Worshiping Goddess in Malta

‘Maybe they were placed as a great mystery to keep people focused on the mysterious.’ (a great quote - I think from Dr. Anton Mifsud)

The Hypogeum, a city of the dead, invited me in, some months ago, and today I want to tell you its story. It is an underground temple that for 1,000s of years, housed around 30,000 departed.

Built more than 5,000 years ago, by an unknown civilisation, this underground marvel consists of halls, chambers and passages, carved within the living rock, and it is huge, it covers some 500m². It was discovered accidentally in 1902, once somebody building a house atop stumbled upon this Neolithic treasure.

In the same way as the womb of the Goddess opens within the temples above the ground, so that you can enter it and emerge through it, on to the other side, re-born, this underground shrine opens its womb to take you in. The chambers are linked and intricately woven within this Sacred Space with many rooms, doorways, passageways, and they invite you into the snake-like stir, before a complete standstill, before you are allowed to enter the land of silence, darkness and stillness from where we all came from.

The Holy of Holies, the Main Chamber, stands at its core. In its shape it mimics the interior of the temples above the ground, built in the same period, as though its solo purpose is to be a mirror expression of another Life cycle.

The main chamber was coloured with red ochre, the colour of blood - the colour of the life stream - and it still echoes this redness. It is in this room that the archaeologists discovered the statuette of the sleeping lady. This huge peaceful woman, made of limestone, invites you to the land of dead, taking you in, through the gates of all-time-utterly familiar state, the state of dreamless sleep. The lady lies on her right side in a yoga position recommended in Tibetan Buddhism as a pose for dieing - with her right hand under her head. Through the dreamless sleep she takes us into the Goddess’s dreams, leading us through the paths of after-life separation from all we’ve known to the entrance of a new world. She lets us die to get reborn again within the wisdom of Her Eternal Stillness.

The next room is called Oracle and its shape is rectangular and within its walls it hides a secret of High Priests of the unknown civilisation. It hides a hole through which a man's voice echoes, amplified, resounding throughout all the other caves. The ceiling of this room is elaborately painted with red spirals repeating to the generations to come messages of cyclical existence.
Within these chambers, the dead were buried in the crouching foetus position as though their bodies are brought back to the womb. A woman buried with her baby in her arms, a boy with his puppy - are all laid with the same care.

A chamber after chamber after chamber, going through this maze, I remembered the story that was written on these walls a century ago with tears of 30 lost children’s mothers’. One of these burial chambers hides a passageway that continues deep into unexplored caverns beyond. It is believed that once upon a time one could walk through the labyrinths and caves from one end of Malta to the catacombs in Rome (this might even be true because the Mediterranean Sea was created after the Neolithic times). In 1940, thirty school children and their teacher on their study tour got lost within the underground passageways of the Hypogeum. The lost children passed through the burial chamber, and a wall collapsed, so that they couldn’t go back. Unwisely, they decided to continue their journey through the passageways hoping to find an exit. Search parties were never able to locate any trace of them. Grieving mothers claimed that for days they could hear their children crying and screaming from under the earth.

Another story narrated at about the same time by an employee of the British Embassy, gives these chambers an aura of a science-fiction movie. She claimed that she crawled through one of the Hypogeum passageways and saw a procession of tall humanoids with white hair covering their bodies from head to toes. Sensing her, these creatures turned towards her lifting their palms sending a strong wind in her direction. At this point she escaped the passageway only to return to the empty room some months later.

Leaving the science-fiction aside both underground and above ground temples are a mystery in its-own right.

A thousand years before the Egyptian pyramids, and four thousand years before Buddha or Christ, a civilization existed that is neither recorded in the Bible nor described in the hieroglyphics of an Egyptian tomb. They left behind twenty five so-far-discovered above the ground temples built with the stones measuring up to 18 meters in height and weighing more than 50 tones.

Having so many temples in such a small space suggests that Malta was a place of pilgrimage and a worshiping centre in early times. I can almost see people from all over the world coming for help, or for spiritual union with the Goddess in all her forms: a young woman sleeping on the stone floor of the Temple to get in touch with her dead lover; silhouettes of people dancing or chanting hypnotically praying for the better crops; circles of bodies, opening like a flower to absorb the healing energy; secluded individuals & priests meditating invoking Her Energies; a pregnant women spending time in the Hypogeum so that the spirit of the dead may protect her new-born; a priest sacrificing animals or fruit worshiping the earth with its manifestations.

The spirals painted in red ochre or carved on the walls reflect the respect for the different expressions of Goddess, for the cycle of life and death, winter and summer, destruction and regeneration.

To live, they did not need weapons (at least we found no trace of them), but many, many worshiping centres, to bury their dead, they carved within the rocks the underground replicas of the above-ground shrines, performed rituals respecting the stages of the after-life, allowing their dead to ‘rest in peace’ in a familiar Goddess’s abode.

All the megalithic Maltese temples and people were hidden, forgotten and ignored for many thousands of years. And yet, this mysterious and advanced civilisation could have been the cradle of all the known civilizations.