‘Okay,’ Jack said. ‘We’re at Atlantis, not in Egypt, and we haven’t got all day. While we’re waiting for Jeremy’s image to upload, I want to talk to you about altered consciousness.’
Lanowski continued staring at the screen, then suddenly looked up. ‘About what?’
‘Altered consciousness. Costas said that neuropsychology was another one of your fascinations.’
Lanowski tapped a key and got up, then pushed back his chair and walked over to Jack, staring at him. ‘Yes?’
‘I had a couple of interesting experiences on the dive today. First in the tunnel going down into the volcano, a strange sensation of being in a vortex. Then in the final seconds before reaching the submersible, when I was out of air. Looking back on it, I remember more of what I sensed. The instant I knew I was about to black out I saw sparkly lights all round me in a kind of lattice pattern, and then a tunnel with a light at the end that I seemed to be drifting towards, with a face appearing and multiplying all around me. The face was Costas, of course, leaning out to pull me in, and the light was the open hatch of the submersible, but the closer I swam towards it, the further away it seemed. I wanted to relax and let it draw me in.’
Lanowski nodded. ‘Anoxia, dopamine, adrenalin, fear, survival instinct. A common feature of altered-consciousness experiences is the sensation of floating underwater. And you were in a high-stress situation, and experiencing sensory deprivation. Odd thing is, it can feel good. Addictive. Diving must tap into something hard-wired in our brains. I’ve been trying to work out what makes you guys always want to go deep. It’s not just nitrogen narcosis, is it?’
‘There’s something to that,’ Jack said, leaning back again. ‘But for me it’s always been cognitive, by which I mean how my own sense of observation and analysis is ramped up by being underwater, and that’s something I relish and want to experience whenever I can. I’ve always seen diving as an interface between present and past, as if putting on the equipment and getting underwater puts you into a different state of awareness, more acute, with the pressure on time making you think quickly and opening up lots of avenues in the mind. Maurice Hiebermeyer says the same thing about going down tunnels, opening up tombs. Being in that state for only a few moments can give those critical insights that don’t always come from hours of patient excavation on land. But my experience today was a different kind of altered consciousness and made me think about the Neolithic. What I’m really interested in now is putting myself in the minds of those shamans who went down tunnels in their minds, who perhaps saw visions that we can understand in terms of neuropsychology but they interpreted as manifestations of a spirit world.’
Costas shook his head in disbelief. ‘So when you were having your near-death experience and I was saving your life, you had a blinding flash of inspiration about the Neolithic? Archaeologists never cease to amaze me.’
Lanowski flicked away his fringe and pushed his glasses up his nose. ‘When I was a first-year undergraduate at Princeton, I worked evenings in the neuropsychology lab. I needed money, and I signed on as a guinea pig.’
‘Uh-oh,’ Costas muttered. ‘This is about to explain a few things.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Lanowski said cheerfully. ‘Only a few mild opiates, and some marijuana. Far less than most students were consuming around me. And the beauty of it was, I didn’t need it. I could put myself into an altered state of consciousness without drugs.’
‘Why does that not surprise me?’ Costas said.
‘If you really believe in the world of your visions, then the mind can easily take you there,’ Lanowski continued. ‘That’s the essence of religious experience. There’s little difference in that respect between a shaman having visions in front of a cave wall and a worshipper in a church transfixed by a statue of the Virgin Mary. Neither of them needs hallucinogenic drugs to get there. Or as in my case, you can really 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 officially 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 actually 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 pulled 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 all that dark imagery of the fall of Troy and modern war in “The Shield of Achilles”, 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 followed 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 Thelwell, 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 million 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 Romant
ic poets. But this is one case where we can talk in neuro-psychological terms about altered consciousness, because Coleridge tells us himself that he’d taken opium.’
‘Coleridge himself called 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 all, a primitive, ill-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 thoughtfully. ‘You get the same kind of imagery in the earliest literature of all, 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 call 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 pillars of Gobekli 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 swivelled 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 chalk. ‘The old vortex, hijacked. Now you see not a swirl, but the walls 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 all, 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 still 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 followed 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, allowing us to see beyond the visuals. It’s going to revolutionize underwater archaeology, because it’ll enable nearly instant transfer of the processed images into the diver’s helmet monitor, allowing a kind of X-ray vision. A few glitches, but Costas and I are nearly there. Meanwhile, look at this. What you’ll see is what Jack actually 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 skull 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 skulls, 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 skulls are mostly older people, men and women who may have lived a full lifespan and died naturally, some of them very old. They’re perhaps the skulls of venerated elders. But the other skulls are widely varied, adults of different ages, teenagers, children. The plastered skulls are all upright in the floor, set in a layer of burnt lime. The other skulls 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-shell eyes. He could see how the plastered skulls had been carefully sunk up to chin level in the lime floor. He remembered the most striking images from the Neolithic town of Catalhoyuk, of bulls’ skulls embedded in house walls, 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 walls, sometimes floating in front of them, alongside haunting imprints of human hands; the plastered skulls 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 skulls 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 skull found by Dame Kathleen Kenyon in her excavations in the 1950s.’
‘And at Catalhoyuk,’ Jack added. ‘They’re usually 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 bulls and the other animals, as travellers between our world and a spirit world, a world entered through the rock of the volcano, through caves, through house walls. 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 ancest
or theory fits in with what our bones lady thinks. The plastered skulls are all disarticulated, right? There are no neck bones attached. There’s no evidence of trauma injury. These skulls 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 Catalhoyuk. And here’s a vulture from Atlantis, from one of those stone pillars above the skulls, 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 originally 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 pillars 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 repixellated. ‘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 skull in the centre of the image, one that had been visible only in vague outline before. ‘This is one of the unplastered skulls, a child about nine or ten years old. Look closely and you can see that four of the neck vertebrae are still attached. You wouldn’t get that if you’d taken the skull from a properly skeletonized body, with all the ligaments gone. And then look over there, beneath the lime accretion on the floor.’
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