“As your small craft nears these islands, you catch your breath in amazement and perhaps in fear. For rising from this rocky terrain you see huge structures that you can scarcely believe are made by human hands, bigger and higher than anything you have seen before, maybe thirty feet or more in height, towering from the cliffs above you.
“‘You may wonder who built them, or even how they were constructed. But you do not ask yourself what they are used for, or to whom they are dedicated. Because when you and your ancestors before you try to explain the unexplainable, when you turn to a deity for succor, inspiration, or an explanation of the mysteries of nature around you, the god you turn to is female. She is the Great Goddess, giver of life, wielder of death, and for at least twenty-five thousand years and arguably much, much longer, She has provided the focus for human existence.”’
The speaker’s name was Anna Stanhope, Dr. Anna Stanhope, Sophia and Anthony had told me. Principal of a posh English girls’ school, she had taken a sabbatical to come to Malta to study the Neolithic Age on the islands. While here, she had taken it upon herself to enlighten Maltese students as to their own history, and had taken a part-time teaching assignment at the school Sophia attended. As she spoke, I sat in the darkness and tried to concentrate on her words.
But it was difficult work trying to keep my mind off the unsettling journey I’d taken to get here. Try as I might, I could not keep from thinking about the incident with the Great White Hunter, a man I’d regarded as something of a buffoon when I first laid eyes on him on the plane. Now his ridiculous outfit and pretensions of grandeur had taken on a more sinister cast. Could it have been he who killed the cat and tampered with the brakes? Did he know where I was staying? Had he followed me home from the airport? That seemed a ridiculous idea, and anyway, he’d been in no shape to do much of anything, and he’d been delayed in customs.
Furthermore, it couldn’t have been he who killed the cat. I’d seen him several times in Valletta, and I didn’t think he’d have had time to get to the house ahead of us. Did that mean he had an accomplice? The hooded man at the back of the yard?
The more I thought about it, the more difficult it was to assume that it was a coincidence that our paths had crossed so often. Could I recall seeing anyone else from the airplane since we’d landed? GWH’s original seatmate, his “lovely lady,” for example? The priest? My own seatmate, an executive with Renault, I think he’d said. No, not one of them. Only the Great White Hunter. Why? I told myself to stop thinking about it. I was driving myself crazy.
“Twenty-five thousand years! Since the end of the last great Ice Age! Not one of the great religions of today can claim a fraction of that! From the steppes of Russia, through the caves of France, all through what we now call Europe and beyond, humankind worshipped the Goddess. How do we know? For one reason, for every phallic symbol or male statue we find in these times, we find many, many more triangles or female statues. All over the ancient world, people buried their dead with tiny statues of the Goddess, they dyed the bones with ochre, the color of blood, symbol of life and of the Great Goddess.
“It is here in Malta that Her worship reached its peak, its most creative expression. Here the Goddess became the presiding deity of every aspect of life. At least forty temples, the oldest freestanding structures in the world, older than the Great Pyramid of Egypt, older than Stonehenge, were built to honor Her. Hagar Qim, Gigantija, Tarxien, names you know well.
“The tools that built these massive structures have been found. Remnants of the huts and cave dwellings of the workers and worshippers have been uncovered. What we do not find from that time period is archaeological evidence of weapons. What does this mean ? Quite simply that these people lived in peace with their neighbors, in harmony with nature, secure in the workings of the universe. That they knew their place, part of the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. That they understood the interrelationship of all things. That they saw life and all things of it as a circle, not a line.
“But even as She flourished here, Her worship was under threat elsewhere. …”
Maybe he was following me. Maybe right this minute, as I sat in the darkness, he was watching me, or outside watching my car, I thought. Or perhaps he was back at the house doing something even more awful than before. Try to get a grip, I told myself. Your imagination is running away with you. Think this one through logically.
I tried to do that. Either it was a coincidence that our paths kept crossing, or it wasn’t. Either way, there had to be some rational explanation, a missing piece of information that would make it all make sense.
“What happened to the Goddess? Where did She go? Around about the fifth millennium b.c.e., a new group of people moved into the area which later became known as Europe. These people, some historians have called them Kurgans, brought a different belief system, a different religion. They worshipped what have come to be called sky gods, gods not of the Earth as the Goddess was, but rather deities, usually male and warlike, who ruled humankind from another place, a place without. Like Mount Olympus, for example, or the Elysian Fields, or more recently and perhaps closer to home, Heaven.
“Gradually these people, warlike like their gods, began to take over. In some cases, they lived in coexistence with the people of the Goddess, but by the time of the ascendancy of Greece, and even earlier, active attempts were made to stamp Her worship out, attempts that would ultimately be successful. Here in Malta, isolated in many ways from the rest of the Mediterranean world, the Goddess ruled supreme, omnipotent, long after Her worship had vanished elsewhere. Longer, but not forever. Suddenly, about 2500 B.C.B., the part of Malta’s history that belongs to the temple builders abruptly and mysteriously ends.”‘
Maybe, I thought, I needed to know more about the places where I had seen him, the places built by Gerolamo Cassar. I had the guidebook Anthony had chosen for me, and had already started reading it, in part because I thought he might quiz me later and I didn’t want to appear to be a total ignoramus where his country was concerned, but also because I was beginning to find the history of this tiny island absolutely fascinating. If I could do some study on the places Anthony had taken me to, I might find a connection. At the very least, it should take my mind off the morbid thoughts I was having about the Great White Hunter and his intentions toward me. I resolved to do that.
“While we may not know exactly what happened to the Goddess here in Malta, we can find hints as to what happened elsewhere in the stories, the epic poems, the mythology of those times. Many say myths are born of fantasy, but I believe they often have an historical basis, and that a careful reading will give us clues to the political and religious events of the day.
“And many tell of the replacement and subjugation of the Great Goddess and those who worshipped Her by ‘heroes’ of invading peoples. By the time we reach the world of classical Greece, we have an active attempt to rewrite the story of the Goddess to justify the new order as defined by the Greeks, and to denigrate the old. In the stories of that time, we have numerous examples of the conquest of centers of Goddess worship. We find these in the stories of Zeus and other members of that quarrelsome pantheon of Gods of Mount Olympus.
“Zeus’ rape of Europa, for example, probably tells us of an invasion of Crete, where the Goddess was worshipped for centuries. Think also of the story of Ariadne of Crete, whose name means holy or sacred, and who was probably an earth Goddess. She helped Theseus slay the dreaded Minotaur on his promise that he would carry her away with him. He did, but then he abandoned her on the island of Naxos. There are many stories of this kind—the beheading of Medusa by Perseus, Apollo’s attempted rape of Daphne—all representing invading peoples’ conquest and assimilation of centers of Goddess worship. The Goddess had been tamed.