And We Washed Our Weapons in the Sea:  Gods and Goddesses of the Neolithic Period

 

The next great stage is the emergence of the city civilizations - the beginning of historic processes. A remarkable thing happens, in certain places at certain times. The timeless idyll of the nature religions yields to a temporally ordered process. Civilizations emerge that have histories: a youth, a maturity, and an aging. The most important representation of this in literature is in Oswald Spengler's Der Untergang des bendlandes -The Decline of the West. He discusses eight civilizations that have gone through these cycles and indicates exactly where we are. 

 

                  There are three main centers that have been recognized as matrices of origin of agriculture and the domestication of animals. They are southeast Asia, which is now recognized as probably the earliest center; the area that comprises southwest Asia, Asia Minor, and southeast Europe; and, of course, Middle America, Mexico, and Peru. 

 

                  In the Near East, high culture cities, writing, and high mathematics developed. Here, the principal agriculture is of grains. The animals domesticated are cattle, and then later the horse and in the Syro-Arabian desert area the dromedary, the camel. 

 

                  We start in south Turkey, in Anatoha, in a little town called Catal Huyuk. There's a very important series of excavations here, conducted by James Mellaart, which lowered the antiquity of planting cultures in the Near East down to about 10,000 B.C. Catal Huyuk is situated on a plain, and the village is a little bit like the pueblos of the American Southwest. Houses are packed one on the other. To take such a town by storm you have to tear the buildings down. There is no way to get into the town except by way of the buildings themselves. There are some fifteen levels of these buildings at Catal Huyuk. This is one of the most important and oldest finds, and it is the key symbol of the main mythology of this area. Here you have the mother goddess back-to-back with herself. On the left she is embracing an adult male, and on the right she holds a child. She is the transformer. Where you have agriculture as the base, the goddess is going to be the primary mythological figure, personifying the energies of nature which transform past into future, transforming semen into child, seed into produce. 

 

                  This small piece, made of a green schist, dates from 7000 B.C. It was found in a grain bin, and so it is associated with agriculture. It's a ceramic of the goddess seated between two felines. You remember our association of the lion with the goddess? She has given birth, and we can see the head of a child. From Rome, about A.D. 100, we have a figure of the Anatolian goddess, flanked by lions, seated on a throne, with the sun disk in her hand and on her head the crown, the Walled City. Here the city has arisen. During the Carthaginian wars, the cult of this Anatolian goddess was brought into Rome as one of the supporting powers to support the Roman cause. So here we have seven thousand years of this goddess. 

 

                  A great number of little chapels have been found at Catal Huyuk, and in one of them, associated with the goddess, we have a figure of two facing leopards. These are the threshold guardians, the male and female leopard defending the sanctuary. The spots on the leopard are trefoil, three-leaf forms. 

 

                  Here is a drawing of a typical little shrine room, with a form of the goddess called, by the excavators, the birth-giving form. And what she has given birth to here is not a human child, but a bull. Now, we have no

writing from the period, but the bull, later, is associated with the moon. The moon dies and is resurrected and is born again from the solar goddess. In the grain bin figure, we have her giving birth to a human form and here to the symbolic bucranium, the head of the bull. 

 

                  In another fascinating chapel is a mural with the bull's head, the returning moon, with a skull under it. We have already spoken about the skull cult. On the wall is a vulture eating a body that is without a head. The head or skull has been removed. The body is returned to mother earth, or mother sky. The vulture is the consuming aspect of the goddess who gives birth; the body is therefore being recycled, as we would say today. If you were to translate into words the sense of this little shrine with the skull, it would be, "O Goddess Mother, as the moon is reborn, so may I, my mortal body being returned to the source.” 

 

                  The excavations in Jericho were conducted under the supervision of Kathleen Kenyon, just about the time that Mellaart, working in Catal Huyuk, uncovered on a wall (ca. 6000-5000 B.C.) another of these vulture murals, where the goddess is consuming bodies from which the heads, which apparently contain the consciousness, have been removed. Representations of this vulture goddess - her name is Nekbet - cover the whole ceiling of the tomb of Ramses VI in Egypt. So this cult lasted six or seven thousand years. 

 

                  In southeast Europe, in the past thirty years or so, a tremendous amount of material has been

excavated. There is a magnificent study of these materials by Marija Cimbutas, from the University of California at Los Angeles. Her book is called Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, 7000-3500 B. C. This is very early, and it's a period when the mother goddess is dominant. I want to review a series of images associated with northern Greece principally, but also the Balkans and the areas around the Danube, Dnieper, Dniester, and even a little bit of the Volga. In a 6000 B.C. representation of the goddess, there are a number of traits that are essential. One is the towering neck; this is the world axis. She is the axis. There is a bird figure on the top of the neck. She is bird goddess and spiritual goddess, but also obviously a human female with breasts. Associated with her is the boar. The labyrinth is another recurring theme incised on ceramic serpents, jars, and statues. 

 

                  On the inside of this bowl, which dates from 5000 B.C., is what looks like a linear script. If it is, this is the earliest writing in the history of civilization. The date usually given for the origins of writing is about 3200 B.C. in Mesopotamia, in ancient Sumer. 

 

                  There is a male figure of a ruler from this period, and over his shoulder is a scepter in the shape of a reaping sickle. An actual sickle of copper from that date, 5000 B.C., survives, so these are agricultural people harvesting a grain of some kind. Their tools are not weapons. They are heavy copper tools and they are used for carpentry and/or agriculture. These are peaceful cities. It's only later that walls begin appearing that indicate raids coming in from outside. We're approaching, with these walls, the whole history, later history, of the Near East. 

 

                  First we have planting people in high mountain valleys and later in the great river valleys: Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile. Then there are the barbarians raiding in from the desert and the great plains. There are two orders of barbarians: the Semites, from the Syro-Arabian desert from the south; and the Indo-Europeans, from the north. The Indo-Europeans were herders of cattle. It is they who first domesticated the horse and invented the war chariot, which became an invincible weapon. The Semites were herders of sheep and goats, and they first domesticated the camel. 

 

                  The gods are of two orders really: those that represent the powers of nature, which operate in the universe and within ourselves; and those that are the specific patrons of the tribe. In most mythologies, the tribal patron deities are secondary to the nature deities. In Semitic mythologies, the role is reversed. Around 4500 B.C. the early minotaur appears - a human head and

the bull's body. Sometimes it is reversed - a human body and a bull's head. So we have the minotaur, the bull and cattle as a principal deity - just as the bison was among the Amerrican Indians. The animal and human forms become mixed, just as they were in the early dancer at Les Trois Freres. 

 

                  Around 3500 to 3000 or 2500 B.C., in Crete, we find a continuation into the island world of the mother goddess system that had flourished on the mainland. Meanwhile, on the mainland, patriarchal warrior people, herders, are raiding in and the culture is changing. You have a marginal survival in Crete of the earlier mother goddess systems. She is depicted with the laboris, or double axe, which is the prime symbol of Crete. She not only is

the one who gives life, she is the one who takes it. There are lunar suggestions in the crescent form of the blades - death and resurrection. In Crete the prime animal is the bull with the horns. The moon must die to be resurrected. The sacred bull is slain and the young bull is the resurrection. 

 

                  The bull sacrifice seems to be a substitute for an earlier king sacrifice. Here we see bull games depicted in a little mural in the palace at Knossos in the king's chamber. There's been a question as to whether bull games of this kind, of people leaping over bulls, are possible. It's a shorter-legged bull than the toro bravo of the Spanish bullring, and yet it still seems an impossible feat. Well, when I was a student in France I went down to Bordeaux to see a bullfight. There the bull isn't killed. There came into the bullring a collection of chaps in white duck pants and white shirts with red sashes. Trumpets of triumph greeted them. Most of them were lame from having met the bull in one encounter or another; and after they had saluted the congregation, a young bull with horns like needles was released into the arena. The thing was to get this bull to run at you and then to step aside, moving only one foot. So you can imagine that there were some moments of horror. This was going on very nicely when one of the chaps, when the bull came at him, ran at the bull and jumped right over the bull. Years later, I thought, Did I dream this? No, I did not. The practice lives on in France. So, it can be done. 

 

                  The floor plan of the palace of Knossos is a kind of labyrinth. The question is, Where did the bull games occur? People used to suggest it was inside the palace, but that would be too dangerous. There's a big slope outside and probably they were held there. Young women as well as young men participated. In one mural women are dancing, much like the girls that dance at halftime of a football game. And the whole audience is women. In none of the archaic cultures are women as elegantly prominent as in Crete. There must have been some kind of continuation there of the women's role in the earlier mother goddess culture systems. 

 

                  At Knossos there's a tiny little throne room. On the king's throne there is carved the moon that dies to be resurrected. The Cretan king was killed possibly once every eight years in association with the cycle of the planet Venus. You don't see pictures of old kings in Crete. On either side of the throne we have a griffin. 

 

                  Where you have women prominent in a cult there is most likely going to be an accent on what might be called the religious experience rather than on the theological, logical, and rational aspects. It's much more the experience accent. In a depiction of a dance, the female figures have the heads of griffins. So the griffin is somehow associated with the goddess cult. 

 

                  Here is a tomb ceremony, with the dead person, the tomb, and offerings. The moon boat carries the soul to the underworld and there are animal sacrifices. The giant altar horns at Knossos, through which you see Mount Ida, the sacred mountain, were put there by Sir Arthur Evans, but he knew what he was doing. Here is the goddess on the cosmic mountain with her lions, the feline animal, and behind her the altar horns and the

trident, the way between the pair of opposites - the way to transcendence. 

 

                  It is in the Near East that the first cities appear, and here is something entirely new. The culture life of a small community or nomadic tribe would be pretty well available to everybody in the community. You would have a community of equivalent adults. The distinctions would be age group distinctions, male and female distinctions, and the distinctions between the normal order of people and especially gifted, shamanic visionaries. But with the enlargement of the communities that followed the establishment of agriculture and the domestication of animals, we begin to have a differentiation of professions. Instead of a culture of what might be called generalists and amateurs, we have professionals - people whose whole life and the wholle dynasty of their family is devoted to government or the priesthood or trade or agriculture. So we have a differentiation of peoples and a new problem, namely, to get people of different life forms to experience themselves as members of a single organism. And that's what is disintegrating in our world. With the worker against the employer, and this against that, and so forth and so on, there is a disintegration of the cultural organism. 

 

                  In the early cultures the problem was to keep the organization intact. With the professional priesthood, there was a recognition of the passages of the planets through the zodiac of the fixed constellations. These were the people who invented writing, arithmetic, and numeration in terms of sixties and of tens - the sexagesimal and the reckoning by tens. We still use the sexagesimal for reckoning cycles of time or of space. With writing, mathematics, and precise observation of the heavens, it was possible to determine that the planets were moving at a mathematically determinable rate. So we begin to get an idea of a cosmic order that could be mathematically recorded. This is a whole transformation of culture, and something altogether new and different comes in. In the earlier situations this peculiar tree, this special pond or rock, the exceptional becomes important. Later it is the animal that is of most importance, or the plant. But now we begin to have the notion of a cosmic order, and the exception is out rather than in. The exception is aberrant. And so we have a totally new way of regarding the universe. 

 

                  In the Tigris-Euphrates area, the earliest cities in the world first appear. The entry into these river valleys occurs somewhere around 4000 B.C. About the same time there's also an entrance into the Nile valley. The Nile is a kind of oasis area protected on all sides by desert. The Tigris-Euphrates is something quite different. They're wide open - north, south, east, and west - to invasions. And so, whereas something very stable evolved in Egypt, there were enormous transformations and historical developments in the Tigris-Euphrates area. 

 

                  Among the early finds that we're going to be dealing with are those from Halaf, very early pottery, 4000

B.C., and from Samarra. Uruk and Al-Ubaid were very early cities. This is a beautiful example of Halaf from about 4000 B.C. Now, it's in this period, and in precisely this kind of work, that the notion of an aesthetic field first appears. When we go to the caves, you don't have an aesthetic field. You have a great organization of forms in terms of the structure of the cave, but you don't have an enclosed area like this. Also, the designs here are more abstract. So abstraction and an aesthetically organized field begin to appear. The pottery here, which is very early pottery, is extremely fine. It's an elegant ceramic period. For example, the bucranium, the bull's head, is arranged in such a way as to make a Maltese cross. Aesthetic composition and arrangement have become significant. In Samarra, we find a whole constellation of swastika forms and animals going around in a counter-clockwise fashion. The swastika represents the four points of the compass, the cross of the earth in movement. There is another piece of ceramic ware with women and scorpions in a circular pattern - the circumambulation motif, circumambulating the cosmic tree. We're going to see this theme again in a surprising context - two animals, a kind of reversed mirror image, sharing a single set of legs. 

 

                  One of the earliest little temples that has ever been excavated and reconstructed is at Al-Ubaid and comes from around 3500 B.C. The huge temple compound is in the form of the vagina of a cow. You have the cow goddess, the universe as cow mother. The milk of the cow is the milk of the goddess. In the compound was a herd of sacred cattle, cared for by the priests. The sacred milk of the sacred cattle would be fed to the ruling house. It is holy food. These are the same sacred animals that are walking the streets of Calcutta today. There's a continuity here of the cow, the mother universe. The four feet of the cow are the four points of the compass. The same imagery appears in Egypt. 

 

                  Now we come to the lion form. Here is the lion pouncing on the cow, or on the bull in this case. The sun pounces on the moon; the lion pounces on the bull. An equivalent symbol is the eagle pouncing on the serpent. The moon sheds its shadow; the serpent sheds its skin. The eagle is the solar bird; the lion is the solar animal. This figure dates from 3200 B.C., from Sumer, the earliest high civilization in the world. It is an enormously important and impressive figure. This is the bull. The sacred beard indicates a ceremonial and symbolic animal with the bull's horns. He's being consumed by the lion eagle. This lion bird is a Sumerian representation of the solar power constantly consuming the bull.  Life comes, life goes. One foot is on a crescent form here on the top of the cosmic mountain. The cosmic mountain is the earth goddess. Here is the generating power of the bull. It is reminiscent of those flints that appeared in the Navaho, representing energy and power. This is the same kind of motif from the joints of the bull.

 

                  This serpent madonna is from Babylon. When this was first discovered in the 1920s, it was thought perhaps to be a foreview of the fall in the Garden of Eden in the biblical tradition, because the Book of Genesis, the mythology in the Book of Genesis, is largely an adaptation of Sumero-Babylonian myths. But there's a very different spirit here. This is the cosmic tree, the axial tree. Here is the goddess of the tree, and here is the serpent who sheds its skin to be born again. The association of goddess, serpent, and tree recalls the Garden of Eden, Eve, and the serpent. And here comes the male moon figure for refreshment. He comes here to receive the fruit of eternal life for refreshment. This is not a fall. There's no idea of a fall in these traditions. In India, the deity enters the world voluntarily, as a dance. The world is a play; it's a game. That's the mood you have in these mythologies. It's joyous, humorous at least. There's no more dreary mythology in the world than that of the Old Testament. 

 

                  The Warka vase, from Uruk, is from the same period. Unfortunately, the vase is broken so we don't see the king, but we do see his train and the servant carrying it. A priest brings offerings to the priestess of the temple. Within the temple are offerings that have been brought. The Sumerian priests bringing the offerings go before the shrine naked. We go before God naked. The flocks, the sheep and goats and so forth, which are to be increased through these offerings, are also represented. 

 

                  You remember the little Paleolithic figure of the woman as muse, as inspirer of the spiritual life? This figure here is the first thing of this delicacy and sweetness that we have in the history of sculpture. The eyes originally would have been of blue lapis lazuli, and there would have been a wig on the figure. When we think now of mother cults, everybody talks about fertility. But that's not the main inspiration of the goddess. That's only on the physical level. This is woman as muse. On the spiritual level she's the mother of our spiritual birth as well, the virgin birth, the birth of our spiritual life; and that's certainly what's represented here. This is one of the

most beautiful things from this whole period. Other representations of the goddess and god in this aspect lack the delicacy of this work, but they tell us something of the accent. These are called eye goddesses. The accent here is in the spiritual realm; the blue eyes are the eyes of the heavens. There is a male deity in this tradition, and in one work we can see the blue eyes, and the face is quite specifically a Semitic face. So the Semites are coming in from the desert. People of the Akkad and the Moabites, these ones and those ones, the Ammorites and so forth, pouring in and becoming assimilated. Indeed, there is an eye goddess shrine with just the eyes. 

 

                  Now we come to 2350 B.C. and Sargon I. This is the first known important Semitic emperor in this zone. These people have come in from the Syro-Arabian desert, first as conquerors, then as rulers. This beautiful bronze is from 2350 B.C. Sargon was born of a humble mother in the upper reaches of the Tigris. She put him in a little basket of rushes, which had been made watertight by pitch, and confided him to the waters of the river. He floated down the river and was pulled out of the river by a gardener on the royal estate. The goddess loved him and so he advanced in rank and presently became ruler himself. This is, of course, just about two thousand years earlier than the text with which we are familiar. Sargon is the first conqueror for whom we have praise and celebrations of victory. 

 

                  About this time wars of conquest come into being. Formerly, wars were simply revenge wars or ceremonial wars like the ones in New Guinea. A village would be raided and that was it. But now we have substantial conquest with hymns and celebrations. There is wholesale tearing down and annihilating of cities. And a refrain comes back: "And we washed our weapons in the sea. And we washed our weapons in the sea." So, here it is, about 2400 B.C., the beginnings of the kind of war that has been distinctive of our world, of civilization, ever since - ruthless annihilation of whole populations. Read the Book of Judges, read the Book of Joshua. You get plenty of it. 

 

                  There was an early Sumerian period in Ur, 3300 or 3500 B.C. or so, then a Semitic invasion with Sargon I, and then a Sumerian restoration, a resurgence, about 2000 B.C. Most of what we know about the mythology and architecture of ancient Sumer dates from this Ur number three and the Laga3h periods, 2000 B.C. 

 

                  At the ziggurat of Ur, the lower manifestation of the deity was shown to the people down below. But up on high, where heaven and earth are married, you have the esoteric cult of the priesthood. The same thing occurred in Middle and South America. 

 

                  Sir Leonard Woolley, excavating at Ur, came upon the most amazing burials. Whole courts had been buried alive. There is a reconstruction at the University of Chicago Museum of one of the great royal tombs at Ur. Whether the king was killed or died a natural death, we do not know. He could, in fact, have been just a high

priest king who became a sacrificial offering. 

 

                  The bullock carts and drivers that brought the body in, the officers of the court, the girl dancers, and the musicians were all buried. The hands of the harpists, the skeleton hands, were at that place on the harp where the strings would have been had they not decayed 

 

                  There were two orders of women in the tomb. One wore gold headbands and the other wore silver. One of those wearing silver was found not to have the headband on her skull, but it was all wrapped up and at her hip. She had been late for the party and had not had time to put her crown on.  

 

                  Above this tomb of the king was the tomb of the queen. So it's a suttee burial in high style. Her court is also buried along with her. The figures lie in regular rows and many of them have a little cup at their side in which there had been probably henbane or something of the sort to put the person to sleep while they were buried. 

 

                  Now this business of mass burial, whole courts buried, continued in the Near East into very late times. The history of the early dynasties of Egypt are filled with this. In China it was continued until the time of Confucius and Lao-tzu, both of whom mention it as something abominable that should not be continued. 

 

                  The Banner of Ur is the representation of a military expedition and contains the earliest known pictures of chariots. The wheels did not revolve on the axles; the axle revolved with the wheel. So they were very clumsy chariots. The animals pulling them were not horses but asses. The brilliant horse-drawn war chariot comes much later. We see the victory feast of the potaze, the principal governor, with his court, probably drinking beer or mead. These were not wine drinkers. The cattle are being brought in for the feast. There is also a figure standing with a harp, and on the harp's head we see the figure of the bull. 

 

                  We have hymns from this period of the bull god, the moon god, Dumutse, who has gone into the underworld and sings for his goddess to come and bring them both to eternal life. The great heroic deed of the goddess is the descent, stage by stage, to the underworld to bring eternal life to both. This is the idea of suttee. The husband and wife are one. When he dies or is sacrificed, she must follow. And the two together are then brought to eternity through her heroic act. 

 

                  From this time also we have about the earliest examples of animal fables. The animals play human parts. We have the simulation of a sacrificial offering; the simulation of a dance, with a bear doing the dancing; and a scorpion man in the abyss. 

 

                  Now we come to about 1750 B.C. and this is Hammurabi of Babylon. It's from his period that the great epic of Gilgamesh comes. Hammurabi received the law from the god Shamash, the sun god. You see the sun rays from his shoulders. As Moses received the law from Yahweh, so Hammurabi from Shamash. Urnamu, the lord of the great city of Ur, from which Abraham is supposed to have departed, also received the law from the sun god. And when the law comes with that kind of a backing, it can't be fooled around with. The law was, of course, invented by Hammurabi but attributed to God. And we can say the same for Moses.