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Triquetas and the Ground plan - The ground plan is based on egg shapes and spirals: there is a lobed or kidney-shaped plan found in Mġarr east; a trefoil plan evident in Skorba, Kordin and various minor sites;  and a five-apsed plan Ġgantija South, Tarxien East.

 

The number is significant.  If we take the three lobed plan it is symbolically related to the Triqueta or Trisquela/ Triskela.  In all shamanic lore, including the law of the druids and Celtic races, there are Three Worlds – the upper world, the middle world and the lower world. These worlds are capable of being visited within spiritual experience. Lower Subconscious world travel is via symbolic caves and tunnels, middle Conscious world travel is out-of-body mirror world travel – the world is simply a mirror image of the physical.  The Upper world is the world beyond the soul.  If you see any three part symbol, it signifies that it is a spot where all three worlds are accessible.  If it incorporates the spiral all the better.

Spirals - Spiral reliefs resembling those still visible at Tarxien once adorned the Ġgantija temples, but have faded to a level where they are only clearly recognisable in a series of drawings made by the artist Charles de Brochtorff in 1829, immediately after the temples’ excavation.

Spirals in general represent a portal.  Vortexes of energy can occur within spiritual experiences and are frequently a means of travel from one level or layer to another acting somewhat like a tunnel.  Thus the out-of-body traveller may find himself or herself picked up in one area and dropped in another – all this remember is within the experience. If the sign is placed on a rock or stone a spiral sign can mean that that is the spot where this may happen.  In other words this spot can produce a spiritual experience.

Courts, Forecourt/enclosure - The approach to the temples lies on an oval forecourt, levelled by terracing if the terrain is sloping. The forecourt is bounded on one side by the temples’ own façades, which faces south or south-east. To understand the symbolism of the court, one needs also to understand the symbolism of the Egg – the cosmic egg on which the entire temple design was based.  There is an inner court, an outward court and an inward court symbolically and spiritually speaking.  Thus depending on the layout this meaning may be being employed.  There is also, however, in this mystic movement the concept of the ‘Dance floor’ an area where ecstatic dancing and music took place as part of initiation ceremonies, healing rites and so on.

The Three Worlds and the mountain/Teeth

Teeth, Mountains and Orthostats - The monuments’ façades and internal walls are made up of orthostats, a row of large stone slabs laid on end.   An orthostat is a large stone with a more or less slab-like shape that has been artificially set upright (so a cube-shaped block is not an orthostat). Menhirs and other standing stones are technically orthostats although the term is only used by archaeologists to describe individual prehistoric stones that constitute part of larger structures. In Malta they appear to symbolically be representing ‘mountains’, again an extension of the three worlds system and better understood by looking at the picture.  They are the ‘teeth’ in an enormous mouth that takes you to the other worlds.  [There is a direct correspondence here with cones and triangles as well].

Portals and tunnels - The centre of the façades in the Malta temples is usually interrupted by an entrance doorway forming a trilithon, a pair of orthostats surmounted by a massive lintel slab. Further trilithons form a passage, which is always paved in stone. There are trilithons at other sites such as Stonehenge. They are commonly found in dolmens.

Chambers and apses – Overall, the layout of the temples is connected with the Egg.  For comparative purposes we have provided some ancient maps – Mappi Mundi – spiritual maps of the earth.  Africa, America and Asia are symbolic in a map like this, but as we can see from the chart, the continents correspond to the Elements.  Thus depending on the number of chambers, one could tell whether it was a temple to the Earth, Water, Air, Fire or the Aether levels.

The main variation in the temples lies in the number of apses found; this may vary to three, four, five or six. If three, they open directly from the central court in a trefoil fashion.  Here a person would have been in the Outer court of the symbolic Egg.   In cases of more complex temples, a second axial passage is built, using the same trilithon construction, leading from the first set of apses into another pair, and either a fifth central or a niche giving the four or five apsial form. In one case, at the Tarxien central temple, the fifth apse or niche is replaced by a further passage, leading to a final pair of apses, making six in all.  So from Outer court to Inward court and from there to Inner court, the person was moving symbolically towards the centre of the Egg and thus the Holy of Holies.