The eminent pre-historian Andrew Collins has just released a book of extreme importance for our posture research—Göbekli Tepe: Genesis of the Gods. Our experiments with more than 80 ritual body postures used by humans to access shamanic states for at least 36,000 years should be investigated by anyone who wants to thin the veil obscuring the Göbekli Tepe shamanic cultists. I am really excited about Andrew’s brilliant analysis of Göbekli Tepe because it resonates deeply with Dr. Goodman’s discoveries and my writing. I studied with Dr. Goodman for thirteen years before she died in 2005, and we became colleagues because she was deeply moved by my exploration of past cataclysms in Catastrophobia (2001). She would be very excited by Andrew’s book. We feel her presence at the Institute because her shamanic ways continue here, especially in our kiva. Many thousands of ecstatic trance students have assumed postures with fifteen minutes of rattling to enter the Alternate Reality, the world of the spirits. In a similar way, the shamans of Göbekli Tepe are present in the sacred circles of tall beings whispering secrets to visitors like Andrew Collins. In honor of the 100th anniversary of Dr. Goodman’s birth in Transylvania, I propose the existence of an ecstatic trance posture at Göbekli Tepe.
Klaus Schmidt, who has so far excavated four out of the twenty or so anticipated carved and incised circles of T-shaped stones, says they were used for rituals; they were sanctuaries. Geophysical surveys have detected many more circles, yet only about five percent have been excavated. Nearly all researchers believe these circles were sacred space. Schmidt, an archeologist with the German
Archeological Institute and the University of Heidelberg, began his excavation in 1995. The public began hearing about this amazing site around 2000. Local inhabitants of the bleak plateau at the southern limits of the Anti-Taurus Mountains 8 miles northeast of Şanlıurfa, Turkey, refer to the “tell” or hill covering the site as Göbekli Tepe, which means “Hill of the Navel” in Turkish, or some say “Potbelly.” This name going way back in time is local ancestral memory that suggests pregnancy. The oldest carbon dates at the site are Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPNA) going back to 9500-8500 BCE, which really got my attention.
Catastrophobia describes a series of cataclysms 13,000 to 11,500 years ago during the Younger Dryas, a mini ice age that ended abruptly 11,500 years ago. Scientific analysis of this period, in particular by science historian, D.S. Allan, and Oxford-based geologist and anthropologist, J. B. Delair, describes a cosmic disaster 11,500 years ago that disarranged the solar system and severely impacted Earth. (1) This trauma changed human consciousness, and hunter-gatherers learned to farm. Those who survived during a few thousand years more of dramatic climate change and rising seas were a multi-traumatized species afflicted with what I call catastrophobia—extreme fear of starvation and chaos. This word is catching on now that paleoanthropologists have completed an accurate picture of global migrations and settling during the last 100,000 years. (2) Ironically, at first the word didn’t get much attention because the book was released when the World Trade Towers crumbled to the ground in September 2001. Regardless, evidence for the cataclysms followed by a human cultural regression has been building since the 1950s, when Immanuel Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision sold millions of copies ripping open repressed memory. (3) Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings by the cartographer Charles Hapgood inspired the eminent new-paradigm writer Graham Hancock to explore these mysterious mariners. Hancock describes a seafaring global culture that lived before 12,000 years ago on the continental shelves now inundated by rising seas. (4) This new paradigm captivated the public mind, so my publisher asked me to update Catastrophobia. This clarifying picture of the past is magnificent support for our discoveries of the postures used by shamanic cultures for 50,000 years.
The 2011 edition of Catastrophobia titled Awakening the Planetary Mind: Beyond the Trauma of the Past to a New Era of Creativity has a whole new audience. Bored by old-paradigm Darwinian archeology that claims the human species has always advanced, young researchers hear me when I say we are a very damaged species because we were almost destroyed. Seeking what really happened to us so recently, they paint and pierce their bodies like hunter-gatherers at the end of the last ice age! Meanwhile, the recovery of our real story makes us realize people did survive radical climate changes, information that young people know they may need. Well, Göbekli Tepe goes right back to these great changes, so it is a gateway that can help us imagine who we were before we regressed. I think cosmic contact was severed 11,500 years ago. The recovery of the advanced astronomical knowledge of our ancestors is piercing the pain of human separation from the universe. Andrew Collins said to me in a recent email that he “probably didn’t fully understand the term catastrophobia until I started to piece together the motives behind the construction of Göbekli Tepe some 12,000 years ago. Then suddenly it all made sense! God, those people must have lived in fear, and without psychologists in those days, it was a matter that could only be rectified by shamans, which is exactly what I think happened.” (5)
I’ve been thinking about the evocative circles filled with great humanoid beings for ten years. Göbekli Tepe appears to be a temple built by the survivors of the great cataclysm, a truly monumental achievement considering their probable state of mind and the amount of work to construct it. Archeologists estimate up to 500 individuals were needed to extract each pillar from nearby quarries and erect them, and there are thought to be around 200 large pillars in total at the site. (6) Also I wondered whether the pillar of the humanoid figure with long oddly bent arms and long fingers reaching into their groins (Figure One: Pillar 18/Enclosure D) was a posture. When I was mentoring Marianne Carroll in 2011, she wondered the same thing, and we’ve been exploring it since. (7)
Back to 1999, I was struck by exactly the same hand position on the Nevali Çori pillar, a nearby ancient cultic site. My illustrator drew this pillar for Catastrophobia from a photo taken at Nevalı Çori by Andrew Collins. (8) I chose it to awaken ancient memory in my readers, since this beautiful place was about to be inundated by a dam. Considering the hand positions—oddly bent elbow and long fingers clutched under the belly that appears to be pregnant—anybody who knows our postures would immediately think “Birthing Posture!” Goodman says, “the pivotal, the most significant, rituals of the hunter gatherers and later of the horticulturalists, who created these figurines, centered around the celebration of birth.” She also said way back in 1990, “Some of these figures [Birthing Posture] are quite large and may well have marked the sacred places where such important rites were celebrated.” (9)
The same hand and arm positions exist on the torsos of the Easter Island heads (Moai) statues that are relatively the same height (15 feet) as the Göbekli Tepe humanoids. In 2010, when archeologists dug down below the heads, they were resting on bodies with the same odd hand position. (10) When I saw the first photos of these unburied torsos, I was astonished to see they closely match the size, arm, and hand positions of the Nevalı Çori and Göbekli Tepe pillars!
These widely separated tall humanoids in the Birthing Posture suggest that a global shamanic culture used this posture. Goodman catalogued Bear Posture figurines that are found in virtually all pre-historic sites on both continents going back to 8,000 years ago, the sure sign of an originating culture thousands of years earlier. (11)Were survivors using the Birthing Posture for procreation, even to enhance their DNA? Think of how precious each child would have been! Andrew Collins came up with the same idea from a completely different perspective, a synchronicity that makes me think we are identifying the essential shamanic practices of post-cataclysmic cultures. Let’s look at what Collins has discovered.
Collins uses archeo-astronomy (dating the alignments of ancient sites by precession of the equinoxes) to investigate the activities of the Göbekli cultists. Seeking the originating culture of this advanced site, he goes farther back to 17,000 years ago, before human culture regressed. He was the ideal researcher to do this because of his earlier studies of regional archeology in From the Ashes of Angels, and of late Paleolithic archeology in The Cygnus Mystery. (12) In The Cygnus Mystery, Collins posits our ancestors believed life (DNA) originated in the heavens, specifically in the region of the Cygnus constellation. This is because Paleolithic sites, such as Lascaux Cave, many megalithic sites, and the Giza Plateau pyramids all have symbolism and orientations to Cygnus because its brightest star, Deneb, was the Pole Star for a few thousand years starting 18,500 years ago. Also, cosmic rays from Cygnus X-3 have impacted human evolution to be discussed in a moment. Gazing out past the Pole Star’s location by precession, many ancient cultures believed this part of the sky was a birthing region, a place of human origin. This region of the sky was sacred to the ancient Egyptians, and to the Maya as Xibalba, the great dark rift of the Milky Way. Finding these specific cosmic orientations in widely separate cultures suggests the existence of a pre-cataclysmic sky religion practiced by advanced astronomers.
Let’s consider recent astronomy: Cygnus X-3 is a unique “microblazer” that spews to Earth a broad spectrum of frequencies from radio waves to gamma rays and even cosmic rays. In fact, Cygnus X-3 is one of the only accepted sources for high-energy gamma rays and cosmic rays reaching the earth. Moreover, a “growing number of scientists are considering that cosmic rays might have played a role in human evolution (my italics) causing either mutations in DNA, or even the deletion of DNA sequences . . .” Did these ancient cultures use the Birthing Posture to enhance their DNA? A US think tank went public in 2005 with its conviction that a binary system (Cygnus X-3) producing powerful jets of cosmic rays triggered a rapid acceleration in human evolution during the last ice age. (13) You will need to study The Cygnus Mystery to consider this astonishing possibility. For my purposes in this short paper, in 2006 Collins presented clear evidence that this region of the sky inspired global cultic beliefs 17,000 years ago. With more consideration of the influence of Cygnus, Collins thinks the survivors at Göbekli were multi-traumatized, yet they still managed to build this sacred temple to record their knowledge of human cosmic contact with our place of origin in the heavens. And, they carved beautiful examples of the Birthing Posture to save their precious knowledge of procreation. There’s more: Pillar 18 in Enclosure D (Figure-1b) at Göbekli targets Cygnus.
Collins says, ”The Solutreans are the key to the emergence of high culture across Central and Western Europe during the Upper Paleolithic Age.” He wonders if they were the ancestors of the people of Göbekli Tepe. (14) The Solutreans lived 25,000-16,500 years ago; they made way for the Magdalenians around 16,500-11,500 years ago; and then a mysterious culture called the Swiderians appeared around 12,900 years ago. Collins describes the Swiderians as a power elite that survived the cataclysm and harnessed other stunned survivors to construct Göbekli Tepe. (15) He offers fascinating detail on these three early shamanic cultures, people that I believe used postures while in trance. Art has been found depicting astral flight in the form of a bird; for example, in the Lascaux Shaft Scene, the source of our Lascaux Cave Posture for flight. Years ago when I was following Collins’s astonishing explorations of pre-cataclysmic cultures, I remember wishing he knew about our discoveries at Cuyamungue during shamanic flight! When I experienced the Lascaux Cave posture back in 1992 with Felicitas rattling, I zoomed through a pyramid right into the Egyptian world of the sky! New paradigm prehistory has advanced sufficiently to add our posture research to Collins’s hypothesis regarding cosmic shamanic travel at Göbekli. Even Klaus Schmidt said he “assumes shamanic practices, and suggests that the T-shaped pillars represent human forms, perhaps ancestors.” (16)
