Stones of the Gods

  Sometimes Willow LaMonte takes a handful of seeds, but she never forgets the water she pours down the libation holes. Another woman used to take menstrual blood for an offering.  Others leave candles burning on the altars, or bread or pomegranate, even personal trinkets of sentimental value such as amulets. To commune with the Goddess in her dreamscape, a young woman once slept on the stone floor at Mnajdra Temple. Even now, with the fence up, the guards still hear the intruders at night: clanks of clicking china, flickers of candles in a flurry, silhouettes of people dancing hypnotically, chants of explosive emotion, the sweet narcotic whiff of burning sage.

  These days there is no rest for Malta's Neolithic temples. An increasing number of pilgrims - hundreds if not thousands - travel halfway across the globe to experience the orbit of energy in the temples. Linda C Eneix, a tour operator for American pilgrims, said: "I get a real buzz in the temples. I have to get quiet first, then it's like all the molecules in my body start moving faster and something goes zipping up and down and all around."  Danica Anderson, an American psychotherapist, recounted, "When we chanted in the Hypogeum, the voices accentuated the energy and the sound moved through our bodies.  In Ggantija I felt as though I was pregnant."

  For these converts, the energy is not static.  It directed Anna Grima's painting brush like an invisible hand.  For Jeni Caruana, another artist, it's a beacon of inspiration. Anderson harnesses the energy for therapy. For LaMonte, editor and publisher of Godessing Regenerated, the force proved ground shattering: an accident left her hobbling on a stick, but in the temples she flings her stick and starts to dance in a flutter. 

  Perhaps, I thought, the fact that people expect to feel something creates the placebo psychological effect of experiencing the projection of desire. Or is this supposed energy the superstition of New Age, turning intelligent people soft?   

  What is sure is that Malta's Neolithic Culture has sprung some deep puzzles and mysteries. Malta, one half the size of London, has more major Neolithic shrines than the rest of Europe combined - twenty three major temples and two underground burial shrines: the oldest built structures in the world, pre-dating the Egyptian pyramids by 1,000 years.

  The temples are impressive round complexes, sometimes two or three temples meshed together.  Ggantija Temples (3,600BC), the oldest temple, towered sixteen metres high, domed by megaliths; its largest stone, weighing 55 tons, would topple a crane that attempts to lift it.  The temples' lobed chambers present a vista of changing perspective, and express fluidity of energy with round architecture. The crest of the temples' roofs have long caved in, but you can still see the stepped corbelling.  Their walls are shells of megaliths packed with an infill of rubble, solid as natural cliff. Why did the temple people built the temples to last at a time when their tools were fragile bones, antlers, stone mallets and slivers of flint? That's a question that precipitates Richard England, Malta's most famous architect whose signature is also round architecture, into silent awe. "You can feel the wisdom of the temple builders," he mused recently in a Channel 4 documentary about the temples.

  Thought to have numbered about 5,000, the temple people were peaceful, resourceful, and artistic.  For 2,500 years (5,000-2,500BC) their community blossomed. Their art transcends into mystic realms.  Think of the sleeping lady infused with metaphor and emotion found in the Hypogeum, and the elegantly dramatic shaman's bundle unearthed in the Xaghra Stone Circle. Their larger sculptures are a calm balance of composition.

  Like other Neolithic cultures they worshipped fertility. They sacrificed animals and venerated the earth; like LaMonte with her water, they poured blood into the earth via the libation holes. They considered life a cyclical continuum, symbolized by the ubiquitous spiral motifs in the temples. In the book The Goddess of Malta, Lady of the Waters and the Earth, the Dutch cultural anthropologist Veronica Veen wrote: "They had a cyclical worldview in which everything was in a continuous state of transformation. The changing of the seasons, the phases of the moon, the menstrual cycles of women, the stages of human life, form a true weaving of cyclical symbolism.  Change, growth and flowering, death and rebirth are experienced as parts of the same ever-going process."

  They painted the temples' interior and the artifacts within with red ochre, the colour of blood - the life stream. To bury their death, they performed elaborate rituals, placing offerings in the graves and painting the dead with red ochre.  In the Hypogeum, some historians suggest, they buried the dead in the crouching position - mimicking the foetus in the womb - and pregnant women would sojourn in the Hypogeum so the spirit of the dead would infuse the child to be. In one grave at the Xaghra Stone Circle, a dog was buried with its owner; in another, a mother cradles a child in her dead arms.

  But the story has a tragic ending. In 2,500BC the temple people disappeared from Malta's prehistory in abrupt circumstances that have baffled historians for two centuries. Most archeologists think that, in a likely period of chronic drought, the temple people overran the environment, and their frenetic temple building designed to appease the earth into productivity further drained their resources until their communities collapsed in hunger.

  Now they have entered modern mythology as if they were celestial beings, and we feel nostalgic because these people represent an utopia: they are the anti-thesis of everything that is wrong in the modern world.  "We can learn a lot from how they lived harmoniously and revered life," says Willow LaMonte. "They were more sophisticated than we can ever realize, and left us these little mysteries that we can't figure out."

  Some say that the distant din of energy so many people feel is explained by the ley lines, supposedly pathways of highly-charged electromagnetic energy that traverse certain parts of the globe and run through all ancient Neolithic sights.  Malta lies at the major pathways and intersections of these ley lines, the theory goes.  Tuned to this cosmic force, the Neolithic peoples crowded Malta with temples at the points the force pulsated strongest.  Mnajdra is aligned to sunrise on the equinoxes and the changing of the seasons, and there is some inconclusive evidence that Hagar Qim may be calibrated with the main phases of the moon.

  Danica Anderson, an American psychotherapist who practices Feminist Archetypal Psychology, thinks the energy can be explained by evolutionary psychology. She believes we carry the whole story of human thought in our genes - a collective consciousness shaped by the evolution of thought. In the temples, because they were used as shrines by layers of generations over thousands of years, we activate ancient genetic memories that find an emotional resonance in our pool of collective consciousness.

  In Malta's temples Anderson has become the horse whisperer of psychology.  I accompanied her on one of her workshops, made up by a clutch of three pairs of mother and daughters, including her daughter, and another teenage girl whose mum was absent. The girls were teenagers, their mothers in their forties, and the workshop was designed to improve the mother-daughter relationship and fortify the women with confidence. Melanie Thubron and Andrea Benjamin, 15, recounted the most moving stories.  Thubron had a hundred emotional demons to exhume. Benjamin grew motherless and had attempted suicide; her mum's condition, Multiple Personality Disorder, gave her little hope. She said, "I want a mum not a friend."

  I joined the women in Ggantija Temples after-hours for their ceremonial rituals that, Anderson explained, would help her women bond together and with the temples, and open up for healing and reconciliation.  First Anderson eased the women into meditation until they were both relaxed and alert. Then they laid the gifts to be blessed on a scarf - a helter-skelter of belongings, candles, an amulet of medusa, a prism, a loaf of bread, and a mound of jewelry.  The ceremonial purification began with wails of chanting, then the women passed smouldering bundles of dried sage over the gifts and around each other's body.  Afterwards we squatted on our hunches, and it was time for Benjamin to face her psychological unrest. Unsheathing her guitar, at first she strummed tentatively, then she suddenly burst singing Suicidal Dreams by Silver Chain. Her voice quivered with emotion, and after the song she said, "Now I feel free." 

  As in previous visits, in the temple I felt a creeping force of drama that could be the energy emitted from the temples or my sense of wonder.  Then I thought I heard hundreds of voices, but they sounded unintelligible like jumbled cacophonies submerged underwater.  There were tears trickling down Anderson's cheeks, and I remember wondering whether I was hallucinating. Was this the energy so many people spoke about or was it my imagination?

  The ceremony climaxed with more archetypal rituals - the women forming a circle of bodies, then opening like a flower - to absorb the healing energy.  To wrap up the ceremony, seven pairs of hands clasped the blessed loaf of bread and tore it apart in spasms of giggles, and we ate bread smeared with honey.

  The temples have inspired a cultural renaissance of rituals and community spurred by the Goddess culture articulated by the late American archeologist Marija Gimbutas. Gimbutas proposed the theory that ancient Neolithic cultures in Europe worshipped the female Goddess of fertility. Employing cultural symbolism, she festooned every aspect and artifact of the temple culture on the theory of a matriarchal, peaceful, healthy, Goddess worshipping culture. The fat lady sculptures stand for the Goddess, the temples' outline is modeled on the Goddess - her theories grow more elaborate, more complete.  Entering the temples is explained with symbolism: the threshold, the vagina, the womb, and the inner intuitive feminine divinity. Gimbutas maintains that the Neolithic culture in Malta, rather than collapsing on the heels of environmental exhaustion, was subdued by the wave of warring patriarchal East European tribes who smothered Europe's Neolithic utopia. 

  Gimbutas' theories, however, make hardline archeologists grit their teeth. They argue that while Gimbutas' work is plausible, her imagination ran amok with cultural symbolism, and she ended up concocting a complete mythological theology. When asked about the energy or the ley lines, most archeologists diplomatically sidestepped the question. When I asked Anthony Bonanno, archeology lecturer in the University of Malta, if chanting toned the Hypogeum walls as Anderson suggested, he laughed, then his face screwed and said: "You don't believe that, do you?"

  "I don't know what to believe."

  I visited Joe Attard, a Maltese self-taught historian, to find out how he made a series of archeological discoveries. "Inspiration?" he mused. "No. Hard work and an intuition developed by years of study." In the 1970's Attard became obsessed with an archeological treasure hunt for a suspected underground burial shrine. He slogged through the diaries and accounts of travelers in Malta in earlier centuries.  He interrogated farmers.  He analyzed folk tales and legends. He studied old landscape paintings. And he combed the countryside for traces of megaliths and pottery shreds.  Five years later he stumbled on the Xaghra Stone Circle, an underground burial shrine that yielded thousands of skeletons and piece of art during excavations in the nineties'.

  I asked Attard about the energy, the Goddess culture, the theory of environmental collapse - but he remained tight-lipped. "I won't talk without hard evidence. Everything that's extrapolated is fantasy."

  But Attard is part of that fantasy, even if he is sheepish about it. He used dowsing sticks to look for archeological remains. So did Anthony Bonanno, and the British archeologist David Trump.  Guided by the dowsing sticks, Trump discovered some early tombs, predating the temples, in Xemxija. The dowsing sticks fascinated Trump, and when he told his colleagues that the dowsing sticks had given him a vision of the roofing method in the temples, they thought he had gone nuts.

  If the dowsing sticks work, doesn't that proof the ley lines' theory?  Why else would two twigs of metal suddenly twist on one another to form a loop near archeological sites? "I can vouch that the dowsing sticks work," Attard said. "But I can't explain why or how."

  Looking for answers, I visited the Hypogeum, the most impressive Neolithic monument in the world and one of the oldest, a burial shrine hewn underground on three levels from 3,600-2,500BC - still a work in progress when it was abandoned.  Seven thousand skeletons were piled in its lobed chambers.  Spirals plume on some of its walls in red ochre, and there's a crude tree.  Goddess followers believe the Hypogeum symbolizes the womb - the earth's bosom.  You walk past trilithons, their surfaces pitted dramatically. 

  The Holy of Holies and the Main Chamber stand at its core. Both mimic the interior of the temples, especially the egg-shaped Main Chamber, its trilithons at the entrances, corbelling stepping to the ceiling, and chambers opening into the walls like dark windows.  The guide told us of hallucinogen-induced ceremonies of people dancing round a fire, enveloped by the stench of death.  Goddess worshippers told me they felt protected here as if in the watery comfort of the womb.  Temi Zammit, who excavated the Hypogeum at the dawn of the twentieth century, scribbled in his notes: "An air of profound mystery pervades the place."

  I felt a deep-seated tranquility, the frizzle of drama I feel in the temples, but also a reverie of mystery. The Hypogeum kept coming back at me in hallucinatory flashes.  Like every generation of scholars and bleeding hearts who tried to understand the temples, I had been infected. Suddenly I understood Attard's obsessive five-year treasure hunt. I kept going back to temples expecting to experience something I missed the first time.  I spent a long, cold night in Ggantija Temples, sipping wine and waiting in the dark until I found myself, at the crack of dawn, sprawled asleep on the stone floor. What did I expect to find?

  What does the German artist Ebba von Fersen Balzan expect to paint anew after eleven years painting the temples?  "I feel the energy in the temples tremendously," she said, "and I try to express their secret, sacred spaces."  Her paintings are bold brushstrokes of reds, purples, dirty browns, blacks, but she tenderly expresses the curvaceous qualities, the megaliths overlapping one another like folds leading deeper into some living organ.  There is no pattern, just a sense of marching drama and mystery. Even the skies are red.

  I joined Balzan in Mnajdra Temples.  "Mnajdra is very calm and healing," she said. As she painted the watercolors, I sat outside in the sun, facing a pancake sea beyond the cliff.  Set on a rugged, rocky plateau enveloped in the fragrance of thyme, Mnajdra and Hagar Qim are within a kilometre of each other.  Hagar Qim is a round complex with several entrances and temples, one of the latest and most complicated. Mnajdra is one of the smallest, three temples lined together, the south and largest one the best preserved temple in Malta, and the only one aligned to sunrise on the equinoxes - a moving scene as a shaft of sun break over the cliff and lands on the inner altar.  The interior megaliths, cut from globigerina limestone, make a smooth finish: they are stacked on one another seamlessly like soft slabs of cheese, and the small, intimate chambers of this five-apsed temple have a neat finish. The passageway megaliths are pitted dramatically.  The inner shrine has three curious altars: the tabletop supported by round, concave stones.

  Later, inspecting Balzan's paintings, I recognized the same elements that imprint her temple paintings.

  "Why is red so prevalent?"

  "Red is a vibrant colour," she explained.  "But red somehow feels natural in the temples.  It's like I felt that the colour of the temples should be red, and recently, to my surprise, I read that the temples' interior was in fact red."

  It's these little, intuitive mysteries, coupled with our sense of wonder and our tireless search for spiritual bearings, what makes the temples so infectious.  Balzan's early temple paintings redefined her inner landscape and her art, and set her path. She said: "I can't stop working on the temples.  I'm hooked."