The Origins of the Gods - Part 1 (video)

Hello friends! I know this is a very long video (probably too long!) I’ll try to make it shorter next time 😛 But I hope you enjoy it!

This video is about the deities worshiped during the prehistoric periods of the Palaeolithic age to the Mesolithic. I’ve used the Norse Gods as examples of the types of deities that were worshiped during these periods in history. Not that the Norse gods were worshiped in prehistoric times, but certainly the gods of prehistory were the ancestors of certain gods of the Norse Pantheon. This is getting confused? Alright, I’ll explain it better during the video.

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Ritual Spear found in Poland

A ritual spear dating back 9,000 years - made of wood and decorated with engraved ornament - has been discovered by archaeologists in Bolków near lake Świdwie (West Pomerania). The spear is an unusual artefact. The unique aspect of the find is the rich decoration on its outer, slightly convex side: interwoven geometric and zoomorphic patterns. The construction of the spear, and above all the presence of ornamentation indicates that it was a ritual object associated with the beliefs of the Mesolithic peoples inhabiting the lakeside settlements and hunting camps.

Communities living in the Mesolithic period often adorned items they used. In Europe there are known carvings made on various objects made of antlers and animal bones, wood, and rarely also on objects made of amber, flint and on stone pebbles. They represent the wealth of stylised depictions of forest animals, birds, fish and plants, as well as human figures.

The carvings on the spear showed the presence of different combinations of geometrical patterns in the form of single and grouped triangles, zigzags, herringbone, horizontal and vertical short notches and the dominant theme of short perpendicular incisions, arranged along the lines. Also visible are depictions of stylised human and animal figures. The analysis shows that central place in the image formed by the carvings has a ritual scene with three human figures. One of them is wearing a characteristic mask, made of widely branched antlers. "It certainly symbolizes a shaman - a spiritual guide of the community. The second figure is shown without clothes - drawn with a single thick line. Its position suggests performing a ritual dance. Hands are raised upwards. The third figure is presented in a long robe and carrying a bundle, possibly an offering. The scene takes place on the shores of a lake, by two boats. On the opposite side, in the background, there is an encampment composed of at least four shelters, presented in the form of several adjoining slender triangles.

The spear was discovered during excavations in the vicinity of previously studied shamanic sanctuary from the early Mesolithic. According to archaeologists about 9,000 years ago mysterious rituals were performed in this place. Archaeologists have been studying traces of these enigmatic activities since 2012. During that time they discovered, among other things, a meteorite located inside one of the huts, a wooden censer used during rituals, an unusually shaped stick, and even an object is made of birch bark, which is described as a fragment of a ritual mask.

9,000-Year-Old Shaman Sanctuary in Europe

There was a recent discovery in Europe of a 9,000-year-old shamanic sanctuary which shows that there was once a culture very knowledgeable in spiritual working. There are thousands of evidences of shamanism in many places all arround the world, but in European ground ancient shamanism is still a very delicate subject. There are not many findings of shamanism in Europe, and that's why this recent discovery might bring a new light to the knowledge we have about shamanic practices by our European ancestors.

One of the major society figures of the ancient cultures was the shaman, or the person who held the power and the knowledge to communicate with the spiritual world. According to ancient accounts, the practitioners of shamanism helped shape the first human societies. They were both wise and feared by the communities of the ancient world. The role of the shaman was not only being able to commune with the spirits of the land, ancestors, deities and the spirits of the afterlife, but also able to heal both body and soul, curse enemies, cure the land, give good council and basically being the one person everyone went to for all sorts of things. The guide of the community.

This all thing seems something out of a fairy tale; complete fantasy to our modern mind. However, with the help of the human sciences such as Anthropology and Archaeology, we modern humans are getting closer and closer to understand this very delicate subject. So it seems that these people, these shamans of bygone days, were really capable of preforming these wonderful, amazing and also terrible things. The human mind is quite powerful and maybe we have forgotten how to properly use it in some fields of consciousness. This new discovery came to help us understand all these strange facts.

In the year of 2012, archaeologists uncovered an unusual site near Lake Świdwie, in north-western Poland. After analyzing the settlement the team of researchers concluded that it dated back more than 9,000 years ago. One of the most amazing finds in this area consisted in a circular design of approximately six meters in diameter where the foundation of the structures was still visible. A trapezoid-like building with poles, encircled by an arch of rocks aligned at equal distances from each other. Within this ancient design, yew sticks were piercing through the ground so that they formed the shape of the Big Dipper – a fragment of the constellation Ursa Major, also known as The Great Bear. A construction made by our ancestors some time during the end of the Mesolithic Era and the beginning of the Neolithic revolution (dates differ from place to place and it took a good thousand years to spread all over Europe. These were our ancestors who had just found farming, and had begun to settle down in specific places, constructing the first villages, the first communities, and now they also started to have a keen interest in astronomy.

This discovery is unique, because other shaman settlements were only found in Siberia and Mongolia and never so close to European ground. Apparently this structure served as a sanctuary from where the spirit practitioners engaged into rituals and out-of-body experiences which are obviously out of reach from written history, and very difficult for modern science to explain. Pieces of wood used in smoking rituals, bark, herbaceous plants and animal bones presumably used as offerings and for driving off evil spirits before a ritual were also discovered at the site.

A rich collection of different stones were also found inside the sanctuary. Among them were syenite, diorite, granite, quartzite, sandstone, gneiss, and even unusual rocks for the Pomerania area such as red marble and green syenite. These were not picked at random or to only decorate the sanctuary. Such stones had a purpose closely linked to spiritual working. It was also discovered black amber and pumice – an extrusive volcanic rock obtained when molten lava is spit out of a volcano. This is an extraordinary and rich collection of stones, unique among the previously known Mesolithic sites, located both within the vast European Plain, and in the zone of the foothills and highlands. These stones had to be brought to this place. and not only did they came from the surrounding area, but also from distant lands, the best example of which is hornfels, which occurs closest in the Giant Mountains and the Harz Mountains.

The archaeological site later proved to be very rich in items mostly made of wood such as pendants and wood masks used in mystic rituals. Thanks to the favorable conditions of the area, all the unearthed pieces were very well preserved.

This interesting discovery adds another dimension to our written history due to the fact that it proves that shamans once ruled the plains of Europe before pré-christian beliefs and Christianity itself, of course. It also demonstrates that ancient Europeans had knowledgeable advisors who could read the stars, use advanced remedies from nature, and probably a list of other good many things that have been lost to us.

World's oldest wooden statue

Scientists in Germany are ever closer to dating an ancient wooden statue which they say contains secret encrypted codes written around 9,500 years ago - possibly the oldest on the planet (so far). The Shigir Idol, as it was called, is twice as old as the Egyptian pyramids and was preserved as if in a "time capsule" in a peat bog on the western fringes of Siberia. Now Russian experts say the remarkable relic contains encoded information on the 'creation of the world' - a message to modern man from the Mesolithic Era, during the pré-historic time.

German scientists are now close to a precise dating - within five decades - of the remarkable artifact, which is a stunning example of ancient man's creativity. The results are likely to be known in late February or early March, 2015.

The idol, 'scraped' using a 'stone spoon' from larch timber, is around 4,000 to 5,000 years older than Britain's world famous Stonehenge monument. The idol stands 9.2ft (2.8 metres) in height but originally was 17.4ft (5.3 metres) tall, as high as a two storey house.

Almost 6.5ft (2 metres) of the artefact went missing during Russian's 20th century political turmoil, though Siberian archaeologists drew images of all the pieces. It is a unique sculpture, there is nothing else in the world like this. It is very alive, and very complicated at the same time.

The ornament is covered with nothing but encrypted information. People were passing on knowledge with the help of this Idol. While the messages remain an utter mystery to modern man, the Russian academics have said its creators lived in total harmony with the world, had advanced intellectual development, and a complicated spiritual world.

There is a representation of a straight line in this idol, which could denote land, or horizon - possibly the boundary between earth and sky, water and sky, or the borderline between the worlds. A wavy line or zigzag symbolised the watery element, snake, lizard, or determined a certain border. In addition, the zigzag signaled danger, like a pike. Cross, rhombus, square, circle depicted the fire or the sun, and so on. But the marks could have multiple meanings for the ancient statue-makers who gave the idol seven faces, only one of which is three-dimensional.

If these are images of spirits that inhabited the human world in ancient times, the vertical position of figures (one above the other) probably relate to their hierarchy according to the researchers. Images on the front and back planes of the Idol, possibly indicate that they belong to different worlds.

If there are depicted myths about the origin of humans and the world, the vertical arrangement of the images may reflect the sequence of events. Ornaments can be special signs which mark something as significant.

The Mesolithic Lunar Calendar

The other day i have been writing about the Moon and its importance for our ancestors in ancient times and today i came across a very interesting article about an archaeological finding which comes to prove what i have writen, about our ancestors guiding their lifes through the phases of the Moon rather than the Sun as we do today.

We often hear the words Ancient Astronomy, and we quickly associate that with Stonehenge, or the ancient pyramids of Egypt or even the Mayan stone calendars, which isn't incorrect, however a recent discovery in Scotland shows that these type of ancient calendars are from an early period when compared to these new discovery. In Aberdeenshire in Scotland it was found in 2004 ( however only recently after many years of research we know its true secrets ) a very sophisticated calendar construced by the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers living around 10.000years ago, which consists in twelve pits dug into the earth perfeclty aligned with the lunar progression through the year, this enabled people to determine accurately the Moon's progress by moving a marker post along the arc of the pits, interesting to see that the variable depths of these pits enabled people to measure the cycle of each lunar month, the pits themselves were arranged in a shallow arc, possibly trying to symbolize the movement of the Moon, those pits at one end starting small and shallow, then increasing in diameter and depth towards the middle of the arc, before deminishing in zise again at the other end. This arrangement divided each lunar month into three ten day weeks, representing the waxing moon, the period around the full moon, and the waning moon. There is also an alignment of the midsummer solstice, this might helped people "recalibrate" their lunar calendar. The calendar was still in use around 8.000 BC still in the Mesolithic era to around 4.000 BC the early Neolithic, this might had been the calendar that helped people gaining their knowledge to create other astronomical monuments in the late Neolithic era including Stonehenge.

This is a very interesting archeological finding, showing that in this period that was already an astonishing sophistication in these hunter-gatherers, and their everyday life was probably more nocturnal rather than a diurnal life, the opposite of us nowadays.

As I have writen on another post, to these people the nocturnal life would have been easier for them to hunt, or to move from one place to another without being seen by other rival tribes, the phases of the moon marked the time they spend from one place to another, or how many phases of the moon or how many moons whould have to pass to go from a neighboring village and back. As the moon also has an influence in the tides, by knowing its phases and how it moves across the sky, was vital for these people in relying on the sea for their food, people could predict when the tide would be out and when they should coordinate their gathering of crustaceans, seesnails, limpets, clams and other shellfish species, or they would also know when the ocean itself was far less tormented and could go out fishing.

Taking into account the size of this calendar, it was probably consulted by the entire community as it happens in Stonehenge, there might have been the existance of a spiritual leader, a shaman, with special knowledge about the spiritual world, designing and operating the calendar, these spiritual practitioners may have been women, as it was among the Norse/Germanic communities, with their menstrual cycles adhering to the cycle of the Moon.

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