Enclosure D is the
largest and best-preserved of Göbekli Tepe’s buildings. Twelve
T-shaped pillars ring the oval structure, twenty metres wide, and another pair
of pillars stand in the centre. Their array of animals, birds and insects
carved onto the stone in high relief, with other three-dimensional creatures
rising from the front of the stones, is unequalled.
In Broken Skies,
Enclosure D is The Enduring, the oldest and most important of the
spirit-buildings at Duku. Its artwork, which I will discuss in later
posts, I believe represents a mnemonic device for its builders’ history, myths,
world view, cosmology and hunting lore which was integral to their daily life.
The no doubt many-layered meanings of this artwork will probably never now be
understood, but we can imagine.
The two central pillars,
almost six metres in height, are the most intriguing. Arms carved on their
sides, ending in long fingers clasped at the front, show that they represent
human-like forms. So far, no other pillars have been identified as decorated
this way, although pillars from a much later building on the site and also from
the later site of Nevali Çori, fifty miles to the north, are
depicted with human arms.
The right-hand pillar,
known as Pillar 18, has an H-symbol at what is reasonably identified as its
throat, with a hollow circle and a crescent below it. A ‘belt’ is decorated
with further H-symbols and crescents and is hung with a fox-pelt, complete with
tail and hind legs, interpreted as a loincloth. A fox is also found in the
crook of its right arm.
Pillar 31, standing
beside it, also has arms, a belt and a fox-pelt, but none of the abstract
symbols. A bucranium or bull’s head is found at its throat and another bull is
depicted on its belt.
The circular and crescent
symbols are often linked to the sun and the moon. The ‘H’, which is in fact
likely two ‘T’s linked together, is sometimes linked to a shamanic symbol, for
example representing the world tree and its upside-down counterpart in the
spirit world. This is the interpretation I have chosen in Broken Skies.
The symbols of the sun
and the moon, as well as being cosmological symbols, have an esoteric
interpretation reflecting the paradoxical ever-changing constancy of the world
and the rules that govern it. The sun rises and sets and changes position in
the sky as the seasons change; the moon waxes and wanes and alters in its orbit
just the same. Every day it is in a different place, but with enough
understanding we know it follows perfectly constant and predictable laws.
This understanding is one
of the gifts of the Irin, and in Broken Skies Pillar 18
represents the greatest Irin shaman of all. Pillar 31 beside it represents an Anunnaki
shaman, whose gifts reflect the brutal philosophy which comes of living by the
hunt, and whose main totem spirit is the wild bull.
A human statue found in Göbekli Tepe, with the crooked arms in the same position as
those on Enclosure D’s central pillars.
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