The bigger question left in my mind, however, was why supersize everything at the site, especially when no one before had even attempted to create stone sanctuaries on this scale. Only the great stone wall and tower at Jericho
might
be contemporaneous with the earliest building phases of Göbekli Tepe. Further back in time we have only the carved stone blocks fashioned by the Solutrean peoples to create rock friezes within the caves of southwest Europe.
So why the sudden change in policy at places like Göbekli Tepe in southeast Anatolia during the tenth millennium BC? My archaeological friend suggested that Göbekli Tepe was the culmination of a natural evolution in building construction across a period of thousands of years, which was also the opinion of his mentor, Klaus Schmidt. I thought differently, citing fear as the greatest motivation—fear that something bad would happen if you
didn’t
do it. He did consider the possibility before deciding to differ with me on this point.
JUTTING HEADLAND
After the archaeologist’s departure, I spent some time in the baking heat walking out to the tip of a narrow headland that juts toward the northeast of the main east-west aligned mountain ridge. Although purely natural, I had a sense that this promontory might have played some role in the beliefs and practices of the Göbekli builders.
The closer I got to the end of the headland, the more the flint tools that litter the bellylike tepe almost disappear. Either this place was completely left unoccupied or it was reserved for special occasions. Large, rectilinear blocks that had fractured away from the limestone bedrock had clearly been removed to leave a flat, rectangular enclosure that faced roughly north toward the direction of Karaca Dağ and, of course, the stars of the northern night sky. Here the Göbekli builders could have watched Cygnus rise and set and the Milky Way’s Great Rift form an entrance to the sky world. There was little question that this place possessed an ancient sanctity even more primeval than the large enclosures on the top of the ridge, which, as the crow flies, are about a third of a mile (550 meters) away from this location.
The only other evidence of human activity I saw was what appeared to be a small fragment of a stone bowl, most likely from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic age. It would remain undisturbed until such time as the archaeologists turned their attention to this strange place, which, I sensed, was not going to be any time soon. It would take decades to excavate the many enclosures still to be uncovered beneath the artificial mound, and that was always going to be their primary focus of attention.
NEW LION PILLAR
As I returned to the occupational mound, I passed the square grid of 30-foot (9 meter) trenches opened to the northwest of the main enclosures and caught sight of a new discovery sticking out of the ground. It was another major pillar that, even with its T-shaped termination missing, stands an impressive 7 feet (2 meters) in height. On its western face is the carved relief of a leaping lion (see
plate 20
), occupying the same position as the foxes on the central pillars in the enclosures forming part of the main group. Next to nothing is known about the enclosure that once surrounded the pillar, although presumably this great monolith stood proud as part of a pair at the center of the structure. That the carved lion appears on its western face, directed toward the entrant approaching from the south, implies that this is the eastern pillar, its western neighbor probably still awaiting discovery somewhere beneath the compact soil and rock debris forming the surface of the mound.
MIGHTY LION
Seeing this mighty lion, which was just about to be encased in wood to protect it against potential vandalism and the harsh winter ahead, made me recall the lion simulacrum crowning the summit of Bingöl Mountain and the lion of Ali, sacred to the Alevi and Yâresân. Did this carved lion on the side of a Göbekli pillar symbolize the kosmokrator, the guardian of the world pillar and keeper of cosmic time, like the lion-headed cosmic being called Zurvan Akarana in the branch of Zoroastrianism known as Zurvanism? Or was it yet another form of the cosmic trickster, a creature of Ahriman, the dark principle in Zoroastrianism, just like the wolf and fox? In ancient Egypt, the goddess Hathor, in her guise as the lioness-headed Sekhmet, rained down fire on the earth and nearly destroyed humankind when the sun god Re deemed that humankind had become “too old,” a memory perhaps of the terrifying destruction that accompanied the Younger Dryas comet impact of 10,900 BC. Was this same leonine destructress depicted on the newly uncovered pillar at Göbekli Tepe, or was it simply a creature encountered upon entering the sky world, perhaps a proto-form of the Mesopotamian sky panther
MUL
UD. KA.DUH.A, made up of stars belonging to Cygnus and the neighboring constellation of Cepheus (as described in chapter 8)? It is too early to say, especially since each new pillar or porthole stone uncovered raises even more questions about this extraordinary place.
To confirm that the carving on the newly uncovered pillar was really a lion and not some other species of quadruped, I pointed to the stone and called out, “azlan?” The two men, who were probably about 30 yards (27 meters) away, stopped what they were doing, waved, and shouted back, “azlan,” which is Turkish for “lion.”
I felt I was done at Göbekli Tepe. I could do no more here for the time being. Yet before leaving I vowed to come back to this place whenever time and money would permit, for it was clear that discoveries were being made all the time and that I could always expect to learn something new whenever I returned to this sanctuary on the edge of Eden itself.
42
A LOSS OF INNOCENCE
T
he following afternoon I departed for London, reaching home some twenty-four hours later. The world for me soon returned to normal, but I could not get out of my mind one persisting image no matter what I did, even at the local gym that week. As I lay on a bench, using a chest machine, the hardest possible rap music was pumping out of the speakers, alienating me from the activities taking place in the room and somehow allowing my mind to escape this unnerving madness.
I was back in Hıdır Çelik’s garden in Muska, the noise of the nearby Fountain of Hızır and the network of tiny brooks that passed through this paradise still audible in my ear. Golden sunlight sparkled off the running water as it trickled gently over a trail of pebbles, some of them undoubtedly pieces of polished obsidian ejected in some former age by Bingöl Mountain itself.
We had finished eating the fresh fish, cooked by the youth on an open fire, and Hıdır’s daughter, Gülüzar, now gathered water from the mountain stream running through the garden. These people, all Alevi by birth, seemed completely at peace living their lives on a mountainside, only rarely coming into contact with the pressures and tensions of the outside world. They are relatively free of the stresses and strains that come with a modern, urban existence like the one most of us are doomed to suffer during our lives.
Without even trying, these people experience a harmony with nature that allows them a purity of heart, and a certain sense of grace, that almost seems reflected in the fecundity of everything that grows in and around the garden. From the trees overhanging the sacred Fountain of Hızır to the bright green fields and meadows that fill the local landscape, and even the abundance of fish that thrive here in the thousands, everything appears utterly awash with life and vitality.
A SENSE OF GUILT
I imagined that this was the same innocence, the same purity of heart, that must have prevailed in the Garden of Eden before the serpent beguiled Adam and Eve into partaking of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of God and Evil. Instantly, their innocence vanished as their eyes were opened to the fact that they were naked. I am sure they must have noticed before that they wore no clothes, the difference being that now they felt a sense of shame and guilt over this innocent act, and so covered themselves up. This was something they did, according to some accounts, by using fig leaves picked from the same tree that the couple had eaten from, implying that the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was a fig tree,
1
just like the one that graces the summit of Göbekli Tepe today.
DEATH OF AN IDYLLIC WORLD
Adam and Eve, as our First Parents, are merely metaphors for humanity as it existed before we woke up to our “nakedness.” Before this time we had lived in a state of innocence and grace that was taken away from us, and ever since that time we have been made to suffer and toil, not only in body, but also in spirit. The eternal golden age of hunting and foraging, when people were free to experience life on their own terms, would appear to have been halted by a cataclysm, arguably the proposed comet impact of 10,900 BC, and this changed everything. From these ashes arose people who wanted to tell us that thinking for ourselves and making decisions based on our own vision of life were essentially wrong, immoral even, and that whenever we have such thoughts we should feel guilt and shame, exactly what happened to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. It was a form of social conditioning imposed on our ancestors by those who assumed control over the way the future would now be shaped in the wake of the Neolithic revolution.
The greatest clue in this transition from a state of innocence to one of mental entrapment is in the fact that after being expelled from Paradise, Adam and Eve are condemned to forever till the land, for as Yahweh makes clear to Adam:
Cursed is the ground for your sake;
In toil you shall eat of it
All the days of your life . . .
In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread
Till you return to the ground.
2
In other words, humankind began to live by the process of subsistence agriculture, something that could only be done if everyone worked side by side with a more-or-less hive mentality under the control of taskmasters. No longer could we have the free lives of hunters, to do exactly what we wanted, when we wanted. People had now to exist day in, day out under regulated, and often confined, working environments. From such communities, which must have supplied the quarry men, stone masons, knappers, carvers, butchers, and construction workers for the creation of places like Göbekli Tepe, came much larger agricultural centers, leading eventually to Neolithic town complexes such as Çatal Höyük and Aşıklı Höyük in central Turkey. Founded around the same time that Göbekli Tepe was finally abandoned, ca. 8000 BC, Aşıklı Höyük was made up of a tight network of residential dwellings, workshops, and claustrophobic streets, no wider than alleyways, where beautiful obsidian mirrors, bracelets, and necklaces were manufactured.
TRAUMA AND INJURIES
Exactly what the work ethics might have been at Aşıklı Höyük is quite another matter. Skeletal remains show that men lived until they were fifty-five to fifty-seven years of age, while women lived only to the age of twenty to twenty-five years.
3
Severe trauma and injuries to the shoulders and spine indicate that these women carried heavy loads during their lives or were bending over or kneeling constantly, perhaps in front of a saddle quern used to make cereal grain. The skeletal remains of the men, on the other hand, show signs of joint disease and trauma of the type that might be expected from constant heavy labor, such as wood logging, construction work, and tilling the land.
Clearly, living in the first industrial age, where everyone had to have a home and be fed equally, took its toll on the population in a manner that might raise the question of who exactly was in charge at Aşıklı Höyük. Curiously, one ancient tradition asserts that the forbidden fruit consumed by Adam and Eve that brought about the misery of the original sin was “an ear of wheat,”
4
emphasizing once again that the introduction of widescale sedentary farming was at the root of humanity’s loss of innocence.
In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread
Till you return to the ground.
No longer were we now just individuals, thinking and making decisions for ourselves on behalf of our families and friends. Others now told us how to think, what to do, when to get up, when to eat, and when we could go to sleep. Since that time, we have been unable to break free from the fear that something bad will happen if we deviate from this path, and ultimately there is very little we can do to escape this torment. Those who do try to break free of their psychological shackles are often vilified or persecuted as blasphemers, heretics, dropouts, or just plain lunatics.
BACK TO EDEN
Various religious groups and communities throughout history have realized that the return to Paradise, and the freedom of thought that it brings, is through a simple innocence and purity of heart, just as it was with our First Parents before the time of the Fall. It is actually a good philosophy, and the strange thing is that some of the most successful of these communities had their inception in the same geographical region as that identified in this book as the true site of the Garden of Eden. They include the Cathars, or Albigensians, who in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries advocated a return to a simple purity in places such as Italy and France. That was, of course, until they were annihilated in the Albigensian Crusade, a mass genocide of atrocious proportions orchestrated by the Church of Rome.
The doctrine of the Cathars derived from the Bogomils, who thrived in Eastern Europe during the tenth and eleventh centuries AD. Their communities grew from exiled Christians of a semi-Gnostic nature who arrived here from the foothills of the Armenian Highlands, north of Lake Van. Known as the Paulicians, they owed at least some of their ideas to the Arevordi, the Children of the Sun, who, although broadly classed as Armenian Zoroastrians, followed a simple faith in complete harmony with nature.
5
Unbelievably, surviving elements of all these faiths, whether Christian, Zoroastrian, or pagan, were absorbed into the indigenous religions of the Kurds, most notably the Alevi.
6