gobekli tepe - genesis of the gods (38 page)

It seems clear that whatever incentive there had been to remain loyal to a particular style and design gradually diminished as the centuries rolled by. It is almost as if the Göbekli builders, although still committed to following an established tradition, which included the erection of anthropomorphic T-shaped pillars, were now downsizing in their choice of architectural styles. By the end they were simply going through the motions, without the original motivation being there any more.

It has been suggested that the entire complex at Göbekli Tepe was buried hurriedly around 8000 BC, as if there was some urgency involved. It has even been speculated that the large enclosures were covered over to protect them from another cataclysm, either a comet strike or some kind of plasma-induced event, brought about by a coronal mass ejection from the sun.
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As attractive as such disaster scenarios might seem, there is at present nothing that has been discovered at Göbekli Tepe that might support such claims. The site’s final decommissioning involved the remaining sanctuaries, cult buildings, shrines, and other structures being buried beneath thousands of tons of imported earth, quarry chippings, and refuse matter. Yet even then, very occasionally, the heads of stones would be exposed by soil erosion and tilling of the land. The rest, however, remained encased within the tell’s swollen belly for a full ten thousand years until Klaus Schmidt realized the site’s incredible importance in 1994. We owe him a great debt for bringing back to life this unimaginable stone complex that reveals to us the mind-set of our ancestors during an age of uncertainty and change.

Yet we cannot end the story here, for even after the final abandonment of Göbekli Tepe its legacy lived on, and there is every reason to believe that the role its founders,
and maintainers,
played in the instigation of the Neolithic revolution was preserved in the myths and legends of the cultures that thrived in these same regions during much later times.

Some of these ancient accounts are still with us today, and it is time now to see how exactly they address the strange world that existed in southeast Anatolia and the Armenian Highlands during the formative years of the Neolithic era. As we shall see, they seem to preserve dim echoes of the Younger Dryas Boundary impact event and the existence of the Hooded Ones—the Swiderian elite whose memory is encapsulated in the rings of T-shaped pillars and twin central monoliths at Göbekli Tepe.

For the next part of our journey the author would like to ask the reader to excuse him as he now switches from a third-person narrative to, where necessary, a first-person delivery that much better fits the quest of discovery that befell him in the wake of an extraordinary sequence of events that will culminate with the finding of Eden itself.

PART FIVE

Convergence

27

IN THE GARDEN OF EDEN

The overwhelming aroma of incense hung heavy in the air of the church’s darkened interior. Low chanting, almost like a murmuring, filled the open space, where lamps burned, a few candles flickered, and the soft light pouring in through the high windows revealed a strange but compelling sight.
    Illuminated on the cold stone floor, close to the center of this archaic house of God, was a group of Armenian monks, dressed from head to foot in thick, dark garments. They were the source of the melancholic chanting that continued unabated, like some primal tone, essential to the success of their ritual actions. It was unlike any singing ever heard before, even in the strange, secluded monasteries of Mount Athos in Greece. Their combined voices made the whole place seem like a slowly building powerhouse of divine energy.
    The monks were engaged in a religious ceremony, yet one without any congregation. It seemed to involve the elevation of an object high above their heads, as if offering it up for God to acknowledge its presence here in this monastery. It was an act that had been performed for countless generations to celebrate the gift of eternal life, given to our First Parents in the Garden of Eden, but taken away from them at the time of the Fall.
    For these monks believed that their monastery was located on the very spot where the terrestrial Paradise could once be found. It was an unerring conviction that, although they could never have realized it themselves, was linked integrally with the location, just a couple of hundred miles away, of the hidden world that would one day be uncovered at Göbekli Tepe, the site of the oldest temple in the world.

I
t was an unprompted dream I awoke from on Wednesday, April 20, 2011, triggered no doubt by the fact that I had just agreed with the publisher to write a book on the story of Göbekli Tepe and its impact on myth, religion, and the origins of civilization
.
I had already submitted a detailed synopsis and chapter breakdown and knew pretty well what I was going to write.

Yet now I sensed that something was missing, a major piece of the jigsaw that my vivid dream suggested I would find if I looked in the right places. Somewhere in eastern Turkey, not far from the huge inland sea named Lake Van, a couple of hundred miles east of Göbekli Tepe, was, I felt, a church and monastery where the monks believed that the landscape thereabouts was the actual Garden of Eden. These were thoughts now going through my mind, even though twenty years of research into the origins of the Genesis account of the Fall and its geographical relationship to eastern Turkey, for books such as
From the Ashes of Angels
(1996) and
Gods of Eden
(1998), had failed to uncover anything even remotely like this tradition.

TEMPLE IN EDEN

There seemed only one thing to do, and this was for me to reexamine the evidence that had led me to conclude that eastern Turkey, the former Greater Armenia, or Armenia Major, was the true site of the Garden of Eden, and to see if I could turn up any new leads that might throw further light on this puzzling mystery. This seemed especially important to do, as in 2009 there had been reports that Professor Klaus Schmidt had told British journalist Sean Thomas (writing under the pseudonym Tom Knox) that “Göbekli Tepe was not the Garden of Eden: it is a temple in Eden.”
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Although Klaus Schmidt told me in September 2012 that Sean Thomas had misquoted him (the German archaeologist had actually said that Göbekli Tepe was an Eden
-like
place, not “a temple in Eden”), the story became a news sensation, with headlines such as “Do These Mysterious Stones Mark the Site of the Garden of Eden?”
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appearing worldwide. The German archaeologist obviously played down the matter, and eventually it did all die down. (I actually apologized to Schmidt as it was me who’d given Sean Thomas instructions on how to get out there, after he became interested in Göbekli Tepe through reading material I’d written on the subject.)

So if Göbekli Tepe was not the Garden of Eden, where was it really located, and how did the Genesis story of Adam and Eve and the Fall fit into the emergence of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic world of southeast Anatolia?

THE EXISTENCE OF PARADISE

It was really not until medieval times that people started looking for the Garden of Eden. Prior to this time it was considered a paradisiacal realm created by God for the benefit of our First Parents, Adam and Eve, who had lived in a state of perpetual bliss and happiness, not knowing death, pain, or hunger. Yet when they committed the original sin by eating of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and knew immediately that they were naked, God removed Paradise from the reach not only of our First Parents, but also of humanity as a whole. Never again would humans gaze upon the garden until the Final Judgment, when all righteous souls would be reunited with God in the heavenly Paradise. In other words, there was no point looking for Eden as it had no material presence in the mundane world. In fact, so detached from the physical world was it considered to be that some medieval theologians and church leaders thought that God had removed it to the vicinity of the Moon.
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Even if Paradise
had
existed in a material sense, there was no way it was accessible to humankind. It existed as a place beyond physical existence, almost like a parallel world, guarded by angels called cherubim, whose flaming swords protected its entrances with an impenetrable wall of fire. This was the manner in which Paradise was portrayed on medieval maps of the world—as a walled garden surrounded by fire, existing just beyond the eastern limits of the Eurasian landmass. Adam and Eve, the Serpent of Temptation, the Tree of Good and Evil, and the cherubim with flaming swords would all be present, as if to remind the onlooker where humanity might now be if the original sin had not been committed.

Those church leaders or theologians who
did
propose that the Garden of Eden might once have had a physical existence would be informed that if this were the case, then it would have been destroyed in the Great Flood. According to the Genesis account, this all-encompassing deluge engulfed the entire earth, right to the highest mountaintops. Only Noah and his family survived by taking to the ark and eventually finding the sole piece of land that God had set aside to remain above water, and it was from here that the world began anew.

THE GREAT REFORM

These were the generally accepted views that the Church of Rome held regarding the existence of Paradise, and very few scholars or church leaders dared challenge these opinions for fear of being branded as heretics. It was not until the religious reforms of the sixteenth century and the birth of Lutheranism and Protestantism that attitudes began to change regarding the concept of Paradise. This was helped by the discovery of the American continent, which confirmed that the known world was not surrounded by an expanse of water, beyond which there was nothing, a realization that led eventually to the abandonment of the long-held belief that the world was flat. The earth was a globe, and every part of it could be mapped and explored without fear of falling off into an abyss that existed beyond God’s creation. So everything in the world became more tangible and fixed, and even the inspired word of God transmitted through the prophet Moses to create the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament, became subject to question for the first time.

Church leaders, travelers, and cartographers began now to find firm geographical clues in the Bible that revealed the true location of the Garden of Eden, which many now concluded had existed in the Bible lands themselves. According to the book of Genesis, as well as various apocryphal and pseudepigraphical works of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim origin, the Garden of Eden was watered by a single stream that took its rise from a spring or fountain that emerged from the base of the Tree of Life. After exiting the garden, the stream then split into four heads that became the sources of four great rivers (see figure 27.1), each of which are named and described in chapter two of the book of Genesis (I shall quote from
Young’s Literal Translation of the Bible,
which exactly reproduces the original Jewish and Greek text, so that nothing is lost in translation):

And a river is going out from Eden to water the garden, and from thence it is parted, and hath become four chief [rivers]; the name of the one [is] Pison, it [is] that which is surrounding the whole land of the Havilah where the gold [is], and the gold of that land [is] good, there [in Havilah, is] the bdolach and the shoham stone; and the name of the second river [is] Gibon [or Gihon], it [is] that which is surrounding the whole land of Cush; and the name of the third river [is] Hiddekel, it [is] that which is going east of Asshur; and the fourth river is Phrat. (Gen. 2:10–14)
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