-Caveat Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/"> </A> -Cui Bono?- Gateway to the Gods - New Approach to Mysteries of Egypt -Picknett & Prince 2/2 http://www.templarlodge.com/stargate.html#Ancient Egypt, Mars & ET's But first, it is worth considering how we tend to think people learn new skills. We normally think that there are only two ways - whether we're talking about an individual or a civilisation. Either we work it our for ourselves by experimentation or trial and error, or somebody else (who has already worked it out) teaches us. This is, in a nutshell, the problem of the anomalous sophistication of ancient Egypt (and many other ancient civilisations). There is no archeaological evidence of a process of gradual development of these skills. So logically we have to invoke the second method, and assume that they were taught these things, either by a lost civilisation or by ancient astronauts. But what if there is a third way to acquire knowledge? On an individual level, we know that there is: inspiration. But can this work for an entire culture, and if so what would be the mechanism behind it? Is there any evidence for such a thing? There is. And it is something that is happening today. During our research we came across the ground-breaking work of a Swiss anthroplogist named Jeremy Narby, who in 1995 wrote a book called, in English, The Cosmic Serpent, DNA and the Origins of Knowledge. About fifteen years ago, Narby was studying the indigenous people of the Peruvian Amazon, and became fascinated by their astounding botanical knwowledge, specifically their use of plants for medical and other purposes. What intrigued him most was how these supposedly primitive people had acquired this knowledge. Since they have no science in the sense that we understand it, they must have learned how to make their medicines by trial and error. But there are some 80,000 species of plants growing in the Amazon rain forest, so to discover an effective remedy using just two of them would theoretically require the testing of every possible combination - just under four billion. But many of their medicines involve not just two plants, but several. If they had found their recipes by experimentation, it would have taken millions of years to find just a few, and yet they have a vast range of medicines and other useful substances. Added to this, preparation of many of them involve long and complex processes with many stages. The classic example is curare. This is a powerful poison whose ingredients come from several different plants, and which, Narby points out, fits a very precise set of requirements. The hunters needed something that, when smeared on the tips of blow-pipe darts, would not only kill an animal but also ensure that it does not tighten its death-grip on a branch and die out of reach (as often happens with animals killed by arrows). And the meat would have to be safe to eat. It seems like a very tall order - but curare fits all these requirements perfectly. It is a muscle relaxant, which kills by arresting the respiratory muscles. It is only effective when injected directly into the bloodstream, hence its delivery by blowpipe, and has no effect when taken by mouth. The most common type of curare requires a complicated method of preparation in which the extracts of several plants are boiled together for three days, during which lethal fumes are given off. And the final result needs a specific piece of technology - the blow-pipe - to deliver it. How was all this discovered? The problem becomes even more baffling, because no fewer than forty different types of curare are used in the Amazon rain forest. All do the same job but use slightly different ingredients, because the same plants do not grow in every region. Therefore, in effect, curare was invented forty times. After puzzling about such questions for a long time, Narby realised that the best way to find an answer was to ask the Amazonians themselves. So how do they claim to have discovered curare - and all the other plants-derived substances that they use? In fact, they take no credit for them. They claim that all were given to them by the spirits through their shamans. Shamans have existed throughout the world, especially in tribal societies. They are what used to be called witch doctors, especially talented and highly trained trance psychics, who use their gifts to heal, locate the best hunting and find water in times of drought. In short, they help to solve the problems of the tribe, and help it survive. The shaman does this by going into trance, which can be induced in a variety of ways, from whirling, drumming and dancing, to taking psychoactive drugs derived from plants or mushrooms. Those studied by Narby in Peru achieve their trance by ingesting a plant mixture called ayahuasca, which mimics a substance found naturally in the human brain and which, in large doses, is a powerful hallucinogen. When in trance, the shaman's spirit goes on a journey to another realm, in which he faces horrible dangers. But once he has overcome his adversaries he communicates with superior intelligences, who often appear in the form of animals, who answer his questions. As in fairy tales, the spirits only answer the questions they are asked - they seldom, if ever, volunteer extra information. So, if the shaman asks them how to cure a little village girl's meningitis, they will give him that information - but they will not also tell him how to cure her mother's cancer unless he specifically asks. And that may involve another trip. This is what the Amazonians told Jeremy Narby about how they know the properties of plants and how to combine them. But they also claim that this is how they learned of specific techniques, such as woodworking and weaving - in fact, all the arts and crafts necessary for survival. We must stress that the Amazonians' knowledge of pharmacology (plant-derived drugs and their potential and actual uses) is not just surprising for what are considered primitive peoples, but actually exceeds that of modern Western science. Many modern medicines were taken from those used in the Amazon - curare, for example, is used in heart surgery. Even the giant drug companies do not have the ability to develop products to meet specific requirements as quickly, easily - and naturally - as the Amazonian shamans can. This is, in fact, an exact analogy for the problem posed by the ancient Egyptians' anomalous knowledge of, for example, highly sophisticated constructon techniques. Although they are two very different fields of knowledge, the basic problem in accounting for the knowledge is exactly the same. Could it be that the ancient Egyptians acquired the knowledge of how to build pyramids the shaman's way - by asking the great spirits directly? It might be thought that it is just too big a step from brewing up potions to designing and building one of the world's largest and most enduring buildings, but Jeremy Narby pointed out to us that in some ancient American civilisations both skills existed side by side. The Aztecs, Incas and Maya constructed comparable temples to those of Egypt, and attributed their knowledge of how to build them to their gods. But they also maintained that the gods had also taught them other arts, such as the use of plants for healing, and astronomy. So there is a direct analogue for the mysterious knowledge of, and evidence of advanced technology in, ancient Egypt - in something that is happening today. So could the Heliopolitan religion have been based on a form of shamanism? It is instructive to look at the experiences of anthropologist Michael Harner among the Conibo Indians of the Peruvian Amazon in the 1960s. He took the shamans' hallucinogenic drink and later wrote: 'For several hours after drinking the brew I found myself, though awake, in a world literally beyond my wildest dreams. I met bird-headed people, as well as dragon-like creatures who explained that they were the gods of this world.' Bird-headed people. Doesn't this remind us of the ibis-headed god Thoth and the hawk-headed Horus? The Egyptians had many animal-headed gods, including the fearsome lioness-headed Sekhmet and the jackal-headed Anubis. Do they all live through the stargate of shamanic vision? In the Pyramid Texts there are many passages that are an exact parallel for the shamanic experience. In the Pyramid Texts we read how the King, who is identified with Osiris, must face terrifying ordeals, similar to the myth of the god himself, in which he was cut into pieces by the evil god Set, later to be reassembled and brought back to life by his sister-wife Isis. This is virtually identical to the classic shamanic experience in which the shaman is hacked to pieces and magically reassembled before ascending into the spirit world. Jeremy Narby made a study of shamanism all over the world, and found many common themes in shamanic visions. A major example is that of snakes or serpents being bringers of wisdom. This is found even in cultures living in regions where there are no snakes. Another common theme is that of the divine twins, also as bringers of wisdom. Narby points out that the Aztec word 'coatl', as in the name Quetzalcoatl, means both 'snake' and 'twin'. This reminds us of the two sets of twins in the Heliopolitan pantheon - Isis and Osiris, and Nephtys and Set. Another central element common to shamanism all over the world is that of a ladder joining Heaven and Earth, which the shaman ascends to meet the spirits of wisdom. As Narby says: 'They talk of a ladder, or a vine, a rope, a spiral staircase, a twisted rope ladder, that connects Heaven and Earth and which they use to gain access to the world of spirits. They consider these spirits to have come from the sky and to have created life on Earth.' Significantly, the same imagery is found in the Pyramid Texts. For example, speaking of Isis as the personification of the ladder, it says: 'As for any spirit or any god who will help me when I ascend to the sky on the ladder of the god; my bones are assembled for me, my limbs are gathered together for me, and I leap up to the sky in the presence of the god of the lord of the ladder.' Ascension to the Milky Way is a central theme of the Pyramid Texts. The fact that Isis is personified as the ladder is interesting because it brings up the whole question of the role of women in shamanism. We have been saying 'he' whenever we have talked about shamans, because virtually all of them are men. We were at a conference in London about four years ago at which Jeremy Narby was speaking. During question time, one of the audience asked why he hadn't mentioned female shamans. He replied that womens' place in this is very interesting. In the Amazonian shamanic rites he had witnessed, the shaman takes ayahuasca, goes into trance, and then goes off on his otherwordly flight. But next to him is a woman, and she accompanies him on his journey, experiencing exactly the same visions that he experiences. It is her job to make him recall them when he returns, because shamans often forget their experiences. But she does this without touching ayahuasca. How can the women do this without recourse to artificial means - the drug? It appears that certain women find the shamanic experience comes to them quite naturally. We don't know the details of this, because in tribal societies the men's mysteries and the women's mysteries are kept strictly apart. Until recently, the vast majority of Western anthropologists have been male, so if they were let in on any secrets it was the male ones. As a result, the literature on female shamanism is virtually non-existent. The fact that Isis plays this role in the Pyramid Texts suggests that women played an important part in Egyptian shamanism - and we know that there were female priests at Heliopolis. It is generally accepted as fact that the Pyramid Texts describe the afterlife journey of the King, but there is much internal evience that this is simply not so - or rather that they do not exclusively describe an afterlife journey at all. We believe that they actually describe the classic out-of-the-body flight of the shaman, who is, significantly, often regarded as physically dead while in his trance, in which he visits the world of the dead. The gods and monsters encountered in the Pyramid Texts are strikingly similar to those described across the world by tribal shamans. There are many ways for shamans to become entranced, which include whirling, dancing, drumming and pushing the mind and body beyond the limit through induced pain. All of these techniques produce some form of altered state of consciousness, perhaps hallucinations, certainly an apparent physical deadness and mental and spiritual alertness. But it must be said that the most favoured way of inducing shamanic trance is through the use of psychoactive drugs. Jeremy Narby spent a lot of time researching the shamans of the Amazonian rain forest, in particular their use of ayahuasca. Narby himself took ayahuasca and, although at first it made him violently sick, he then entered into the sacred trance state, where he had a particularly significant vision. He encountered two giant serpents who talked with him. They told him that he was 'only a human being', which humbled him. He later said that they induced thoughts that he wasn't then capable of having himself. All of this made him examine his Western arrogance and preconceptions about life and humanity's place in the scheme of things, which led directly to him writing his ground-breaking book. As we will see, the serpents are very important. For now, suffice it to say that Narby's own experience showed that the shamanic state can provide otherwise inaccessible knowledge and an entirely different way of looking at things. We asked Narby whether he thought that his theory about the shamanic acquisition of knowledge could apply to ancient Egypt. He replied that he was reluctant to comment on this, as it was outside his area of specialism, but he did suggest that if we could establish that they used drugs for sacred purposes, this would make a strong connection with the shamanic cultures. To be honest we didn't know then whether such drugs were used in ancient Egypt, but by an amazing piece of synchronicity virtually the next day there was a Channel 4 programme in the Sacred Weeds series about the possible use of the blue waterlily as a psychoactive drug in ancient Egypt. In fact, it has long been recognised that the blue lily was important to the Egyptians, because it was depicted in many wall paintings and papyri. It even forms the design of the pillars of the Temple of Karnak. Egyptologists believe that it was so popular simply because it is very pretty. There are many pictures of virtually naked young ladies in party settings with blue lilies stuck - often a bit askew - into their headdresses or belts. In fact, the blue lily is so often associated with party scenes that some researchers were led to wonder if they were, in fact, not merely pretty, but recreational drugs. The programme set out to test the properties of the blue lily and, yes, it does have a psychoactive effect, although Channel 4 erred on the side of caution and only used a very mild dose on its volunteers. However, we have every reason to believe that the ancient Egyptians probably had no such scruples. At the end of the programme, one of the contributors, the historian Michael Carmichael, said that in larger quantities the blue lily could be used to induce shamanic trances. It is, perhaps, significant that the blue lily was sacred to Atum, the god of Heliopolis. We contacted Michael Carmichael and discussed the whole subject. He said that the ancient Egyptians are known to have used many drugs, includinbg opium, mandrake and cannabis. Carmichael had made a specific study of all this, but had not heard of Jeremy Narby's work, although he had come to virtually the same conclusions about the acquisition of knowledge while in shamanic trance. We ought to say at this point that we are not in any way encouraging drug taking. It must be pointed out that shamans are highly trained and experienced in their techniques. Don't think that we can just take some drug or another and we'll all have extraordinary shamanic visions. We won't. We'll get very ill, perhaps suffer psychological problems, and maybe even die. There are no shortcuts to enlightenment. And there are other dangers apart from the physical ones. Not all the entities encountered in visions are benevolent. Many are tricksters, bent on deceiving the untrained and unwary. Shamans know how to recognise them and outwit them. Untrained people can be misled, or even possessed. So, we know that it is possible for people to acquire advanced, sophisticated knowledge direct from some source. Is this how the ancient Egyptians discovered, for example, how to build the pyramids, or the secrets of the cosmos? In fact, we may, paradoxically, be able to deduce that this is so from the things that the ancient Egyptians didn't know. Remember, the Amazonian shamans get specific answers to specific questions, no less, but certainly no more than they ask for. The Egyptians, for all their advanced building techniques, had no concept of the arch. The arch is a particularly efficient way of distributing weight, compared to straight lintels. However, building with an arch requires a conceptual leap and an understanding of weight distribution. Perhaps this also accounts for the fact that the ancient Egyptians did not build large bridges. There is more evidence that they had no understanding of the intricacies of weight distribution. Recently, French Egyptologist Jean Kerisel argued that the cracks in the ceiling of the King's Chamber in the Great Pyramid were not, as generally believed, caused by an earthquake at some point in the monument's long history, but actually happened while it was being built. This was because the builders did not appreciate the consequences of juxtaposing granite and limestone, which compress at different rates. Despite all the wonders of the construction of the Great Pyramid - the quarrying, transportation, shaping and placing of such mammoth blocks of stone - the builders made a simple technical error that would be avoided by any modern student of architecture. Everything about the ancient Egyptians is practise, not theory. It is as if they were given specific answers to specific qeustions, just as the Amazonian shamans are. It might seem a big leap from building the pyramids to understanding the properties of plants but we argue that the both skills came were the result of the same process. We do not know the limits of the knowledge that can be acquired the shaman's way. Could it, for example, include techniques for quarrying and shifting huge blocks of stone? Could it include information about distant stars and the origins of the cosmos? In our previous talk we looked at the mysterious knowledge of the West African Dogon tribe about the Sirius star system, which Robert Temple believes results from actual contact with beings from that system. But could their knowledge have been acquired using the shamanic technique, by asking the spirits about the brightest star in the sky? There are clear shamanistic aspects of the Dogon religion and mythology. For example, the gods of the Dogon are pairs of twins, which is a common theme of shamanism the world over. All tribal cultures use the skills of shamans, but does this mean that it is a primitive practise, something that a society grows out of as it becomes more sophisticated? In the Amazon, it is true that the shamans only give information that is necessary for day to day survival. But what would happen if shamanism continued to exist as a culture became more organised and sophisticated? What would be the limits of the knowledge that its shamans could gather? What if the Egyptians had built shamanism into their advanced culture? Could they have taken their quest for knowledge to new levels? Could the priesthood of Heliopolis have been, in effect, a college of shamans? The big question is, who or what bestows this information? Are the entities, the spirits or gods real or some kind of dramatisation of the shamans' subconscious? Does the shaman actually go somewhere on his visionary flight, or is it 'all in the mind'? The whole subject of otherworld reality is a very complex one that has received little scientific or academic attention, but which is now beginning to attract serious study at last. In the final analysis we just don't know the answers, but at least some people are beginning to phrase the questions. Jeremy Narby has made a hugely thought-provoking suggestion. We have seen that he identified certain common elements in shamanism worldwide. There is the theme of the twin gods and serpents as bringers of wisdom - often combined in the form of twin serpents who impart great secrets. Nrby himself encountered two giant snakes when he took ayahuasca. There is also the theme of the twisting rope ladder or the twisted vine. Another theme is that of the spirits that the shamans meet, who often claim that they are in some way present in every living thing - that they are life itself... It occurred to Narby from that statement that those common images of twin serpents and twisted ladders are descriptions of the DNA double helix. In fact, if straightened out the strands of DNA would look exactly like a rope ladder. What Narby suggests is that the shaman is, in some way, communicating with his own DNA, and this is where he is getting the information from. This may sound bizarre, but it must be remembered that we do not know the function of 97% of DNA, which science terms 'junk DNA', but which Narby suggests we call 'mystery DNA'. All the diversity of life is accounted for by just 3% of DNA, so it seems inconceivable that the other 97% has no function. But what could it do? Narby goes further. He points out that it is known that DNA in one cell actually exchanges signals with the DNA in other cells. He suggests that, once someone taps into their own DNA, it can then communicate across organisms, across species - even across the boundary between animal and plant - and that the totality of all the DNA in the world forms a kind of matrix. Perhaps this could explain phenomena such as telepathy and ESP. The DNA in one cell transmits and receives signals from DNA in other cells. This is done by emitting photons - that is, they actually exchange signals in the form of light, oddly at a wavelength that is visible to humans. Perhaps this is where we get the concept of being 'enlightened' from, and it could be a literal description of the 'Light' of Gnosticism. It is early days for the DNA theory, but, in our view, it has a lot going for it. What is certain is that shamans acquire knowledge direct from some source without any process of trial and error. It is knowledge that they didn't have before, useful knowledge which we cannot explain - and which is often more advanced than ours. This is something that is happening right now, and there is no suggestion of visitors from lost continents or spaceships landing. We have called our book The Stargate Conspiracy, which some take to be a reference to the movie and the TV series. In fact, it is very largely a reference to the ancient Egyptian word sba which means both 'star' and 'gateway'. Unlike the concept of the movie, in which there is a physical portal through which you can step up to meet the space gods, we suggest that the real stargate is much, much closer to home. It is probably even within each cell of our bodies. Perhaps in seeking wisdom from gurus and those with secret agendas we are actually moving away from enlightenment. Perhaps we should just recognise that not only the stargate, but also the gods are within us all. 320pp, ISBN 0 316 64861 2 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soap-boxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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