The new religion
As people moved from ‘wild’ to ‘civilized’, as ‘man made himself ’ – in another memorable phrase of Gordon Childe – we may see the first glimmerings of anthropomorphic gods. Ancestors who had been sought in the spirit world became ancestors who were venerated, and permanent sites of ritual meant that specific ancestors could be remembered in association with a particular place. The altered consciousness of the voyage to the spirit world was transferred to piety and worship, so that the religious experience remained similar even if the belief had changed. In looking at the crucial step from venerating ancestors to the creation of named gods, it is impossible not to see deliberate human agency at work, driven by the psychology of power and control. The faceless pillars of Gobekli Tepe and Nevali Cori may represent the very threshold of the gods, not the result of a gradual process but an act of creation by a group of ambitious priests.
Veneration can quickly change to awe and fear, and the tiered cosmology of the old spirit world transmutes into heaven and hell – where people are trapped between fear of hell and a need to fulfil the requirements of reaching heaven. These changes were reflected in dramatically evolving lifestyles, from the unpredictability and excitement of the hunter-gatherer to the tedium and toil of the agriculturalist, where the new priesthood could present the promise of a better afterlife as a goal. It was these priests whose descendants would be the first kings, and it was they who were responsible for the birth of modern religion; the first acts of worship may in truth have been the first acts of obeisance to a new class of priest-kings. To paraphrase Gordon Childe, man not only made himself; he also made his gods.
The move from the natural world to a man-made world may also be seen on a much grander scale in a shift from sacred caves and mountains to burial mounds and pyramids. Whereas the ‘old’ religion may have carried on into the Neolithic in the private context of houses – much as older rituals were to do in later periods, for example in the continuance of pagan worship in Christian times – the new religion was focused on monumental sites such as Gobekli Tepe, which took over the function of caves and mountains as the focus for communal religious activity. The manipulation of belief by a new breed of priests may be the beginning of the tension between centralized, state-controlled religion and private belief and ritual, something I explored with early Christianity in my novel The Last Gospel. Throughout history this tension has been the cause of bloody persecution and conflict, and the possibility that this can be traced back to a violent dislocation at the dawn of civilization is suggested by the disturbing nature of the rituals revealed in the archaeological evidence, another part of the extraordinary revelation of the ‘new’ Neolithic.
Altered-consciousness visions
A common altered-consciousness experience is of travelling through a tunnel or vortex; the interpretation of this vision as a ‘portal’ into the spirit world may be seen in the swirling spirals of Neolithic rock art, and in the circular shape of prehistoric monuments ranging from Gobekli Tepe and Stonehenge to the huge concentric earthworks of prehistoric Britain. The strange swirling shape seen by Jack on one of the monoliths in Atlantis is inspired by a carving on a stone inside the Neolithic passage tomb at Knowth, Ireland, dating from the fourth millennium BC, believed by some to represent a face and by others to be a chance arrangement of circular and semicircular motifs. Although Knowth and the other ‘Megalithic’ sites of western Europe date four or five millennia after the earliest Neolithic sites of the Near East, they may represent societies at a comparable stage of development with similar belief systems, including rituals based on altered-consciousness experiences and the use of rocks and underground places as portals into the spirit world.
Human sacrifice
The stone basins in the inner sanctum of Atlantis in this novel were inspired by several beautifully decorated basins from the Irish passage tomb at Knowth, where they have been interpreted as receptacles for cremated remains or as water basins that may have been windows into the spirit world. At the Anatolian site of Cayonu, a stone basin was found with possible traces of human blood on its rim, the inspiration for Jack’s idea that the basins may have been filled not with water, but with human blood. Another structure at Cayonu known as the ‘House of the Dead’ contained a flat stone with residues of human blood, as well as aurochs and sheep blood; and yet another building held a slab decorated with a carving of a human head, also with traces of human blood. Beneath the House of the Dead were no fewer than sixty-six human skulls and bones from four hundred additional people. A disproportionately large number of the skulls were from young adults, male and female, suggesting that they may have been selected for killing. The possibility that human sacrifice was widespread is suggested by finds at Catalhoyuk, where infants were found buried under the thresholds and in the walls of houses, and at Jericho, where several infant skulls were found with vertebrae still in place, showing that the heads had been cut from intact bodies rather than taken from skeletons. At Cayonu, one of the most telling finds was a long flint knife with traces of human blood on the blade, suggesting that the obsidian blades found in cached deposits in houses at Catalhoyuk – long thought to have some symbolic meaning – may well have served this chilling function.
Whether sacrifice was an invention of the new religion or an inheritance from the old is unclear. The religion of the hunter-gatherers may have involved shamans or ‘seers’ transporting themselves into the spirit world, using sacred animals – for example, bulls – as vehicles to aid their journey. The inception of the Neolithic may have seen a step from imagination to reality, from the dream animals portrayed in the cave paintings to real animals sacrificed so that the moment of their death opened the portal. It has even been suggested that the first large-scale animal husbandry may have been to provide bulls for sacrifice. The shift from caves to open-air sites for communal ritual may have been associated with developing rituals of excarnation, where human bodies were exposed to be eaten by birds, a possibility suggested by depictions of vultures with body parts in a carving at Gobekli Tepe and a wall painting at Catalhoyuk. The step from this to human sacrifice may have been associated with the emergence of the new priestly elite who could use it to instil awe and fear and exert control. The idea of sacrifice as an ‘offering’ may have come about as religious practice shifted from the spirit travel of the shaman to the worship of gods closely associated with that new elite. If this interpretation is correct, then the early Neolithic ‘Garden of Eden’ may have been not only a place of revelation and creativity, but also one of bloodshed and terror.
These extraordinary and disturbing discoveries bring to mind later traditions of child sacrifice in the Near East, from the Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac to the Phoenicians and their western Mediterranean successors, the Carthaginians; elsewhere in the world, human sacrifice also occurred at places – including submerged caves and sinkholes, as well as man-made altars and pyramids – that may have been seen as access points to the spirit world, for example among the Aztec and Maya and their predecessors in Mesoamerica. The importance of blood and dismemberment is also seen elsewhere, for example among the Moche of Peru. A similarity between European megalithic tombs and the interior layout of Mesoamerican pyramids has also been suggested, including passageways with horizontal and vertical axes that may have given access to the underworld as well as to a spirit realm overhead; these structures may be seen as successors to natural caves used in the same way during the Palaeolithic. The idea of an ‘ axis mundi ’, a special place where the supernatural world can be reached, is common to many religions. Whether or not these cross-cultural similarities should be seen in terms of lines drawn on a map, of the diffusion of people and ideas, will always be a focus of fascinating debate; what does seem likely is that the receptivity of distant peoples to new religious ideas, rituals and structures – for example, pyramids – may have been increased by common neuropsychological experiences and visions that might have allowed these ideas to
be absorbed rather than rejected.
Epics and scripts
As well as pulling in the evidence of much earlier prehistory, the new finds from the Neolithic have caused scholars to look afresh at the foundation myths of the ancient Near Eastern civilizations to see whether they might hark back to a formative period soon after the end of the Ice Age. The Epic of Gilgamesh, probably first written down in Old Babylonian in the third millennium BC, is best known for its flood story, which parallels the Old Testament account and may derive from a memory of sea-level rise after the last Ice Age – perhaps even a Black Sea flood that inundated Neolithic settlements in the sixth millennium BC. If that is the case, it strengthens the idea that the central theme of the epic, the struggle and then friendship between the ‘wild’ Enkidu and the ‘civilized’ Gilgamesh, may reflect the period of transition between hunter-gatherers and settled ways of life in the early Neolithic. The epic is told largely as a dream narrative, suggesting the importance of dreams and their interpretation in a world where altered-consciousness experiences gave access to the spirits, and later the first ‘gods’, whose inchoate form is suggested by a reference elsewhere in Babylonian myth to the faceless ‘Annu’ coming from a mountain in the north, perhaps in the region of Anatolia or the Black Sea coast.
Another fascinating aspect of the Epic of Gilgamesh is the repeated reference to ‘sacred stones’, suggestive of the importance of stones in the archaeology of early Neolithic religion, and particularly the extraordinary account of the meteorite recounted here in Chapter 6: one so heavy that it could barely be lifted, bringing to mind the ancient Greek myth that the Trojan palladion was originally a thunderbolt sent down by Zeus, very probably referring to a meteorite. Meteorites in recent history have most readily been found on the polar icecaps, suggesting that these ancient stories may even recall discoveries made by hunter-gatherer ancestors – before the end of the Ice Age – of objects whose sacred significance was remembered into the Neolithic and the first period when the epics were being written down.
In my novel Atlantis I suggested that the symbols on the real-life Phaistos disc, a mysterious object found near the second-millennium BC palace of that name in Crete, may have been a lost Neolithic script of Anatolia. One of those symbols, the ‘Atlantis symbol’ seen by Jack and Costas as they dive through the lava tunnel, is on the banner of my website. While an early Anatolian origin for the Phaistos symbols remains possible, no writing system as we would understand it has yet been found pre-dating the early cuneiform of the clay tablets on which myths such as the Epic of Gilgamesh were first inscribed. However, as with so much else that is being overturned by the new discoveries from the Neolithic, we may need to reject the long-held assumption that writing developed in response to the need for record-keeping in the early cities, and instead look to the religious organization and belief systems that may have been behind such developments. The ‘Stone Age code’ in this novel is based on an actual assessment of symbols that are found repetitively and in groups in cave paintings of the Palaeolithic dating as far back as thirty-five thousand years ago. These and similar symbols could have been mnemonics, and together may have formed a narrative of myth or ritual; in that sense they may be regarded as a writing system. These new ways of thinking may allow us to see symbolic and narrative significance in artefacts that have already been excavated, even in the shape and association of stones. The extraordinary nature of the finds so far made at the Neolithic sites suggests that future excavations may reveal more certain evidence of this type than has yet been found.
Prehistoric voyages of the mind
In order to reach Uta-napishtim – the Babylonian Noah – in his mountain fastness, Gilgamesh undergoes a sea voyage that would have taken a lesser man ‘a month and fifteen days’, a span equivalent to a voyage from Mesopotamia to the tip of India or from the Strait of Gibraltar across the Atlantic. Voyages of this nature were well within the capabilities of people in the early Neolithic. Yet our understanding of the period has been plagued by the misconception that people were terrified of the open ocean, and that long-distance voyages only became common with the needs of colonization, trade and warfare after the first civilizations had developed. In fact, the fear of the open sea, fear of the unknown, that remains so strongly embedded in our psyche today may be traced back to this formative period in the early Neolithic, when people moved inland, when the resources of the sea became less important, and when control by the new elite involved keeping people in one place and restraining them from exploration. In the preceding period – the Mesolithic – people had lived near the sea and ranged widely, and hunter-gatherers of the Palaeolithic travelled thousands of miles over land and sea. People first crossed the ocean to Australia some fifty thousand years ago, and by fifteen thousand years ago people had travelled huge distances by sea along the west coast of the Americas from the Bering Strait.
To those early travellers the ocean was not a barrier but a conduit, the most important conclusion reached by the adventurer Thor Heyerdahl after completing his ‘Ra’ expeditions in 1970 using reed boats. He was referring to his experience on the Atlantic Ocean, where in the right place – sailing south from Gibraltar – it is difficult not to be swept westwards across the ocean, a voyage that would have been well within the technology of early Neolithic seafarers using reed, skin or wooden boats. Yet there is another aspect to early seafaring that new research on Neolithic religion brings to the fore. A sea voyage was the final journey in the dream world of Gilgamesh, his ultimate adventure; and watery visions, of water being an access point to the underworld and of floating in an endless ocean, are common altered-consciousness experiences. Among people who were sensitized to these experiences, a voyage such as one across the Atlantic could be perceived at a level of consciousness unfamiliar to those of us who have not been driven to hallucination – as many are when pushed to their limits at sea – or to interpret those visions within a system of ritual and belief that gave structure to the experience. I have tried to bring something of this across in the Prologue. To these early seafarers, reality may have merged with the spirit world; the sea voyage became a voyage of the mind. For those still steeped in the old religion – the religion of spirit journeys – ocean voyages may not have provoked terror, but actually have been relished.
It seems possible that for the greater part of the history of Homo sapiens, it has been this type of belief system, rather than belief in gods and deferential acts of worship, that has sustained people’s spiritual needs – a system built on remembering and rationalizing dreams, and on other altered-consciousness experiences that seemed to access a supernatural world, a system whose common features may owe much to human neuropsychology. The inception of religion with anthropomorphic gods may have gone hand-in-hand with early state formation and the burgeoning power-base of the new leaders, something we may see appearing with dramatic speed and conflicting with the old religion at the remarkable sites of the early Neolithic – at Catalhoyuk, Gobekli Tepe, Nevali Cori, Cayonu – over nine thousand years ago. As more early sites are discovered and excavated – one day perhaps including submerged sites off the Black Sea coast of Turkey, even a real-life Atlantis – it may truly be possible to speak of archaeologists making the greatest discovery of all time, and revealing the birthplace of the gods.
The swirling vortex images from the Neolithic may be the origin of two ancient symbols that have come to have dark connotations, the swastika – first seen on Bronze Age pottery of Troy – and the Sonnenrad, the sun symbol that Heinrich Himmler incorporated in the decoration of his SS ‘order-castle’ at Wewelsburg. There, the symbol was placed in the floor as if it were at the apex of an axis mundi, an idea that would have been well within Himmler’s mystical vision of Wewelsburg, and it was this that led me to imagine the Zoo flak tower in Berlin in similar terms.
The Zoo flak tower was one of the most terrifying German creations of the Second World War, a vast five-storey concrete bunker that rose like a castle keep out
of the grounds of the Berlin Zoo. The tower provided shelter for thousands of civilians during bombing raids, and had its own power supply, water reservoir and hospital; in the final hours of the Russian onslaught, the defenders even dropped explosives off the parapet like medieval soldiers pouring burning oil on attackers. It was one of three flak towers in Berlin and was ready for action in April 1941, along with the adjacent L-Tower, which housed the radar that directed the flak (anti-aircraft) fire.
The main armament of the Zoo tower comprised four huge twin 128mm guns, each barrel capable of firing up to ten rounds a minute. The tower was designed with elasticity in the ferroconcrete to withstand the shock of the guns firing at high elevations, which drove the recoil force down into the structure; but damage was caused to the concrete as well as to the gun crews’ hearing when the guns were fired at low elevations, at ground targets. The flak towers shot down many British and American bombers, as well as Russian dive-bombers in the 1945 onslaught that were engaged by the 37mm and quadruple 20mm guns on the outer gallery below the parapet. During the final assault the big guns provided withering fire against infantry and tanks until the Soviets advanced below the minimum elevation of the guns, and the last German defenders outside the tower were overwhelmed.
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