The House of the Giantess

The Island of Gozo has a story about its megalithic temple; the clue is in the name 'Ggantija,' the giantess. Tales tell of how one such titan lived on Gozo, her diet being of broad beans and honey. She bore a child by one of the human men of the island, and built the temple with her bare hands, child sat upon her shoulder.

I found the story reassuring, because it depicts a female artist/builder as opposed to yet another fertility goddess. Maybe prehistoric societies were intrigued by genitals, but their interest pales beside the obsessions of 19th/20th century researchers. I can see how periods and pregnancies might have seemed magical, but surely it's possible that priests and potters occasionally thought about something else. The idea of Woman as Embodiment and Man as Agency, that women are while men do remains, however insidiously. A female artist friend mentioned how she was told her artistic drive was a male characteristic, a 'trans man' part of her psyche. New bottle, new label, but some of this wine is very old. Fortunately, the giantess is older, her temple standing millennia before the pyramids rose.

When we visited, the Ggantijan temple complex seemed thoroughly de-magicked by heat and scaffolding but the art held me. Fertility my patootie! What they loved was food, more food, and sitting around probably contemplating their next meal.






How they loved their sofas! How they dripped in luxurious fat! How strange their haircuts were! The Sleeping Lady was the best example with her Max Wall coiffure and divan seeming to creak beneath her weight.





She was of their time and people, but not of here. She slept nearby in a place of stranger magic.

They might be Morlocks

The Hypogeum at Ħal Saflieni sits under streets and cisterns and modern houses. It was discovered as part of a building development right at the start of the 20th century. Even if they allowed cameras, it is not photogenic, one will get little understanding of it from images in a guide book. But the Hypogeum is the most extraordinary Neolithic site I have ever 'felt,' barring one occasion at Stone Henge best kept to myself.

6000 years and counting, the culture that created it does not have a name. People talk about the Maltese Temple Building Culture, but we have no clue what they called themselves. They came, they built, they disappeared. When Bronze Age Settlers came to Malta they found an empty land.

The Hypogeum is an underground necropolis, though the hundreds, some say thousands, of bones found there have been removed. The practice seems to have been as follows: a corpse would be laid in a foetal position, apparently covered with red ochre. It would be left to rot in an outer area, then when the bones were bare, they would be hauled inwards to one of the chambers to join others in mass graves. The crafters built even as the bodies rotted around them; and how straight and clear were their walls, their outlines, their curves, formed with nothing more than stone tools and antlers! The walls were decorated with red ochre loops and spirals, honeycomb patterns kinetic in firelight.

I was not afraid, not in the realm of these long lost carvers, these artists and architects and engineers and musicians; one part seems specifically carved out to create acoustic resonance. Once someone chanted here to fill this space, it is thought at a pitch too deep for most women to reach. I wanted to do it though! To do it properly, unlike the idiot lady trying to entertain her little son with loud 'Huh!' sounds into the stone, the magician in my head thinking 'Do not call up what you can't put down!' But I wanted to sing there, if Covid and the fragile micro-climate didn't make that a twattish thing to do.

So I put my ego away for a short while.

It may not have been just a place of care for the dead; looks as though when it was above ground, the most seemingly sacred room may have been illuminated by the light of the winter solstice. They were astronomers and mathematicians too, these people.

And yet to have no name? No written language, no signal that lasts beyond the immediate word? How could that be? How could they have all this and yet no way of recording themselves?

I don't believe it. To chart the skies, to remember the dead, to work on this place for hundreds of years, to scrape and chisel strong clean lines patiently and yet to write nothing down? How does one calculate without symbols?

Received wisdom indicates that writing emerged in the worlds's Bronze Age, but I cannot believe that these intellects just didn't bother beyond immediate instruction, that it was all verbal and memorised.

And this is a thing, an excitement I cannot convey. The presence of ghosts? Dunno. The presence of intelligence? Everywhere, everywhere. And yes it feels like something is watching. But a lot of this comes down to sympathetic lighting, including one very strange moment when beyond us it looked as though tall shadows loomed from an inner wall.

'That's us,' said R.

'Then why aren't they moving?' I replied, jigging up and down and side to side. The shadows stayed still. The lights went out, we turned away, the audio guide moved us on, helped by the real guide.

Stories about the Hypogeum abound. The most famous has to be the genuine discovery of strange elongated skulls among the many, leading to Ancient Alien/Serpent Priest conspiracy theories. The skulls aren't on public display right now, but binding/trepanning type practices were hardly unknown in Neolithic societies. Still, doesn't it make the Indiana Jones in your blood spark up?

Then there was Lois Jessup's story from 1940, of the lady begging a guide to let her pop down and have a look in some part of the complex. She talked about finding herself faced with a procession of exceptionally tall humanoid figures, all covered with white hair, as well as something slippery that seemed to brush past her, The humanoids lifted their hands when they noticed her, and a strong wind blew her candle out. Panic stricken she ran back. She got very involved in Ufology after that. There was also a story of a school group going down a week later, never to be seen again, though in true Village of the Damned style, their parents could hear their voices calling up out of the earth, begging for help.

I was struck by her humanoids' resemblance to the Morlocks of H.G. Wells' story, The Time Machine. He described a morlock as 'this bleached, obscene, nocturnal thing,'... The story was written in 1895, so she might have read it. Assuming the presence of a flickering candle, the effect of the swirling patterns on the roof and walls, the possible nearness of skeletons, the experience might have induced a kind of swoon or fit, or even self hypnosis. Or she could be mad. Or lying. Or hysterical. Or...

No, I am not worried about the Morlocks of Malta. But I confess, if someone gave me a chance to go exploring the Hypogeum and beyond I would probably take it. There must, must be some form of written communication somewhere. I cannot believe in the eternal silence of the megalith builders. It is said that the island is honeycombed, that you could walk from one end to the other underground, though the government sealed off many passages long ago.

But still... who could resist it? All it needs is a little tech and derring-do. What's the worst that could happen?