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    Neolithic populations definitely had a religious system more complex than we can understand it today, as shown through discoveries and hypothesis, elaborated in connection to them sometimes incomplete, other times risky. Mysterious places, full of sacred significance, are becoming more and more enigmatic. Only half a kilometre away from the most important sacred place of Europe, Stonehenge, another circular megalithic monument was discovered in October, last year. This discovery appears when in Damerham, situated 24km away from the famous monument, a huge prehistoric ceremonial complex was discovered in June, last year, complex comprising at least 12 circles, a thousand years older than Stonehenge.

    From ancient times, some people, gifted with special “powers” or using magical rituals, have created and limited sacred places, which usually were under the shape of a circle. The circle is dynamic, it expresses perfection; it is a symbol of equilibrium, of eternal returning, of the cycle found in nature under the presence of seasons, days, phases of the moon, being found even at cellular level. People who abandoned their old protecting deities of the hunter and the game, started worshiping deities protecting the fields and fertility, in particular, all related to their new occupations.





The snake, going underground for hibernation near the autumnal equinox and reappearing above-ground near spring equinox and together with the rebirth of vegetation, overlapped its biological cycle on the annual astronomical cycle of the Sun. Considered the main symbol of cyclical regeneration of nature, of vital force, of welfare and fertility, but also looked at with fear, as death bringing poisonous animal, the snake is a component of the Neolithic pantheon, represented, like the Great Goddess, by the form of the Snake Goddess. The main symbol for the snake is the spiral, about which Vasile Parvan stated that it has its real origin in Dacia. J. Deshayes mentioned that the spiral appeared in Lower Danube, in the 4th millennium, from where it migrated, in the course of 2,000 years, to the Peloponnesus, to Crete, Egypt and Mesopotamia. Recent data position the appearance of the spiral, as symbol of the snake, in the Superior Palaeolithic, in the space between the Carpathians and the Danube, the snake being endemic in this area. On a piece of bone discovered at Mitoc, county of Botosani, Romania, and dated to 27th millennium BC, an entire geometrical encyclopaedia, among which a spiral, was scratched.



    Less than 5 km away from the place where The Thinker and the Woman Sitting, the two figurines that are among the oldest and the most beautiful examples of human artistic manifestation, were found, on the Danube bank, where the people of the Hamangia Culture used to live, a huge sanctuary was discovered in March last year, sanctuary representing the biggest concentration of solar symbols from Europe. The sanctuary from Seimeni is composed of 59 disks having their diameters of 20 metres. Some are so close one to another that they touch, others are separated by “lanes” that may be walls, up to 4 metres in thickness. In the middle, on one of the disks, a spiral can be noticed which aggregates towards the point from the middle of the disk, forming a ramp, having at its base more than 8 metres in width and which, getting narrower towards the interior, captures the entire energy of the spirit that feeds the matter, propelling it towards the encounter with the deity. The disks have a different rigidity from the earth around them, fact that can be noticed in the areas with land slides, the disks keeping their flat form even where the land slides. Actually, the entire village of Seimeni slides towards the Danube everglade, the last land slide, from 2005, destroyed the connection road between the localities of Dunarea and Seimeni, road that at present is still impracticable.
    In the sanctuary from Seimeni, motifs representing three cultures are present: Cult of the Sun – the disk, the Cult of the Great Goddess, in the form of the Snake Goddess – the spiral and the Cult of Water – the Danube. Until the discovery of this sanctuary there was no concrete archaeological evidence to confirm the existence of a powerful cult and of a numerous sacrificer class, structured on hierarchic ranks. The placement of the sanctuary at the height of 85 metres, on a hogback, does not allow the performance of rituals hidden away from the eyes of the uninitiated and the construction of fences around the sanctuary would have been useless – the surface of the sanctuary, inclined towards the base of the hill, is perfectly visible from the bank of the Danube and from the higher places. The 59 disks have the surface of approximately 20,000 square metres and in case the disks would have been used as base for the performance of various activities, more than 1,000 persons would have been involved. And this under the circumstances when the disks noticeable today, would represent just a part from the total of disks that composed the sanctuary. To build scores of disks, all of them having the diameter of exactly 20 metres, would imply a great effort and a good organisation. In case the disks would be built of limestone blocks and the disks would be 1 metre thick, only the construction of the disks noticeable today would imply a mass of blocks of 50,000 tonnes. The rocks would be transported on wooden sledges from 26 km, from the quarries near the locality of Medgidia.
    The discovery of the ceremonial complex from Seimeni is not a singular case. Almost 25 km away from Seimeni, on the south-east limit of the locality of Mireasa, another sanctuary was discovered in April, the current year, sanctuary that presents 4 disks with 26 m in diameter, placed and divided similarly to those from Seimeni. Also in April, other three sanctuaries were discovered at 70 km from Seimeni, near the localities of Vartop and Albesti, on the shore of the Black Sea. Among the 13 disks of the sanctuaries, there are two that have the diameter of 28 metres, representing the biggest disks discovered so far in the area between the Carpathians and the Danube. On a straight line of 75 km, there are five sanctuaries, representing the clearest and the most suggestive solar motif – the disk. The smaller sanctuaries from Mireasa, Vartop and Albesti would have served for performing current rituals and at certain intervals, once a year, a bigger ritual would have been performed at Seimeni.

    No historical data are explicit when referring to the solar character of the Getan-Dacian religion. The character of urano-solar god of Zamolxis is suggested by the lack of roofs from the Dacian temples, the god was idolized on mountain tops (Kogaion), through the funeral ritual (cremation suggests the elevation to the sky together with the smoke), through the ritual of sending a messenger to Zamolxis, messenger that was thrown up just to fall down on spears, believing to reach the god not as shadows, but as a body (the body was impeded from dieing, keeping a connection with the earth and after the offering, the body was burnt).

    The andesite solar disk from Sarmisegetuza suggests the sun. Nevertheless, as Mircea Eliade wrote, a detail seems to be important for Strabon: the fact that Zamolxis – just like Deceneu - accomplished a prodigious career especially due to his astronomical and mantic knowledge. In the 6th century AD, but being helped by older data, Iordanes, described in extravagant terms the Dacian priests’ interest in astronomy and natural sciences. The emphasis on the knowledge of the planets can suggest exact information. The temples from Sarmisegetuza and Costesti, where the urano-solar symbolism is evident, seem indeed to have a calendar function.

    Mircea Eliade wrote about the Thracians: according to Herodotus, the Thracians worshiped Ares, Dionysus and Artemis; nevertheless their kings worshiped Hermes, whose descendants believed to be. As about Hermes, who, according to Herodotus, was adored exclusively by kings, meaning the military aristocracy, is difficult to identify. Herodotus does not make any remarks about the solar god, although such a god is plentifully certified by other sources (R. Pettazzoni, The Religion of Ancient Thrace). One could see in Thracian Hermes a solar deity. A few centuries later, the monuments called monuments of the hero knight are spreading in the Balkans; and the Hero-Knight is identified with Apollo. Nevertheless, it is a later idea that does not clarify at all the royal theology mentioned by Herodotus.

    The cult of the Thracian Dionysus reminds of the ceremonies performed during the night, in the mountains, at torchlight, under a wild music (noises of percussion on bronze pots and reed pipes) urging the believers to happily scream and to dance in a circular, furious dance. Women in particular dedicated themselves to these erratic and exhausting dances; their costumes were strange, they were wearing bessares, flowing long clothes made of fox skins; on top of these, deer skins and on their heads, probably horns. They were holding in their hands snakes dedicated to Sabazios (Thracian name for Dionysus), daggers and maces. Reaching paroxysm, sacred madness, they were grabbing the animals chosen as offering and were ripping them to pieces, tearing them and eating their flesh. Ritual omophagia was completing their identification with the god; the participants were now called Sabos or Sabazios.

    Human’s accomplishing a magical space is not limited to a ritual drawing of a circle on the ground or on the floor. One of the “methods” of creating a sacred space is to dance in circle. Even from the Neolithic, the “hora” (round dance) was born, which at origin was a sacred ceremony when the dancers surrounded a magical circle, around a mystic centre, a “axis mundis”, a belly button of the earth. The big statues made of quartz, decorated with concentric motifs, circles, spirals were “dancing a hora”, even from the 7th millennium BC, around the fireplace of the Mesolithic locality discovered at Lepenski Vir.

    Nicolae Iorga proved that the hora phenomenon represents a reminder of an ancient magical ritual of ascension to the sky that was performed throughout the entire Dacia even from the Palaeolithic era. The ritual, called Kolabrismos, or a Kolo, was an esoteric hora, during the dance people became brothers, forming a magic-ritual brotherhood. There are few data regarding the Thracian Kolo, but we can complete them with what we know about the current hora.

    In the Britannica Encyclopaedia we can find the following definition: Kolo derives from the ancient Slavonian name of the word wheel. Kolo was probably danced for the worshiping of the Sun, long before the arrival of the Slavs in the Balkan Peninsula. The Thracian Kolo gave the Hora to the Romanians, the Kolesca to the Serbs, the Horo to the Bulgarians, the Korovad to the Russians and the Choros to the Greeks. From the initial Kolabrismos, two types of Hora evolved: the circle closed type and the open type which has more versions; the spiral open type hora still exists at the Macedoromanians, as well as at the Dacoromanians from Banat and Oltenia, loosing however its magical character. It is assumed that this hora is the closest to the initial archaic ritual.

    It has been established that on the territory of Dacia, the Hora phenomenon is present even from the era of the Cucuteni Culture (3,700 – 2,500 BC), the last great culture of painted ceramics from Europe. The discovery from Bodesti-Frumusica of a representation on ceramics of a hora of six women, belonging to this Culture, would certify the fact that on the territory of Romania, a cult of the magic spiral existed before that existing in India, Tibet and China.

    On the crest of a hill situated on the Istru River bank, in the sanctuary from Seimeni, thousands of women are dancing, woven as many as 30, 40 and dancing inside immense circles. There are dozens of hora. They are spinning in a frantic joy, and then they break into spirals, getting closer to the middle of the disks and then expanding into circles again, reaching the borders.
    They can dance in the mysterious moonlight, worshiping Dionysus. But just as well they can dance 2,000 years ago, enjoying the warm touch of the Sun, thanking him for the plentiful crop.


All my gratitude and consideration goes to Mr. Iordan Stavar, Director Worldwide Independent Inventors Association – Washington D.C., Platform Coordinator www.inventatori.ro, www.worldwideinvention.com, and www.inventions-license.com. Without the constant support and confidence, these findinas would not have reached readers interested.