Another example given by Narby is that of curare.2 This powerful nerve poison is another ‘made-to-order’ drug, whose ingredients this time come from several different plants and fit a very precise set of requirements. As Narby points out, the natives needed a substance that, when smeared on the tips of blowpipe darts, would not only kill the animal but also ensure that it would fall to the ground. Tree monkeys, for example, if shot with an unpoisoned arrow, often tighten their grip on the branches with a reflex action and so die out of reach of the hunter. The meat itself would, of course, have to be free from poison and safe to eat. It seemed like a very tall order, but curare fits all these requirements: it is a muscle relaxant (killing by arresting the respiratory muscles); it is only effective when injected into the bloodstream - hence its delivery by blowpipe; and it has no effect when taken orally.
The invention of curare is a truly astounding thing. The most common type requires a complex method of preparation in which several plants are boiled for three days, during which lethal fumes are produced. And the final result needs a specific piece of technology - the blowpipe - to deliver it. How was all this discovered in the first place?
The problem becomes even more baffling when it is realised that forty different types of curare are used across the Amazon rain forest, all with the same properties but each using slightly different ingredients as the same plants do not grow in every region. Therefore, in effect, curare was invented forty times. The Western world only learned of it in the 1940s, when it first began to be used as a muscle relaxant during surgery.
The Amazonians themselves do not claim to have invented curare, but that it was given to them by the spirits, through their shamans.
These are just two examples from a vast range of vegetable mixtures used by the peoples of the Amazon, the full extent of which has not yet been catalogued by modern botanists. Realising that it was nonsense to suggest that these complex recipes could have been achieved by experimentation, Narby began to ask local people and shamans how they had acquired this knowledge. They told him that the properties of plants and the recipes for combining them are given directly to the shaman by very powerful spirit entities while he is in ecstatic trance under the influence of hallucinogens such as ayahuasca. (Of course this raises a fascinating chicken-and-egg type of problem. If the shamans discovered the secret properties of ayahuasca only by ingesting it, how did they know about them in the first place?)
This realisation led Narby on to his own personal quest to research this neglected aspect of shamanism, which included taking ayahuasca himself. Many anthropologists before Narby had recorded the claim that the shaman obtains knowledge by the ingestion of hallucinogens, but none had ever taken this seriously enough to follow it up. He found that this was a shared feature of shamanism across the world, and that the tribes ascribe the origins and the techniques of their culture to knowledge gleaned by their shamans while in ecstatic trance, during which they encounter guiding entities who teach them.
Narby himself, on his first experience with ayahuasca, encountered a pair of gigantic snakes that lectured him on his insignificance as a human being and the limits of his knowledge, which turned out to be an important personal turning point. He began to question his Western preconceptions and approached his subsequent studies in a more open-minded and less scientifically arrogant way. His own book is itself an example of the way in which the shamanic experience can impart new knowledge. Narby writes that the serpents induced thoughts in his mind that he was incapable of having himself.3
The properties and methods of combining plants to achieve specific results are not the only things communicated through the trance state by spiritual entities in this way. The Amazonian tribes ascribe their knowledge of specific techniques, such as the art of weaving and their mastery of woodworking, to the same source. What the shamans receive while in trance is useful knowledge that often, in the case of healing, actually saves lives.
Aside from the question of the reality of such entities, the very idea of obtaining practical tips and actual information by such a method is, to our culture, absurd. There are, surely, only two ways of obtaining knowledge: it is either worked out in logical steps by experiment or trial-and-error; or it is taught by someone who, or some other culture which, has already worked it out.
This, in a nutshell, forms the problem of the origins of the knowledge of the ancient Egyptians, such as how they built the ‘impossible’ Great Pyramid. Techniques appeared to come out of nowhere, without any apparent process of logical or historical development. Since no archaeological evidence of stage-by-stage technological development has been found, it can be assumed that the process never occurred. This may seem crazy, but where are all the failed pyramids predating those of the Old Kingdom? The only alternative seems to be that the ancient Egyptians learned their techniques whole and fully formed from somebody else - a lost civilisation, or visiting extraterrestrials perhaps.
What if there is a third way of obtaining useful and unique information: the way of the shaman, where knowledge is somehow obtained directly from its source?
The extraordinary botanical knowledge of the Amazonian peoples forms, in fact, an exact parallel to the building expertise of the ancient Egyptians. Not only should it lie beyond the skills of their time and place, but it also stands far in advance of today’s scientific knowledge.
Questions and answers
Shamanism is considered to be a phenomenon of ‘primitive’ societies, those who still live at roughly the level of the Stone Age while surrounded by the extreme sophistication of the modem world. It was outgrown by the ‘advanced’ cultures thousands of years ago. However, can we imagine that shamanic rituals could be practised as a culture moved from primitive to advanced, perhaps at an even more sophisticated level than is found in today’s Amazonian rain forest? If such a phenomenon could be conceived, what would be the limits of the knowledge obtained through the shamans’ curious art?
Several writers have recently noted clear signs of shamanistic influence at work in ancient Egypt. Andrew Collins, for example, has written of the shamanistic nature of the ‘Elder Culture’ that he believes was responsible for the great achievements of Egypt, but he has also surmised that they developed the advanced techniques that enabled them to build the pyramids and carve the Great Sphinx.4 Could the priesthood of Heliopolis have been in essence a college of shamans, free to apply their closely guarded techniques for purposes of pure research? Could the shamanic hypothesis explain how the pyramid builders knew how to quarry, transport, shape and position immense blocks of stone, among many other baffling examples of their knowledge?
This would also account for an aspect of the ancient Egyptians’ knowledge that has not been properly explored - its curiously selective nature. While they are justly famed for their mysterious expertise in pyramid building, there are certain areas that - perhaps bizarrely - appear to have been unknown arts to them. We have noted that, despite the use of colossal granite and limestone blocks and the extraordinary skill used in shaping them, the walls of the Valley Temple at Giza have been built in an oddly primitive way. And one sophisticated architectural feature completely missing in ancient Egypt was the arch. Perhaps this is because the development of the arch requires a conceptual leap, and its construction requires a theoretical knowledge of weight distribution. Maybe this is also the reason why the Egyptians do not seem to have mastered the art of bridge-building.
Recently French Egyptologist Jean Kerisel has argued persuasively that cracks in the granite slabs forming the ceiling of the King’s Chamber were not, as previously thought, the result of an earthquake, but happened while the Great Pyramid was actually under construction.5 This, he suggests, was because the builders did not understand the consequences of working with two materials - limestone and granite - of different composition, which would compress at different rates under the enormous weight of stone pressing down on them. (If Kerisel is correct, this would also cast doubt on the theory that the cavities above the
King’s Chamber were intended as stress-relieving chambers for the building.)
We have observed that the Amazonian shamans receive specific answers to specific questions, such as the herbal recipe for the cure for a specific illness, but rarely more or less than is needed. The same appears to be true of the Egyptians, who appear to have had information only about, for example, ways of moving huge blocks of stone. Because bridges and arches needed new concepts of building, they never asked the right questions in order to be told how to build them.
Could this be how the Dogon have such otherwise inexplicable knowledge of the Sirius system? If the Amazonian shamans can directly obtain information about the chemical properties of plants, could they not have asked their guides: ‘Tell us about the brightest star in the sky. That one there’?
There are some very clear and sometimes strikingly precise parallels between the religion of ancient Egypt and the shamanic visions described by Jeremy Narby. Narby cites the experiences of anthropologist Michael Harner among the Conibo Indians of the Peruvian Amazon in the 1960s. Harner himself took the shamans’ hallucinogenic drink and later he wrote:
For several hours after drinking the brew, I found myself, although 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 true gods of this world.6
‘Bird-headed people’, ‘the true gods of this world’: this seems to be startling confirmation of the reality of the ancient Egyptian pantheon, which, of course, included the ibis-headed Thoth and the hawk-headed Horus, besides many animal-headed gods and goddesses such as the lioness-headed Sekhmet and the jackal-headed Anubis. If modern tribal shamans, in their drug-induced ecstatic trances, have access to the dimension where such beings live, could it not be that the shamanic priests of Heliopolis also knew the secret of speaking to the gods directly in this way? Interestingly, Harner himself noted the similarity between the bird-headed people of his vision and the gods of ancient Egypt. (And it inevitably calls to mind Saul Paul Sirag and Ray Stanford’s visions of the hawk-headed Spectra as described in Chapter 5.)
In his review of world shamanism, Jeremy Narby noted many common features, such as the prevalence of snakes as imparters of wisdom, even in areas where there are no snakes. Certain themes recur in all shamanic visions, one of the most central being 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 have come from the sky and to have created life on earth.7
This imagery is found in the ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts. For example, in Utterance 478 - which speaks 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.8
And another utterance says:
A ladder is knotted together by Re before Osiris, a ladder is knotted together by Horus before his father Osiris when he goes to his spirit, one of them being on this side and one of them being on that, while I am between them.9
Ascension to the Milky Way is a central theme of the Pyramid Texts; in Colombia the ayahuasca vine is known as the ‘ladder to the Milky Way’.10
Recognising the concept of shamanism in the Pyramid Texts radically changes our understanding of the ancient Egyptians and their religion - and perhaps even the whole nature of human potential. Could it be that the central ‘ascension of the king’ is not the description of his afterlife journey as is always believed, but the shamanic flight to the ‘otherworld’ - the realm of guiding spirits - that is undertaken in life? The two are not mutually exclusive, for the shamans know that the realm they enter when entranced is the portal to the eternal world of light where the spirits of the dead are taken, so the Pyramid Texts can be read as a description of both the shamanic and afterlife journeys. Traditionally, the journeying shaman is believed to have actually died, to be resurrected when his soul returns.
Although shamans are very special people, born with a natural psychic gift, they are nevertheless required to undergo fearsome initiations by ordeal, the horrors of which impinge on both the physical and spiritual levels. A classic feature of the shamanic initiation is a hellish out-of-the-body experience in which they appear to be torn limb from limb, after which they are magically reassembled. As Stanislav Grof writes:
The career of many shamans start by the powerful experiences of unusual states of consciousness with the sense of going into the underworld, being attacked, dismembered, and then being put back together, and ascending to the supernal realm.11
This is strikingly reminiscent of the story of Osiris, with whom the king in the Pyramid Texts is identified, who is cut into pieces by the evil god Set, but magically reassembled by his lover Isis in order to father the hawk god Horus, who is in turn regarded as the reincarnation of Osiris as well as his son. As we have seen in the extract from Utterance 478, Isis is identified with the legendary ladder, up which the reassembled king climbs to heaven - clearly, a classic shamanic image.
The role of Isis is particularly interesting because it portrays the feminine principle as being essential to the shamanic journey. In fact, the whole concept of female initiates has been sadly neglected, but perhaps for unexpected reasons. At a London conference in October 1996 called The Incident, Jeremy Narby was questioned on why all the shamans he had mentioned in his talk were men. He replied that specially selected women often sit with the ayahuasqueros as, fuelled with the drug, they embark on their out-of-the-body adventures. The women actually accompany them and share in their experience, and afterwards, when they have returned to normal consciousness, help them to remember what took place in those other realms. But the important point is that the women do all this without taking ayahuasca. Clearly, the female companions of the shamans have no need of chemical aids for their spiritual flights. Why is not known, possibly because women’s roles have traditionally been of less interest to anthropologists.
The mathematician, cyberneticist and mythologist Charles Muses has written extensively on shamanism. (As with most of his non-New Age/mystical writings under the pseudonym of ‘Musaios’, these are particularly incisive and persuasive.) He has noted the nature of its essential significance:
The point of shamanism is really not ecstasy, ‘archaic’ or otherwise, or even ‘healing’, but rather the development of communication with a community of higher than human beings and a modus operandi for attaining an eventual transmutation to more exalted states and paths.12
Muses goes on to make the explicit parallel between this, the underlying objective of shamanism, and the religion of ancient Egypt. He equates the Duat - the afterlife realm to which the king travels - of the Pyramid Texts, not with a mythical otherworld but with the Tibetan Bardo, where spirits live between incarnations and which certain special people can visit during life.13
The Pyramid Texts also speak of the ‘deceased’ being transformed into a ‘body of light’ (aker), which again may imply more than a straightforward afterlife existence. Charles Muses says: ‘The acquisition of a higher body by an individual meant also, by that very token, the possibility of communicating with beings already so endowed.’14 In other words, anyone with a higher body can communicate with anyone else who exists in the light. Shamans, during their trips to the invisible realm, can make contact with all the higher beings who live there.
In our opinion, Jeremy Narby’s ground-breaking work on shamanism has important implications for some of the recent theories concerning the origins of Egyptian wisdom, particularly those of the ‘ancient astronaut’ school. Proponents of such hypotheses, such as Alan F. Alford, tend to treat the myths and religious w
ritings, such as the Pyramid Texts, in an excessively literal way. When the ancients tell us of meetings with part-animal, part-man entities, who descend to Earth or to whom the priest ascends, and who impart specific information, such researchers assume these to be garbled stories of actual meetings with exotic beings from outer space, making gods of astronauts.
Shamans living in the Amazonian rain forest today regularly describe identical experiences - sometimes under the watchful gaze of anthropologists - without the least suggestion of a descending spaceship or visitors from a lost continent.
But who are the entities from whom shamans have always received their invaluable knowledge?
It is possible that we will never be able to answer that question fully. Even shamans know that some mysteries and secrets are never meant to be understood. But once again, the work of Jeremy Narby may provide certain exciting clues about what it is that shamans - from ancient Heliopolis to today - tap into when they enter their exalted states of consciousness.
Narby noted that the visions of shamans across the world shared certain key images, the most fundamental being that of twin serpents that live inside every creature. The penny finally dropped for him when he read about Michael Harner’s experience in 1961. He saw winged, dragonlike creatures who explained to him that they ‘had created life on the planet in order to hide within the multitudinous forms ... I learned that the dragon-like creatures were thus inside all forms of life, including man’.15 Harner himself wrote that ‘one could say they were almost like DNA’, but added that he had no idea where the vision came from — certainly not from his own mind, as at that time he knew nothing about DNA. Whatever the origin of the words, this was to be a major inspiration: Narby realised that the image of ‘serpents’ living inside every living thing is, in fact, an excellent description of the strands of DNA.
The Stargate Conspiracy Page 38
