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Kings of the Stone-Age?

Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits
Gordon White, Scarlet Imprint, 2016
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& Trade Paperback 978-0-9931200-9-1

Reviewed by Mogg Morgan

-Big book with a big vision
The title appears to contain a fairly big hint as to where this
books final destination could be; although in the end the
author rejects UFO theories of human progress. In our
troubled times many claim to have experienced things such
as alien abduction, but is this really just another way of
describing magical or supernatural experiences using the
vocabulary of our de-enchanted times?

This is a big book in every sense, very much in the tradition

of alternative archaeology of Graham Hancock, Robert
Bauval, Andy Collins, Robert Schoch et al. Of the many new
things the author brings to the mix is a focus on magic, its
source in the cultures of the Stone Age and a belief that
returning to the source now is both an inevitable and
revitalizing project.
Gordon White here presents much modern research on
prehistory to the reader, taking account of the latest
discoveries and offering them up to a magical community
which he feels has been too dependent on an older, perhaps
moribund strata of scholarly works. In this Gordon is part of
the current geist, steadily chipping away at the magical
paradigm, realigning it back to an older, more authentic
version of its role and mission.
For me the early chapters of this book contain the biggest
punch. Especially chapter 2: The Cathedral predates the
City which recounts the recent discoveries at Gobekli Tepe,
which by all accounts is the worlds oldest purpose built
stone temple. It dates from a dizzying early time circa
10,000bce. (Perhaps a date that might also ring bells for
readers of some of the other authors mentioned above, for it
is also the date favoured by alternative archaeologists for
the carving of Egypts famous Sphinx. Gordon White may
well include himself in that company, although I must
confess Ive not so far seen anything to convince me and
thus tend to stick to the boring scholarly consensus, but
who knows.
Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, really is 12, 000 years old, which is
so early that it predates the invention of ceramics. Its
discovery is causing a slow earthquake in our view of our
origins. Thus far there is no evidence of permanent human
occupation at Gobekli Tepe, and it thus appears to be an
elaborate structure built purely for religious purposes. This
must have been the work of ancient nomads, who returned
repeatedly to their temple, to refresh their memories of
ancestors, with feasting, celebration and no doubt, some

devotions at the altar of one of the worlds oldest religions,

astronomy.
Gordon Whites chapter title is taken from the work of the
sites discoverer and chief excavator, the late Klaus Schmidt.
If you dont have Gordons book, its worth googling Gobekli
Tepe and looking at the images to get some idea of the sites
significance, majesty & indeed magic. One of many
wonderful things about this temple is the iconography.
Gordon draws our attention to the serpent lore of a kind
that is to become so important in many later cultures, ie it
lies behind the late Hindu idea of Kundalini; serpents also
play many roles in ancient Egyptian religion, and for
instance appear on the diadem of the king as the protective
Uraeus.
White also invites us to see the hammer headed pillar
statues found there as possible headless entities, again a
theme pregnant with meaning for later generations,
including ours. This sign he rightly calls the New Rosetta
Stone.
If Gordon had finished his monograph here I think he would
already have done enough service to the magical community
in offering such a cogent presentation of the important
material from Gobekli Tepe.
Ive recently been reading the work of Egyptologist Dirk
Huyge, an expert on ancient rock art. Some of his research
on the cultures of Egypts Neolithic and Palaeolithic past
offer some points of contact here and perhaps some
corroboration of Gordons theory.

For during the last glaciation, Huyge says, the level of the
Mediterranean Sea was about 100 meters lower than today,
and therefore he does not rule out the possibility that people
of the Palaeolithic established contact with Egypt and may
even have exchanged artistic and symbolic concepts.
Klaus Schmidt, also made a few tentative comparisons with
Egypt, but art of much later times, during the era of its
famous kings.
But, The existence of ancient artistic remains on the
African continent has long been known. Thus, in 1969, were
discovered in a cave in Namibia, stone plates with painted
animals that can be dated to 26,000 years ago! In Egypt,
there are now scores of sites with Palaeolithic artwork, in
caves and in the open air. Thus Gordon is on fairly firm
ground if he compares Gobekli Tepe with the Rock Art of
Upper Egypt, which does indeed show forms that may
persist into historical, pharaonic times. The uncertainty is
caused by the Egyptians ideological reworking of their own
prehistory, motivated by politics, a process that has
obscured the links between dynastic and predynastic
imagery.

The other great theme running through this book is from

the controversial theories of E.J. Michael Witzel. The Origins
of the World's Mythologies. Witzel apparently also sees in
myth evidence of two primary streams, (according to his
critics races, one dark skinned, one light). The ultimate
division would be between the Gondwana and Laurasian
myth. To get a grip of this, one has to cast ones mind back
200 or 300 million years to when the first geological
continent of Pangaie broke into two super-continents, a
northern Laurasia and a South Godwana. Humans and
their myth making come only within the last 2 million years.
Question is, does later myth somehow reflect these primary
divisions?
If one looks at the vast ocean of story one might well be able
do a bit of textual archaeology, stratifying these from the
more modern, right back to the oldest primal myths.
Examples of the lowest strata of myth could be the story of
the flood.
One might also consider astronomical myths, where stories
are attached to the life and death of prominent
constellations, planets, the Sun and Moon. This cluster of
ideas encodes secrets, which seem to get pushed ever
further back in the time-line. Gobekli Tepe is a structure
with strong astronomical alignments, the investigation of
which is just starting. Perhaps we should not be surprised
that our ancestors made such a thing about natures
greatest spectacle and exercise in virtual reality.
White also suggests the myth of the two Brothers, known
from Biblical, Egyptian and no doubt many other sources,
might also be one of those primal stories told by what he
calls our Laurasian ancestors.
The myth of Atlantis is another candidate that springs to
mind. Gordon White, basing himself on the work of Robert
Schoch, accepts this idea of an Ur Culture, but would push

it back a lot further than many might find comfortable.

Atlantis, as in the myth of the primal homeland, is not to
be found in the Mediterranean, or even the Egyptian desert,
but if it is anywhere , is in Polynesia. If there were such
peoples as Atlanteans they would have been the survivors
of the sinking of Sunda and Sahul [In the South Pacific
who] brought technology and magical techniques with them
to populations across central and western Asia that were
already in situ and likely even had vaguely recognizable
pantheons and practices. P 108. Perhaps an example of
having ones cake and eating it, if they brought myths to
people whom already had those myths, what are we talking
about?
Another of the great themes in this book is that of Kingship
and its origins.
This notion of kingship descending from the stars, and the
king going up to the stars to ensure immortality and the
well-being of the tribe is highly likely to be the origin of the
Hermetic and Classical ritual magick we find in the
grimoires, having come down to us via the dual routes of the
Nile and the Fertile Crescent. If this stellar technology
reaches back to the first emergence of the Laurasian
storyline, as I believe it does, then we may, with a straight
face, say western ritual magick is at least 30,000 years old.
We may also, with a smiling face, send back the Ancient
Aliens crowd back to the library to check their numbers p
146.

Star.Ships certainly got me thinking about Kingship again.

Gordon, as the above citation makes clear, sees in the figure
of the king a central character in the European grimoire
tradition, but also something that he thinks of as one of
those primal themes of our world, and that of their
magicians, from the very beginning.
This is controversial, because the consensus of academic
research would now place the origins of the state and its

elite rulers to circa 4000BCE. A long time ago, of course,

but nothing like the 30,000 years or even 12,000. If Gobekli
Tepe is dated to some time 10,000 BCE, then the
intervening millennia was a time when humanity studied
the stars, but also lived in nomadic extended family groups,
perhaps around a patriarch, matriarch, or both. In Egypt,
the first traces of inequality & elite burials are there for all
to see in the Naqada 1 predynastic strata, named so from
the ancient settlement of Ombos, citadel of Seth in Upper
Egypt.
My own research for Isis, Goddess of Egypt & India also
touched on whether the whole Osiris narrative even counted
as "true myth" . One would expect the origins of a true myth
to be lost in the mists of time, to thus be archaic. It may
come as a shock to see the myth being crafted by priestly
spin-doctors. But this is precisely what does happen in the
Egyptian record. Osiris probably isnt a Neolithic deity, he
bears all the ideological traces of the biggest of Egyptian
confidence tricks, otherwise known as "the myth of divine
kingship". Whether these kings were ever really viewed by
the Egyptian people, or even by the kings themselves as
really Divine is a view that can only be sustained if one
makes literal reading of official inscriptions. These, like
those of every era, are full of conventions, polite fictions and
protocols. Was this really the lived reality, the Egyptologist
George Posener suggests not.
Establishing the ideology of Egyptian Kings in the early
dynasties required "massive amounts of labour appropriated
from across the country." The corollary of the increasing
drama of elite (Egyptian) life however, was the long shadow
that it cast over the majority of society. Again, the scale of
this activity is one that Gordon feels is mysterious and
unexplained by existing scholarly research. Thus, he would
push the Egyptian time line backward towards some
Atlantean race, which had the secrets needed to construct
these immense monuments.

Personally, I remain sceptical and suspect that any burials

at Gobekli Tepe will be communal, the equivalent to
Europes long barrows or perhaps they will turn out to be
the treasured bones of the builders. Or, as transpired with
some of the remains at nearby Catal Huyuk, at first
identified as images of an ancient goddess but after further
discoveries were later revealed to be animal totems the
"bear" of atal Huyuk. So, I am mindful to treat these ideas
more as predictions about Gobekli Tepe, rather than as
established facts.
Apart from fragments of human bone found in the sites
careful infill, no complete human burials or cemeteries have
thus far been discovered. The late Klaus Schmidt fully
expected that it was only a matter of time before they were.
If such a cemetery does turn out to contain whats known as
an elite burial, with rich grave goods of special people, if
there is clear evidence of inequality, then perhaps we might
be looking at a proto king or even a queen. And that really
would be a major sea change on our understanding of
humanitys ancient history.
All in all, this book is quite a ride, a good stimulating read &
highly recommended.