The Gods of Atlantis

by David Gibbons

  Down to a sunless sea.’

  Costas followed from memory:

  ‘Five miles meandering with a mazy motion

  Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,

  Then reached the caverns measureless to man,

  And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean.’

  Jeremy put his finger on some handwritten notes under the poem. ‘Coleridge wrote a letter to a friend of his, John Thelwell, about the same time he composed the poem. Listen to this: “I should much wish, like the Indian Vishnu, to float about along an infinite ocean cradled in the flower of the Lotus, and wake once in a million years for a few minutes.” And then he writes: “My mind feels as if it ached to behold and know something great – something one and indivisible.”’ Jeremy paused. ‘The metaphor of flowing water as a vehicle for the imagination is pretty widespread, and images of water are common among the Romantic poets. But this is one case where we can talk in neuro-psychological terms about altered consciousness, because Coleridge tells us himself that he’d taken opium.’

  ‘Coleridge himself called the poem a “psychological curiosity”,’ Costas added. ‘He also writes of a mighty fountain, spewing out huge fragments, spoken of almost as if it’s a volcano: it comes from a deep chasm, a savage place. The poem’s like a cosmology of the earth and the underworld combined with visions that come from an altered state of consciousness, visions that are familiar to us because they’re hard-wired into our brains just as Lanowski suggested.’

  Jeremy shut the book and pocketed it. ‘I think it’s another way of understanding what we’re looking at in early prehistory. For too long archaeologists have assumed that ancient belief systems are somehow beyond their reach. Many early archaeologists were dogmatic about their Christianity, and shamanistic religion was regarded as the least accessible of all, a primitive, ill-formed system of spiritualism that existed before God revealed himself. But I’d argue that’s precisely where we need to go if we are to understand the origins of religion today, to look at neuropsychology. And most fascinatingly, what Coleridge was describing shows how that experience could have been intense and rapturous without the worship of gods.’

  ‘It’s not just in modern poetry,’ Jack said thoughtfully. ‘You get the same kind of imagery in the earliest literature of all, in the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, where long voyages are taken over water and there’s that same juxtaposition of the world of nature and the world of men. And the Epic of Gilgamesh may preserve an actual memory of the spiritualist world of the early Neolithic, a world just before the gods came into being.’

  Lanowski got up, put the blackboard resolutely back on the chair and whipped out his piece of chalk. He drew a spiral on one side of the board, then turned back to them, his eyes gleaming. ‘Here you see the vision of a tunnel, a vortex. It’s the most common altered consciousness vision, and also the most common early Neolithic symbol. You find it everywhere, from the megalithic tombs of Ireland to Atlantis. The vortex can be surrounded by animal images, like Jack’s image of Costas repeatedly on the edge of his vision, but here it’s empty. You could call it a vision of pure rapture. But then something changes.’ He flourished the chalk, then drew two circles beside the first, the same size but without the spiral. ‘Think of Stonehenge. Think of the Neolithic temples. They’re circles. But what do they have inside them?’ He slashed a T shape and a pi shape on the top of the board. ‘What you’ve got, gentlemen, is gods. That’s what the trilithons at Stonehenge are. That’s what the T-shaped pillars of Göbekli Tepe and Atlantis are. And how do you depict this new type of temple, this new religion, as a symbol?’ He put the chalk in the centre of the second circle and drew a series of straight lines radiating out, turning each line sharply to the left. He swivelled back to them, his arms held out questioningly.

  ‘The Sonnenrad,’ Jack said quietly. ‘The ancient sun symbol, used by the Nazis as the SS symbol.’

  Lanowski flourished the chalk. ‘The old vortex, hijacked. Now you see not a swirl, but the walls of the tunnel lined with these images of gods.’

  ‘And there’s another ancient symbol,’ Jack said quietly.

  Lanowski turned and drew inside the third circle, this time only four lines intersecting, the ends turned left. Jack stared at it. The swastika. But now he saw it not as a cross at all, but as a symbol of the ascendancy of the gods; the gods who had taken over the old religion ten thousand years ago. And a horrifying modern symbol, a symbol of gods reborn, not in the depths of prehistory but in the cauldron of Europe eighty years ago.

  Lanowski tossed the chalk, pocketed it and marched back to his computer workstation. ‘Just a little more time, Jack. Then I’ve got something more to show you.’

  Jack looked to the ROV screen, which was still blank, and Jeremy glanced at the monitor where he had left his program loading. ‘Okay,’ Jeremy exclaimed. ‘We’re in business. This is going to completely change your view of Atlantis.’

  Jack and Costas followed Jeremy, who sat down in front of the monitor and glanced at Jack. ‘As soon as you surfaced from the dive, Costas emailed me the photos from your helmet camera, the ones you’ve already seen as raw images. The beauty of that camera pod is that it incorporates a miniature thermal-imaging device and GPR, ground-penetrating radar, allowing us to see beyond the visuals. It’s going to revolutionize underwater archaeology, because it’ll enable nearly instant transfer of the processed images into the diver’s helmet monitor, allowing a kind of X-ray vision. A few glitches, but Costas and I are nearly there. Meanwhile, look at this. What you’ll see is what Jack actually saw when he poked his head into that chamber, minus the reflections from his headlamp off suspended particles, which I’ve removed.’ He clicked the mouse, and an extraordinary image came on the screen, taking Jack back to that heart-pounding moment in the depths of the volcano only a few hours before.

  ‘Holy shit,’ Costas murmured. ‘It’s like a charnel house. Like something out of an Aztec nightmare.’

  It was the image of the human skull Jack had been looking at before Jeremy and Lanowski arrived, visible in sharper detail so that they could clearly see the finger marks of the ancient sculptor in the plaster that had been formed over the bone. But behind it were rows of other skulls, far more than Jack had seen before. Jeremy opened up a toolbar and sharpened the contrast. ‘I count at least twenty-five. About half are deliberately plastered like these ones, and the rest only look as if they are because they’re covered in calcite precipitate that formed over them after they were submerged. The anoxic environment of the Black Sea accounts for the amazing preservation. Our osteologist at Troy thinks the plastered skulls are mostly older people, men and women who may have lived a full lifespan and died naturally, some of them very old. They’re perhaps the skulls of venerated elders. But the other skulls are widely varied, adults of different ages, teenagers, children. The plastered skulls are all upright in the floor, set in a layer of burnt lime. The other skulls are scattered around as if whatever ritual was happening here was abandoned partway through, as the flood waters were rising.’

  Jack stared at the image that had been inches away from him underwater, seeing how the plaster had been moulded to form high cheekbones and bedding in the sockets for cowrie-shell eyes. He could see how the plastered skulls had been carefully sunk up to chin level in the lime floor. He remembered the most striking images from the Neolithic town of Çatalhöyük, of bulls’ skulls embedded in house walls, almost as if they were caught at the moment of coming through. In the cave paintings of the Palaeolithic the animals seemed to be emerging from the walls, sometimes floating in front of them, alongside haunting imprints of human hands; the plastered skulls here seemed the same, as if they represented bodies emerging from a chthonic spirit world, emissaries between the world of the living and the world of the dead.

  Costas tapped Jack’s shoulder. ‘You said plastered skulls like this had been found at other sites?’

  ‘At early Neolithic Jericho in Palestine,’ Jeremy interjec
ted. ‘I was researching it on the way here. A famous skull found by Dame Kathleen Kenyon in her excavations in the 1950s.’

  ‘And at Çatalhöyük,’ Jack added. ‘They’re usually interpreted as evidence for a cult of the dead, for ancestor worship. But I worry about that. Worship is the wrong word, a modern word with misleading connotations. To me, this image from Atlantis suggests that they should be seen in the same way as the bulls and the other animals, as travellers between our world and a spirit world, a world entered through the rock of the volcano, through caves, through house walls. Maybe the ancestors could do this if their remains were properly treated. They were venerated, just as elders would have been when they were alive, but I don’t think they were worshipped. I don’t think the ancestors were seen as gods: that’s an idea I don’t see any clear evidence for in prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies.’

  Jeremy nodded. ‘The ancestor theory fits in with what our bones lady thinks. The plastered skulls are all disarticulated, right? There are no neck bones attached. There’s no evidence of trauma injury. These skulls were taken from bodies that were already skeletonized.’

  Jack reached for his tablet computer, dragged his fingers over the screen and showed it to Jeremy. ‘There’s a lot of vulture imagery from Atlantis and the other Neolithic sites. Look at this one: a painting of a vulture pecking at a headless corpse from Çatalhöyük. And here’s a vulture from Atlantis, from one of those stone pillars above the skulls, another image taken by my helmet camera. You can see a carving of a great bird of prey with a human arm clutched in its talons. It looks like a Mayan thunderbird, a spirit bird, but is probably meant to be a real bird of prey. I’m convinced we’re looking at evidence for sky burial – for excarnation – with bodies being exposed to be consumed by vultures like Zoroastrian sky burial today in India. That sanctum at Atlantis was originally partly open to the air beside a platform on the flank of the volcano, and I believe that sky burial was one of the functions of these temple sites before the pillars were erected. The birds may have been seen as spirit birds, and by consuming human flesh they may have been able to transport the spirits of the departed to the other world. Seeing this now, I think the Atlantis symbol may not have been an eagle as we supposed, but instead a vulture, a spirit bird.’

  Jeremy nodded. ‘Now for that X-ray vision I was talking about. Prepare to be amazed.’ He zoomed in, tapped a key and sat back, and they watched while the screen repixellated. ‘This is a composite CGI of what you just saw, using the GPR data.’ The screen transformed into an image showing far more than was visible with the naked eye, shapes and artefacts that were buried beneath the lime encrustation. Costas whistled, and Jeremy pointed at the skull in the centre of the image, one that had been visible only in vague outline before. ‘This is one of the unplastered skulls, a child about nine or ten years old. Look closely and you can see that four of the neck vertebrae are still attached. You wouldn’t get that if you’d taken the skull from a properly skeletonized body, with all the ligaments gone. And then look over there, beneath the lime accretion on the floor.’

  ‘Holy cow,’ Costas exclaimed. ‘It’s a complete skeleton.’

  ‘Nearly complete,’ Jeremy corrected. ‘And that wasn’t just dumped there. Look, you can see dark rings where the wrists were lashed together, probably copper wire. There’s a little reed flute in one of the hands. This was a fully articulated fresh corpse, with musculature and sinews intact when the waters rose and it was encased in lime. I said nearly complete. The head’s missing. And it isn’t another body. It’s the same body. The number of missing neck vertebrae match those on the child’s skull.’

  Costas looked at Jeremy aghast. ‘Do you think this child was killed by being beheaded?’

  ‘That’s what I thought at first. But then I emailed this image to our bones lady. She zoomed in on the skull, and pointed this out. You see? It’s been bashed in on one side. And look at the shapes of the objects buried in the lime just below it. There’s some kind of mace, a stone-topped wooden hammer. And that leaf-shaped thing in the foreground is a chipped stone knife, ripple-flaked, almost certainly obsidian. You see what I’m getting at? What Costas said about the Aztecs might not be that far off the mark.’

  ‘That child was sacrificed,’ Costas whispered.

  Jeremy zoomed out from the skull to reveal a panorama of the chamber, showing the circle of pillars and the stone basins rising up between the skulls. ‘Look at the relationship between the skeleton and the skull and that stone basin. It makes sense of the basin, don’t you think? It was an altar. A sacrificial altar.’

  Jack wondered whether the basins were windows into the depths, into the underworld, some kind of visionary device. He remembered the dark red stain on his glove when he put his hand into the basin. ‘We know they sacrificed bulls, because we found the remains of one five years ago spread over a large stone table at an entrance chamber into the volcano. But this is a revelation. It’s horrifying. Human sacrifice.’

  Jeremy leaned back. ‘I think that child was killed by being bludgeoned with the mace. Then it was bled from the neck into the basin, and the knife was used to behead it. Separate the head from the body, and maybe you dispatch the soul to the spirit world. Maybe the blood in the basin was a conduit, a river, fitting in with those altered-consciousness visions we were talking about. Maybe the sacrificer also travelled that river, a portal to the spirit world opened up by the act of sacrifice.’

  ‘With implements specifically designed for the purpose,’ Jack murmured. ‘Obsidian blades like that one have been found in caches in houses at Çatalhöyük, and have long been suspected to have symbolic significance. And those stone basins look much older than the pillars, carved out of the living rock. They were part of the ancient function of this chamber way before the flood.’

  ‘Wasn’t there a tradition of child sacrifice in the Near East?’ Costas said. ‘I mean the Old Testament account of Abraham and his son Isaac. And the Phoenicians, and their successors in the west Mediterranean, at Carthage. When we’ve been at the IMU museum at Carthage I’ve often walked around the tophet, where the children were supposedly sacrificed.’

  ‘But we know child sacrifice may have been exaggerated by the Romans,’ Jack said, staring pensively at the image. ‘It may only have been in times of extreme duress, in the case of the Carthaginians when they were faced with annihilation by the Romans.’

  ‘But isn’t that what we’re seeing at Atlantis?’ Costas said. ‘I mean, extreme duress? The flood waters rising, and no way out?’

  That was it. And no way out. Jack remembered the walled-over chamber, the pillars freshly carved and the old paintings erased. Had this been a newly refurbished temple, on the verge of being revealed as the flood waters came, but instead used as a dungeon for the last remaining shamans, their death chamber? He stared at the skeleton. Had those people been driven in desperation to take human life, when the blood of bulls had no longer been sufficient?

  ‘It wasn’t just children,’ Jeremy said. ‘The osteologist reckons there are at least twelve other trussed-up bodies in there, all of them articulated skeletons and all of them decapitated. They seem to be of widely varying ages, adults and younger, probably male and female. Visionary ability is often perceived to be passed down in a family, isn’t it, from parent to child? That’s what I think we’ve got here. I think we’ve got entire families being locked in this chamber. It’s a really chilling image, like those Jewish families trapped at Masada by the Romans. It’s as Costas says: people driven to it by extreme duress.’

  ‘You mean driven to sacrifice?’ Costas said.

  ‘Call it sacrifice. Or call it assisted mass suicide.’

  They were all silent for a moment, staring at the image. Costas coughed, and then spoke quietly. ‘So let me get this right. In this Garden of Eden, at the dawn of civilization, you’ve got vultures picking away at dismembered corpses. You’ve got a new order of priests that make the Jesuits of the Inquisition look like angels, fo
rcing people to hack out limestone pillars and drag them up the volcano to make this temple, a temple to themselves, the new gods. And you’ve got an old order of shamans, off their heads on some kind of psychedelic trip, trapped in this death chamber and performing human sacrifice. And all of that while the flood waters are rising, and their world is being annihilated.’

  ‘The old order swept away, the new world about to dawn,’ Jeremy murmured. ‘If you look at the Old Testament account and the Epic of Gilgamesh, the flood is represented as an act of God, an act of divine punishment. Maybe that idea was created by the new priests and became the myth. And maybe the flood was actually propitious timing for the new priests, the new gods, who were ready for the diaspora to leave and found new cities and civilizations around the ancient world.’

  ‘In which case,’ Costas said, ‘who was Noah? A shaman survivor?’

  Jeremy paused. ‘In the Epic of Gilgamesh, Uta-napishtim is cast up on a mountain far across the waters, cut off from the world of men and their gods.’

  Jack stared at Costas, his mind racing. ‘It’s possible. Maybe one of them did survive. Maybe the annihilation wasn’t complete.’

  ‘Maybe he was a vacillator,’ Jeremy said. ‘Maybe he had been unsure whether to stay with the old order or go with the new.’

  ‘Maybe he was guardian of the animals, of the bulls the shamans corralled for sacrifice, and the new priests needed him to tend those they were taking with them.’

  Jack stared at the image on the screen. ‘If I could get into that chamber this morning, then someone could have got out. That hole in the wall had been made deliberately, by pulling the stones from the outside. Maybe someone dragged him out, at the last moment.’

  Jack cast his mind back again to his image of those final hours. Had the shamans been sealed in, blamed perhaps for the flood, told to use all their powers to stem the waters? Or had that been a lie, and it had truly been a death chamber of the new priests’ devising? In the absence of bulls to sacrifice, sealed in that chamber and realizing they were facing certain death, had they crossed the boundary and committed the ultimate act of sacrifice? Had the new gods forced them to unspeakable horror?