Is Angelik Caruana a prankster? Can plaster statues weep tears of cooking oil? Does the Virgin Mary really swoop down on Birżebbuġa every Wednesday to tell us that the internet is evil and causes earthquakes? Was it nine or 10 demons that last sumo-wrestled the seer to the ground?
Such are the questions I might ask if I were interested in poking fun at the phenomenon of Is-Sinjura ta’ Borġ in-Nadur. But I’m not, definitely not after having seen for myself the other day.
The place certainly oozes atmosphere, no quibbles about that. I ended up asking a very non-Maltese-looking couple for directions. “Follow us,” they said, “we come from England several times a year just for this.”
Caruana may be an irrational guy, but I doubt anyone will ever travel from England for my rational lectures – it’s effort enough to get students to make Monday mornings.
Gloomy thoughts aside, I eventually joined the couple-of-hundred-strong crowd on the little hilltop overlooking Birżebbuġa and settled down to an evening of people-watching. Mostly women-watching actually since it seems the majority of is-Sinjura’s followers share her gender (which is not to say there weren’t the odd few dozen men around). I also spotted one or two anthropologists hopelessly trying to blend in – but I won’t further spill the beans on my colleagues.
It didn’t take me very long torun out of cynicism and snidesoliloquies. The reason was partly the very comfy cushion handed to me by a kind lady, partly the magic of the event.
There was a minute of special intensity when Caruana, arms outstretched and apparently in some kind of trance, turned to face the crowd. Right at that very moment a flock of screaming swifts swooped down low over the place. “Sinjal, sinjal”, the murmur went, and I could see why. To get all hard-nosed and scientific would be so miserably to miss the point.
There was something else too. The whole do happens at a major archaeological site. Borġ in-Nadur manages to cram, within a few hundred square metres, a 5,000-year-old Tarxien-period temple and a Bronze Age fortified village from around 1000 BC. If I figured correctly, the actual ‘visions’ take place right on a mound of spoils moved by A.A. Caruana’s excavations in 1880.
Which brings me to two things. First, the seductive power of continuity. When you spend an evening in a place that has been sanctified with 5,000 years of ritual, you stop fretting about false prophets and the consistency of soya bean oil.
Time itself seems to warp when you think that generations separated by a historical gulf continue to search for much the same thing – an encounter with a special woman – on the very same hill.
The second point concerns the ways in which we seek to understand, and to some extent relive,our archaeological past. I’ve justfinished reading a book calledAn Archaeology of the Senses by Robin Skeates, who argues that our appreciation of temples and such is primarily visual and architectural.
That is to say, the way these sites are presented is a banquet to the eye but something of a ploughman’s lunch to the other senses. We are seldom encouraged to touch the stones, to experience them within the context of the smells and sounds they would have existed in so many years ago. It’s all a bit like going to church without the incense, the singing, and the feel of old pews.
What Skeates tries to do is bring back some of the magic. It’s risky business and archaeologists of the strait-laced school will cry foul,but the result is no less fascinating for that.
The book combines scholarly rigour with flights of fancy for the senses. What might worship atMnajdra have felt like on a summer night, when the southern cliffs come alive with the cries of breeding shearwaters?
It seems Malta is well-placed for this ‘full-bodied’ study of the past. In his TLS review of Skeates’s book, Cambridge archaeologist Simon Stoddart says that Malta “benefits from arguably the richest three-dimensional archaeology in the world... if a feeling for the prehistoric past can be achieved at all, prehistoric Malta might provide anopening”.
Which brings me back toCaruana. I suspect, and archaeologists will lynch me for this, that Skeates would have benefited from a Wednesday visit or two to Borġin-Nadur. It’s not the stones themselves that matter as much as their setting within a landscape which, in this case, probably hasn’t changed all that much.
It’s one thing to look at glossy pictures of the site or to be bundled there in a tourist van, another to walk up the hill. This is what is-Sinjura’s followers do every week and it is also what the temple-builders did 5,000 years ago (no gloss or vans back then).
To get to the place, one has to cross a tiny valley and then walk up a fairly steep slope to the mound itself. The sensation of moving vertically upwards is not a clinical one. Rather like the spires of a Gothic cathedral, it uplifts the spirit. The light, too, is particular: One emerges from the gloomy shade of the valley and slope to the bright afternoon light of the hilltop. It is a sudden and movingpassage that has hints of ritual anticipation about it.
Stoddart’s optimism about Malta may be well-founded. Beyond the “three-dimensional richness” of our archaeological heritage there’s also the fact that some of these sites are still used for ritual purposes. Armed with a stash of imagination and a shield against the slings and arrows of traditional archaeology, it may well be possible literally to relive the past.
The hope is that Caruana will take his show places. Is-Sinjura ta’ Ħaġar Qim... now wouldn’t that be a fine day for archaeology?
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