By Ellen Bierhorst
........... 1
Three
Different Cultures................. 1
Modern Egypt........... 2
Jordan........... 4
Sound Healing
in Saqqara; King’s
Chamber in Cheops Pyramid................. 4
Valley of the
Kings................. 6
Temples of
Luxor and Karnack................. 8
The Jewish
Angle................. 11
Meaning of it
all................. 14
On December 2, 2009 I took off from Cincinnati for New York, thence to Cairo, Egypt for a sixteen day junket. First time in my life I’d ever done a package tour. This one, (see www.greatmystery.org) was touted as, “This extraordinary adventure is a step beyond, giving you the opportunity to invoke and move into the wondrous Egyptian inter-dimensional portals with two truly powerful shamanic teachers.”
It’s been nearly twenty years since I considered myself a shamanic psychologist, and I’d never before had a strong yen to see Egypt. But something came over me and I made a hasty decision at the last moment to join the forty other Americans—plus one Aussie—on this magical mystery tour.
I had just five weeks to learn about ancient Egypt, which I hadn’t studied since drawing pyramids and palm trees on 15 feet of brown paper in sixth grade.
Hank
Wesselman
I read two and a half books of leader shaman-anthropologist Hank Wesselman’s fantastic journeys through time and stars.
SPIRITWALKER (book 1) An
astonishing
true
story
of
an
anthroplologist's
quest into a world of magic,
mysticism and
meaning. In this
world, he
met a fellow traveler, a Hawaiian kahuna mystic named Nainoa and
embarked on a
mystical journey beyond the boundaries of ordinary consciousness. The
result is
an incredible true story of a fascinating adventure, an exciting
discovery, and
the story of how a hard-headed scientific realist may have stumbled on
an
important piece in the puzzle of human evolution.
MEDICINEMAKER (book 2)Anthopologist
Hank Wesselman’s travels continue in this remarkable book, which also
takes us
on expedition to Africa and gives us an unprecedented glimpse into the
origin
and destiny of our species. Hank Wesselman has brought back from his
extraordinary travels an extraordinary message: the keys to personal
power and
the healing of all humankind.
VISIONSEEKER (book 3)In
the third remarkable book in the Spiritwalker trilogy, Dr. Hank
Wesselman
reveals what it means to be a scientist, a mystic, and a medicine man
in an age
of high technology and super science, casting light on the emergence of
a
modern Western Shamanism, the phenomenon of spirit possession, the
conveyance
of the souls of the dead, authentic shamanic time travel, and the true
nature
of the human spirit.
And I also read
The Search for Omm Sety: A True Story of
Eternal Love and One Woman’s
Voyage Through the Ages by
Jonathan Cott
Dorothy
Eady, born in 1904, recounts her story of a lengthy experience of a
past-life
as a consort of Pharoah Sety the First. Her psychic re-experiencing of
this
lifetime, led her to explorations of sites in Egypt.
Dorothy Eady/Omm Sety lived her last years (until mid 1980s) at
Abydos
where she assisted in the restoration of the temple and followed the
ancient
religion.
From Atlantis to the Sphinx:
Recovering the Lost Wisdom of the
Ancient World by
Colin Wilson Wilson has
presented an
interesting and plausible alternative account of the history of mankind
on
Earth, namely that humans have existed for much longer than orthodox
academics
are willing to believe, and that advanced civilizations had developed
millennia
before the Great Pyramids of Egypt.
(Annotations from the webpage, not from me.)
Ancient
Egypt : an illustrated reference to the myths, religions, pyramids and
temples
of the land of the pharaohs by Lorna Oakes is a sumptuously illustrated
coffee table
book that I was able to check out of the library.
Finally,
I read Two books by conventional Egyptologist (and mystery fiction
writer!)
Barbara Mertz: Tombs, Temples
and Heiroglyphs (a layman’s history of ancient Egypt) in which she
calls by
the name “pyramidiots” those perennial movements to find mystical
meanings in
the remnants of ancient Egyptian culture . Also, He
Shall Thunder in The Sky, an Amelia Peabody mystery by nom de plume
Elizabeth Peters in which English archeologists/adventurers explore
ancient
tombs and WW I in Cairo of 1914.
Charming.
I was
more than a little persuaded to believe the Atlantis explanation for
why
advanced culture, medicine, science, mathematics suddenly sprang up
with no
lead-in about 3,000 BCE in the Nile valley, and why curiously similar
pyramids
are to be found in Egypt, Central America, Thailand.
Also that the ancient pyramid builders (and the builders of
those monumental stone walls in Peru and Central America) had a
technology that
we know nothing of. I was
respectful of the society I imagined had existed in the Old Kingdom,
Middle
Kingdom, New Kingdom, and inclined to
think that the people had been happy and healthy, with dignity
for the
common human being.
The first society encountered, however, was not Ancient Egypt, but rather the modern Arabic culture of President Mubarak, in office since 1981 (!)
You see a few giant photos of him in public places, on buildings.
Egypt is part of the Sahara desert where nothing lives. Nothing. Unlike the American western desert, or the southwestern desert, or the Sinai desert. No blanched weed, no cactus, nothing. The expressway coming from the airport looks just like any expressway, except that the ground on either side of the roadbed looks like messy piles in an abandoned playground sandbox. They don’t even bother to smooth it out.
Mile after mile, driving towards the city, on either side of the highway you’d see large multi-storey apartment building complexes mostly under construction and mostly vacant. Weird. I couldn’t get a satisfactory explanation of this.
Entering the city proper there were acre after acre of multi-storey apartment buildings, also frequently empty and occasionally under construction. Sometimes laundry hanging out the windows on lines. Lots of trash everywhere. Significant numbers of donkey and horse drawn wagons, some with pneumatic rubber tires.
Lots of people, almost all male, some wearing trousers, but many in galabias, (gal-ah-BEE-ahs) long sleeve long hemmed dresses in muted colors. Occasionally a woman, always in galabia with head and neck covered in scarves. Muted colors. Some of the men wore scarves as well, wound about their necks, or sometimes like a sort of turban. The only fez I saw (tarboosh) was on a porter at the fancy hotel, the Mena House, in Giza just a mile from the pyramids.
The Nile! The river was wonderful. It is larger than the Ohio, wider, but less wide than the Mississippi, and there is at least one very large island in it in downtown Cairo. Larger than the Isle de la Cite in Paris. You can’t see the green in downtown Cairo, of course, being built up like any city. But on our four-day river boat cruise up to Aswan from Luxor we saw it. Seemed about a mile on either bank of lush green. Palm trees of several varieties. Alfalfa (grown as fodder). Vegetable crops, cabbage. Now that the Aswan high dam has eliminated the annual overbank flooding that used to bring fertile black silt to the fields, I was concerned about the fertility of the soil. Our guide, Dr. Weil, said it was indeed a problem and the decline in soil quality has been correlated to rising rates of disease in the population. However, he said, “We need the electricity generated by the damn too badly to consider giving it up, and the savings from preventing flood damage to buildings is also a welcome relief.”
Arab culture makes me nervous, despite the fact that the folks were all warm, courteous, and lively. I think it is because I don’t understand the sex/gender thing.
One night in Cairo we boarded a restaurant boat for a short cruise with dinner and entertainment. We were 40 American tourists in casual dress and 80 prosperous Egyptian couples and families, dressed to the nines. All the women wore the head scarves and long dresses, but they were colorful, beaded, sparkly. The star entertainment act was a belly dancer. No dancer at a sleazy strip joint could have been more bawdy than she was. But that is just accepted entertainment in Egypt, even though it would be considered too risqué for a classy restaurant in Cincinnati.
According to our guide, the average Muslim man marries in his mid to late twenties, and has no sexual experience outside his marriage throughout his life. One of our group suggested this makes for rampant pre-marital homosexuality and an angry, violent young male population. The Islamic culture doesn’t consider homosexuality a sin for the man doing the penetration, according to my source. Where does that leave the other guy?
The east side of the Gulf of Aqaba is Jordan, a monarchy. Frequent huge photographs of the reigning king and his father, King Hussein. (More frequent than those of Mubarak in Egypt.) They have a bicameral parliament with the upper house appointed by the king. Somehow, Jordan seemed jollier than Egypt. Morale better. Same Arab culture, but the Jordanians didn’t have as largely Arabic features as the Egyptians; more of a melting pot, apparently.
Saqqara, our first foray into Ancient Egypt, was a
cemetery
in the Old Kingdom and features the earliest pyramids.
We went to the Step Pyramid of Djoser,
2630 BCE. 
The structure in the foreground, the “Heb-Sed
Court” was a
healing temple, according to Hank, where priests made drumming and
other sounds
for the treatment of the sick.
Exploring this court we found several well-preserved niches and
to our
delight and group excitement, experienced curious acoustic phenomena
there. Standing in a small unroofed
alcove,
approximately 4’x4’x8’ I heard and felt with my body a very clear
thrumming,
pulsing sound. Stepping out again,
it disappeared. What was
that? It felt marvelous and I
lingered there. Later, back in the
bus, which was parked some 200 yards away, I noticed the same kind of
pitch and
throbbing of the diesel engine.
Perhaps something about the construction of the Heb-Sed Court
niches
amplified sounds too faint to be perceived otherwise.
We were there with Hank to experience mysterious ancient energies, and this really turned us on.
The culmination of our trip, on the final day, was our visit inside the great pyramid of Khufu/Cheops in Giza. Heavy handed explorers some 200 years ago or so finally succeeded in blowing an entry into the structure with dynamite, finding curious passages and a fascinating granite-lined room, the King’s Chamber, about 5m x 10.5 m x 5 m high. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pyramid_of_Giza#King.27s_Chamber
We climbed up the outside of the pyramid (the current exterior surface is of stepping-stone blocks, roughly 3’ cubes. Inside I remember a long rectangular tunnel that angles up. Having to bend over and use the ladder-rung stops fixed in the floor. Surprisingly, it was warm in there, maybe 75 degrees F., as opposed to the fresh winter air outside (65 and sunny). Then another tunnel. Up, up. Legs very sore that night and the next day.
You enter through a low rectangular opening, maybe 4.5’ high near one end of the chamber. It is a featureless granite box. Near the other end is a lidless granite “sarcophagus”, carved from one piece of stone. Napoleon spent one night alone there, and emerged looking queer the next morning, and refused to discuss it, ever. The fantasy for us was that when we did a shamanistic journeying there we’d pick up new information, have major healings, get insights. There are those who believe the pyramid was a machine for star travel, to Sirius the dog star, for instance. Ooooh.
Hank lit a candle. Did some kind of invocation/ blessing that I don’t remember. People started toning spontaneously. Maybe 15 minutes of that. It was beautiful. Imagine the reverberations in a solid stone room. Then Hank started the drumming… maybe 25 minutes of that. I lay down, opening myself to the energies. It was an altered state.
One of
our group in the
King’s Chamber, standing behind the “sarcophagus”.
One spunky woman got up and lay down in the “sarcophagus” for a while. Then others followed suit, including me. Lying there was a remarkable experience. The drumming had ended by then, and I tried some simple toning. Lo and behold there was an answering tone, much lower than mine. In the semi darkness, with all the exotic spirit of the thing, I found this thrilling, “alive”. That was probably the high point of the whole trip for me.
I remembered Robert Monroe, author of Journeys Out of The Body , and how he, an acoustical engineer with RCA started having out-of-body experiences after moving to a house with a pyramidal copper roof. My fantasy was that the pyramid with its original gold top was an engine for inducing OBE’s in the ancient Egyptian pharaohs.
We were in there an hour and a half. I felt a mild exhilaration on leaving, and hoped that my sore throat and runny nose would have been cured. But that didn’t happen.
From Cairo we flew to Luxor, about half way
towards the
southern border, and bused to the Valley of the Kings, where the
Pharaohs had
their tombs, including the famous King Tut. In
the
Sahara,
so
completely
lifeless,
it is a winding
declivity between hills. Our
tickets entitled us to visit three tombs of the dozens available. I chose first the tomb of Ramses IV
(1160 BCE). 
I descended this
straight hallway, plenty tall to stand up, maybe 10’ wide, inclined so
sharply
they had to have “rungs” bolted to the floor. Then
you
found
just
one
larger
room with the coffin in the
middle, the ceiling and walls completely decorated.
It
was
amazing
to
find such vibrant colors
in artwork
over 3000 years old. I don’t much
like tombs and cemeteries, and so it felt kind of dead in there to me. But there I was on the shamanistic
tour, so I opened myself to feel whatever energies might be there for
me, kind
of like the time on LSD when I sent my awareness into a maple tree…but
that’s
another story. So there I was,
reaching out to commune with a dead Pharaoh, when zap!
I got something. Most surprising
thing. Felt myself present with, or in
communication with this person, I presume it was Ramses IV. He had a distinct “flavor”,
personality. In sharp contrast
with the circumstances (underground, strange decorations all over the
walls, in
a tomb, in Egypt for heaven’s sake!) the personality, the communion I
got was
of a completely modern consciousness, up close and personal, amused and
buoyant. And I didn’t feel him out
“there”, distant, but rather extremely close, like someone in bed with
you, and
it was as though the “energy” was right here, at the base of my neck.
Now, safe at home in Cincinnati, I wish I had stayed to ask him a few things, get acquainted. It couldn’t hurt. At the time I was a little freaked out, as you can imagine, so it was as though I just acknowledged his friendliness, said thank you very much, and got back out of there.
Hate to admit it, but I found the tombs a bit boring. Once I’d seen one, they pretty much looked alike to me. The other two I visited had nobody “home” in them. But one was empty of other tourists when I was in there, so I opened myself up again. Nobody answered, but an idea came to me. Maybe we have misinterpreted all this preparation for the afterlife business. Maybe it was rather that if you go to a lot of trouble to make the tomb, and decorate it, and have ceremonies and stuff, then it sets up a “telephone” for the living to communicate with the dead person. Like I felt with Ramses IV.
These were the most impressive of all the temples
we
saw. I didn’t relate much to
them. The pylon is the gate, big
flat things with a door in the middle.
Must have been impressive when there were huge wooden doors
there. Then you go in and there is a big
open
courtyard where the lower classes can go.
Then you go thru another gateway in a wall and into a hypostyle
hall
where only priests and priests in training (i.e. the middle class) can
go. These were roofed over with huge
stones
bridging the enormous pillars, and there was a clerestory for the
center
aisle. The pillars are so large it
takes ten men holding hands to circle one. 
I
asked
myself
what
I
would
have felt to be in there in
1350 BCE. Dim light. Surprising
thing,
though,
it
didn’t
seem
like
it was intimidating. I got
the idea that all this colossal architecture was to say, “See, human
beings are
gods, really, and you, citizen of Egypt, are part of all this, and so
glorified.” Seductive, maybe, but
I didn’t much like it. My new
friend, an astrologer from Melbourne, Australia said for her the
temples
weren’t very spiritual. For her,
there is more real spirituality in nature. Bingo!
To me, the gorgeous canyon carved out of the rock at Petra was more uplifting than the astonishing temples carved there by man.
Entrance
to Petra
But for some of us the icons of ancient Egypt were intensely spiritual and powerful. One loveable woman, a naturopath herself and a retired computer programmer, revealed painfully the first night that she had stage 4 cancer. When we were at Karnack temple she had an amazing experience at a statue of Sekhmet, the Kali–like goddess with the head of a lion.
Sekhmet kills, and she also heals.
I wasn’t there, but I heard about it. The
woman
wept
and
wept,
and
shook and trembled, and later,
at a shamanistic healing ceremony with the entire group, she announced
in a
resonating voice that she was priestess of Sekhmet and that she had
been
healed. She threw away her
chemotherapy tablets, and here she is dancing for joy on the felucca sailboat on our way to
Elephantine Island.
She’s
got my credulity for a
miraculous
healing.
I didn’t expect to have a big Jewish experience in Egypt. Went there to get the mysterious energies of an ancient culture that sprang up seeming without any slow dawn about 5,000 years ago and may have been the scion of a much older culture, perhaps the Atlantis that Plato spoke of.
And then, the Egyptologist-tour guide, Dr. Wael Soliman said there was no evidence that Jews or Israelites had ever been in Egypt nor that they had escaped amidst signs and wonders, and surely we’d have some if it had happened. (Of course Immanuel Velikovsky has something to say about that… ) That didn’t trouble me over much; I know that Joseph was the Grand Vizier, that he forgave his brothers, that Moses led us through the Narrows and out of there. And maybe Freud was right about the heretic Pharaoh Akhenaton being the real father of monotheism, inspiring Moses, etc. etc.
What we know (at least we Jews) was that we were sickened by the Egyptians’ preoccupation with the afterlife and their preparations for it. They certainly were obsessed, to spend so much wealth and energy on it. I’m glad we got out of there. And I am sure the Egyptian priests and royalty had fine contempt for the rag-tag band of 20,000 Semites who walked away with their goats and donkeys around 1500 BCE, but this much was clear to me: the land of the Pharaohs and the Sphinx is populated today by people from the Arabian peninsula, not the straight-nosed folks in the sculptures and friezes, and of those people there is no living trace; yet here I stand, a living, breathing Jew. So who gets the last laugh?
The modern Egyptians are Muslims and they look like Arabs. They claim descent in part from the tourism-generating ancient Egyptians, but this appeared to me a kind of opportunistic delusion. The culture in Egypt today has everything to do with Mecca, and shows no trace of the spirit that built the temples and tombs. No more than General Motors has to do with Tecumseh or the Adena mound-builders. The energies represented by the figures of humans with feline heads or falcon heads are as enigmatic to them as they are to me, and are in fact of less interest to the man in the street of Cairo.
And incidentally that was what there is in the street. Men. Rarely do we see an Egyptian woman. The women we do see wear galabias or other loose fitting clothing and always a head scarf, though they do not cover their faces. Women are seen, however in the airport and onboard planes. Interestingly, although they wear tent-like dresses and scarves, they incorporate shawls with beads and glitter, and sometimes bright colors.
At the conclusion of the 2-week Egypt tour, four of us took a 4-day excursion to Petra, in Jordan near the Gulf of Aqaba. From Cairo we took a seats-10 van to Suez, then the tunnel under the canal, and then followed a hypotenuse road across the Sinai to Taba Heights, which is a bit south of Eilat, Israel. Then we ferried across the gulf and drove north to Petra in Jordan, on the East side of the Jordan valley (at this point, the Dead Sea valley). Hour after hour, motoring through the empty desert, mountains in the distance, two lane highway, occasional Bedouin hut/tent (they look like a pile of rags) with some camels sauntering around, unfenced. Amazing to imagine the Israelites walking all that distance with goats, donkeys, children.
In Jordan the guide pointed out the Mountains of the Moon, unlike anything in this hemisphere, where “Indiana Jones” was filmed and parts of “Star Wars”, and I knew that the People had gazed on those same lumpy rock mountains.
Wadi
Rum, “theMountains of
the Moon”, Jordan
And he pointed out the mountain where, according to tradition, the high priest Aaron was buried.
Aaron’s
Tomb, Petra
Whether his bones were laid to rest there or not, it was a thrill for me to know that Moses, Miriam, Joshua and all the ancestors had looked at these mountains, had walked this distance. How did they ever do it? Just about killed me, riding all day and I was in a motor van.
Israelis ooh and ahh about the beauty of the Sinai desert, and I have to admit I agree. What is it about the desert that stimulates the spirit so? Definitely a crown-chakra place. Bare existence. Wind, rocks, sand, scrub plants here and there.
Sinai
desert, here looking as
dead as the Sahara, but most places a bit more alive, like Nevada
Several times during the desert crossing we passed Egyptian military bases. Soldiers are soldiers, look the same as ours.
Egyptian
soldiers
Throughout Egypt we saw armed soldiers, and little elevated guard stations with the barrel of a machine gun sticking out. Creepy. I learned that the men in suits and ties all over the ancient sites were armed guards. They can’t afford for tourists to get spooked and stop coming to spend money in their country. I do hope it is not to police their own people. Although… who am I to talk? My country imprisons more of her citizens, proportionately than any nation on earth.
I couldn’t help reflecting on the nature of societies, modern and ancient. Ancient monarchies; modern monarchies. The American system. Modern Jordan is a frank monarchy; modern Egypt appears to be a monarchy masquerading as a democracy. The “king”, Mubarak, is now 81 years old. Possibly this is the reason why Egypt is not as buoyant as Jordan, whose king is only 47.
Rulers or leaders always lead with the consent of the governed, no matter what the system. If not, the people either revolt or languish and die.
In Ancient Egypt, the priests kept their knowledge to themselves rather than publish it on Wikipedia. So when the Romans, upset that the Egyptians didn’t want to worship their Caesar as a god, had the priests executed, all the know-how of ancient Egypt died with them.
I had assumed life was pretty brutish under the Pharaohs for everybody except the royal family. Apparently I was wrong about that.
In both Egypt and Jordan there was trash all over the place. Egypt worse than Jordan. Made me think a trashy society can’t be a truly healthy society. If Switzerland makes Ohio look like a dump, Egypt makes Ohio look like Switzerland.
Right after I returned from my trip, the Senate passed a Health Care Reform bill. Many of its provisions are disappointing to me, but our energetic, youthful, and brilliant president thinks it is worth having, so I guess I’ll go along. What a cumbersome and crazy legislative system we have, as revealed in this agonizing process of crafting Health Care legislation!
Being abroad, coming home again to JFK, I again experienced my love for the American people. For all our poor taste at times, and our crazy conceits, we are more individualistic than anyone else. You can tell an American across the street, no mater how she or he is dressed, by the sheer amount of space they dare to occupy. I love that. I love it that we are moving in the direction of more freedoms, not less… like legalized abortion and growing rights for gays. I love it that our smart president really believes in democracy … and that he can only have two terms. Perhaps, just perhaps, if we keep trying to learn what’s going on, and keep talking to one another, we’ll manage to make it through the 21st century, and just perhaps, there really will be a dawning of the age of Aquarius.
Ellen Bierhorst 12/25/09