Gbekli Tepes Shamanic Birthing Temple

Barbara Hand Clow 2014

This article was written for the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Dr.
Felicitas D. Goodman, the anthropologist who realized that postures depicted globally
in ancient figurines and art are ritual instructions for accessing specific shamanic
states of consciousness. This monumental discovery in 1977 inspired the recovery of a
rich, ancestral shamanic system, an expanding library of ancient wisdom centered at
the Cuyamungue Institute (Santa Fe, NM), which was founded and directed by Dr.
Goodman.

The eminent pre-historian Andrew Collins has just released a book of extreme
importance for our posture researchGbekli 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 Gbekli Tepe shamanic cultists. I am really
excited about Andrews brilliant analysis of Gbekli Tepe because it resonates
deeply with Dr. Goodmans 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 Andrews 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
Gbekli 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. Goodmans
birth in Transylvania, I propose the existence of an ecstatic trance posture at
Gbekli 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

a b
(Figure-1) a) Gbekli Tepe circle b) Pillar 18/Enclosure D
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 anlurfa, Turkey, refer to the tell or hill covering the site as
Gbekli 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
catastrophobiaextreme 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 didnt 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 Velikovskys 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,
Gbekli 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 didnt fully understand the
term catastrophobia until I started to piece together the motives behind the
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construction of Gbekli 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)

Ive been thinking about the evocative circles filled with great humanoid beings for
ten years. Gbekli 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 weve been exploring it since. (7)

(Figure 2) Neval ori Pillar

Back to 1999, I was struck by exactly the same hand position on the Nevali ori
pillar, a nearby ancient cultic site. My illustrator drew this pillar for Catastrophobia
from a photo taken at Neval ori 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 positionsoddly bent elbow and long fingers clutched
under the belly that appears to be pregnantanybody 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

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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)

a b c d
(Figure 3) Birthing Postures practiced at the Cuyamungue Institute

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 Gbekli 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 Neval ori and Gbekli Tepe pillars!

(Figure 4) Easter Island Moai

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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. Lets 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 Gbekli 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
Stars 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.

Lets 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 Gbekli 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. Theres
more: Pillar 18 in Enclosure D (Figure-1b) at Gbekli targets Cygnus.

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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 Gbekli 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 Gbekli 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 Collinss 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 Collinss hypothesis regarding cosmic shamanic travel
at Gbekli. Even Klaus Schmidt said he assumes shamanic practices, and suggests
that the T-shaped pillars represent human forms, perhaps ancestors. (16)

The Birthing Posture is oriented to Deneb, the brightest star in the constellation of
Cygnus, the celestial bird. This suggests the Swiderians retained the Solutrean sky
religion orientation to Deneb, the Pole Star 18,500 years ago. They put this posture
in a key spot, exactly what survivors would do to salvage ancient knowledge, and
there is much more: Soul holes are drilled holes in pillars where souls of the
deceased can leave, unborn souls can enter, and where shamans can exit to travel in
the sky. (17) There is a soul hole right in front of the Birthing Posture pillar where a
person could look through to watch Deneb setting on the horizon each night. This
region of the sky marks the opening of the dark rift of the Milky Way near where the
ecliptic crosses the Milky Way. This also is the zone of direct access for modern
humans to the Galactic Center in the ninth dimension according to my alchemical
research. (18) More recent sacred cultures, such as the Vedic, Maya, and Native
American all had sacred traditions aimed at this part of the sky, which suggests this
orientation goes back to the Paleolithic. Collins says the Gbekli Tepe builders
adhered to much earlier Paleolithic traditions regarding the location of the sky
world that reached back to the time when Deneb was the Pole Star, ca. 16,500-
14,500 BC. (19) He describes Gbekli Tepes Vulture Stone Pillar as a star map that
depicts the stars of Scorpius at the base of the Milky Ways Great Rift, to its final
destination in the region of the Cygnus constellation at the top of the Great Rift with
Cygnus depicted as a bird with spread wings. (20) What is the reason for this
orientation? Collins thinks the incised lines around the hole in a stone in the north
wall of Gbekli Tepes Enclosure D depict the open legs of a female, with the hole
being her vulva located where the Milky Ways Dark Rift begins. (21)

Collins notes this depiction of this region of the sky 11,500 years ago is similar to
the Maya Cosmic tree, the symbol of the Milky Way that has a Scorpion biting its
base. Mithraic altars from the Roman Empire have exactly the same symbolism in
almost every Mithraeumritual caves with altars that depict the constellations on
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the ecliptic over Perseus slaying the bull with a scorpion biting his testicles. (22)
Collins relates the hole in the stone in the north wall to a remarkable T-shaped,
long-headed figurethe Kilisik Statuefound near Gbekli Tepe that derives from
the same period. (23) The Kilisik statue has the same distinctive arm position of the
Birthing Posture as well as a vulva hole! Anyone from the Institute would
immediately recognize the Kilisik statue as the Birthing Posture, and she even has a
depiction of what is probably a fetus above the hole. This is very exciting for the
Institute, since it drives the dating for the Birthing Posture back to at least 11,000
years ago! And this is a very significant mini-statue because it is 31 inches tall even
though the bottom is broken off. (24) She was probably around 60 inches tall, the
height of the average female in the region. Put it on the Institute record: The Kilisik
Statue depicts the Birthing Posture with a hole for her vulva and her fetus ready to
arrive!

(Figure 4) Kilisik Statue

Collins wonders about the significantly placed holed stone, So if the abstract female
form seen on the holed stone in Enclosure D symbolizes the Cosmic Mother, is the
purpose of the synchronization between star and stone to indicate she is about to
give birth? (25) Of course it does, since Pillar 18, the Birthing Posture, is right behind
the holed stone and both are aimed at Deneb. These artifacts were dedicated to
procreation, survival, and maintaining contact with the birthing zone in the Galaxy. I
can easily visualize shamans gathered in the circle, assuming the Birthing Posture,
and travelling into the Alternate Reality to contact the soul that was coming in.
Possibly the birthing mother was also in the temple? Collins says Enclosure Ds
holed stones are confirmation of the sites role as a place where the rites of birth,
death, and rebirth were celebrated both in its carved art and within the
architectural design of its larger enclosures, which formed symbolic wombs
complete with twin souls and axes mundi. (26) Assuming people in the region were
struggling with depopulation, they would have used the Birthing Posture, since it
activates the nervous system to birth and celebrate new arrivals.

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The ancient global cache of postures was nearly lost until Dr. Goodman rediscovered
it with students in 1977. As the result of her remarkable vision and dedicated
research, we can see easily that ancient figurines and statues, such as the pillars of
Neval ori, Gbekli Tepe, and the Moai of Easter Island are ritual instructions.
Judging by the enormous effort made to create Gbekli 11,500 years ago, they felt
they had to save their knowledge. Mysteriously, they filled in the complex with huge
amounts of fill 10,000 years ago, which is the reason we can study it in pristine
condition. We can see the part of the sky they focused on, and we can be sure this
central pillar is the Birthing Posture. A shamanic culture 11,500 years ago knew that
the great swan Cygnus in the sky is the source of cosmic particles that evolve our DNA!
The Birthing Posture suggests this great temple was built for the survival of our
species after the great cataclysm 11,500 years ago. Perhaps, since we can still
assume the postures now, we can use the Lascaux Cave Posture to fly through
Cygnus into the Galactic Center, the ultimate human cosmic initiation.

When I studied with Felicitas more than twenty years ago, I was dismayed by the
lack of attention given to her monumental discovery of a shamanic technique used
by humans to contact other worlds since the Middle Paleolithic. Regardless,
students of ecstatic trance are daily assuming postures for flight, journeys down into
the lower world, healing, metamorphosis, divination, and more. Now that some
researchers are open to the idea of shamanic practices at Gbekli Tepe, I hope the
cold silence from most anthropologists to Goodmans discovery in 1977 is coming to
an end. This wall of silence almost always greets new ideas from innovators like Dr.
Goodman, Andrew Collins, and myself. New sound is shattering the walls of Jericho,
and a new pre-historical paradigm is being born. Paleoarcheologists have finally
recovered the great story of our long journey since the end of the last ice age. In
synchronicity, the ancient cache of instructions telling us how to position our bodies
in tranceEcstatic Tranceis recovering cosmic intelligence within each person in
trance. On this 100th anniversary of her birth, Felicitas Goodman would be happy to
hear we are celebrating in 2014 her role in the new pre-historical paradigm.

FIGURES:
Figure-1 a) Gbekli Tepe circle DAI Deutsches Archologisches Institut
b) Pillar 18/Enclosure D at Gbekli Tepe
Figure-2 Neval ori
Figure-3 Birthing Postures practiced at the Cuyamungue Institute. a) Vera Cruz,
Mexico, 1000 AD b) Negev, Palestine, 6,000 BCE c) sub-Saharan Africa,
nearly modern d) Olmec, 1200 BCE.
Figure-4 Easter Island Moai.
Figure 5 Kilisik Statue, NEO-LITHICS, 1/01, p 9. [Hauptman, 2000]

Footnotes:

1. Allan, D.S. and J.B Delair. Catalcysm! Compelling Evidence of a Cosmic

Catalcym in 9500 B.C. Santa Fe: Bear & company, 1997.
2. Stanford, Dennis J., and Bruce A. Bradley. Across Atlantic Ice: The Origins of
Americas Clovis Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.
8
3. Vellikovsy, Immanuel, Worlds in Collision. New York: Doubleday, 1950.
4. Hapgood, Charles. Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings: Evidence of Advanced
Civilization in the Ice Age. London: Turnstone Books, 1966. Hancock, Graham.
Fingerprints of the Gods: Evidence of Earths Lost Civilization. New York:
Crown Publishers, 1995. Hancock, Underworld; the Mysterious Origins of
Civilization. New York, Crown Publishers, 2002.
5. Email from Andrew Collins on May 19, 2014.
6. Collins, Andrew. Gbekli Tepe: Genesis of the Gods, Rochester, VT: Bear &
Company, 2014, 49. Wikipedia, Gbekli Tepe.
7. Marianne Carroll, New Moon ceremony for November 25, 2011, when she
selected the Birthing Posture. Mariannes assistance for collecting and
inserting the figures for this article is most appreciated.
8. Clow, Barbara Hand. Catastrophobia: The Truth Behind Earth Changes. Santa
Fe, Bear & Company, 2001, 135. (page 152 in Awakening the Planetary Mind,
2011).
9. Goodman, Felicitas, D. Where The Spirits Ride the Wind: Trance Journeys and
Other Ecstatic Experiences. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1990,
101.
10. www.eisp.org
11. Where the Spirits Ride the Wind, 107.
12. Collins, Andrew. From the Ashes of Angels: The Forbidden Legacy of a
Forgotten Race. London: Signet, 1966, and The Cygnus Mystery: Unlocking the
Ancient Secret of Lifes Origins in the Cosmos, London: Watkins, 2006.
13. Collins, Andrew, Cosmic Rays and Cygnus X-3. New Dawn Magazine,
March/April, 2010.
14. Collins, Gbekli Tepe, 177.
15. Ibid. 215-21.
16. Wikipedia: Gbekli Tepe.
17. Collins, Gbekli Tepe. 105-8.
18. Clow, Barbara Hand. Alchemy of Nine Dimensions; The 2011/12 Prophecies
and Nine Dimensions of Consciousness. Charlottesville, Va.: Hampton Roads,
2010.
19. Collins, Gbekli Tepe. 94.
20. Ibid., 102.
21. Collins, Gbekli Tepe. 106.
22. Ulansey, David. The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries: Cosmology and Salvation
in the Ancient World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
23. Ibid. 106-8.
24. NEO-LITHICS 1/01, Marc Verhoeven Person or Penis? Interpreting a New
PPNB Anthropomorphic Statue from the Taurus Foothills. Pages 8-9.
25. Gbekli Tepe. 108.
26. Ibid. 111.