America Before

by Graham Hancock

  A legend of the Native American Tachi Yokut people tells of a husband whose deeply cherished wife had died. Grieving, he went to her grave and dug a hole near it:

  There he stayed watching, not eating. … After two nights he saw that she came up, brushed the earth off herself, and started to go to the [land] of the dead.34

  Similarly, in the ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, lines 747–48, we read the following invocation to the deceased:

  Arise, remove your earth, shake off your dust, raise yourself that you may travel in company with the spirits.35

  In ancient Egypt the first stage of the journey to the realm of the dead was to ensure that the mortuary rites were properly observed. The purpose of these rites, Wallis Budge explains, was to enable the “disembodied spirit … to pass through the tomb out into the region which lies immediately to the west of the mountain chain on the west bank of the Nile, which we may consider as one mountain and call Manu, or the mountain of the sunset.”36

  In the case of the Native American afterlife journey, likewise, as Lankford summarizes:

  The path leads towards the west, the place of the setting sun, the end of the east-west cosmic passage, the point of transition from day to night.37

  Returning to ancient Egypt, it is clear that the first stage of the afterlife journey unfolds on the earth plane and brings the soul to a special location in the west, described as beyond “the mountain of sunset.” At this place, Budge continues,

  are gathered together numbers of spirits, all bent on making their way to the abode of the blessed; these are they who have departed from their bodies during the day.38

  In Native America, too, a place is reached at the western edge of the “earth-disk” where the dead gather and where they, too, must await the right moment, after nightfall, to make the transition from the earth plane to the Sky World. “There may be a camping-place for the free-soul,” Lankford tells us:

  For there may be a wait until conditions are right to continue the journey.39

  ORION, THE “LEAP,” AND THE PORTAL IN ANCIENT AMERICA

  IN ANCIENT EGYPT, THE CONSTELLATION of Orion, located prominently on the west bank of the Milky Way, was seen as the celestial figure of the God Osiris, Lord of the Realm of the Dead, and the funerary texts explicitly and repeatedly urge the soul to ascend to the sky and unite itself with Orion. A few examples:

  You shall reach the sky as Orion.40

  May a stairway to the Netherworld be set up for you in the place where Orion is.41

  I have gone upon the ladder with my foot on Orion.42

  The Netherworld has grasped your hand at the place where Orion is.43

  May Orion give me his hand.44

  The intention, confirmed in architecture by the star-shaft of the Great Pyramid (see previous chapter) is unmistakable. After completing its westward journey on the earth plane, and gathering with other souls at a staging point, the spiritual form of the deceased must find a way to gain access to the “place where Orion is” from whence the remainder of its journey to the realm of the dead will unfold.

  But how to get to Orion?

  The means suggested in the utterances quoted above include a stairway, a ladder, and the “hand” of the constellation itself. Another utterance tells us more vaguely, “There is brought to him a way of ascent to the sky”45 and fifty lines later we read:

  Here comes the ascender, here comes the ascender! Here comes the climber, here comes the climber! Here comes he who flew up, here comes he who flew up.46

  How was the transition to the Sky World achieved in the Native American afterlife journey when the soul had reached the staging point at the edge of the earth-disk? Lankford draws on his vast store of knowledge of the ethnography surrounding this subject when he tells us that in order to continue its journey to the realm of the dead:

  What the free-soul must do … is to make a terrifying leap. The realm of the dead … can only be reached by walking the Path of Souls, the Milky Way, across the night sky. To get to the path, however, one must leave the earth-disk and enter the celestial realm. The portal that is appointed for the free-soul at death is to be seen on the edge of the Path of Souls. It is a constellation in the shape of a hand, and the portal is in its palm.47

  As I learned at Moundville, this Native American “Hand” constellation is none other than the constellation we know as Orion, with the three prominent belt stars forming the wrist. Beneath these stars, identified as part of Orion’s sword by the Greeks, is a bright sky object known as Messier 42, or the Orion Nebula. In the “hand-and-eye” motif it is this nebula, regarded by modern astronomers as a “stellar nursery” where new stars are constantly born,48 that represents the “eye.” Its description as such is, however, a misleading and long outdated label that only remains in use out of habit. The truth, as scholars are now agreed, is that in Mississippian iconography it does not represent an eye at all but “a hole in the sky, a portal,”49 through which the free-soul must pass in order to reach the realm of the dead.

  LEFT: Native American “Hand” constellation in which the three stars of Orion’s belt form the wrist. CENTER: Orion’s belt and the Orion Nebula. RIGHT: An example of the Moundville “hand-and-eye” motif. The Orion Nebula is represented by the “eye,” and was conceived of as a portal through which the soul must leap on its afterlife journey.

  George Lankford clarifies the muddle:

  The hole in the sky is indicated as a slit being pulled apart, and the fact that it is celestial is frequently elaborated by the inclusion of a star circle or dot. The resulting double sign thus gives the appearance of being an eye, but … it is a coincidental similarity. The “eye” is but a portal with a star at its center. The hand-and-eye combination thus indicates the beginning of the spirit journey, the entry of the soul into the Milky Way at Orion.50

  In ancient Egypt the hieroglyphic representation of the Duat Netherworld (likewise accessed via Orion and the Milky Way) made use of exactly the same concepts expressed in locally appropriate symbolism. Whereas in Mississippian art it was customary to depict a star in the form of a circle or dot, the star symbol in ancient Egypt was very much like the five-pointed version we still use today. Likewise, in Mississippian art the sky portal was depicted as an aperture in the form of an open slit while in ancient Egypt it was represented by a circle.

  LEFT: ANCIENT EGYPT: The hieroglyph for the Duat Netherworld depicts a hole in the sky with a star at its center. RIGHT: ANCIENT NATIVE AMERICA: “The hole in the sky is indicated as a slit being pulled apart, and the fact that it is celestial is frequently elaborated by the inclusion of a star circle or dot.”

  ORION, THE “LEAP,” AND THE PORTAL IN ANCIENT EGYPT

  THE TOP HALF OF “ORION” above the belt stars is important in the ancient Egyptian Sahu constellation but isn’t part of the “Hand” at all. The stories behind the imagery that were told in the Nile Valley and the Mississippi Valley are also very different. Nonetheless, it’s bizarre that the same constellation plays such a key role in both Native American and ancient Egyptian beliefs concerning the afterlife journey.

  Moreover, although ladders and stairs are among the “means of ascent” suggested to the soul in the ancient Egyptian funerary texts, they are by no means the only ones. Particularly close to the Native American notion of a “leap” for the portal is Utterance 478 of the Pyramid Texts, line 980, in which the deceased states:

  I leap up to the sky into the presence of the god.51

  Likewise in Utterance 467, lines 890–91, we read:

  Someone flies up. I fly up from you, O men; I am not for the earth, I am for the sky.52

  And again, almost technologically, in Utterance 261:

  The King is a flame moving before the wind to the end of the sky.53

  Such references, and numerous other examples that could be cited, leave little room for misinterpretation. As with the Native Americans, so, too, with the ancient Egyptians—a “leap” by one means or another from the earth-plane to
Orion was an essential stage in the afterlife journey.

  It might be objected that the constellation Sahu/Orion for the ancient Egyptians was the celestial figure of Osiris, Lord of the Realm of the Dead, and therefore in no way a “portal” in the Native American sense. That, however, does no justice to the possibility, in so subtle a system as the ancient Egyptian funerary texts, that symbols might be encoded with multiple levels of meaning. A close study of the texts reveals that the passage of the soul through a portal in the sky was indeed a fundamental stage of the ancient Egyptian afterlife journey.

  The Pyramid Texts again:

  Portal of the Abyss, I have come to you; let this be opened to me.54

  The doors of the sky are opened for you, the doors of the starry sky are thrown open for you.55

  The doors of iron which are in the starry sky are thrown open for me, and I go through them.56

  Open the gates which are in the Abyss.57

  The aperture of the sky-window is open to you.58

  The celestial portal to the horizon is open to you.59

  I am he who opened a door in the sky.60

  The door of the sky at the horizon opens to you.61

  “The Orion Nebula,” clarifies Susan Brind Morrow in a new study of the Pyramid Texts, “is in the door of the sky.”62

  And in case there is any remaining doubt, the celestial address of this portal through which the deceased must pass in order to enter the Duat Netherworld is also repeated on multiple occasions in the Pyramid Texts, for example:

  The Duat has grasped your hand at the place where Orion is.63

  And, as we’ve seen:

  May a stairway to the Netherworld be set up for you in the place where Orion is.64

  THE TIMING OF THE “LEAP”

  FOR THE ANCIENT EGYPTIANS, ARRIVAL at the top of the metaphorical “stairway,” the accomplishment of the “leap” to the sky “in the presence of the god,” was to be timed to coincide with the moment when:

  Orion is swallowed up by the Duat.65

  According to R. O. Faulkner, translator of the Pyramid Texts, this occurs when “the stars vanish at dawn.”66 More broadly the “swallowing” of Orion by the Duat can be linked to the setting of the constellation in the west at whichever time of day or night this happens.

  Let’s now return to George Lankford’s authoritative account of the Mississippian afterlife journey and the soul’s leap to the portal in the Orion Nebula in the constellation that Native North Americans called the “Hand.” The leap can only be attempted when that constellation makes its closest approach to the edge of the earth-disk, setting low in the west under the Milky Way just before it vanishes beneath the horizon—the precise moment, for both ancient Egyptians and ancient Native Americans, when the door of the sky, “the celestial portal to the horizon,” was believed to stand open. As Lankford makes clear:

  The portal in the Hand must be entered by a leap at the optimum time, which is a ten-minute window which occurs once each night from November 29, when the Hand vanishes … in the West just at dawn, to April 25, when the Hand sinks at dusk, not to be seen again for six months. During that winter period the portal is on the horizon for a breathless few minutes each night, and the free-souls must enter at that time or be lost. Free-souls who do not make the transition remain in the West and can eventually become unhappy threats to the realm of the living.67

  Likewise in ancient Egypt, Budge informs us, it is the fate of those who have not prepared adequately for the afterlife journey to remain trapped on the earth plane—where their lot, “having failed to present themselves in the Judgment Hall of Osiris,” is an unhappy one.68

  And in both ancient Egypt and ancient North America it was also believed that those souls that had successfully ascended to Orion must then continue their long and arduous journey, now transposed from the earth plane to the Sky World. On that journey they would meet monsters and terrors for which it appears that the ancient Egyptian books of the dead and the parallel oral and iconographic traditions of the Mississippian civilization were designed to prepare them.69

  Before we explore these further similarities between the supposedly entirely unconnected religions of the Mississippi and the Nile, let’s reflect in passing on the spiritual system that has evolved in the Amazon rainforest around the use of ayahuasca, the “Vine of the Dead.” The reader will recall that it has that name because in the “indigenous context” ayahuasca is “intimately related to death.”70 The visions received in the ayahuasca trance are considered to resemble death and to give foreknowledge of the death process and thus, at the level of experience rather than of study, the “Vine of the Dead” appears to be performing the same function as a “Book of the Dead.”

  Ayahuasca shamans in the Amazon speak of “dying” when they drink the brew. It’s again suggestive of hidden connections that thereafter, as we saw in chapter 17, they experience “ascent to the Milky Way” in a “single soaring flight” (which sounds very much like a “leap”) in order to reach the “Otherworld” that lies “beyond the Milky Way.”

  Sometimes, as they make these journeys, the shamans encounter trials and adversaries that will test them:

  Terrifying monsters … jaguars and serpents that approach and threaten to devour the person who, terror stricken, will call out in anguish.71

  TERRORS AND OBSTACLES OF THE ANCIENT EGYPTIAN NETHERWORLD

  NO ONE IN THE NORTHERN Hemisphere who pays any attention to the sky can fail to notice the presence of the majestic constellation of Orion during the winter months or the fact that it stands at the western side—indeed one could say on the west bank—of the glowing band of supernal light that is our own disk-shaped galaxy viewed from within. We call that band of light the Milky Way. To the ancient Egyptians it was the “Winding Waterway,”72 the great celestial river that, as Wallis Budge informs us,

  flowed through the Duat much as the Nile flowed through Egypt. There were inhabitants on each of its banks, just as there were human beings on each side of the Nile.73

  Moreover, the soul’s leap to Orion was not an end in itself, but simply its means of entry to the Sky World. Once there, it was the Winding Waterway that would provide the setting for the next stage of the afterlife journey. “May you take me and raise me to the Winding Waterway,” as the Pyramid Texts put it.74

  It is therefore intriguing that in ancient North America the Milky Way was most widely known as the “Path of Souls,”75 and it was on this path, after passing through the Orion portal, that the spirits of the deceased found themselves. Lankford takes up the story again:

  When the free-soul has entered the celestial realm, the Path of Souls stretches out before it. By most accounts it is a realm much like the earthly one left behind, but some describe it as a river of light with free-souls camped alongside. The free-soul must journey down the Path to the realm of the dead.76

  Inevitably, with a great river flowing through it, the Duat “had the shape of a valley.”77 However, unlike the Nile Valley, which it otherwise resembled, this ancient Egyptian realm of the dead was “shrouded in the gloom and darkness of night … a place of fear and horror.”78

  It was, moreover, a place filled with obstacles and fearsome challenges including:

  abysses of darkness, murderous knives, streams of boiling water, foul stenches, fiery serpents, hideous animal-headed monsters and creatures, and cruel, death-dealing beings of various shapes.79

  A few hours with the vignettes and tomb paintings and you begin to get the idea.

  The Duat is an utterly eerie parallel universe that is at once a starry “otherworld” and a strange physical domain with narrow passageways and darkened galleries and chambers populated by fiends and terrors. There are entities whose work is “to hack souls in pieces.” There are serpents of enormous size, serpents with legs and feet, serpents with multiple heads, serpents with wings. There are serpents that breathe fire and that are depicted as flooding corridors with fire. There is in particular the monstrous s
erpent Apep and a specially dedicated company of nine gods whose work is to slay Apep. There are firepits where souls are roasted, in some cases head down. There are bodies of water to cross and “abysmal depths of darkness.” There are torture blocks. There are gods armed with knives who will kill inadequately prepared souls.80 And one particularly curious vignette shows “a goddess standing upright with her hands stretched out to the top of the head of a man who is kneeling before her, and is cutting open his head with a hatchet.”81

  Vignette from the Book of What Is in the Duat. E. A. Wallis Budge offers no direct translation of the relevant hieroglyphs, merely describing the scene thus: “[A] goddess standing upright with her hands stretched out to the top of the head of a man who is kneeling before her, and is cutting open his head with a hatchet.” LEFT: Detail of the vignette. RIGHT: The vignette in context.

  The vignette82 captured my attention for reasons that I will explain below. Budge expresses no opinion in his description and since I don’t read hieroglyphs I couldn’t be sure exactly what was going on. One interpretation that occurred to me was that the goddess was trying to stop the kneeling man from bashing his own brains out. But the scene had an uncanny, rather ominous, quality that suggested a very different possibility. From the way the outstretched arms and hands of the goddess were portrayed it looked more to me as though she was encouraging him to take that hatchet to his own head—or even perhaps exerting some kind of divine will to force him to do it.

  Since there are repeated references to a menacing female figure, usually called the “brain-smasher” or the “brain-taker” in accounts of the Native American afterlife journey, it occurred to me there was an opportunity here to test the mettle of my evolving theory of a deep structural connection between the spiritual systems of ancient Egypt and the ancient Mississippi Valley. All I had to do was find an Egyptologist to translate the hieroglyphs in the vignette for me. If the translation showed no relationship whatsoever between the goddess in this vignette and the Native American “brain-smasher,” then my theory would be weakened. If, on the other hand, a clear relationship emerged, then my theory would be strengthened.