Kiribali leaned forward. 'And then?'
'Now we reach recorded history. Around 8000BC the suffering, sacrifice and violence must have become too much. The local huntergatherers turned on the Northern invaders. They fought back. There was a huge battle. In desperation, the ordinary cavemen slaughtered the last of the invading Northmen, whom they greatly outnumbered. And then they buried all those bodies in a valley, close to the graves of the sacrificed children. Creating one great death-pit-not far from here, from Gobekli. The Valley of Killing.'
'And then they buried the temple!'
Rob nodded. 'And then Gobekli Tepe was interred, laboriously, to hide the shame of this cross-breeding, and to entomb the evil seed. The hunter-gatherers deliberately buried the great temple to eradicate the memory: the memory of the horrors, of the Fall from Eden, of their encounter with evil.
'But the burial didn't work. It was too late. The violent and sacrificial genes of the Northern men had entered the DNA of Homo sapiens. The Gobekli gene was now part of the human inheritance. And it was spreading. Using the Bible and other sources we can actually trace the gene, trace the exiles from Gobekli wandering south, to Sumer, Canaan and Israel; because as they went they spread the genes of sacrifice and violence. Hence the early evidence for sacrifice in these lands. The lands of Canaan, Israel and Sumer.'
'The lands of Abraham,' said Kiribali.
'Yes. The prophet Abraham, born near Sanliurfa, must have been partly descended from the Gobekli Northmen: he was intelligent, a leader, charismatic. And he was also obsessed with sacrifice. In the Bible he was prepared to slay his own son, in obedience to some wrathful god. Abraham was also, of course, the founder of the three great religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The Abrahamic faiths. And Abraham founded these faiths on the folk memory he shared with those around him.
'All these great monotheistic religions spring from the trauma of what happened at Gobekli Tepe. All religions are based on a fear of great angels and a wrathful god: a subconscious and mass recollection of what happened in the Kurdish desert: when powerful and violent beings came amongst us. Significantly, all these religions are still based on the principal of human sacrifice: in Judaism there is the mock fleshly sacrifice of circumcision, in Islam we have the sacrifice of jihad-'
'Or maybe the butchered captives of al-Qaeda?'
'Maybe. And in Christianity we have the repetitive sacrifice of Christ, the firstborn of God, forever dying on the cross. So all these religions are a stress syndrome, a kind of nightmare, in which we constantly relive the trauma of the northern incursions, the time when we humans were cast out of Eden, and forced to give up our life of leisure. Forced to farm. Forced to kiss the phallus. Forced to kill our own children to please the wrathful gods.'
'But, Robert…How do the Yezidi fit in?'
'They are vitally important. Because there are only two sources of knowledge as to what really happened at Gobekli. The first are the Kurdish cultists, the Yarsens, Alevis and the Yezidi. These tribes like to believe they are directly descended from the purebred Gobekli cavemen. They are the Sons of the Jar. The sons of Adam. The rest of humanity, they say, comes from Eve, from the second jar of quarterbreeds and halfbreeds: the jar full of scorpions and snakes.'
'I see…'
'These cultists share many myths about the Garden of Eden. But even to the cultists, what happened at Gobekli is just a vague, frightening memory, of some sneering, birdlike angels that demanded worship. But the hazy folk-memory is potent. This is why the Yezidi, in particular, don't outmarry. They have a mythic fear that they might taint their own bloodline with the traits of the violence and sacrifice they see in wider humanity. In the rest of us. The peoples who carry the Gobekli gene.'
Kiribali was silent, taking this in.
Rob continued. 'The cursed Yezidi also bear a terrible burden. A mortification. They may claim to be pure, but deep down they sense the truth: that some of their forefathers interbred with the evil Northmen, allowing the Northmen to spread the Gobekli gene, and so the ills of the world are essentially their fault. Hence their inhibition, their secrecy, the Yezidis' peculiar sense of shame. Hence also the fact they have not spread far from the temple whence they come. They need to protect it. They still fear that if the truth is ever properly uncovered, and their deeds revealed to the world, they will be exterminated by the rest of humanity, in anger. Their forefathers failed to protect humanity from the Northmen. Their women lay with the Northern demons. Like the horizontal collaborators of occupied France.'
'And this,' Kiribali said, 'would explain their god. The peacock angel.'
'Yes. The Yezidis' knowledge of the truth makes it impossible for them to worship the normal gods. Which is why they worship the Devil, Melek Taus-the Moloch of the child-burnings. A symbolic reworking of the evil supermen, with their birdlike eyes. And for many thousands of years this strange faith and credo was a hidden mystery. The Gobekli gene spread around the world, it had already spread across the Bering Straits into America. But the actual Yezidi secret, the Genesis Secret, was perfectly safe. As long as Gobekli Tepe remained undisturbed.'
'And who was the other source? You said that there were two…wellsprings of knowledge?'
'The secret societies of Europe that arose in the sixteenth century. The Freemasons, and so forth. People intrigued by rumours and traditions, traditions which told of evidence, even documents, which existed in the Near East, and which threatened the historical and theological basis of Christianity, and of religion in general.'
The stars were high now; high and glittering.
'The loucher members of the anti-clerical English aristocracy,' Rob explained, 'were especially intrigued by these rumours. One of them, Francis Dashwood, travelled across Anatolia. What he learned there convinced him that Christianity was a charade. He then established the Hellfire Club, along with other likeminded intellectuals, artists and writers, whose raison d'etre was contempt and derision of established faith.' Rob gazed at the largest of the megaliths, then added, 'But the Hellfires still had no conclusive proof that religion was false or 'wrong'. It was only when Jerusalem Whaley, of the Irish Hellfires, returned from his trip to Israel that the true story of Gobekli became known. In Jerusalem he was given the so-called Black Book, by a Yezidic priest. We do not know why. We do know the book was actually a box: the box you have now, containing the bizarre skull, and a map. The skull was not human. It was a hybrid. The map showed a graveyard near Gobekli Tepe, the graveyard of the evil gods: the Valley of the Slaughter. The priest explained to Whaley the significance of each.'
Kiribali frowned. 'And this significance was?'
'Jerusalem Whaley had, therefore, learned the truth about the descent of Man, and the genesis of religion. He had proved that religion was a charade, a folk memory, a relived nightmare. But he had also discovered something else: that an evil trait has infiltrated itself into the human bloodline, and that this trait gifts its carriers with great talent, intelligence and charisma. It makes them leaders. Yet leaders tend to sadism and cruelty because of this same gene cluster. Jerusalem Whaley only had to look at his own bloodline for proof, especially his brutal father, descended in turn from Oliver Cromwell. In other words, Whaley had discovered an appalling fact: that the fate of man is to be led by the cruel, because sadism and cruelty are linked to the genes that make men intelligent and charismatic leaders. The genes of the Northmen.'
Kiribali went to speak; but Rob stalled him with a gesture; he had nearly finished. 'Shattered by this revelation, Jerusalem Whaley hid the evidence: the skull and the map; the Black Book that Christine and I found in Ireland. And then he retired to the Isle of Man, broken and frightened. He was convinced that the world could not bear the truth-not just that all the Abrahamic religions were based on a falsity, an amalgam of remembered terrors and sacrificial urges-but that all political systems, aristocratic, feudal, oligarchic or even democratic, are bound to produce leaders predisposed to violence. Men who like to kill and to sacrifice. Men who will send thousands over a trench. Men who will fly a plane into a tower of innocents. Men who will clusterbomb a helpless desert village.'
Kiribali regarded him, grimly.
'And so the Hellfires disbanded, and the matter was suppressed. But one family preserved the terrible truth discovered by Jerusalem Whaley.'
'The Cloncurrys.'
'Exactly. The descendants of Jerusalem and Burnchapel Whaley. Rich, privileged and blood-thirsty, the Cloncurrys carried the Gobekli gene. They also passed down the knowledge once given to them by Tom Whaley. This knowledge was the deepest family secret, never to be revealed. If the knowledge was ever broadcast, elites across the world would be overthrown, and Islam and Judaism and Christianity likewise destroyed. It would be apocalyptic. The end of everything. The Cloncurrys' job, as they saw it, was therefore to ensure that this hideous
