As Geller’s fame rose, Puharich decided to write a biography of the exploits of this remarkable psychic. In the book, Puharich mentioned The Nine, but for reasons that will forever remain obscure, he largely ridiculed them, even though for several decades before and after he would remain obsessed with them. Geller himself has always remained silent on what transpired with The Nine, as he was unconscious throughout the channeling. To this day, in some of the private conversations I have had with Uri, it is clear that he has tremendous respect for Puharich, who at some point became something of a father figure to him, but that he himself is somewhat unclear as to what really happened in those days and what it all means.
We therefore only have Puharich’s word for it, and whereas that might not mean much to anyone who doesn’t know him, for the U.S. government, at one point, Puharich’s word meant an awful lot. According to Puharich, when in contact with The Nine, they summoned him to UFO fly-pasts and more. Puharich claimed that he made tape recordings of these sessions, but none have ever been made public, so it truly is a case of Puharich’s word against the world. Supposedly Puharich asked The Nine, “Are you behind the UFO sightings that started in the United States when Kenneth Arnold saw nine flying saucers on June 24, 1947?” They answered, “Yes.”
According to Puharich, The Nine stated they were from a world called Hoova, though on occasion, they called themselves Rhombus 4D. They contacted Puharich and Geller because they had been chosen to prevent war, as well as help steer the Earth’s fate into a specific direction, which The Nine said was indeed to their benefit, though it was also for the benefit of humankind. The Nine also claimed that they were responsible for Geller’s powers, and that the way in which humankind used Geller would determine whether The Nine’s “program for Planet Earth” would continue or not. What is apparent from these communications is that The Nine, whoever they were, were clearly akin to the Nine Principles of ancient Egypt, in the sense that they were primarily all about directing the fate of humankind.
Other psychics, such as Phyllis Schlemmer, have since claimed to have contacted The Nine, too. Schlemmer claims to have spoken to “Tom”—a modern rendition of the name Atum—who claimed to be the spokesperson for The Nine. Her story made it into Stuart Holroyd’s Prelude to the Landing on Planet Earth and the later The Only Planet of Choice. Other Nine contactees are Don Elkins and Carla Rueckert, who channeled “Ra,” a member of The Nine who declared that it was he who had built the Great Pyramid. In sessions with Puharich, “Tom” said the Sphinx was built and named after him.
I would not go as far as to argue that everyone who has channeled The Nine should be treated with the same respect as Puharich. I have done extensive research into The Nine for more than a decade, and they are, quite simply, a complex issue that defies easy categorization. But what can be definitively said about them is this: It is clear that each culture, whether Mayan, Egyptian, or 20th-century Western society, was and is in contact with an alien intelligence, which each time relates messages that are identical in context. And in the case of the Mayan civilization, there is even archaeological evidence that shows that the story of The Nine is directly relevant to the Ancient Alien Question: The Nine are mentioned in an inscription on Monument 6 of the Mayan site Tortuguero, in the Mexican state of Tabasco. The monument was erected in AD 669 and is one of the very few pre-Conquest sources that mention the infamous date of AD December 21, 2012. Various translations or partial translations of the Tortuguero inscription exist; this is the most common:
At the next creation [i.e. December 21, 2012], the
Bolon Yokte Ku, or Nine Support Gods, will return.
However, the actual word return, sometimes translated as descent, is not intact on the monument. Still, it is a safe conclusion to make that the missing word is return. Why? Because other Mayan sources reference the return of these deities at the ending of each baktun.
There is no doubt whatsoever that the returning deities are the Bolon Yokte Ku—The Nine. But who are they within a Mayan context? They have variously been translated as the God of Nine Strides, the Nine-Footed God, Jaguar-Foot-Tree and Nine-Dog-Tree. They were seen as living in the Underworld and were generally described as god(s) of conflict and warfare, and are thus linked with dangerous transition times, social unrest, eclipses, and natural disasters like earthquakes. It is said that at the end of a baktun, the end of a cycle, they would abandon their Underworld realm and rise to the Earth’s surface, where they would do battle with the 13 deities of Heaven.
To further identify what The Nine Support Gods are supposed to be, we need to consult other sources—in this case, anthropological ones. Such evidence makes it clear that The Nine Gods were said to have appeared during ceremonies that were held at the end of each baktun, the last of which occurred in AD 1618, shortly after the Conquest of Mexico by Spanish troops.
The ceremony of the baktun is described in Chapter 29 of The Book of Chilam Balam de Chumayel, a Mayan chronicle composed after the Spanish Conquest and therefore sometimes treated as less interesting by archaeologists, who have little interest in anthropological material. The book nevertheless provides a detailed description of the ceremonies that were performed in Merida in AD 1618, at the end of 12.0.0.0.0. In total, there are 20 acts, each representing one of the 20 katuns that make up a baktun cycle. After some initial preparations, in Act 2, the bee god ties the masks of the 13 gods of Heaven to those people who were going to perform in the ceremonies. The actual baktun cycle’s end was described in Act 3, whereby The Nine Gods fought, conquered, and sacrificed these 13 gods; night had conquered day.
The subsequent acts involved rituals to do with the election of the new officials for the new period, and in Act 12, The Nine Gods sacrifice the Seven Pacers and count the mats, which is an initial lineup of the candidates for investiture for the coming era, as a new leader for the Mayan people had to be chosen; that ruler’s task was to rule and maintain an active “up and downlink” with the gods. Most importantly, in Act 15, The Nine Gods announce the fate of the new era. This fate was largely the will of the gods, which the community had to achieve during the new era, and it reflects what The Nine said in communications with Puharich.
In short, the baktun ceremony was a series of rituals, focusing on the Nine Gods and their emanation and rulings. For the Mayans, the ceremonies were extraordinarily elaborate and were performed within the sacred precincts of temple complexes, such as Chichen Itza and Teotihuacán. It was, after all, at Teotihuacán that the first council of these deities had occurred in 3114 BC, and the temple complex was a three-dimensional rendering of the Creation Act, for—as in ancient Egypt—the deities that were contacted were linked with the creator deity. For Puharich, the rituals were performed in the privacy of a mundane living room, but the end result was nevertheless contact with nonhuman intelligences that claimed they were the gods that had brought us civilization—and were responsible for the pyramids.
The Pyramid Purpose
The idea that the pyramid was a place of initiation, rather than a gigantic mausoleum, was very much in vogue a century ago, mainly among people who adhered to a Masonic ideology. The “pyramid as temple of initiation” debate was revived in 1982 by the Egyptologist Edward Wente and has been principally discussed by British author Jeremy Naydler, most prominently in his book Shamanic Wisdom in the Pyramid Texts. Naydler stated that “While scholars generally accept that this ‘voluntary death’ was one of the central aims of the Greek and Hellenistic mystery cults, Egyptology has resisted the idea that any such initiatory rites or experiences existed in Egypt.” This would make Egypt unique among all ancient civilizations—by the absence of such practices. It would mean that Egypt, of all ancient cultures, did not have a religion that allowed for the spiritual development of the soul—which would be extremely odd, because all accounts, including several from Ancient Greece, written down by men who went to Egypt and often were taught in the Egyptian temples, argue that Egypt was the world’s authority on such p
ractices.
It is precisely this attitude from the Egyptologist—making Egypt into something that it was not—that has contributed to so many people asking the Ancient Alien Question. By making ancient Egypt into something that it never was, the Egyptologists created a fertile soil for outlandish theories, many of which do not involve extraterrestrial beings, but which are nevertheless extremely unlikely. To properly answer the Ancient Alien Question, we therefore need to render Egypt back to what it was.
The answer to the Ancient Alien Question can be found in the Book of the Dead and the earlier Pyramid Texts. These texts have been overlooked as the obvious solution because they became a victim of their own child, the Corpus Hermeticum, a concise and clear synopsis of the religious framework of ancient Egypt, codified in the third century BC, following the Greek conquest of Egypt. The texts inspired the alchemists of the Middle Ages, lay at the foundation of the Italian Renaissance, may be a key to explaining the symbolism in paintings by Leonardo da Vinci and Sandro Botticelli, and even contain the earliest reference to the Grail. But above all, the Pyramid Texts were believed to contain the true—native—message of ancient Egypt, unlike the Corpus Hermeticum, which was written for a Greek audience.
At the time of their discovery, it was felt that the decipherment of the hieroglyphic language of the Pyramid Texts—which the ancient Egyptians used as a sacred language, as it was deemed to be the language of the gods themselves—would soon reveal ancient Egypt’s true doctrine. But when Gaston Maspero, the first to publish the Pyramid Texts in translation, summed up his effort to translate these texts, he confessed that despite trying, he was unable to discover any profound wisdom in ancient Egypt’s religious doctrine.
The disappointment came because the Pyramid Texts did not contain the doctrine of the ancient Egyptians, but “only” the rituals, the manuals used in that religion, through which contact with the gods was established. To put this in today’s terms, a manual of your television set does not reveal what programs it shows or what you watch on it, nor what the experience of “television watching” really is or feels like. The manual will never reveal the joy you experienced when Goran Ivanisevich finally won Wimbledon, but only how to increase the volume on your set during those agonizing last few minutes of his final against Australian Pat Rafter. The Pyramid Texts were just such a manual, for in ancient Egypt (as elsewhere), the doctrine itself was apparently never put to print. But in Ptolemaic times, when the Greeks ruled over Egypt and when most scholars now accept the Corpus Hermeticum was written, there was a need for Jews and Greeks to learn the religious doctrine of the Egyptians, to understand the religious life of their neighbors and compatriots. The doctrine was therefore finally written down, though the Greeks and the Jews had no need for the rituals themselves, and hence the Pyramid Texts were not incorporated into the Corpus Hermeticum. Millennia later, when the mystique of the hieroglyph had lifted, the disappointment of not seeing the true breadth of the Egyptian doctrine hung over Egyptology as a black cloud—which is only slowly drifting away.
Though the Pyramid Texts are ancient Egypt’s most extraordinary document, the fact that they contain rituals on how to contact the gods is not well-liked by Egyptologists, who would prefer that they contain anything but. Egyptologists have argued that the Pyramid Texts are the rituals that were said during the funeral of the deceased pharaoh—a logical conclusion, seeing as they were originally written down in the pyramids, which Egyptologists believed to be the tombs of the pharaohs, and later on the coffins of the deceased, thus clearly showing there is a funerary aspect to these rituals.
But Naydler has shown that the Pyramid Texts in no single instance actually imply that the king is dead. Naydler has seen phrases in the Pyramid Texts that suggest that the king is very much alive—physically alive—at the time when that section of the texts is supposed to be read out. Though it is therefore without doubt that the Pyramid Texts focus on the king, Naydler argues that they focus mainly on his role as an active ruler—not as deceased head of state. The Texts thus become records of the rituals that the king performed, at key times of his rule, which Naydler has identified as his coronation and the Heb Sed festivals, which was a renewal of his kingship that occurred at 30-year (or shorter) intervals. These rites specifically confirmed the power of the king over this world and the Otherworld, symbolized by his ability to control the Nine Principles, as well as the union of Egypt and the Otherworld by the king, through which he established his divine rule over the land.
In Naydler’s interpretation, the pyramid was built as a temple, and the inscriptions on its wall were not meant to be read by the funeral cortege, or by the deceased soul of the pharaoh, but by the living pharaoh, as he performed these rituals in the interior of the pyramid during key ceremonies. This would mean that the pyramids of ancient Egypt were—indeed—communication devices, helping the pharaoh establish contact with the gods, through a series of rituals.
Though in ancient Egypt maintaining contact with the gods was seen as the pharaoh’s daily occupation, there were certain occasions, one might say on par with the baktun-ending ceremonies of the Mayan calendar, that stood out more. One of these festivals was the Heb Sed festival, and it is this ceremony that Stone channeled in 1954. As were the baktun-ending festivals, the Heb Sed festivals were held in temple complexes and involved both public and private displays and rituals.
The Heb Sed festival is named after the short kilt with a bull’s tail that the king wore for the culminating rites of the festival. The festival lasted five days in total and took place immediately after the annual Osiris rites, at the time when the Nile’s flooding retreated, at the moment of the rebirth of the land, mimicking the creation of the world—a new age. For the five days preceding the Heb Sed festival, a fire ceremony called “lighting the flame” served to purify the festival precincts. But though much of the ceremony was public in nature, the most sacred parts of the Heb Sed rite occurred in a secret chamber—and the question is where precisely this chamber was located. From the reliefs of Niuserre, the Sixth ruler of the Fifth Dynasty, we know that this chamber contained a bed (a couch?), though other depictions show that in certain cases a sarcophagus was used. Naydler has suggested that this secret chamber was inside the pyramid and that the pharaohs in fact built their pyramids because they were specifically linked with their Heb Sed festivals.
The main purpose of the Heb Sed festival was to confirm that the pharaoh was still fit to rule; that he was still able to maintain his link with the Otherworld. Naydler points out that upon a pharaoh’s death, he was meant to join the gods permanently in the Otherworld, where he would help guide his successors and Egypt as a whole from the other side. Thus the Heb Sed rituals were closely linked with the king’s preparedness to make a successful voyage after death; they were a test run for his ascension to the Otherworld. This may explain the confusion about why pyramids were seen as tombs and why the Pyramid Texts were seen as evidence supporting this conclusion.
The fit state of mind that the pharaoh had to be in, both in life and in death, was known as “akh.” Intriguingly, the pharaoh accomplished this state in a place known as the “akhet,” which is often translated as “horizon,” but which should be interpreted as a place of spiritual illumination, which historian Mircea Eliade labeled an awakening as well as ascension. Egyptologist Mark Lehner has suggested that this “akhet” is the Giza Plateau, further supporting the conclusion that the pyramids were linked with this ceremony.
Naydler titled one of the chapters of his book “The Pyramids as the Locus of Secret Rites,” where he argues that the Heb Sed festivals were performed in the pyramids. He notes that there is an obvious contradiction in the fact that the construction of a pyramid was often abandoned as soon as a pharaoh died. So, when he was most in need of a tomb, all work on that tomb was stopped? Let us also note that several pharaohs who did not live long had no pyramids whatsoever. Djedefra, Khufu’s son, did not live very long, and his pyramid was never completed—
though he clearly died the son of a dynasty of pyramid-builders extraordinaire who could surely have spared some men to build at least a small or minuscule tomb for their king. This scenario makes little sense. Surely the pharaoh’s successor—often his beloved son—on occasion would desire to have his father’s tomb completed, so that his father could be buried inside before work commenced on his own pyramid? If the successor was in his early 20s when he ascended to the throne, there was more than enough time left before he had to wonder about his own death, as the life expectancy of an Egyptian pharaoh was not too different from most of us. But each time a pharaoh dies, construction work on his pyramid is stopped, as if the pyramid is no longer required now that the pharaoh is dead. In the “pyramid = tomb” equation, that practice does not make sense.
But the Heb Sed festival is the key to unlocking the true purpose of the pyramids. The Heb Sed festival was normally to be held for the 30th year of the king’s rule. Is it a coincidence, therefore, that Khufu was said to have taken 10 years to plan his pyramid, which included diverting the river Nile, and that it took a further 20 years of work to actually build his pyramid? According to archaeologist Rainer Stadelman, two of the three pyramids of Sneferu were built between the 14th and 30th years of his reign. Coincidence, or evidence of a link with the Heb Sed festival?
In summary, Naydler has found evidence for the practice of this festival in most pyramids (including the intact pyramid of Third Dynasty Pharaoh Sekhemkhet), but he focuses on the Zoser complex, if only because it is perhaps the best remaining evidence—and was, after all, Egypt’s original pyramid, built by Imhotep. For one thing, the walls of the Zoser pyramid complex are not blank as they are at Giza. Of all the possible scenes they could display, the texts and depictions show various stages of a Heb Sed festival. If they were tombs, why not show scenes from the afterlife? To use Naydler’s own words, “As these are the only reliefs inside the pyramid, there could be no stronger evidence to demonstrate that the interior of the pyramid was as much associated with the Heb Sed festival as were the buildings and architectural spaces in its vicinity.”5 Let us add that the causeway of the Great Pyramid also has scenes of Khufu’s Heb Sed festival.
The Ancient Alien Question Page 24
