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

true precision involved in their construction? We examine now the evidence presented by the T-shaped pillars, which reveal a recurring pattern that will leave the reader in little doubt that they were once turned toward something very specific in the night sky.

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    THE PATH OF SOULS;
    T he orientation of the central pillars in Göbekli Tepe’s main enclosures toward both Deneb and the Milky Way’s Great Rift is by no means unique. All around the globe ancient cultures and societies saw this area of the heavens as an entrance to the sky world. It was considered a place of the gods, a land of the ancestors, and the source of creation in the universe.
    For instance, the ancient Maya of Central America pictured Xibalba, their underworld, as accessible from a sky road known as ri b’e xib’alb’a, the Black Road, identified as the Milky Way’s Great Rift. 1 Its actual entrance or location was represented by cave and mouth imagery, often accompanied by a symbol known as the Cross Bands glyph. This has the appearance of a letter X inside a square frame and has been identified with the Cygnus stars in their guise as a celestial cross, made up of five specific stars. 2 The actual road to Xibalba (a word meaning “place of fear”) is shown as a caiman crocodile, its long jaws the twin streams created by the Great Rift, with its head, eyes, and gullet located in the vicinity of the Cygnus region (see figure 8.1 on p. 90).
    In Mayan mythology the solar god One Hunahpu was reborn from the mouth of the caiman. The sun god was perhaps imagined as being carried along the length of the creature’s open jaws to the place where the ecliptic, the sun’s path, crosses the Milky Way in the vicinity of the stars of Sagittarius and Scorpius. 3 This is a point corresponding, visually at least, with the nuclear bulge in the galactic plane that marks the center of the Milky Way galaxy. The sun god reached this point of rebirth at the moment of sunrise on the winter solstice.

    Figure 8.1. Left, caiman crocodile overlaid on the Milky Way’s Great Rift, as conceived by the Maya of Central America. Right, the Milky Way’s Great Rift on its own for comparison.
    The Olmec of Mexico, whom the Maya might well have seen as spiritual forebears, created grotesque stone offering tables with the likeness of the head and jaws of a monstrous jaguar. From the creature’s open mouth (some see it as a cave entrance) a deity identified as a were-jaguar—half human, half jaguar—is seen emerging. Although next to nothing is known about Olmec cosmology, it probably involved mythological ideas similar to those of the Maya.
    As the Cross Bands glyph appears on these offering tables, usually either between the teeth of the monster or on the headdress worn by the were-jaguar, it is likely the Olmec also had some concept of the sun god being reborn from the Milky Way’s Great Rift, seen as the cavelike mouth of a hideous sky monster.
    CLEAVING OPEN THE PORTALS
    The Maya manufactured enormous ceremonial ax heads in jade that take the form of abstract were-jaguars, the lips on their human faces downturned in a peculiar and highly exaggerated manner (see figure 8.2). Across the top of the head, going from front to back, is a furrow or cleft, which has a deeply significant meaning, for on the were-jaguar’s breech cloth the Cross Bands glyph appears, like the Union Jack emblazoned on a belt buckle. According to the label accompanying the British Museum’s own were-jaguar hand ax:
The crossed bands glyph incised on the breech cloth signifies an entrance or opening. . . . These symbols (i.e., the glyph and the cleft on the top of the head) proclaim the axe’s magical power to cleave open the portals into the spirit world.
    As that “spirit world” was almost certainly Xibalba, it confirms that the Cross Bands glyph symbolizes its “entrance or opening,” which, as we have seen, was marked by the constellation of Cygnus, the Northern Cross. Even the cleft is