Gobekli Tepe Page 10

  For instance, the ancient Maya of Central America pictured Xibalba, their underworld, as accessible from a sky road known as ri b’e xib’alb’a, the Black Road, identified as the Milky Way’s Great Rift.1 Its actual entrance or location was represented by cave and mouth imagery, often accompanied by a symbol known as the Cross Bands glyph. This has the appearance of a letter X inside a square frame and has been identified with the Cygnus stars in their guise as a celestial cross, made up of five specific stars.2 The actual road to Xibalba (a word meaning “place of fear”) is shown as a caiman crocodile, its long jaws the twin streams created by the Great Rift, with its head, eyes, and gullet located in the vicinity of the Cygnus region (see figure 8.1 on p. 90).

  In Mayan mythology the solar god One Hunahpu was reborn from the mouth of the caiman. The sun god was perhaps imagined as being carried along the length of the creature’s open jaws to the place where the ecliptic, the sun’s path, crosses the Milky Way in the vicinity of the stars of Sagittarius and Scorpius.3 This is a point corresponding, visually at least, with the nuclear bulge in the galactic plane that marks the center of the Milky Way galaxy. The sun god reached this point of rebirth at the moment of sunrise on the winter solstice.

  Figure 8.1. Left, caiman crocodile overlaid on the Milky Way’s Great Rift, as conceived by the Maya of Central America. Right, the Milky Way’s Great Rift on its own for comparison.

  The Olmec of Mexico, whom the Maya might well have seen as spiritual forebears, created grotesque stone offering tables with the likeness of the head and jaws of a monstrous jaguar. From the creature’s open mouth (some see it as a cave entrance) a deity identified as a were-jaguar—half human, half jaguar—is seen emerging. Although next to nothing is known about Olmec cosmology, it probably involved mythological ideas similar to those of the Maya.

  As the Cross Bands glyph appears on these offering tables, usually either between the teeth of the monster or on the headdress worn by the were-jaguar, it is likely the Olmec also had some concept of the sun god being reborn from the Milky Way’s Great Rift, seen as the cavelike mouth of a hideous sky monster.

  CLEAVING OPEN THE PORTALS

  The Maya manufactured enormous ceremonial ax heads in jade that take the form of abstract were-jaguars, the lips on their human faces downturned in a peculiar and highly exaggerated manner (see figure 8.2). Across the top of the head, going from front to back, is a furrow or cleft, which has a deeply significant meaning, for on the were-jaguar’s breech cloth the Cross Bands glyph appears, like the Union Jack emblazoned on a belt buckle. According to the label accompanying the British Museum’s own were-jaguar hand ax:

  The crossed bands glyph incised on the breech cloth signifies an entrance or opening. . . . These symbols (i.e., the glyph and the cleft on the top of the head) proclaim the axe’s magical power to cleave open the portals into the spirit world.

  As that “spirit world” was almost certainly Xibalba, it confirms that the Cross Bands glyph symbolizes its “entrance or opening,” which, as we have seen, was marked by the constellation of Cygnus, the Northern Cross. Even the cleft is evidence of this connection, for the Great Rift is known also as the Great Cleft, as it appears to cleave the Milky Way in two, a symbolic act carried out in Mayan tradition by the jade ax in its celestial guise.

  Figure 8.2. Left, Olmec altar at La Venta, in Mexico’s Tabasco state, showing a figure emerging from the cave-like mouth of the were-jaguar. Note the Cross Bands glyph between the creature’s fangs. Right, Mayan ax in jade fashioned into the likeness of the were-jaguar. Note the cross bands glyph on the belt buckle area of the breeches and the cleft on the top of the head.

  THE DENEB PORTAL

  Similar ideas regarding a spirit world existing beyond the opening to the Great Rift are held even today by a number of Native American tribes, whose star myths are thought to have a common origin among the Mississippi mound-building cultures, forming what is known as the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, which thrived ca. AD 1200–1650.4 The most consistent story that emerges from their beliefs and practices tells of how in death the soul departs to the west, a journey that takes three to four days to complete. When finally it reaches the edge of the Earth’s disk, the soul waits for the right moment to make a leap of faith to enter the Milky Way, the so-called Path of Souls, via a star portal, knowing that the consequences of failing this difficult jump will mean being lost forever in the lower world.

  The portal is marked by a celestial hand, its fingers pointing downward and made up of stars belonging to the Orion constellation, the three belt stars marking the severed wrist. It is a symbol found again and again in the iconography of the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex and dates back to the Hopewell mound builders of Ohio, who thrived some two thousand years ago.

  The actual portal is the stellar object Messier 42, a small, fuzzy nebula located in Orion’s “sword.” Here the soul joins the Milky Way and travels south and then north until it reaches a fork on the path identified with the twin arms of the Great Rift. Its longer arm, the one bridging the two halves of the Milky Way, is envisioned as a log spanning a celestial river that the soul must cross to reach the sky world.

  Yet before the soul can cross the log bridge it has to encounter its guardian, most usually a “forked-eye raptor,” a supernatural eagle known as the “Brain Smasher,” identified with the star Deneb. Only by receiving the right judgment can the soul avoid Brain Smasher and pass over the log and enter the afterlife. If the judgment is not favorable, the soul is forced to take the Great Rift’s shorter, severed arm, which leads only to oblivion. Clearly, the raptor is Cygnus in its role as the celestial bird, its forked eye the Milky Way’s Great Rift (see figure 8.3).

  STORM DEMON WITH OPEN MOUTH

  How exactly the Göbekli builders might have viewed the starry existence beyond the Great Rift is now lost. Yet some idea of their understanding of cosmic geography can be gleaned from the star lore recorded in cuneiform script by the astronomer-priests of the civilizations that thrived on the Mesopotamia Plain in what is today Iraq.

  Figure 8.3. Native American symbols from artifacts found at mound sites. Note the raptor, which represents Cygnus, and the eye in the hand, representing Orion, above which is a circle that represents the bright star Deneb in Cygnus (after Greg Little).

  Babylonian texts, which contain source material that goes back to the third millennium BC, catalogue dozens of stellar objects, either stars or asterisms, a few of which, such as the Scorpion (Scorpius), the Goat-headed Fish (Capricorn), and the Lion (Leo), are recognizable from their equivalents in the Greek zodiac. The stars of Cygnus would seem to have been combined with others from the neighboring constellation of Cepheus (located immediately above Deneb in astronomical terms) to create a huge griffinlike creature with the head and body of a panther (nimru in Akkadian) and the wings, back feet, and tail of an eagle. Its name was MULUD.KA.DUH.A, which means “constellation (MUL) of the storm-demon with an open mouth,” and it was seen as the place of reception of dead souls.5

  With the head of the panther in Cygnus6 and its tail in Cepheus (making it perfectly synchronized with the Milky Way), it becomes clear that in Babylonian star lore the entrance to the realm of the dead was through the mouth or gullet of MULUD.KA.DUH.A, which corresponds to the opening of the Great Rift. This, of course, is similar to the Olmec and Mayan conception of the entrance to the underworld being through the mouth of a gruesome monster, either a jaguar or caiman. For this reason, it seems certain that the Babylonians, and presumably their forebears the Sumerians and Akkadians, saw the entrance to the netherworld, or realm of the dead, as synonymous with the Great Rift.

  VENERATION OF THE POLE STAR

  From the evidence presented here, it seems likely that the Pre-Pottery Neolithic peoples of southeast Anatolia considered Deneb the visible marker for the opening into a sky world accessed via the Milky Way’s Great Rift. Why exactly this particular area of the sky became so important to the mind-set of the Pre-Pottery Neolithi
c world of southeast Anatolia lies in the fact that there was no Pole Star when Göbekli Tepe was constructed, ca. 9500–8000 BC. In other words, the celestial pole was not marked by any bright stellar object in the night sky. Thus it seems reasonable to suggest that the Göbekli builders adhered to much earlier Paleolithic traditions regarding the location of the sky world that reached back to a time when Deneb was Pole Star, ca. 16,500–14,500 BC. It was, of course, during this epoch that the Lascaux Shaft Scene was created by Paleolithic cave artists. This shows the bird on the pole, perhaps signifying the ascent of the bird-headed shaman (depicted next to it) into a sky world accessed through the celestial pole, marked at that time by Cygnus in the form of a bird.

  SHIFTING POLE STARS

  Is it really possible that the people of Göbekli Tepe followed a tradition that was more than five thousand years old? As already mentioned, the effects of precession caused the celestial pole to shift away from Cygnus around 13,000 BC. Thereafter it entered the constellation of Lyra, causing its bright star Vega to become Pole Star, ca. 13,000–11,000 BC. So why had the sky watchers of this age not switched their allegiance from Cygnus to Vega? The answer is that some Paleolithic cultures probably did start seeing Vega as the point of entry to the sky world. However, others almost certainly remained loyal to Cygnus, and Deneb in particular, simply because it synchronized with the start of the Milky Way’s Great Rift, which was already considered the rightful entrance to the sky world. Visually, the star Vega lies well away from both the Great Rift and the Milky Way, explaining why the star might not have attained the same significance as Deneb.

  So not only did Vega lose its importance around 11,000 BC, but veneration of Deneb and the Great Rift as the true entrance to the sky world was almost certainly on the increase again, a situation that probably existed when the main enclosures at Göbekli Tepe were under construction in the tenth millennium BC. It thus makes sense that the builders of these monuments, the oldest known star temples anywhere in the world, chose to align them to the opening of the Great Rift, the most obvious point of entry into the sky world at that time.

  Yet as we shall see next, the method by which the soul made its journey to and from the sky world was by using Cygnus’s most primordial totem, the celestial bird, which we find represented quite spectacularly in the carved art at Göbekli Tepe.

  9

  CULT OF THE VULTURE

  At Çatal Höyük, the 9,500-year-old Neolithic city in southern central Anatolia, the dead were portrayed in art as headless matchstick men, often seen in the company of vultures. These are carrion or scavenger birds associated with the process of excarnation, the deliberate defleshing of human carcasses, which often took place on wooden mortuary towers, the remaining bones being afterward collected for what is known as a secondary, or disarticulated, burial.

  Excarnation is certainly considered to have taken place during the Neolithic age and might even have occurred at Göbekli Tepe, according to Klaus Schmidt. He compares its large enclosures to the Towers of Silence that feature in the funerary practices of the religion known as Zoroastrianism,1 which thrived in Iran, Armenia, and later India (under the name Parsism) until comparatively recent times. Here the dead were placed at the top of round stone towers, the Towers of Silence, away from a community. The vultures would swoop down and pick the carcasses clean, after which the remaining bones were allowed to calcine in the hot sun before being collected for final burial.

  Although such practices are rare today, they do continue under the name sky burials among some remote Tibetan Buddhist communities in the Himalayas. Eyewitness reports show that first the vultures swoop down to devour the carcasses, then the ravens, hawks, and crows arrive to finish the job, almost as if this honor among birds might be the true origin of the term pecking order.

  Excarnation almost certainly occurred at Çatal Höyük, where it is depicted on at least one painted fresco (see figure 9.1). This shows two wooden towers, accessed by a staircase, at the base of which are two figures, guardians perhaps of the charnel area. On top of the right-hand tower vultures attack a headless matchstick man, which is very likely an abstract symbol used to represent a dead body. The head was considered the seat of the soul, and because the soul has departed the body, it is portrayed as headless; that is, soulless. The missing head is seen in outline on top of the left-hand tower, where two vultures appear to be taking the head, or soul, under their wings.

  Figure 9.1. Excarnation towers from a reconstructed panel found at the Neolithic city of Çatal Höyük, dating to 7500–5700 BC (after James Mellaart). Note the soul of the deceased depicted as a head, with its denuded body shown as a headless matchstick man.

  PSYCHOPOMP

  The painting is meant to convey the idea that, even though the human carcass might suffer the unsightly (although very efficient) act of excarnation, the spirits of the vultures accompany the soul into the afterlife. Each bird is thus acting as a psychopomp, an ancient Greek word meaning “soul carrier,” used to describe a supernatural being or creature whose role was to assist a newly deceased soul reach the next world.

  British archaeologist James Mellaart recorded that all panels connected with death and rebirth at Çatal Höyük were located on either the north or east walls of cult shrines.2 East is clearly the direction of rebirth, symbolized by the appearance of the sun each morning, leaving the north as the direction of the netherworld, the realm of darkness and the dead. Indeed, some of the most prominent vulture imagery featuring matchstick men at Çatal Höyük was placed on the north walls of cult shrines.

  Not only is the north the only place where, in the Northern Hemisphere, the sun never reaches, it is also the direction of the Milky Way’s Great Rift, the stars of Cygnus, and, of course, the celestial pole. Was it in this direction, toward the perceived entrance to the sky world, that the vultures were thought to carry or accompany the soul into the afterlife?

  Although Cygnus is most often represented in Eurasian star lore as a swan, evidence indicates it was once seen on the Euphrates as Vultur cadens, the “falling vulture,”3 even though this is a title more commonly associated with the nearby constellation of Lyra.

  GÖBEKLI’S VULTURE STONE

  Representations of vultures were found among the ruins of the cult building at Nevalı Çori. Here Harald Hauptmann and his team uncovered a stone totem pole on which human heads and vultures are shown together, as well as a beautifully executed sculpture of a vulture that would not look out of place in a modern art gallery. Yet strangely this beautiful piece of art was being used as fill within the wall of the cult building, indicating that it belonged to an earlier phase of building activity, probably ca. 8500–8400 BC.

  Vultures are also to be seen among the carved art at Göbekli Tepe, most obviously on Pillar 43. Located in the north-northwestern section of Enclosure D, it stands immediately west of the holed stone that would have allowed a person crouching between the twin pillars to observe the setting of Deneb during the epoch in question.

  On Pillar 43’s western face are three vultures, one of which is a juvenile. Also visible is a scorpion and two long-necked wader birds—flamingos perhaps—and between them and the head of the adult vulture in the upper register is a line of small squares, abutted on each side by a series of V-shapes, possibly signifying the flow of water.

  Other strange features are depicted at the top of the stone. Three rectangular forms appear in a line with linked loops that make them resemble handbags. Next to each is a small creature, which in order, from left to right, can be identified as a long-legged bird (a wader perhaps), a quadruped (seemingly a feline), and an amphibian (possibly a frog or toad). An interpretation of this scene is problematic, although the handbags, or “man bags,” as some people are calling them, are most likely animal pens or houses, situated on what could be the edge of a river, upon which is a trackway (the lines of squares) underneath which flows water (the accompanying V-shapes).

  This, however, is not why Pillar 43 has been sin
gled out as important. It is the vulture positioned at the end of the line of small squares that draws the eye (see figure 9.2 on p. 100). It stands up, with its wings articulated in a manner resembling human arms. It also has bent knees and bizarre flat feet, in the shape of oversized clowns’ shoes, indicating that this is very likely a shaman in the guise of a vulture or a bird spirit with anthropomorphic features. Similar vultures with articulated legs are depicted on the walls of shrines at Çatal Höyük, and these too are interpreted either as anthropomorphs or as shamans adorned in the manner of vultures.4

  HEAD LIKE A BALL

  Just above the vulture’s right wing is a carved circle, like a ball or sun disk. Klaus Schmidt interprets this “ball” as a human head, and this is almost certainly what it is, for on the back of another vulture lower down the register is a headless, or soulless, figure, just like the examples found in association with the vultures and excarnation towers at Çatal Höyük. And we can be sure that this “ball” does represent a human head as similar balls are seen in the prehistoric rock art of the region, where their context makes it clear they represent human souls.5 As Anatolian prehistoric rock art expert Muvaffak Uyanik explains:

  Figure 9.2. Göbekli Tepe’s Vulture Stone (Pillar 43). Note the scorpion on the shaft, the headless human figure with erect penis on the neck of the vulture-like bird at the base of the shaft, and the ball above the right wing of the vulture in the upper register.

  In the Mesolithic age [i.e., in the epoch of the Göbekli builders], it was realized that man had a soul, apart from his body and, as it was accepted that the soul inhabited the head, only the skull of the human body was buried. We also know that the human soul was symbolized as a circle and that this symbol was later used, in a traditional manner, on tomb-stones without inscriptions.6