Why is Göbekli Tepe mysterious? Six miles from Urfa, an ancient city in southeastern Turkey, the archeologist Klaus Schmidt made one of the most startling archaeological discoveries of our time — a temple complex Göbekli Tepe datingabout 11,000 years old.
The most striking thing about this discovery was that the temple complex dated before the advent of agriculture and a settled way of life. In other words, several tribes of nomadic hunter-gatherers decided that they needed a temple and settled. Why?
In the traditional view of societal development (influenced by Marxism), economic factors always precede and predate culture and religion. Economy is the basis, the structure; culture is secondary — it is the superstructure. Culture and religion always flow out of the economy, not the other way around.
Schmidt came to the opposite conclusion. The main motivation for building Göbekli Tepe was not economy but religion — which was a huge blow to the traditional understanding of societal development. The hunter-gatherers settled because they had acquired some strong religious belief which substantiated building a temple.
This gave rise to the development of agriculture — they needed to feed all those people involved in the construction. And ultimately, this led to the creation of a “settled” way of life. How we live always flows from what we believe, not the other way around. We create an economy around our strongest beliefs, which are usually metaphors.
Metaphor is the structure; how we live it out is the superstructure. The further back we go in history, the more we find vestiges of metaphor-driven consciousness. That’s what Owen Barfield discovered in studying languages: the further back we go in history, the more metaphorical the language gets. Ancient consciousness was metaphoric. Modern consciousness is literal.
Man himself is a metaphor. Before the fall, Adam and Eve were acutely conscious of being vessels of the Divine — images of God. They were icons (“image” in Greek). Looking at each other, they saw God. They were walking metaphors — microcosms reflecting the macrocosm. After the fall, this metaphor-consciousness started disintegrating. Adam and Eve started taking themselves “literally.”
Over time, they started seeing themselves as separate beings — not as icons but as idols. An icon is a metaphor of God. An idol is a metaphor of nothing. It doesn’t show anything beyond the visible. Idolatry is the loss of metaphor-consciousness. Our gaze no longer penetrates the images; it is arrested by the images at the level of the visible and literal. This marks the rise of literalness-consciousness.
Why is Göbekli Tepe mysterious? The children of Adam and Eve always vacillate between metaphor and literalness. When we forget about God, we take ourselves literally. We idealize our earthly existence (economy) over the metaphor (religion). When we get fed up with the meaninglessness of the “literal,” we wake up to our true nature — we are metaphors of God. We experience a shift from an idol to an icon.
The moment we realize we are icons, we start building temples. We see everything as sacred. We take off our sandals for even the ground we are standing on is holy. We reconnect with God and ourselves as The Metaphor.
