the Apollo landings on the moon finally confirmed that most or all lunar craters have an impact rather than a volcanic origin and a series of other probes clearly showed that all the bodies of the solar system have been heavily bombarded. In addition, an increasing number of impact craters have been found on Earth itself.12
As a result of all this activity, what seems established now are two things that concern us. First, that during the Bronze Age, especially around 3000 BC and for several centuries after that, the night sky was disturbed, far more than it is now, for example, with one or a few comets recurring annually, coupled with epochs when, according to W.M. Napier, onc
e of the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, and Oxford University, ‘the annual meteor storms reached prodigious levels’, meteor storms being ‘probably the most impressive spectacles the sky has to offer’.13 Furthermore, ‘At some intensity level beyond modern experience, they may become an ecological hazard.’14 In addition to that, known impact events in geologically/astronomically ‘recent’ times have included the Rio Cuarto string of craters in Argentina 2,000–4,000 years ago, caused by a bouncing asteroid, and with a known impact on mythology, the Henbury impact crater, in the north-western territory of Australia, at 3000 BC, the Broken Bow crater in Nebraska at 1000 BC, the Wabar craters in Saudi Arabia at AD 500, meteorites in China in AD 1490, which killed 10,000 people, and the well-known Tunguska impact over Siberia in 1908. This list of known catastrophes is by no means complete but is sufficient to show that they do occur not infrequently and have occurred in recorded history (see figure 6).
In fact, Bruce Masse, of the United States Air Force and the University of Hawaii, has compiled a list of 1,124 ‘naked eye events’ recorded by Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Arab and European observers between 200 BC and AD 1800.15 Figures 4 and 5 show, respectively, eclipse demons from the American south-west, dated to the fourteenth century AD and a series of ‘frightful’ celestial deities from Mesopotamia. Masse makes the point that the popularity of these deities was not constant but that they waxed and waned over the centuries according to how active the night sky was.16
Fig. 4 ‘Eclipse demons’ from the American southwest, 14th century AD.
Fig. 5 ‘Frightful’ clestial demons from Mesopotamia.
Fig. 6 List of known catastrophes in ancient times.
One of the most important impacts would appear to have been the so-called ‘flood comet’ of 2807 BC. By studying a number of myths, Masse was able to arrive at an exact date for this event, 10–12 May 2807 BC, and concluded that the collision probably occurred in the Atlantic-Indian Ocean basin, near Antarctica, producing a massive tsunami and several days of torrential rains world-wide through the injection of water vapour into and through the upper atmosphere, creating vast cyclonic storms which lasted for up to a week.17 Masse also thinks this event coincided with the beginning date for the enso, and that populations world-wide suffered a sizeable die-off at about this time, giving rise, he says, to the mythological traditions of repeated creations, especially in the New World. Masse traces myths in Argentina, Nebraska, China, Mesoamerica, Mesopotamia, Palestine (Sodom and Gomorrah), Egypt and India to this event.
With this as background, we may return to the megaliths and in particular Stonehenge, in the United Kingdom, which is one of the largest, most complete and most famous sites. Duncan Steel, director of Australia’s Spaceguard Project and a member of NASA’s Spaceguard Committee, has a theory about Stonehenge that is controversial, but then all theories about Stonehenge are controversial and Steel’s at least has the merit of explaining why the attempts to understand this arrangement of standing stones have so far failed. For him, there is no ancient rhythm to discover: Steel thinks that Stonehenge is, or at least started out as, a ‘catastrophe predictor’.
He shares the view that the Bronze Age night sky was more disturbed than our own is and that the Great Cursus – the earthwork near the Stonehenge circle, three kilometres long and the first part of the monument to be built, and originally understood to be an ancient racetrack (cursus = course) – was constructed when there was a trail of comets and debris, about ten degrees long, in the night sky, in effect a meteor storm as the Earth passed through the trail/tail of a comet with some real physical damage being done to the Earth’s surface.18 The showers could have lasted anything from six to seven hours or even twenty-eight hours, he says, and the arrival path of the comets does seem to have an ‘orientation consistent’ with Stonehenge I, the Great Cursus.
Steel’s view is that something ‘truly exceptional’ must have sparked the initial construction of Stonehenge and that as well as the layout of the stones we need also to consider the nearby existence of a number of burial mounds in which were found the bones of individuals whose dating is a good deal younger than the mounds themselves. He therefore suggests that these mounds are not in fact burial mounds at all but were instead early forms of (his words) ‘air raid shelters’, hideaways for people to enter when a catastrophe from the sky (a meteor shower) was imminent, this attempt at prediction being the original purpose of Stonehenge. He finds further support for this idea in the so-called Aubrey holes, which he says have dimensions that enable humans to sit in them and be protected. In other words, this is where the priests/mathematicians would have sequestered themselves, protected, while they observed the threatening features in the sky and aimed to calculate when the worst catastrophes would occur.
By the same token, the importation to Stonehenge of the famous, and famously massive, blue stones from hundreds of miles away in the south-west of Wales – long a puzzle – would be explained because of their similarity to chondrites, stones dropped by meteor storms (similar practices with stones are known elsewhere in the world).19
This is an ingenious solution to the mystery of at least one megalithic monument and it helps explain why Stonehenge was abandoned for a while (after the meteor showers disappeared from the sky), and was later resurrected as a solar- and lunar-linked entity. As was mentioned earlier, it does not necessarily conflict with Sherratt’s ideas.
It is included here, however, because of its timing and because it fits with the general idea that catastrophic events – whether volcanic, tectonic, celestial, or climate-driven – do seem to have been more prevalent in the past, more than we have traditionally believed and more than they are now. This is crucial to understanding the history of the Old World and the New.
THE INVENTION OF SACRIFICE
Gunnar Heinsohn, at the University of Bremen in Germany, goes further. He argues that civilisation itself began as a response to catastrophe and that this helps explain one of the most powerful, seemingly barbaric and yet mysterious aspects of early religions – the widespread existence of human sacrifice. As we shall see, the pattern and trajectory of sacrifice was very different as between the Old World and the New.
As Heinsohn points out, people alive today are used to an evolved world ‘of tiny and harmless changes, imposed in particular by [Charles] Lyell and [Charles] Darwin’ and so are unfamiliar with more catastrophic times; in the same way, theories about sacrifice were formed before modern geology had changed our views about the past. To Heinsohn, however, it is clear that the texts and pictures of Bronze Age antiquity ‘show us lavishly decorated actors who clearly represent destructive celestial bodies and who are participating in blood sacrifice’. He finds a world-wide ‘combat myth of gods and heroes who encounter and defeat dragons, monsters, demons and giants’.20 He further argues that priest-kings and temples had the role of catalysts in the formation of cities in which sacrificial compounds emerged early. (We recall here Leonard Woolley’s discoveries of a civilisation and sacrifice at Ur immediately above evidence of a flood. Many of the Mesopotamian Bronze Age gods embodied fearsome principles as well as fertility.)
In chapter five, the work of Clift and Plumb was introduced, showing that early civilisations both formed and collapsed in response to climatic changes. In chapter fifteen we shall see in more detail that, in both hemispheres, urban structures do appear to have been first erected following environmental catastrophes of one kind or another, but here, in this chapter, our purpose is to explain sacrifice.
There are several theories about sacrifice. The most well known are what we might call the psychological or anthropological theories of Walter Burkett, a philologist from Zurich, Réné Girard, a literature professor at Stanford University, and Jonathan Z. Smith, a religious historian from the University of Chicago. Their theories take violence to be at the heart of civilisation, envisaging a sort of Freudian ‘primal murder’, which is lodged in the collective memory and acts as a unifying and therefore a religious force
in the community – indeed, on this view sacrifice defines the community. Other theories see sacrifice as a function of domestication: it is not found among hunter-gatherers and only domestic animals are ever sacrificed. The domesticated animal, in being half-way between man and wild animals, is also – and by analogy – half-way between humans and the gods. Some scholars think that animals were domesticated for the purpose of sacrifice.21 Still other theories root sacrifice in plant domestication: existing plants have to be beheaded in order to generate new growth.
None of these theories is very convincing. Instead, it seems clear that since human sacrifice is so extreme only extreme circumstances would have initiated the practice.
In this, catastrophe plays an obvious enough role. Catastrophes, by definition, kill people, sometimes hundreds of people, sometimes tens of thousands of people. Often, the bodies of the victims disappear for all time, buried under volcanic lava, swept away by tsunamis, crushed in the fissures created by earthquakes, obliterated by asteroid collisions. Other victims would have been visible, either as dead bodies or as injured, when a lot of blood would have been spilled. In such circumstances, ancient peoples, looking upon these forces – volcanoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, rainstorms, asteroids – as evidence that the gods were in some sense angry or dissatisfied or disappointed with humankind, would have drawn the (for them) obvious enough conclusion that the gods ‘required’ human bodies, or human blood, for their own nourishment. In turn, sacrifice would have been an obvious enough propitiatory response to this predicament. And, as Heinsohn points out, myths about great men inventing sacrifice and prayers after they had survived destructive floods are not confined to Mesopotamia. ‘In Chaldea, Ziusudra is such a hero sacrificing after a flood. Assyrians have Utnapishtim and Hebrews Noah in a similar role. In India, Manu invents sacrifice after the flood. In Greek traditions, Perseus, Deucalion, Megaros, Aiakos etc., started to sacrifice after a flood.’ Much the same happens in Egyptian, Chinese and Algonquin myths of North America, in the latter case where the hero Nanaboush starts the practice of praying after a flood.22
