Naturally I’ll post updates here as publication approaches (early 2012 a good estimate), but I’ve also kicked off a website for the project with a sign-up for a special mailing list dedicated to the book. The book’s title isn’t confirmed, but the site is named with rough aptness ‘Polar Cosmology‘.

For now, I’m glad to offer everyone who couldn’t make it both an MP3 download of the talk (with thanks to Mark Pilkington for tech duties), and a slidecast. This is a version of the slideshow I did, synched with the audio recording—which has come out pretty well.

If anyone’s interested in me doing this presentation in their neighbourhood, or in doing an interview on the subject, do get in touch.

At first it was a part of a talk given early this year at Metageum in London. Then I thought I’d develop it into an essay. Then it seemed long enough to print as a nice pamphlet. It’s ended up being a slim book.

It’s my effort to analyze and contribute to the recent debates about the “Noble Savage”. Are pre-civilized cultures more peaceful than we are? Do they live in greater harmony with the environment? Of late, people such as Steven Pinker, Lawrence Keeley and Steven LeBlanc, who aren’t overt bigots—indeed, who generally seem to be fine, well-meaning liberal folks—have been answering these questions with a resounding “no”. In War & the Noble Savage I’ve surveyed this recent literature, and tried to dig beneath the polarized surface of the debate using some less popularized anthropological and historical scholarship.

It went to the printers just today, and should be ready to send out by the end of next week. I’m taking pre-orders now if anyone wants to dive in. (Please note that I’ve also revamped my PayPal integration, and I’ve included options to buy different Dreamflesh publications together and save money on postage.)

October Gallery talk

Coinciding with the release of the book, I’m pleased to have been invited to speak in the October Gallery‘s ‘Ecology, Cosmos & Consciousness’ lecture series on Tuesday 27th October. For more details and booking information see the October Gallery website. I’ll be presenting the book’s main ideas there, and leaving plenty of time for discussion—please bring your questions and ideas along! Copies of the book will of course be on sale, at a specially reduced price.

Review copies

If anyone’s interested in reviewing this, please get in touch.

Related material

At the bottom of the book’s page you’ll find a compilation of related material—my book reviews and blog posts covering similar area, plus a collection of links to the websites, articles, and videos I drew on in my research.

Feedback

If anyone who reads the book wants to respond to anything in it or ask questions, please use the comments here…

Coming up fast, over the last week of March, is the next Metageum conference. The last one was a fascinating event in Malta; this time, we’re in the slightly less megalith-rich, but hopefully more humanly hectic environs of London. Specifically, at the ever-conducive venue, Treadwell’s.

Speakers so far include Paul Devereux, Peter Lloyd, David Luke, Lydia Oukhaneva, Toni Perrott, Peter Knight, Donal Ruane and Deborah Marshall-Warren.

And me. I’m on March 28th at 1.30pm—sign up and I’ll see you there!

My talk has changed slightly from the blurb currently posted there. Here’s the latest version:

Darwin, Rock Art, and the Human Animal

Commemorating this year’s double anniversary (of Darwin’s birth and the publication of The Origin of Species), this talk will delve into the complex influence of evolutionary theory on both the study of prehistoric rock art in particular, and modern attitudes to “primitive” man in general. From the surprising origins of the myth of “the noble savage” in Victorian ethnology to Stephen Pinker’s contentions about prehistoric violence; from Terence McKenna’s mycological speculations to recent archaeological controversies about shamans and visions. This will be a wide-ranging trip through our varying perspectives on the prehistoric mind, what it means to be an animal with imagination, and the bearing of these stories on the ecological crisis we find ourselves in.

Palaeontologists in a vast desert. Large crested ridges of ancient red sand and rock formations… They remove the top layers, and reveal the skeleton of a giant snake beneath. No thicker than a man’s torso, but miles and miles long… stretching along the crest of the ridge… Sections of the remains are exposed intermittently

That was a dream I had once. It had an electric thrill about it, as if even the skeleton of this fantastic beast enlivened the dream landscape with seething energy.

I felt a surge of that reading a report about Titanoboa cerrejonesis, the name given to the recently discovered skeleton of the biggest snake known to have lived. From the steaming tropics of 60 million years ago, this beast was at least 13 meters long, “longer than a city bus … and heavier than a car”.

Link via Reality Sandwich. Creative Commons licensed photo by Doc Searls.

by Gyrus

Most of the writings in this book were written during a very strange, obsessive and fruitful time in my life. I was, as ever, experimenting with various ways of altering consciousness and interacting with the environment in magical ways. My own trip, the various complexes that I’d become aware of in my psyche, seemed to resonate uncannily with certain aspects of the prehistoric landscapes I was exploring—for the most part, Ilkley Moor and the Avebury monuments. As I dug deeper into their histories and associations, it sometimes felt like I was unearthing buried contents of my own mind.

There’s no certain outcome from getting into stuff like this. You can go off the rails a bit; you can publish some very dubious theories that say more about you than prehistory. My own approach was to keep my critical mind alert, but to embrace the fact that there’s a grey area between digging into your own unconscious and unearthing the realities of prehistoric life. How could it be otherwise, if we shake off the modern illusion of individual isolation, and accept that all our roots tangle together in the deep past?

There’s a long tradition of overlap between psychology and the study of the past. Carl Jung wanted to study archaeology, but his family couldn’t afford to send him to a university that taught the subject. So, he ended up doing medicine, which led him to psychiatry. The metaphor of archaeology remained with him, though. The crucial dream of 1909 that led to his theory of the collective unconscious involved him descending into the lowest level of the basement underneath a house, passing through a Roman level before encountering scattered bones. “This must be a prehistoric cave!” he exclaimed before waking up.

Oddly enough, my own plunge into the past was largely triggered by something above, in the sky. I had a nasty experience with chemicals at Glastonbury Festival—as you do—where I saw a vortex in the sky that threatened to drag me into it, to my death. The image of the vortex haunted me for years.

Looking back, with a playful eye for the movements of fate, I wonder… What led me after that experience to move to Leeds, a short bus ride from Ilkley Moor? And what led me to Ilkley Moor, where I was gobsmacked to find oodles of prehistoric rock art, the type of exotic and mysterious creations that part of me assumed were confined to caves in the Australian desert?

I had already written most of my essay The Devil & The Goddess, which takes ancient snake goddesses as a central theme, when I discovered by chance that a Romano-Celtic snake goddess—Verbeia—was worshipped as an embodiment of the River Wharfe, which runs past the moors and through Ilkley. I delved deep into etymology, and found that both “Verbeia” and “Wharfe” had potential roots in words referring to turning, swirling, and vortices. I quickly made connections with the turning, swirling Swastika Stone carving on the moor, and the vortex-like concentric circles of the common cup-and-ring marks carved onto many of the moor’s stones. Endless details, myriad connections, all gave me the vertiginous sense that I had psychically meshed with the local landscape and its history. My own association of the vortex with death and altered states permeated my reading of the rock carvings. I railed against the narrow-mindedness of academia (without having actually read much academic research, of course), and proffered my own visionary interpretations in the small press.

Before long, I was reading Richard Bradley’s book on the predominantly cup-and-ring rock art of Atlantic Europe. This was around 1997. Almost a decade before, David Lewis-Williams and Thomas Dowson had caused a storm in archaeological circles with their paper, ‘The Signs of All Times’, which proposed that much Palaeolithic art was inspired by shamanic trance states. Drawing on their ideas about geometric shapes—grids, spirals, dots, and so on—representing the hallucinations from the early stages of trance, archaeologists like Bradley started to speculate about the Neolithic and Bronze Age cup-and-rings. Could they represent these early parts of the shamanic altered state? Lab tests had shown that vortex-like imagery was common as people were drawn into the deeper levels of trance. And entry into the Otherworld was frequently associated with death by shamanic cultures. Could the occurrence of spirals and cup-and-rings at the entrances to Irish passage graves be explained by this connection?

Well, of course it could. I’m all for keeping an open mind about prehistory, this vast period that we’ll never be certain about. But the logic and coherence of the “shamanic trance” theory of rock art, while it obviously can’t be applied anywhere and everywhere, means to me that it has to be placed in the foreground of our collection of possible models for the origins of this art.

Now, I’m really interested in how I managed to come to this conclusion independently, after a few years of messing around with strange drugs and staggering about West Yorkshire’s moors, when earnest academics had taken most of their careers of diligent study to get there. Does this mean that we can throw all our books away and get to the truth of the past by wrenching the lids off our minds? Sadly not. However, I’m not entirely convinced that it was blind luck that led me to this theory that academia has now validated. There really is something to be said for getting down to the basic structures of the psyche through experimentation, and using the data gathered from this first-hand experience to speculate about that period when these basic structures were being laid down—and, for the first time, expressed in material artifacts. It’ll never be an exact science, but it can function as an extremely valuable adjunct to scientific exploration. Some common-sense participation in the ways of magic, animism and altered states could, I believe, help ground abstract theories in the realities of the human body and the many qualities of the human mind that persist through changing historical circumstances. Anthropologists often go a bit native and live their subject’s life a little; why not archaeologists too?

If personal experience can contribute to the study of the past, what can the past contribute to our experience now? For me, history was always my worst subject at school. I’m still pretty patchy on all that stuff that happened between the Romans and the 20th century. My route into the past was Terence McKenna’s theories about the role of psychedelic mushrooms in the origins of human consciousness. Suddenly, someone was drawing compelling links between the direct experiences in my life that fascinated and inspired me, and the grander, often bewildering sweep of human history.

Recently, Andy Letcher’s book Shroom has taken this type of theory to task, heavily criticizing modern psychedelic culture for projecting its own agendas back onto the past. And many pagans, lead by Ronald Hutton, who was a big inspiration for Letcher, have for a while been taking apart the historical fantasies of Wiccans and others who believe themselves to be continuing a genuine lineage of magical practice. Why should we need validation for our current activities so much that we’re prepared to delude ourselves about history?

I do value the hard information and refreshing cynicism of Letcher and Hutton’s work—it’s priceless among subcultures that often succumb to insular illusions. But I think their views can be seen as the flip-side to the fantasies of historical validation that they try to demolish. To polarize things a bit: one side is so blindly in need of validation, that they are prepared to be certain about things that are up in the air; but the other side seems to carry itself with a kind of modern intellectual machismo that believes this need for validation from the past can be disposed of entirely. Science is the watchword, and despite the archaeological cliché that “absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence”, if hard proof isn’t forthcoming, we have to turn away. This seems to be as modern as Wiccan revivalism, and at least as damaging as they believe any uncritical reconstruction of past beliefs is.

We can’t just believe what we want about the past. But I feel we can’t just leave it be, or accept the “hard evidence” of orthodox archaeology as all that remains. The past is alive, and constantly expresses itself through the present, into the future. This isn’t determinism, it’s just the way things are. You can take a more complex angle if you want, and say that it’s our relationship to the past that is alive. The imagination is one of the most potent forces in human life, and it loves the past. Especially ancient times. It seems wise to engage consciously with this love, to nurture it and guard against its excesses, rather than decry it and hope it goes away.

Dreams, as Jung found, are particularly enthused about the past. Nothing is simple and straightforward in dreams; their metaphoric nature and tricksterish layering of meaning always defy any rational attempt to codify and delineate them. But they respond eagerly when you feed your head with images and stories of ancient things. The outward forms of prehistory, when they permeate your waking life, can seep into your dream world and help give shape to long-neglected patterns in your personal history.

Anyone’s deeper complexes can be as uncertain and hard to pin down as the forever lost—but deeply resonant—rituals of prehistoric tribes. Just as we can’t pin down such archaic events with archaeological certainty, the precise identification of our own ancient moments of significance may forever elude us.

But likewise, just as the lingering, intangible traces of these moments can profoundly shape our lives from behind the scenes, we will never be able to fully wipe away our subtle bonds to the deep past of the species. In both personal and collective psychohistory, our unceasing curiosity should be tempered by a light touch that respects the reality and the importance of the past’s essential unknowability. The lack of hope for solid conclusions needn’t be a cause of despair; it can animate our investigations with a playful delight, and a respect for irreducible mystery.

by Gyrus

The bulk of these essays were directly inspired by my experience of Ilkley Moor in West Yorkshire. The essays range wide across topics such as evolution, sacrifice, Kundalini experiences, shamanic cosmology, models of history, and psychedelic plants; but really, for me, Ilkley Moor was where it all started. It initiated me into thinking more deeply about the past, and into trying to make my interactions with the landscape an integral part of that thinking.

Ilkley Moor is covered in stones that are carved with various patterns, apparently abstract arrangements of lines, cup-marks and concentric rings. These are three thousand or more years old. More recently, the region has accumulated more than its fair share of odd folklore, from black dogs to little green men. It’s a bizarre place that practically urges you to map the strangeness of your present experiences there back onto the layers of weirdness from the past.

And that’s what I did. I plunged into studying the moor’s rock art, and eventually the Romano-Celtic goddess of the nearby River Wharfe, called Verbeia, paying close attention at all times to my dreams & synchronicities, and folding the more tantalizing of these back into my research. I performed rituals to ask the moor and Verbeia for help in conducting my research into their histories, and my experience was that this worked—abundantly.

Ilkley Moor isn’t just a major inspiration for these writings, it’s also part of why I’ve invited Phil and Robert along tonight. I arrived in Leeds in 1993, shortly after Phil had left for London, and soon became aware of the recently deceased Chaos Magic scene in the area. After I discovered the moors, the kind of “urban” reputation of Chaos Magic left me slightly surprised that Ilkley Moor was one of the chief stomping grounds for Yorkshire’s Chaos Magicians. This was yet another layer of history on the moor for me; this one place, eighty pence on the bus from where I lived, had a millennia-old reputation for attracting cultural oddities which was still alive and kicking.

I’ve come to know Phil as having a sound appreciation for in-depth scholarship, alongside in-depth magical experience, so that’s another part of why he’s here, this intermingling of our academic and magical traditions; and this brings me to Robert.

I came to realize that my independent research into these prehistoric glyphs happened to be running alongside a new current in rock art research in academia—one which holds that these patterns and forms, from the cup-and-ring art that’s found across northwest Europe to the painted caves of southern France or Africa, may have been derived from visions seen in altered states of consciousness. Specifically, the apparently abstract Ilkley-style art has been associated with the so-called “entoptic” phenomena seen during early stages of trance—lines, grids, dots and vortices, all taken to be hard-wired into the optic nerve in some way. Perhaps the earliest landmark paper in this current, published in 1989, is ‘The Signs of All Times’, by two South African archaeologists, David Lewis-Williams and Thomas Dowson.

David Lewis-Williams has since pushed this theory forward, popularizing it in his books The Mind in the Cave and Inside the Neolithic Mind. Thomas Dowson went on to run a now-defunct MA in rock art at Southampton University. I had a friend there doing archaeology, and Thomas was her tutor. When he mentioned he was taking his MA students on a field trip to Ilkley Moor, she put him in touch with me. Along with a fellow independent obsessive in Yorkshire called Paul Bennett, I thus became a kind of wayward local guide to the moor for Thomas and his students—one of whom was Robert. Robert’s also a practicing pagan—author of a book on Norse magic alongside his many academic works.

Now, I’ve lost track of the academic debate since the late ‘90s. I’ve just recently been catching up with it thanks to Robert. And I’m at once heartened and disappointed. It’s heartening that things seem to be moving along, from an entrenched, long-fought squabble over the “neuropsychological shamanic trance hypothesis”, to a wider debate about the general mindset of prehistoric people. Animism has gone through a revival and re-thinking in anthropology of late, and this seems to be slowing seeping through to archaeology.

It’s disappointing, of course, that it’s taking so long. My reliance on obsession wasn’t a sustainable course for research; but within a few years I hit on basic shifts in envisioning the world that have taken some top academics decades to appreciate. There’s a lot of ideas in my essays here that I wouldn’t stand up and defend now; but looking back, it seems to me that my willingness to make my personal experience of magic and altered states filter my reading of archaeology and anthropology greatly enhanced my ability to tap closer into the mindset of the cultures who created these intriguing artefacts. I have more of an appreciation now for academic research, for the value of developing our own traditions of thinking instead of just trading them in for some kind of cod approximation of animism or shamanism. But still I wonder: might we need to sacrifice a good part of our traditions in order to develop them?

David Lewis-Williams writes in The Mind in the Cave on the neurological basis for religious experience. He says in his conclusion:

If these neurobiologists are correct … the fundamental dichotomy in human behaviour and experience—rational and non-rational beliefs and action—will not go away in the foreseeable future. … We are still a species in transition.

It seems clear that he envisions our species as progressing along a linear path from immersion in “irrational” religion, slowly stepping out into the light of rationality.

However, too much rationality is dangerous. In his excellent book The Paradoxes of Delusion, clinical psychologist Louis Sass argues that schizophrenia, far from being a triumph of irrational instincts over reason and logic, as it is commonly seen, may in fact be a dangerous excess of rationality. He describes schizophrenia as:

not an overwhelming by, but detachment from the instinctual sources of vitality; not immersion in the sensory surround but disengagement from a derealized external world; not stuporous waning of awareness but hypertrophy of consciousness and the conceptual life. … a matter of the mind’s perverse triumph over the body, the emotions, and the external world.

I wonder if the protracted stand-offs in academia, such as the debate in rock art over the past decade or so, also demonstrate “reason gone mad”.

Perhaps a fuller, more sensitive embrace of the evidence of embodied experience offers a way forward, not back, out of these labyrinths of the mind.

[audio:2007-11-06-metageum-pauldevereux.mp3]
(Download 99 MB MP3)

The Metageum conference in Malta, “exploring the megalithic mind”, from which I’ve recently returned, was quite an event.

Certainly over-ambitious, it scheduled nine successive 13-hour days of talks, workshops, field trips, art exhibits, trance dances and performances, with contributions from a diverse array of academics, independent researchers, popular authors, artists, musicians and earth mystics. There were many dramas, organisational snafus, last-minute schedule changes, and the conference was unfortunately under-attended.

However, it was also one of the most inspiring pools of people I’ve swum in, and it was great to have such a leisurely dip. The schedule necessitated missing a morning here and an evening there, just to process things and relax into the pleasant Mediterranean November. But over the week I discerned a “conference conversation” welling up, with ideas criss-crossing between formal presentations, parties and dreams of their own accord. The boundaries between science, art, mysticism and daily life became pretty permeable. Peter Lloyd, Susan Waitt, and everyone else who helped organise and facilitate the event deserve recognition for staging such a fertile experiment.

I did plan to do a full “review” on returning, but it was just too unwieldy an experience to capture in a concise summing-up. I’ll content myself with nods towards some of the great people I met, plus some MP3s I recorded while there. Oh, you can also check out my photos (mostly of the astonishing Maltese Neolithic temples).

Archaeoacoustics

It was great to spend some time with Charla and Paul Devereux. I’ve been threatening to interview Paul for some years now, and it’s just not happened. Oddly, I was uninspired to do so during Metageum. One day…

Paul was at Metageum to talk about his latest cause, archaeoacoustics: the study of sound’s role in ancient monuments, sites and art. Together with Thomas Anderson (an inspiring sonics enthusiast / physicist / skate dude from Nashville, involved with Paul in the International Consciousness Research Laboratory), he also made use of his time in Malta to do some assessments of the famed Hypogeum, an underground Neolithic tomb complex with undoubtedly interesting acoustic properties. Paul classes the nascent field of archaeoacoustics as being where archaeoastronomy was in the ’60s. Given his exemplary record of trail-blazing in archaeology, we should keep an eye (or ear) out for this.

Paul’s research in this area is pretty cutting-edge, so while I did record his formal presentation, before posting it I’m waiting for him to check it over in case there’s anything in it he doesn’t want published in a half-baked form. Watch this space…

UPDATE: Paul’s talk can now be heard and/or downloaded here.

Also keep an eye out for Time & Mind: The Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness & Culture, a new peer-reviewed publication edited by Paul and Neil Mortimer (former editor of 3rd Stone). Contributions come from esteemed Mayanists Dennis and Babara Tedlock (reappraising beliefs in “earth changes” in 2012), Benny Shanon (on psychotropic plants and the Old Testament), Jeremy Harte (on the age of the Devil in Dartmoor), Robert Wallis (on animism and rock art), and many more. If Metageum wasn’t enough, the launch of this journal surely tells us that something is in the air. Subscriptions are currently being offered at a reduced rate until the end of 2007, so get in there!

Art from Atlantis

Erik Davis arrived with his old friend Christopher Fülling, who gave a presentation on his involvement in creating the Atlantis-themed opera for the Burning Man festival. As one who spent very little time among the wackiness of Atlantis theories before deciding they were of mild interest to social anthropologists at best, it was a disarming thrill to be captivated and charmed by Christopher’s exposition of his Atlantis trip, a fascinating mixture of knowing New Age lurve, exhuberant Playa bacchanalia, and respectful postmodern art appropriation.

Trying to subvert the New Age’s lack of conscious political responsibility as well as our culture’s frequently puritanical cynicism, the project looked like a load of fun. Christopher also gave a demonstration of his 3-dimensional “Atlantean tarot”, an octahedron supplemented by four pyramids to form a larger pyramid, each facet decorated with images and glyphs drawn from a consciously fabricated Atlantean symbol system. I’d been party to a personal reading at a party a few nights before, which I have to say was great. I’d been deeply disturbed by a stupendously screwed-up dream the previous night, and Christopher’s divination helped unearth the enlightening side of it. In such consultations, the person doing the reading performs a crucial mediatory role between the querent and the symbol system, treading a subtle balance between guiding and stepping back to give the querent permission to allow their own unconscious wisdom to unfold. Christopher proved to be a dab hand.

The motivations behind the Atlantean opera seem to have moved on for him, though, and he’s currently involved in an amazing-looking project to create an “Art Monastery” in a converted convent in northern Italy.

The entheogens panel

Sadly, Benny Shanon couldn’t make to do his talk about ayahuasca and artistic creativity. I mentioned to Peter Lloyd that there were a number of notable people with interests in psychedelics and art there anyway, so why not have an impromptu panel discussion?

Come Wednesday evening, I happened across Erik Davis, Laurence Caruana and others just about to order food at a restaurant near the conference venue. (A number of artists and photographers had work exhibited during the conference, but the pieces that stood out most for me were Laurence’s vivid, syncretic works that blended myths and symbols with a Gnostic eye for hidden harmonies—see above.) Erik and Laurence each rolled their fingertips together and said, “Ahhhhh, Gyrus!” in a conspiratorial tone. I immediately guessed they were “the impromptu panel”, and wanted to rope me in to fill things out. I was feeling good and breezy, so I assented.

The panel wasn’t exactly structured, and it was held in the intimate setting of the Shisha bar in the upper reaches of the venue, so it turned into more of a group discussion. It threatened to descend into knotty philosophizing at one point, but some interesting ideas were broached. Note that my mike was directed towards the panel, and as I was engaged with this I didn’t have the time to point it at audience members when they spoke—these bits are a little quiet. Peter Lloyd introduces, Erik talks first, then Laurence, then me.

[audio:2007-11-07-metageum-entheogens.mp3]
(Download 95 MB MP3)

The archaeologists

Respect has to be paid to Simon Stoddart and Caroline Malone, two leading archaeologists who have spent much of the past 20 years excavating the so-called Brochtorff Circle, another hypogeum or Neolithic funerary catacomb, as part of the Gozo Project. They presented their laboriously elaborated datasets of bone and artifact categorization and placement with clarity and enthusiasm, doing a job of mediation between bewildering esoteric information and the wider community that’s probably as tricky in its own way as any shaman’s task.

Their tentative efforts at interpretation were a little disappointing, but conjuring interpretations that appeal to people like me is obviously not their forté, probably not even their job. They’re just finalizing the final results of their exhaustive data gathering, so it’s early days for interpretation; and at least they had a few stabs.

Some finds—such as the apparently prime placement of three male corpses at the lowest level of a large communal burial—caused friction with the strong Goddess contingent at the conference. And I have to say I felt that some of their interpretive moves were as much motivated by reaction to Goddess worshippers as these Gimbutas-inspired people are motivated by reaction to current patriarchy. Objectivity, as Erik showed in his talk, is less to do with which individual has gained the most “balanced” perspective than it has to do with the collective apprehension of complexity manifested over time by diverse groups pooling and debating their ideas.

It was encouraging to find such rigorous data-fiends as Simon and Caroline mixing with more wayward researchers, and pleasant to find them so good-humoured and charming to boot.

Chanting in the Hypogeum

After a couple of false starts in trying to fulfill the booking I’d made to visit the Hypogeum, it was great to find myself in a relatively intimate bunch of people (myself, Erik, Christopher, and three women), which included Wende Bartley, a very capable musician and vocalist who led us in a semi-improvised chanting and toning session.

The Hypogeum isn’t the only underground Neolithic tomb in Malta, but it’s the best preserved and most famed. It’s surreal to walk in off a typical urban Maltese street (see picture), through an entrance like your typical modern museum, then down a walkway into an ancient tomb complex carved out of the living rock, a bewitching combination of rough stone tunnelling, exquisitely fashioned chambers, and wild spiralling red ochre art on the roof. None of the images of it I’ve seen give any real sense of the space, like the architected large intestine of a partially artificial stone beast.

Here’s the full recording of our chanting session:

[audio:2007-11-09-hypogeum.mp3]
(Download 67 MB MP3)

If you’ve not got time to make your way through that, the finale is worth a listen at least. Christopher—an operatic tenor—led me and Erik in a chant as the women did their thing in another part of the complex. It’s amazing how perfectly you can hear the women’s voice merge in—effects like this, it is speculated, may have been designed. I’m a little off here I think, but it’s pretty cool for a spontaneous performance:

[audio:2007-11-09-hypogeum-finale.mp3]
(Download 3 MB MP3)

Wrapping up

Erik Davis gave the final talk of the proceedings, a virtuosic and impassioned attempt to fold the conference’s many threads into a multi-dimensional image of engaged, collective apprehension of prehistory:

[audio:2007-11-11-metageum-erikdavis.mp3]
(Download 72 MB MP3)

A couple of vids

I loved the rock-cut tombs at Xemxija. The earliest human constructs in Malta, they’re tiny caves cut into a rocky hillside. Only marked by small piles of rocks, you can squeeze through the tiny holes and check them out first-hand. They’re so small that photos would never convey anything of them, so I shot a little video on my snapshot camera. It’s dingy but it gives some atmosphere, and someone does some good toning at the end…

And, just for fun, here’s a taste of the rough-but-fun ferry crossing when we went on a day trip to Gozo, the smaller island next to Malta:

The ever-clued-up Bob Trubshaw just brought an exciting-looking week-long conference in Malta to my attention:

Metageum 2007: Exploring the Megalithic Mind
An inter-disciplinary international conference on approaches to understanding the origins of our megalithic legacy
- The Caraffa Stores, Birgu, Island of Malta
- 3rd-11th November 2007

Speakers that I’m familiar with include earth mysteries maestro Paul Devereux, ayahuasca phenomenologist Benny Shanon and neo-shamanism scholar Robert Wallis. I’m sure there’ll be some good surprises alongside them.

Besides the chance to explore Malta’s astonishing megalithic monuments, there’s a fantastic openness to “experiential” goings-on in evidence. Especially exciting are New York’s Body Temple troupe, who are facilitating trance-dance workshops throughout the week.

I’ve signed up. Maybe see you there?