The Stargate Conspiracy (50 page)

We find it offensive that the ancient Egyptian religion has been cynically exploited by the conspirators, especially because what it taught, above all, was the necessity for
balance
- light and dark, male and female, as exemplified in the duo of the good goddess Isis and her dark sister Nepthys, and Isis and her consort Osiris. Although their worshippers may have had their favourites, the gods themselves were deemed to be absolutely equal, eternally maintaining the divine balance. All this has been ignored by those who have hijacked the Heliopolitan religion, repackaging it for a mass market, and irreverently using the gods as brand names for their new gimcrack products. The names may be the same, but
this
Isis is merely a new label obscuring the same old, profoundly dangerous patriarchal attitudes.

We do not deny that humanity faces enormous problems, many of its own making. But precisely because we have decisions to make we must not abdicate personal responsibility and hand over our autonomy, both individual and collective, to those who come bearing messages from the space gods, but whose strings are being pulled by the cynical puppetmasters of government cabals and military and intelligence agencies. To hand over our own power is, we argue, entirely to miss the point of being human.

The extraterrestrials, as claimed by the believers, take all the credit for all the achievements of human civilisation, but blame us for all the failures. Why else would they have to come to rescue us (in their nuts-and-bolts spacecraft)?

Even if the Council of Nine turn out to be real, in our own view, they - and their pernicious message - should be roundly rejected. Even if the human race began as their inferiors we seem to have out-evolved them, certainly where basic morality is concerned: at least in principle we now know the difference between good and evil, and unity and division - or we should, by now. Recent history gives us no excuse. If Earth was ever colonised by the star people, surely now is the time to claim our independence from them, not to welcome them, starry-eyed and ignorant, like members of some galactic cargo cult greeting the pilots of supply planes.

Perhaps there is no better time to realise that all men and women themselves are godlike heroes of almost unlimited potential. And if there is any one over-riding message for the Millennium, it is that the time for mankind to come of age is long overdue.

 

 

The Stargate Conspiracy
became, for us, a profoundly unsettling detective story, a ‘case’ that, whether we like it or not, involves all of us as the endtimes machine swings into action. But inevitably, having exposed the intricate layers of human agenda behind the mysteries of Egypt and Mars, we ourselves may appear to be resolutely sceptical on all matters spiritual or mystical. This is not so. Fortunately, as our investigation proceeded, certain lines of research opened up a completely new angle on many of the most intractable mysteries discussed in this book, enabling us to offer an elegant, exciting - and unashamedly otherworldly - solution to those problems.

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.

Shamans are what used to be called medicine men and women, natural-born psychics who are nevertheless highly trained to interpret dreams, heal the sick and guide people through knowledge that comes to them during their ecstatic trances. They are found in what are generally taken to be ‘primitive’ tribal societies, from Siberia to the Amazonian rain forest. These adepts take shamanic ‘flights’ out of the body into the realms normally inaccessible to mankind and return with specific information of great practical use.

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.