Originally we had intended to concentrate much more on the Heliopolitan religion, and had spent many months researching the Pyramid Texts and other material, but because we soon discovered the existence of the conspiracy, our early research was very largely put aside. However, when we began to delve into the work of Andrija Puharich on shamanism, it reminded us of certain elements repeated throughout the Pyramid Texts, and gradually a revolutionary possibility began to take shape in our minds. We noted that Puharich himself linked the shamanic experience, the use of psychoactive substances and the Heliopolitan religion, although he failed to develop the idea in print (no matter how far he may have taken it privately). And we were also fascinated by the implications of the fact that the CIA have spent so much time and resources on experimenting with shamanic techniques and mind-altering drugs.

The Pyramid Texts suggested to us that the afterlife journey of the king could also describe the astral flight characteristic of shamanism. Excitingly, the latest anthropological research into the phenomenon of shamanism could well provide the key to understanding the mystery of the extraordinarily advanced knowledge of the ancient Egyptians and the secrets of the Heliopolitan religion.

In 1995 a remarkable book was published in Switzerland entitled Le serpent cosmique, l’ADN et les origines du savior (The Cosmic Serpent, DNA and the Origins of Knowledge) by Swiss anthropologist Jeremy Narby. (It was first published in English in 1998.) It presents the results of Narby’s personal study of Amazonian shamans, and reveals the remarkable scope of the information shamans glean during the ecstatic trances they induce by taking natural hallucinogenic substances, primarily one called ayahuasca. From this research, Narby developed a theory about the origins of that knowledge that - we believe - has enormous significance for an investigation of the mysteries of ancient Egypt.

In the mid-1980s Narby was studying for his doctorate among the indigenous people of the Peruvian Amazon, working on an environmental project. Like many before him, he soon became fascinated by the astounding botanical knowledge of these so-called ‘primitive’ people, specifically their medicinal use of certain rare plants. He was impressed by the range of plant-derived medicines used by the tribal shamans - ayahuasqueros - and by their effectiveness, especially after they cured a long-standing back problem which European doctors had proved completely incapable of treating. The more he learned, the more intrigued he became about the ways in which the Amazonian natives had developed or acquired this knowledge. The odds against them coming up with even one of these recipes by chance or even by experimentation are simply overwhelming. There are some 80,000 species of plants in the Amazonian rain forest, so to discover an effective remedy using a mixture of just two of them would theoretically require the testing of every possible combination - about 3,700,000,000. It does not end there: many of their medicines involve several plants, and even then such a calculation does not allow for experimentation with the often extremely complex procedures necessary to extract the active ingredients and produce a potent mixture.

One good example of this mysterious medicinal knowledge is ayahuasca itself, a combination of just two plants. The first comes from the leaves of a shrub and contains a hormone naturally secreted in the human brain, dimethyltryptamine, a powerful hallucinogen only discovered by Western science in 1979. If taken orally, though, it is broken down by an enzyme in the stomach and becomes totally ineffective, so the second component of ayahuasca, extracted from a creeper, contains several substances that protect the dimethyltryptamine from that specific enzyme.

In effect, ayahuasca is a designer drug, made to order. It is as if the exact requirements of the mixture were specified in advance, then the correct ingredients chosen to meet the requirements. But how? How could anyone, even sophisticated Western botanists, have found the perfect ingredients without spending decades - perhaps even centuries - on trial and error? How can the ‘primitive’ Amazonian natives have known the properties of these two plants? After all, the odds against them coming up with this combination by accident are truly astronomical. As Narby writes:

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.

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:

‘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:

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 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 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 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.

Shamans ascribe the source of their remarkable knowledge to these twin serpents, like the two Narby himself encountered. Could it be that the ‘primitive’ belief that all living things are animated by the same single principle, described in this ubiquitous serpentine imagery, is actually correct and that what it has always described is DNA? Narby cites numerous examples, from ancient myths and the shamanistic lore of ‘primitive’ cultures from Peru to Australia, to support his superb connection between the serpents and DNA.

The shamans insist that the ‘serpents’ possess consciousness and that they enter into real dialogue with them. If the shamans are, in reality, somehow communicating with DNA, the implication is that it must be intelligent: the DNA of the ayahuasca plants, for example, must ‘know’ its own properties, but will only impart them to the shaman in answer to specific questions. This means that the DNA has to understand the question and be able to communicate with the shaman’s own DNA. Can the DNA of one individual living creature really communicate with that of another?

Narby’s theory still has a long way to go. For example, it is hard to see how intelligent DNA can explain the knowledge the shamans receive about specific techniques, such as weaving or mixing curare. The important achievement is that he has shown that shamans derive usable information by mental contact with some nonhuman source. And they do appear to be in touch with the ‘gods’, or at least some strange beings who exist in another dimension and share their undoubted powers with them.

Another very significant aspect of Narby’s research is his identification of a common feature throughout the shamanistic cultures (and ancient myths): divine twins as the bringers of wisdom, ‘the theme of double beings of celestial origin and creators of life’.¹⁶ He points out, for example, quoting from Claude Lévi-Strauss, that the Aztec word coatl, as in the name Quetzalcoatl, means both ‘snake’ and ‘twin’.¹⁷ (Quetzalcoatl can be interpreted as either ‘feathered serpent’ or ‘magnificent twin’.) Narby believes that the ‘twin serpents’ so often encountered during shamanic flights and which he himself experienced represent the two strands of the double helix of DNA. This reminds us of the two sets of twins in the Heliopolitan religion (Isis and Osiris, Nepthys and Set) as well as the Nommo of the Dogon, as described in Robert Temple’s The Sirius Mystery, who are also made up of sets of twins and descend to earth to civilise mankind.¹⁸ Again, Narby’s shamanic theory provides an elegant - and, in our view, much more plausible - alternative to the ubiquitous ‘ancient astronaut’ explanation for these myths.

Perhaps DNA has other secrets to impart. The genetic code in the human genome is made up of just 3 per cent of its total DNA - the function of the rest is unknown, and is officially termed ‘junk DNA’. Narby suggests that a better term would be ‘mystery DNA’.¹⁹ How many ‘miracles’ and how much potential does the other 97 per cent encompass?

Significantly the flight of the shaman also enables him to visit far distant places and later describe what he saw and heard there - in other words, remote viewing. This aspect of shamanism particularly intrigued anthropologist Kenneth Kensinger, who tested it among the ayahuasqueros of the Amazon and found that they were able to ‘bring back’ accurate information about distant places, as well as tell him about the death of a relative before he heard about it himself.²⁰ (Andrija Puharich also studied the remote-viewing potential of shamans, as described in Chapter 6.)

We asked Jeremy Narby if he agreed with us that his ideas could account for the extraordinary knowledge implicit in the building of the pyramids. He pointed out that the Aztecs, Incas and Maya had constructed comparable temples, and that ‘the double serpent, or Quetzalcoatl, or Viracocha, or whatever figure you take depending on the culture, teaches about curing, healing and plants, but also about astronomy, building techniques, technology - arts and crafts in general.’²¹

Narby was cautious about stepping outside his field of specialism. But was there really an ancient Egyptian equivalent of ayahuasca - and if so, what was it? Synchronistically, the Channel 4 television series, Sacred Weeds, went far in answering this question. This four-part series, first shown in August 1998, featured the use of natural hallucinogens in sacred practices such as shamanism. The final programme attempted to rediscover what some believed to be an ancient Egyptian ritual drug, the blue waterlily.

Although now very rare, this plant was commonly used both recreationally and ritually by the ancient Egyptians. It is frequently depicted in wall paintings and papyri, and even forms the design of the pillars of the great temple at Karnak. Egyptologists believed it to have been merely decorative, but the programme set out to determine if it had a psychoactive effect, which may well have been exploited in ancient Egypt. Interestingly, the lily was specifically associated with Ra-Atum. Seeing the way the plant flowers, shooting a long stem out of the water which then bursts into an open flower, it is easy to see the symbolic association with Atum’s bursting forth from the primeval waters.

As tested on two volunteers, an extract from the blue lily proved to have the suspected narcotic effect. Towards the end of the programme historian Michael Carmichael, an American living in Oxford who is a specialist in the shamanic use of psychoactive plants, discussed the possibility that, in higher doses, it could be used to induce shamanic experiences.

We contacted Carmichael, who worked with R. Gordon Wasson, one of the pioneers of research into the shamanic use of drugs (see Chapter 5). He told us that there is abundant evidence for the use of psychoactive drugs in ancient Egypt, saying, ‘there are so many that I don’t know where to begin’.²² Several are mentioned in the Ebers Papyrus (c. 1500 BCE, the oldest known medical text in the world). They are known to have included opium (imported from Crete), mandrake and cannabis. The psychoactive substances used by ancient cultures, including Egypt, have been studied by several researchers. Little if anything of this has found its way into the Egyptological literature because of its characteristic extreme conservatism.²³

Several other scientists and researchers have studied the shamanic practices of ancient Egypt and their use of psychoactive drugs. They include Benny Shanon, a cognitive psychologist and philosopher at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Carmichael agreed emphatically with Narby’s observations that useful information can be gained by shamans in their ecstatic states, from communion with otherwordly entities. He told us:

Turning to the question of the inexplicable knowledge of the ancient Egyptians, Carmichael - who is well acquainted with the ideas of the New Egyptology - told us:

So what are the entities? Nature spirits, the gods, a dramatisation from the shaman’s subconscious mind, somehow personifying information picked up by ESP or even DNA? Or could the shaman really be in contact with beings on some far-off world?

Jeremy Narby told us: ‘I guess this is what your average Amazonian shaman would testify: travelling in his mind to another planet.’ He referred to the paintings of an Amazonian shaman, Pablo Ameringo, who depicts the things he sees under the influence of ayahuasca, saying:

On the other hand, could the shamanic experience really be of extraterrestrial origin - or is such a question meaningless? Narby says:

Even highly trained shamanistic initiates can encounter not just evil, but also trickster spirits. Perhaps this should be a warning to those amateurs who believe that they are in touch with the gods.

The evidence of shamans and mystics suggests strongly that there is a stargate and it is possible for individuals to step through it into a magical otherworld. But it is not a physical device like the rippling vortex machine of the movie. Just as Michael Harner’s internal journey brought him face to face with animal-headed gods so reminiscent of the ancient Egyptian deities, so it seems each of us already possesses the means to meet the gods. Perhaps this is what the Hermeticists - the much later initiates of the old mystery schools - meant when they taught that man is a microcosm of the whole universe. It is interesting that Dale E. Graff, the man who was not only director of the US Army’s remote viewing STAR GATE project, but also chose its highly evocative name, wrote:

No teacher, priest or guru can locate the stargate for us, so our quest for it and its mysteries, if we care to look for it, may be long and hard. The problem is that many find it easier to listen to those who promise to deliver the stargate already neatly packaged and temptingly ajar, and to invite mighty ineffable beings to step through it to inspire us with awe, enliven our dull existence and make us feel special, chosen - until we realise that in coming through they have slammed shut the ultimate prison door through which there is no escape. The beings who come as gods may not exist beyond top-secret rooms inside government buildings or in the fevered imaginings of channellers. But even if they do come from distant star systems, we have a right to defend our minds against what is dangerous and corrupt.

If we are right, then this warning does not come a moment too soon. If we are wrong, then we still have time to learn to be proud of our humanity - and find the stargate for ourselves.