PILLAR 43 (cont’d)
So much for over confidence! There I was, headfirst into a follow up draft of a Pillar 43 analysis, fully believing that I was coming close to cracking the code, whereupon I hit a series of brick walls and duly froze in the headlights of my own hubris…!
After a few days of poster’s block, and thankfully a great deal more thinking with a hammer (!), I’m going to try and lay out for you in detail certain problems and possibilities to see how they gel with you and thereby hopefully encourage more than one mind to come to bear on this problem – because this crucial design does not wish to give up its secrets willingly, I assure you!
Back in 2015, Dr. Müslüm Ercan, director and head of excavations at the site on behalf of the Sanliurfa Museum, stated in an article titled "Signs of world's first pictograph found in Göbeklitepe," that:
"The scene on the obelisk unearthed in Göbeklitepe [Enclosure D's Pillar 43] could be construed as the first pictograph because it depicts an event thematically. It depicts a human head [the filled circle] in the wing of a vulture and a headless human body under the stela … here are various figures like cranes and scorpions around this figure. This is the portrayal of a moment; it could be the first example of [a] pictograph. They are not random figures."
Whilst I do not necessarily agree with all his observations, Dr Ercan has certainly nailed both the challenge and the particularity of this work. More than any other pillar in the enclosure, this one indeed appears to be heavily thematic and thereby more deeply enigmatic – for it is the totality of connections between otherwise seemingly obscure images that I would suggest conveys its ultimate purpose. However, if one does not understand each and every symbol and its due place ‘thematically’ with regard to the others, one soon gets lost in a maze of maybes and couldbes. I suspect this was likely entirely intentional for reasons we will come on to later after we have first cleared some rubble.
The body of the pillar was in some ways less of an initial challenge because the majority of elements were familiar and thus we have a reasonably confident means by which to in general interpret the headless Male Torso (with upward arms) and accompanying Bird (likely a goose), as well as the ‘Dancing’ Fox and the encircling quasi Oroboros Serpent. Even the Scorpion we have met before in terms of its connections to the story of the great calamity and the part played by the 6/7 Pleiades (though this is merely scratching the surface of its likely meaning). All good in principle so far (even if we are no closer to grasping their overall theme or purpose).
The headstone, however, is a quite different story. To my mind, there are perhaps as many as 11 distinct elements, all likely interconnected in a range of thematic ways so as to create a sum greater than the total of its constituent parts. Unlike Pillar 33, the only other semiotically complex pillar in the enclosure, the designs on Pillar 43 are unlikely intended to be read in a near linear ‘narrative’ fashion, but rather understood as ‘a moment’, as Dr Ercan puts it, even if this moment is out of time and space – a moment akin to the birth of a new ideology perhaps, one that I suspect contained something from past, present and future.
Without going back in depth into their theories, Hancock, Sweatman and co have all assumed that the depictions are astral / solar and that they are in effect a star map of some kind with additional supporting code.
Pillar 43 chart of constellations, Graham Hancock, Magicians of the Gods. Page 310.
In this manner the various creatures become constellations and by way of the additional coded information, a specific date can be interpreted (in the case of Sweatman, a very particular “date-stamp” for the summer solstice of 10,950 ± 250 BC and the arrival of the ‘great comet’ that in his argument kicked off the Younger Dryas event).
Göbekli Tepe's Vulture Stone: A Warning across Time or Signpost to the Land of The Dead?, Andrew Collins.
Even Andrew Collins, who was also a one-time advocate of this theory before eventually rejecting it, still returned to a directly like-for-like astral star map theory, but this time relating a purposeful identification of the constellation Cygnus as his preferred conclusion.
These astral heavy theories have by now become something of a given amongst the alternate history crowd with battle lines between them and the uniform academic rejection of such a concept, (preferring as they do to relate these images to hunting totems and other socio-cultural anthropological norms), invariably drawn up around this singular minded divide.
Well, I also have good reason to think there is ‘heavenly’ information deriving from the outcomes of the trauma of the YD event encoded here – but I am equally fully convinced it has nothing to do with currently recognizable asterisms or constellational associations. If I am close to correct, however, the astronomical and cosmic knowledge specifically alluded to here is in some ways far more challenging to our view of past knowledge than a specific date stamp or reverence for singular constellations in the night sky.
Let us begin our examination right at the top and right in the deep end of this issue.
UNIT 1 (Elements 1-6)
I’m going to treat this section of the headstone design as a singularity of form.
The x6 distinct but interconnecting elements I see are:
1. Top and bottom, (and perhaps by inference all pervasive?), rows of non-symmetrical chevrons, upturned and inverted in alternating pattern.
2-4. Three differently depicted downward observing ‘creatures’.
5. A set of x3 non-symmetrical ‘handbags’.
6. A set of x11, non-symmetrical, loosely horizontally aligned rectangles.
You will note the repeat use of the term ‘non-symmetrical’. Whatever the level of knowledge and intent behind the designs of these Pillars, I detect next to zero prioritizing of mathematical or geometric exactitude. I think this is important to take on board. Whatever the ‘advanced’ knowledge and skill it took to carve these pillars out of the bare rock or the imperative driving the master code by way of carvings upon them, a visual representation of numerical values, geometric exactitude or proportional representation does not appear to have been a driving need (or generally agreed upon or even considered concept?) One look at the geometric inaccuracy in the enclosure, pillar to pillar, tells you that they were clearly not working to a set of distinct and precise mathematical formulae other than perhaps something like big ones of a certain size means ‘X’, smaller ones denotes ‘Y’. The same goes for the pictographic designs; here, for example, the lines used, whether vertical, horizontal or on the angle, are all ‘free hand’ as if the pattern (and its meaning) was symbolically what mattered not any form of encoding of like-for-like measurement. Yet that does not mean this design is not – for want of a better word – ‘scientific’ and ‘accurate’. It is likely a highly precise meaning system despite what we might see as its casualness by way of execution.
A caveat, however, to this general rule; the design was very likely precisely laid out in some way prior to its carving and in such a manner that I think an element of proportional representation across the whole design was likely incorporated - especially say on a left to right axis - albeit on a non-exact measuring scale. More on this anon.
1. CHEVRONS
Arguably the most enigmatic symbol during the entire PPNA – not only at Göbekli Tepe but elsewhere – is
the all-pervasive ‘V’ shaped incision or collar.
Most prominently, it is displayed on both ‘throat’s of the two central pillars of Enclosure D.
Front ‘throat’ area of recessed frontal panels of Central Pillar 31 and Central Pillar 18.
The throat motif was
an extension of (yet I think symbolically different from)
the two arms that 'grew' down either side of the body (an issue I will likely come back to).
The likely identification of this design emblem with a ‘cosmically’ appointed power figure conveying highest status is further amplified by its appearance on multiple human looking totemic figures, most prominent being:
Urfa Man, seen by mainstream archaeology/academia as being symbolically synonymous with the ‘T’ pillar figure design and likely a figurine of great significance to its makers:
Downwards Chevron/collar plus indented chest panel (found on numerous ‘T’ pillars with and without the Chevron/collar). From nearby site of Kurt Tepesi.
Then we also have a number of significant other occurrences:
Seated potent jade figure with feline pup attached to its back, Göbekli Tepe.
Central seated potent figure hemmed in by felines, carved frieze, Sayburç.
Pillar and accompanying potent power figure, 2023 find at Karahan Tepe.
Large, elongated head with raised cranial features set around what may be a central downwards facing chevron, Karahan Tepe.
By these examples I think we are safe to suggest this emblem – and in particular its connection to the upper chest/throat area - very likely denotes high status, rightful power, and I think some form of claim to be able to direct and manage cosmic authority.
I strongly suspect that it is an appropriated, much, much older symbol, here reshaped before being incorporated into a new doctrine by way of the old discredited ‘faith’ as a means to appropriate a widely understood authority.
In the period just before the complex of ‘T’ pillar sites sprang up, at certain north eastern PPNA sites such as Körtik Tepe we see the downwards Chevron everywhere, but this time accompanied by the equal appearance of side by side upwards facing chevrons, so creating a repeat zigzag pattern on everything from ritual stone bowls to tools:
However, with the sly, over time introduction at the same site of the cosmic trickster, our old friend the Fox, we see this happen:
I suspect something is starting to mutate here that was likely originally seen as in balance. For if we take this image again:
I suggest we are seeing an identical, cyclically repeating, benign event being represented here in which the energetic meaning of the two forms of the chevron – upward and downward facing – represent the maintenance of an ever present balance between the ‘outbursts’ as depicted by the ‘Alpha’ and ‘Omega’ moment of the expanding labyrinthine circles – like a flow of cosmic current, or regenerative action, of expansion and then contraction, leading inevitably to a rebirth ‘flare’ and then the cycle starts again.
And within/under its grace the dual facing ‘mountain goats’ prospered.
I have written at length about the one time great God of the sky. Whatever this natural force may have been, I suspect that over time it pulsed, or went through a repeat cycle of energetic expansion and then contraction, but it/he always reset so as to continue the process for apparent time immemorial. However, after the great catastrophe, and this God’s defeat/departure, this process changed to one of unending turmoil for millennia after. But the memory of distinct ‘heavenly ages’, in whatever form they were prior experienced, continued.
Those who have been following this thread in detail may remember this artifact:
It comes from the northern
Siberian/Russian culture of Kostyonki-Streletskaya or Kostyonki-Borshchevond and dates from between 30,000 and 20,000 BC. The design was not uncommon on items thus far discovered from this culture, but this headpiece (?) delicately carved from ivory was clearly of significance and most likely worn by someone of great importance.
Now compare it to the top section of Pillar 43 at Göbekli Tepe, carved maybe 10,000 years later.
It may be significant that depictions of snakes and scorpions took on this wavering, angular line and were even represented with the same Chevron patterns as they did so:
And what was previously presented as a horizontal traveling pattern went vertical and most commonly pointed down… like the collar chevron that became the only element to be retained on all those power figures and ‘T’ Pillars.