Free The Stargate Conspiracy by Lynn Picknett Page A

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