gobekli tepe - genesis of the gods by andrew collins Page A

construction, then, as we have seen, a person standing or crouching between them would have been able to view this astronomical spectacle through a holed stone located immediately east of the Vulture Stone. It would have been a similar case in Enclosure C, where the entrant would also have been able to witness the setting of Deneb through the aperture of a holed stone (Pillar 59) when positioned between the twin central pillars.
    It is time now to better understand the purpose of these holed stones, focusing our attentions on the example in Enclosure D, which remains in situ. It has carved parallel lines that curve around the hole to form what appear to be naïve renderings of human legs bent at the knee. After coming together beneath the hole the “legs” trail off toward the bottom right-hand corner of the stone, leaving a parallel opening between the knee and the presumed ankles. That the twin sets of parallel lines represent legs, and not something else, is confirmed by the fact that the lower left-hand edge noticeably bulges as if to signify the person’s right-hand buttock (see figure 10.1).

    Figure 10.1. Left, decorated holed stone in the north wall of Göbekli Tepe’s Enclosure D. Note the lines flowing around the hole, suggestive of an abstract female form. Right, the broken holed stone in a similar position in Enclosure C.
    THE KILISIK STATUE
    If the incised lines on the sighting stone do show a pair of legs bent at the knees, then the large hole directly above them can only signify one thing—the person’s, or should I say the woman’s, vulva. A similar hole is seen on the mini T-shaped statue found in 1965 at Kilisik, a village in Adıyaman province, some 46.5 miles (75 kilometers) north-northwest of Göbekli Tepe. 1 In addition to having arms and hands, like the T-shaped pillars at Göbekli Tepe and Nevalı Çori, the statue has an additional line that rises at an angle on both its wide faces to meet the hands on the front narrow face. It seems clear that the figure is lifting up its garment to expose its belly and genitalia (see figure 10.2).
    Strangely, the belly or womb area of the statue is sculpted into a much smaller human form represented by a crude head, body, and arms, executed in a style reminiscent of a macabre stone totem pole unearthed at Göbekli Tepe and now in Şanlıurfa’s archaeological museum. This too shows smaller human forms in the position of the womb or stomach of a much larger standing figure (see plate 24 ).
    The small figure on the Kilisik statue very likely represents a fetus inside a woman’s womb, the large incised hole immediately beneath the belly emphasizing not just the position of the vulva but also the birth canal. That a very similar, although much larger hole, has been bored through Enclosure D’s potential sighting stone, which is itself surrounded by incised lines arguably signifying the legs of a woman, suggests this hole is also an exaggerated vulva (presumably the holed stone at the same position in Enclosure C played a similar role).

    Figure 10.2. Stone statue of a T-shaped figure found in 1965 at Kilisik in Adıyaman province, some 46.5 miles (75 kilometers) from Göbekli Tepe. Note the hole forming the figure’s vulva and the small human figure carved into the stomach area.
    This means that when in 9400 BC the setting of Deneb aligned with the hole in the sighting stone in Enclosure D, the star’s presence would have been framed within the abstract woman’s vulva. Clearly, this carefully executed synchronization between star and stone was created to mark the moment of alignment with the opening of the Milky Way’s Great Rift in its role as the suspected entrance to the sky world, where souls departed to in death and, presumably, emerged from at birth. We can go further, for the angle made by the woman’s lower legs, as they trail off toward the right-hand corner of the stone, is similar to the angle of the Milky Way and Great Rift when the star Deneb