The Human Cosmos. Jo Marchant
and pieces of stalactite and limestone from these caves have been found in the Çatalhöyük houses. Lewis-Williams has suggested that – just like visitors to the caves of Upper Palaeolithic western Europe – the people who built these houses saw the walls as permeable interfaces, or portals, to the cosmos’s spirit realms. At Çatalhöyük a house wasn’t just a place to live, but ‘the material expression of a mythical world’. It was a model of their universe.
Houses modelled on the cosmos are still known in societies around the world. The Barasana people in the dense forests of Colombia, for example, traditionally live in wooden longhouses called malokas. Each one is a miniature universe in which the roof is the sky and a vertical post, called ‘the seat of the sun’, aligns with the sun’s rays every day at noon. The major horizontal roof beam, oriented east–west, is called ‘the sun’s path’. The floor is the Earth and beneath it is the underworld, where the dead are buried. In his 2005 book, Inside the Neolithic Mind, Lewis-Williams argues that a similar principle might explain other Neolithic monuments and cult buildings found in the Near East, such as the stone circles of Göbekli Tepe. Like Schmidt, he concludes that they modelled the spirit world, or the cosmic realm of the dead, incorporating spaces that are sunk into the ground, with human remains often under the floor.
Were the builders only concerned with the underworld, or did they also look up at the sky? Göbekli Tepe is located on a high point in the landscape, so would have offered a panoramic view of the heavens. Some researchers have suggested that the flat tops of its pillars could have been used to observe the rising or setting of prominent stars, such as Orion’s Belt, or were built to commemorate the gradual appearance in the sky (due to precession) of the bright star Sirius. Others have linked the animal carvings at the site to specific constellations, for example proposing that a scorpion depicted underground might represent Scorpio below the horizon.
Notroff isn’t convinced: he suspects the enclosures were at least partly subterranean, dug down into the sediment, and had roofs, perhaps made from an organic material such as animal hides. So the site may make more sense as a terrifying journey to a cave-like underworld than as an astronomical observatory. He has experienced these spaces beneath a roof recently built to protect the site, and the shadows make the pillars and carvings look larger and ‘even more awe-inspiring’, he told me. ‘I can only imagine how all these images of giant scorpions, curling snakes and snarling predators must have affected the young hunter on his first descent into the darkness, maybe with nothing but the flickering light of a torch.’
This doesn’t mean that the builders of Göbekli Tepe weren’t interested in the sky. One of the best-preserved pillar statues wears a carved necklace decorated with a disc and crescent. These symbols are thought to refer to the moon; it has even been suggested that the necklace identifies this pillar as a ‘moon-deity’. Either way, what structures like Göbekli Tepe reveal is a fundamental shift in how people related to the cosmos. It seems likely that the people who constructed these sites had a similar tiered universe – with lower, middle and upper worlds – to their predecessors in the Palaeolithic and traditional hunter-gatherer societies today. Lewis-Williams argues that altered states of consciousness were likely still important as a way of journeying between these different cosmic realms.
But such journeys were now occurring in man-made, rather than natural, settings. The residents of Çatalhöyük appear to have copied the cramped passages of natural caves. Elsewhere, the greater control that people now had over these portals allowed the development of simpler, more formulaic designs: circles, pillars, squares. As Lewis-Williams has pointed out, this shift towards purpose-built structures would have allowed for greater social control too, with the emergence of powerful elites and formal rituals – including decorating and displaying selected skulls after death and possibly human sacrifice – that prescribed who could access these other realms and how.
Göbekli Tepe, then, epitomises two important changes that seem to have happened in parallel just before the adoption of farming, both of which involve societies beginning to separate themselves from, or elevate themselves above, nature. The spirit realms became populated primarily not with animal guides but human ancestors. And instead of using existing caves or natural features as entrances to these other worlds, people started to build their own.
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It was many millennia before these changes reached the Boyne valley. Genetic studies suggest that farming gradually spread throughout Europe from the Near East, carried by migrants who largely replaced the local populations. The new way of life arrived in Greece around 7000 BC, in northwestern Europe around 4500 BC. And when these farmers reached the Atlantic coast, they made monuments from giant stones, in an explosion of pillars, circles, tombs and graves, from Portugal to Brittany to Sweden.
Different societies expressed this common theme in a variety of ways: in Ireland, a tradition of passage tombs led to Newgrange, one of the most spectacular Neolithic monuments of all. Farmers arrived here around 3750 BC, bringing with them pottery and robust rectangular houses as well as cereals such as wheat and barley. Studies of plant remains suggest that the transition was relatively swift. Within a century or two, cereals were grown across the island, while large areas of forests had been axed or burned.
At the same time, people started building simple stone tombs, with a burial chamber defined by five or six large stones plus a flat capstone on top, all covered with a mound of earth. Over the following centuries, the designs became larger and more complex. Whereas the first tombs were too small to enter, later ones had cairns or mounds up to 20 metres across. Passages inside led to inner chambers decorated with art and corbelled roofs, where rituals could be performed.
Irish archaeologist Robert Hensey, who has studied the development of passage tombs in Ireland, sees these sites too as portals. In his 2015 book First Light: The Origins of Newgrange, he describes them as ‘a powerful transcendental network; a chain of monuments which had acted as bridges to other worlds’. Through occupying the same space as the bones of their forebears, he suggests, ‘select individuals could now physically enter the other world, the realm of the ancestors’. Just like in the Near East, instead of using natural features of landscape as doorways to other dimensions of reality, people were building their own.
And as at Göbekli Tepe and Çatalhöyük, this journey to the spirit world was deliberately made difficult. Regardless of the size of a tomb, the passage inside was only ever wide enough for one person at once. Reaching the burial chamber often required ducking, crawling or climbing over stones. And as tombs became larger, the burial chambers became more complex, with up to seven recesses, each just big enough for a sitting or squatting adult. Hensey suggests that people might have stayed inside these for long periods, perhaps to facilitate trance states through sensory deprivation (maybe aided by the spooky effect of echoing chants). He notes that in some traditional communities, such as the Kogi of Colombia or the Orokaiva of northern Papua, individuals in training to become spiritual leaders are confined alone, in darkness, for up to years at a time.
At Göbekli Tepe, the link to the sky is unproven. In Neolithic Europe, it’s crystal clear; megalithic monuments here often feature celestial alignments. A survey of 177 dolmen tombs in Spain and Portugal found that every single one faces east, towards a point on the horizon within the arc of the rising sun. The survey author concluded that each tomb was oriented towards sunrise on a particular day, perhaps when construction began. This fits the idea that such tombs were believed to lead to the underworld – where nature regenerates, and where the sun appears to go each night before being reborn in the morning.
In Ireland, not all passage tombs have obvious solar orientations. A few have roof boxes like the one at Newgrange, though – strong evidence that the builders wanted sunlight to enter at certain times. There is also an emerging focus not just on the daily rebirth of the sun but its annual cycle. A 2017 study of 136 Irish passage tombs concluded that more than 20 of them were intentionally oriented towards key dates in the solar cycle, mostly the solstices.
Eventually, between around 3200 and 3000 BC, passage tombs became larger still, often more than 50 metres across, with bigger stones, higher roofs and longer passages. They had other design modifications too, such as art and decorations on the outside of the tombs, public spaces and platforms around