Cheese temples are an abundant, frequently excavated type of Neolithic archaeological site. The rat’s priesthood was clearly far reaching and embraced by millions of devotees (as a protector of children, gamblers, and harvests), and yet effigies of the rat himself are surprisingly rare— whether in the form of priest’s anthropomorphic costumes, or automatons. Recent findings, such as the unrecognizably dismantled automaton in Fig. 1, and a rare depiction of the destruction process in Fig. 2, have indicated that Chucky Cheese’s effigies were almost universally deliberately destroyed.
Fig. 1
While human remains and burial grounds are not typically discovered within or nearby excavated cheese temples, the ritualized destruction of Chucky Cheese’s effigies closely mirrors burial practices in which the skull is broken.
Fig. 2
In the authors’ opinions, this may indicate that the rat’s priesthood symbolically continued to bury their god as they once buried men.