Temples of Sound: Capturing an Ancient Rhythm

by Sharon Nichols and photographs by Beth Blis, March 04, 2009

 

 

I tread these ancient timeworn tracks / memorials to the syntax of this land / probe the molten silence of this place / and sense its pulse beat in the air / the call of man’s ancestral dreams / haunts the shelter of these stones / while shriveled leaves from borrowed skies / fall beneath the voids of emptiness
—FROM MALTESE POET RICHARD ENGLAND’S “THIS HOLY EARTH”

Long before the raising of Stonehenge, the megalithic temples of Malta took their place on the landscape. Considered the earliest free-standing monuments of stone in the world, they are older still than the Pyramids of Egypt. Built between 3800 and 2500BCE by a flourishing agrarian society, these buildings were “life centers”—gathering places for trade, festivals, rituals, and astronomical observation. It is said that they were built as shrines to the Great Goddess, and for some individuals a deep interest lies in the strange, inherent musical beat of this place, for it has a pulse of the Mysteries.

Local guitar virtuoso Lorah Yaccarino began pilgrimages to sacred sites throughout the Mediterranean over a decade ago after learning about healing the body with sound, reading books such as Kay Gardner’s Sounding the Inner Landscape. Yaccarino’s first trip to Malta was in 1992, and she set out for a profound experience.

“I wanted to find ways to incorporate my new philosophies into my art,” she says. “I had read about the temples in Malta, how a university team of scientists with ultrasensitive sound equipment had picked up pulses on some of the altar stones at certain temples during the summer solstice. They did a bunch of studies at the stone circles in England, too, but in Malta they actually picked up a pulse rhythm off one of the stones.”

Yaccarino had her Sony Walkman with her when she visited the various sites, one in particular being Ggantija, or “The Giant,” which stands on a hill on the Maltese island of Gozo. It’s a mother-daughter complex, huge stone forms shaped like female figures with temple rooms inside. It was here that Yaccarino placed her Walkman on the stones. She got a surprise when she returned to her hotel room that night.