Free The Stargate Conspiracy by Lynn Picknett Page B

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 writings, 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