How and why this type of belief system may have changed into the new religion seen at Gobekli Tepe, with its temple-like structures, is a matter for speculation. Earlier religious experience may have been inclusive, with access to the spirit world open to everyone, as reflected in its survival in the houses at Catalhoyuk; rather than being fixed to particular sites, religious practice may have been ‘portable’, involving sacred stones such as meteorites hinted at in the earliest foundation myths of the Bronze Age, noted below. The establishment of fixed sites for ritual may have come about during periods when the glaciers had receded and people were able to remain in one area for generations, particularly at the time of the first cave art in southern Europe and then after the end of the last Ice Age. That period, after about 10,000 BC, gave the ecological stability for long-term settlement that allowed the process to go further than it ever had before. Fixed places of ritual may have become increasingly exclusive, the preserve of shamans or priests empowered by their sway over increasingly large groups of hunter-gatherers who had begun to live in semi-permanent settlements. A new breed of priests may have been the first to exert authority over communities larger than kinship groups, and may have been behind the first communal endeavour in the building of ‘temples’ and then the organization of towns, agriculture and animal husbandry that were needed both to sustain the religious sites and to maintain and control population in one place.
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.