by Peter Watson
Much earlier than this, in Çatalhöyük, between 6000 and 5000 BC, the wall paintings on shrines included depictions of volcanoes erupting and vultures attacking human bodies. In one image a twin-peaked volcano erupts, fire spouts from the summit and lava streams down the shoulders of the mountain. Dots cover the image, which may be a representation of the ash dust that rained down from the eruption and may have blocked out the sun. The only twin-peaked mountain in Turkey is Hasan Dag, which is also the source of the obsidian that the inhabitants of Çatalhöyük found so useful and magical.23
Later, at Knossos in Crete, excavations have revealed a number of children’s bones in basement rooms, dated to 1450 BC, bones that bear knife marks that had resulted from defleshing. British archaeologist Peter Warren believes these were remains of sacrifices designed to avert a great disaster, ‘such as a series of earthquakes, or other natural catastrophes’. (A violent earthquake did indeed overthrow the building.)24 In Japan, many a Shinto shrine has a human sacrifice legend as its foundation story, usually a mighty animal, a demon living in a mountain, often with snake-like tails – clearly a volcano.25 Muslims, and before them pre-Islamic Arabs, worship a black meteorite that fell to Earth from the sky.26 Who knows how many were killed in the impact?
Catastrophe would, of course, have to be explained, as the result of some action on the part of the community. This would have marked the emergence of priest-kings, rather than shamans, who would have led collective worship, prayers rather than soul voyages, to assuage widespread grief brought about by the catastrophes. Some scholars believe that the walls around early cities, which began to appear at about 2900 BC, were for defence against tsunamis rather than other peoples, at least in some cases.
With sacrifice comes the idea of redemption, that humans can in some way ‘atone’ for what had led to the catastrophe and this too would have been the task of priest-kings, to explain why disasters had occurred and what sacrifices would work.
Catastrophes also explain some of the more mysterious rituals of early Bronze Age religions. In some cases, for example, priests administered powerful laxatives. This, Heinsohn argues, is a re-enactment of the phenomenon that, amid the terrifying disasters, many people would have lost control over their bowels. Similar reasoning explains the use of phalloi or the smearing of themselves with soot or ash, or cutting off or burning hair. Catastrophes, spreading panic and fear, can lead to spontaneous erections while the soot or ash being smeared over bodies recall the ash that would have followed volcanic explosions. Fires provoked by lightning or burning magma would have set fire to the hair.
This complex of ideas is a much more credible explanation for the advent of sacrifice than those often given, for example that sacrifice may also have begun in a less cruel way, beginning at a time when grain was the main diet, and meat-eating still relatively rare. In many agricultural societies, for example, the first seeds are not sown but thrown down alongside the furrow as an offering to the gods. By the same token, the last few fruits were never taken from the tree, a few tufts of wool were always left on the sheep and the farmer, when drawing water from a well, would always put back a few drops ‘so that it will not dry up’. Admittedly, we have here the concept of self-denial, of sacrificing part of one’s share, in order to nourish, or propitiate, the gods. Elsewhere (and this is a practice that stretches from Norway to the Balkans) the last ears of wheat were fashioned into a human figure: sometimes this would be thrown into the next field to be harvested, sometimes it would be kept until the following year, when it would be burned and the ashes thrown on to the ground before sowing, to ensure fertility. But all these practices seem to be secondary developments of the earlier practice, and pale echoes: only extraordinary events can explain what is to us the barbarity and yet universality of human sacrifice. From here on, it will constitute a large part of our story.
THE GREAT GODDESS AND THE MOON
At much the same time as megalithic ideas were proliferating, but in a different part of Europe, a different form of worship of essentially the same principles was evolving. This part of the continent is generally referred to as ‘Old Europe’, and includes Greece and the Aegean, the Balkans, southern Italy and Sicily and the lower Danube basin and Ukraine. Here the ancient gods have been studied by the Lithuanian scholar, Marija Gimbutas.
She finds a complex iconography grouped around four main entities. These are the Great Goddess, the Bird or Snake Goddess, the Vegetation Goddess, and the Male God. The snake, bird, egg and fish gods played their part in creation myths, while the Great Goddess was the creative principle itself, the most important idea of all. As Gimbutas puts it, ‘The Great Goddess emerges miraculously out of death, out of the sacrificial bull, and in her body the new life begins. She is not the Earth, but a female human, capable of transforming herself into many living shapes, a doe, dog, toad, bee, butterfly, tree or pillar.’ (This transformative ability has echoes of shamanism but she has decorously changed sex.) Gimbutas goes on: ‘. . . the Great Goddess is associated with moon crescents, quadripartite designs and bull’s horns, symbols of continuous creation and change . . . with the inception of agriculture.’27
In many regions, Gimbutas says, the Great Goddess also became associated with the moon. This was partly on account of the waxing and waning of the moon, its constant alteration in shape, its apparent ‘death’ every month and resurrection when it reappeared in the night sky three nights after its disappearance, partly on account of its temporal/cyclical association with the female menstrual cycle, and partly on account of the appearance of the new moon being similar in shape to the horns of cattle, in particular the bull.
The central theme, says Gimbutas, was the birth of an infant in a pantheon dominated by the mother. The ‘birth-giving Goddess’, with parted legs and pubic triangle, became a form of shorthand, as the capital letter m, as ‘the ideogram of the Great Goddess’.28
Gimbutas’s extensive survey of many figurines, shrines and early pottery produced some fascinating insights – such as the fact that the vegetation goddesses were in general nude until the sixth millennium BC and clothed thereafter, and that many inscriptions on the figurines were an early form of linear proto-writing, thousands of years before true writing, and with a religious rather than an economic meaning. By no means everyone accepts Gimbutas’s ideas about proto-writing but her main point was the development of the Great Goddess, with a complicated iconography, yet at root a human form, though capable of transformation into other animals and, on occasion, trees and stones. Here too the Goddess was a sort of half-way figure between a shaman and what came later.*
Here then, in Old Europe, we have – or appear to have – a spread of ideas derived ultimately from the Middle East, from Natufian and Khiamian cultures, as outlined in the previous chapter. These ideas probably spread along with the idea and practice of farming. They confirm that fertility and the potentially hostile forces of nature – such as catastrophe – continued to be the twin motors of early religious belief. As our story proceeds, we shall see how these twin forces continued strong in Eurasia and the Americas, but nevertheless took very different paths.
• 10 •
FROM NARCOTICS TO ALCOHOL
We now need to introduce a new topic into our story, one that hardly features at all in regular histories but about which this book will have a lot to say. For it is our contention that the role of this topic, while not neglected entirely, has been very much downplayed, or overlooked. That topic is narcotics, hallucinogens, alcohol – in a word, drugs.
Neolithic temperate Europe had relatively few stimulants compared with elsewhere in the world but even so early peoples would have had an extensive knowledge of the various mood-altering substances which occur naturally and, with the emergence of writing, there is no shortage of evidence of the use of drugs in this way. Notably, there was the ritual use of Nymphaea caerula in the Osiris cult, known from Dynastic Egypt, and the Aryans who according to the Rig Veda drank intoxicating soma, regardin
g it as a ‘divine beverage’. Herodotus outlined the Scythians’ ritual practice of inhaling Cannabis smoke.1
In the Old World, two plants in particular stand out: the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum) and hemp (Cannabis sativa). Opium was native to Europe, being found mostly in Neolithic and early Bronze Age archaeological contexts in Switzerland, southern Germany and eastern France, though this may be an artificial bias of differential preservation, for the poppy appears to have survived best in the record of lakeside-dwelling peoples, where bog conditions favoured its identification in such remains as have been found. Later, the poppy is found in the south or Mediterranean region, while hemp grew further east and on the steppes.2
Poppies grew (as weeds) among cereals and, being nutritious and full of flavour, they would have come to man’s notice quite naturally. Moreover, the narcotic alkaloids (medically active organic plant extracts usually containing a nitrogen base, such as morphine, codeine, and papaverine) are formed in the sap of the unripe seed-head or capsule, and may be extracted in weaker solution by soaking. A stronger form is obtained by puncturing the capsule. This is important because the dilute form was used medicinally in the ancient world as a painkiller or analgesic (Galen mentions it in the second century AD) but earlier literary references, and illustrations, show that the stronger form was often used in religious contexts, certainly by the second and first millennia BC.
Poppy seeds have been found among the earliest Bandkeramik assemblages in the Rhineland and in caves in Spain. (Bandkeramik refers to early pottery, dated to ~5500–5000 BC, decorated with linear bands.) These were, without question, domesticated forms of poppy because they were unable to seed themselves. Near Granada in Spain, at a burial site dated to 4200 BC, bags of esparto (‘needle’) grass were unearthed which contained a large number of poppy capsules, suggesting the poppy heads had a symbolic significance and were not just used as food.3
Similarly, we know that cannabis was used in the Iron Age from western Europe to China. It was found (in abundance) in the Hochdorf Hallstatt D wagon-burial (near Eberdingen, near Stuttgart, in Germany, 450 BC), and is mentioned in both Herodotus and Han medical texts. It was used in eastern Europe from the third millennium BC, where in one instance a ‘pipe cup’ was discovered, containing charred hemp-seeds.
To begin with, these narcotic substances were probably inhaled, the seeds being burned as part of a purification or communion ritual.4 For example, different ceramics have been found in the Balkan Neolithic, becoming common in the fifth millennium BC, often described as altars and consisting of a small dish on four feet. Heavily decorated, often with animal heads, they seem to have been burners, and were sufficiently common to suggest they were used in a domestic ritual.5 Later on, in the fourth millennium, in France, we see the emergence of vase-support ceramics, mentioned earlier. These are small, shallow bowls on square or round stands and again are profusely decorated, many of which also show traces of burning. Found in both caves and megaliths, in vast numbers in Brittany, within arcs of standing stones, their ritual use seems established. A specific narcotic appears to have been the focus of the central ritual.6 Andrew Sherratt asks whether it is a coincidence that the appearance of the apparatus of a southern cult should occur in northern France at the same time as Breton megalithic art reached what he called its psychedelic climax in the entoptic forms and hallucinogenic images of the carvings at Gavrinis? Given that Papaver somniferum originated in the Alps, its identification so far north, in such circumstances, strongly suggests a ritual (cult) use.7
Evidence of other cults occurs in the later Neolithic. Bowls with a ‘sunburst’ design inscribed on them are found across eastern Europe in the third millennium BC, retaining a specific form of design over more than a thousand miles from the Pontic steppes, a distribution that, more or less, parallels that of cannabis. The way that ceramic design can change suddenly but then become distributed unrelated to area or time, also suggests the emergence and spread of specific cults involving psychoactive substances.
More provocative still, ceramic assemblages in all parts of Europe were transformed during the fourth and third millennia BC by the appearance of drinking cups and vessels for manipulating liquids. Sherratt argues that this development reflects, not milk drinking but the impact of alcohol on prehistoric Europe. Some of these vessels even look like poppy heads (see figure 7). Are we now dealing with opium this time in soluble form? Analysis of residues confirms that this is so in some cases.8 Ritual equipment for the consumption of liquid opium, shaped in the form of opium plants, became the hallmark of the Funnel Beaker Culture (trb) in northern Germany, Poland and Scandinavia (4000–2700 BC).*
This raises the question as to whether the spread of cord decoration (corded ware), from a steppe origin, was a parallel process. The cord in question was hemp, Cannabis, and in northern Europe it was initially infused rather than smoked, as it was in its area of origin. Does the emergence of the Corded Ware beaker mean it was subsequently combined with alcohol? (This is not so far-fetched: we still do much the same with the close relative of Cannabis, the hop, Humulus lupulus, in making beer.)9
The proliferation of different forms of ceremonial pottery sets makes it likely that each variation was designed for a specific type of food or drink, and that psychoactive substances played a part in each of them.
Fig. 7 Vessels for consuming opium in liquid form?
And sometimes the evidence is much stronger than that. For example, in one chamber burial in western Slovakia ten bodies, each with their hands held before their face, were interred above a collection of amphorae and drinking cups. Sherratt says these individuals must have been buried willingly though they must also have been stupefied, since they made no attempt to avoid asphyxiation. It is not too much to think that they had been poisoned. ‘The stupefiant was presumably contained in the amphorae and drunk from the cup: a sacrament of death. Both the substance which it contained and the beliefs of those who drank from it, must have been extremely powerful to carry out such a ceremony.’ This has all the hallmarks of a sacrifice, one moreover that was carried out on the elite who had preferential access to the sacred world through intoxication.
Later, more communal burials are encountered, still with amphorae present and sometimes including domestic animals, paired cattle in particular. Here too we are seeing a sacrifice, as is the case with other burials where two or more individuals are arranged around a table with pottery and cups, and even musical instruments.10
These sacrificial burials are all dated to ~3200 BC. On the north European plain, therefore, the second half of the fourth millennium BC was characterised by such communal ceremonies, frequently involving some form of drinking ritual. A further change occurred with the advent of Corded Ware, a pattern of individual burial, where adult males were interred with a specific kit: the stone battle-axe and a drinking set consisting of a cord-decorated beaker and an amphora. Continuing offerings were not made at such tombs. They were not ceremonial centres as earlier communal graves had been.
There was, then, a clearly marked change in ritual eating and drinking, from an initial practice of shrine-centred cult to a more personal pattern. What does this suggest? For Sherratt, and others like Ian Hodder, this development was associated with a change to more fluid settlements, as discussed in the previous chapter, based less on cereal agriculture than on more mobile livestock-husbandry, and on a change from collective graves (megaliths) to more individual, less permanent graves. ‘Sacred places’ were de-emphasised, stone structures above ground were replaced by pits below ground, with the bodies being buried once and for all, rather than remaining accessible. This is a major change, implying new beliefs about death, yet another new ideology.11
BOWLS V. BEAKERS
The advent of personal drinking equipment in the new arrangement does not necessarily mean that psychoactive substances were generally available. Rather, Sherratt argues, they were a prerogative of individuals ‘acting on behalf of the community, in a shamanic
or priestly role’. They were probably older males, heads of families. (This practice continues today, among the Tuva Mongols, where the drinking of alcohol is permitted only to males aged over forty.)12 Nevertheless, we are seeing a further change. Instead of forming part of a communal ceremony, ritualising the stability of long-lasting groups, drinking was domesticated or, in Sherratt’s preferred term, profaned. In the more fluid societies associated with pastoralism, the sacred medium ‘escaped’ from its role in the established shrines, and was redeployed. Instead of there being one or a very few shamans per tribe, or village, with access to other worlds by means of trance, achieved through psychoactive substances, each family leader now fulfilled the same role, and began to come together with others of similar authority, where milder psychoactive substances were shared in ceremonies of hospitality and bonding, so that they could each support the others, and jointly face threats from outside. This is a process that would culminate in phenomena such as the symposium in classical Greece (considered later). This was in effect, as Sherratt puts it, the domestication of ecstasy. Moreover, and crucially, the milder alcohol was more suited to this bonding, communal process, rather than the stronger narcotics which isolated people from one another when they were under the influence.
