gobekli tepe - genesis of the gods by andrew collins Read Free Book Online

perhaps, giving birth to bull calves at Çatal Höyük, the Neolithic city on the Konya Plain in southern central Turkey, which dates to ca. 7500–5700 BC (see figure 6.4).

    Figure 6.3. The Venus and the Sorcerer from the Chauvet Cave overlaid on the Milky Way, showing that the woman’s legs form the twin streams of the Great Rift, while the head of the bull calf in her womb area corresponds to the position of the stars of Cygnus and Cepheus.

    Figure 6.4. Three-dimensional panel showing a leopard-headed woman giving birth to a bull calf, from the Neolithic city of Çatal Höyük, ca. 7500–5700 BC.
    In addition to forming the outline of a bird in flight, the arrangement of the Cygnus stars resemble the frontal view of a bovine head, complete with extended horns. It is a realization that probably inspired both the Chauvet Cave’s Venus and Sorcerer panel and the ancient Egyptian belief that the sun is reborn each morning in the form of a bull calf, which emerges from between the twin streams of the Milky Way’s Great Rift. 4
    Yet if Chauvet’s Venus is an abstract representation of the Milky Way in the region of the Great Rift, and the bull calf signifies the Cygnus stars, what does the large feline represent? Its position immediately above the other figures gives the impression that it is either responsible for or connected with what is displayed, suggesting that it too is a representation of something to be seen in the heavens. Universally, large felines, such as panthers, jaguars, pumas, and lions, have been seen as personifications, and even controlling intelligences, of the night sky. Is it possible that the example at Chauvet plays a similar role? Could it be seen as the “father,” or progenitor, of the bull calf, with the Venus as its mother—the feline, bull, and woman having some kind of symbiotic relationship?
    As with the proposed astronomical frescoes at Lascaux, the Venus and Sorcerer panel at Chauvet is located at the extreme northern end of the cave complex at a position suggesting that it too acted as a symbolic window onto the section of sky represented by the images in question. If this surmise is correct, it could suggest that the Ice Age artists that executed this extraordinary cave art some thirty-two thousand years ago possessed, like those at Lascaux, a highly complex understanding of the night sky that we are only now beginning to comprehend.
    CAVE SCENES TO CULT SHRINES
    All this is very interesting and might well be correct. Yet linking Ice Age cave art with the design of sacred enclosures created at Göbekli Tepe in southeast Anatolia thousands of years later might seem presumptuous. It is a fact, however, that in the early Neolithic, stalagmites and stalactites were removed from cave interiors and carried back to Çatal Höyük, where they were placed in cult shrines alongside statuettes, bucrania, vulture beaks, and painted frescoes of extraordinary beauty and sophistication. So many fragments from caves were found there that British archaeologist James Mellaart, who excavated the site in the 1960s, proposed that the shrines at Çatal Höyük might have been the realm of chthonic deities; that is, gods of the underworld. 5
    B. C. Dietrich, Ph.D., author of The Origins of Greek Religion, went further by suggesting that the ritual activities practiced in Çatal Höyük’s cult shrines had formerly been celebrated in primordial cave settings, adding that: “Though the locality of the cult may have changed, its form did not relax its curious hold on the mind of the worshipper who, over many generations, retained the aniconic stalagmite as an image of his goddess.” 6 This, of course, resonates with the manner in which the limestone cone in the Chauvet Cave was utilized in the creation of the Venus and Sorcerer panel.
    If the sacred enclosures at Göbekli Tepe do reflect an interest in the celestial heavens, was it just a symbolic gesture, without any kind of real accuracy, or was there