Neolithic people surely felt the need to thank someone like a god or goddess for their arrival in Malta and at the same time pray for their survival. They prayed for their survival which means that they prayed for food and water to be in abundance. They also needed to pray to the goddess of Fertility; that is "The Fat Lady". Another thing they needed was a place to pray to their goddess and they needed to please her. So they built the Maltese temples and they offered her sacrifices, animal sacrifices.
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They believed that this goddess could make them live by providing their crops
with water from the rain, heat from the sun, fertile soil and animals and birds for
hunting. But if she was angry with them she would starve them to death.
Thus the Neolithic people wanted to please their goddess by adoring her,
praying and especially by offering her sacrifices. Obviously in order to do
this, they needed to erect temples made up of large boulders and stones called
megaliths and thus the name Megalithic Temples (temple made of large stones). The Shape and Form they gave their Temples: When the archaeologists excavated the Megalithic temples in Malta, they found out that they were made up of a number of semi-circular chambers or apses. Why were these apses or rooms semi-circular in shape? In 1956, some 5600 year-old burial-chambers (caves) were discovered near Xemxija. These community graves were made up of semi-circular niches (apses). If one compares the plan of the oldest temples with a cross-section of the Xemxija tombs, the similarity is obvious. The temple builders could have developed the plan of their 'temples' interior from the grave chambers so that the rituals connected with the dead could be practiced in similar surroundings. The massive outer walls of the temple could have meant to convey the impression of a large burial cave. |
The large Megalithic temples that they built give us EVIDENCE that probably the population was growing fast. This is because such a growing population would surely need such great buildings (temples) since the great number of participants of the ritual would never fit in a small, uncomfortable, and rather inaccessible grave chambers. In the temples, the archaeologists found shrines, animal bones, sacrificial knives made of flint and figures of the fat lady; their goddess of fertility. This gives us evidence that only animal sacrifices were practiced to worship the goddess of fertility. Thus, these early inhabitants of the island did not use their temples as burial places.
As time passed, progress was made in the temples' interior design. The development of the temples' interior design evolved into four-, five- or six- semicircular chambers (or apses). Since often there were three apses in each section of the temple, each section had a Trefoil Shape. Such a design shows a striking resemblance to the outlines (silhouette) of The Fat Lady'; their goddess of fertility. So, while most of our churches have the shape of the cross , which symbolises our God, the temples had the shape of the Fat Lady, which symbolises their god. All this shows the great spirituality of the early Maltese at that time. It also shows us that the temple-builders worked under the orders of the spiritual leaders, priests and very able architects.
One can surely notice that the shape of the temples presents us with a contradiction of Life and Death. This is because the rooms or apses of the temples are in the shape of the pre-historic tombs, which symbolise DEATH; while the shape of the temples are often in the shape of the 'Fat Lady', wich symbolises DEATH.
Finally, it is very important to know that the early Maltese were the first human beings in the world to erect the first ever freestanding monuments/temples in the world. Through this they also provide us with ample evidence of their strong faith in life after death.
