Part 9:America before: The Key to Earth’s Lost Civilization ....Quietus...The Portal and the Path

America before: The Key to Earth’s Lost Civilization 

By Graham Hancock

part 6

Equipped for Journeying

The Mystery of Death

22

Quietus

IN MAY 2017, ON A research trip for this book across the American Southwest, I awoke in my hotel room in the small town of Bloomfield, New Mexico. It was deep in the night and very dark. I felt nauseous and assumed I’d picked up a stomach bug somewhere along the way. I didn’t imagine it was anything serious. I remember getting out of bed without disturbing Santha, who was sleeping deeply after a long day of photography in the sun. I found my way to the bathroom, switched on the light, and stood hunched over the toilet, waiting to throw up. 

The next thing I knew I was returning to consciousness, deeply confused, wired to a drip and lying in a hospital bed. It was full daylight and Santha was standing over me, looking scared. 

“Where am I?” I asked. My voice sounded slurred, my tongue thick in my mouth. I had difficulty forming words. “What the fuck happened?” 

“You had a seizure, my love,” Santha replied, “but they say you’re going to be okay.” 

The hospital was the San Juan Regional Medical Center in Farmington, New Mexico, about 15 miles west of Bloomfield. I recall nothing of the paramedics coming, or the ambulance journey, or what happened in the emergency room. What I do know, because Santha subsequently told me, is that at around 3:30 am she had awakened, sensed my absence, seen that the light was on in the bathroom, and called my name. I didn’t answer so she called again, and when there was still no reply she hurried from the bed to find me lying on the floor, half in the bathroom and half out of it, writhing uncontrollably with powerful muscular convulsions and blood pouring from my mouth where I’d bitten my tongue. 

After turning me on my side to stop me from choking, Santha called 911 and woke our traveling companions, Randall Carlson and Bradley Young, who were staying in neighboring rooms. 

I remember none of this. It seems, however, that I’d been stabilized in the ER and then transferred to the bed where I regained consciousness and quite rapidly began to get my wits back. That evening I was discharged and was able to return to our hotel in Bloomfield, where I read my medical notes. It turned out I was suffering from a previously undetected heart condition known as atrial fibrillation and was now to take anticoagulant medication daily to prevent a possible recurrence of what was diagnosed as a transient ischemic attack—in other words, a “mini stroke.” I suffered some loss of memory of events that had taken place in the weeks before the attack but there was no obvious neurological damage visible on the scans. The medical staff at Farmington were absolutely brilliant. I’m deeply grateful for their rapid and effective intervention. 

I do indeed have atrial fibrillation, which can and does cause strokes (the blood pools and clots in the heart). I’m still taking anticoagulants. However, the diagnosis I’d been given was very far from complete, as became clear around noon on Monday, August 14, 2017, when I suffered further, far more severe, seizures at my home in Bath, England. 

Again I was rushed to the emergency room and then to the ICU. Again the medical staff, now at the Royal United Hospital in Bath, were completely brilliant, caring, and engaged with my case far above and beyond the call of duty. This time the convulsions racking my body were exceptionally violent and continuous and Santha was taken aside by the neurologist who advised her she must prepare herself for the worst. The medical team was having no success in stopping the seizures and it was possible I would die or end up so badly brain damaged that I would effectively be a vegetable. 

As a last resort I was put into an induced coma, intubated on a ventilator. My condition settled over the next 48 hours and eventually the doctors were able to withdraw the tube and start me breathing for myself again. It was the evening of Wednesday, August 16, when I began to return to some form of consciousness, baffled to see that Sean and Shanti, two of my grown-up children, had flown from Los Angeles and New York to be with Santha at my bedside, together with Leila and Gabrielle, two more of our grown-up children, who live in London. For quite some time I couldn’t understand what had happened, why I’d been fitted with a catheter, why my brain was so foggy. 

Little by little consciousness increased. I was moved to the neurology ward and on Thursday night, August 17, much to my relief, the catheter was removed. All day Friday the 18th I remained in the neurology ward, very wobbly but able to totter to the toilet with the aid of a stick. By Friday night I was feeling much better. Finally, on Saturday, I was discharged and came home. 

Tests carried out established pretty clearly (although there is still some mystery over what exactly is going on) that the epileptic seizures were not caused by blood clots deriving from my atrial fibrillation, but rather by long term overuse of a migraine medication called sumatriptan, delivered by injection; I was taking up to a dozen of these shots a month and had been doing so for more than 20 years. Turns out having migraines is itself a risk factor for epilepsy, and research has established a link between triptans (especially when overused) and seizures. It’s almost certain it was the sumatriptan that had brought me to death’s door, and it is now obvious that I must simply suffer the hideous and mind-numbing pain of my migraines or end up comatose or dead. As I write this in 2018 I’m still on massive daily doses of the anticonvulsant medication levetiracetam. As long as I keep on taking it there’s a good chance the condition won’t recur. 

OUT OF BODY 

THE 48 HOURS OF INDUCED coma, though utterly harrowing for Santha, for our children, and for myself, raised interesting questions. Where was “I” during these missing 48 hours? I do remember the ventilator tube being stuffed down my throat and the powerful sense that I was being invaded and asphyxiated. But what happened after that? 

A few confused recollections return from time to time to haunt me, but they’re so muddled and fragmentary I can’t put them into place. I don’t think  they’re memories of near-death experiences because—after all—I wasn’t dead. It was simply that my consciousness had been switched by medication to standby mode and the more I look back on it the more I realize that I was just absent, just gone, during those 48 hours. If I try to visualize that strange interlude what I see and what I feel is … darkness. Claustrophobic, enclosed, thick darkness. 

It wasn’t like that the last time I “died,” which was in May 1968, pretty much exactly 49 years earlier, following a massive electric shock. 

I was seventeen then and still living at home with my parents. I’m an only child. One of my siblings, a boy, was carried to term but born dead a couple of years before I was conceived. My two other siblings, first a girl—Susan— and then a boy—Jimmy—each lived for nearly a year before they died. When my parents went away to their holiday cottage that weekend in May 1968 I was home alone. Naturally, I seized the opportunity to throw a party on Saturday night. 

The house was semi-detached with a small garden off a quiet, close-packed street, not an ideal location for 300 rowdy teenagers, loud music, and public drunkenness. It turned into an all-night event. The last stragglers didn’t leave until the early afternoon on Sunday and visits from irate neighbors left me in no doubt how fortunate I was that the police had not been called. Certainly my parents would be informed about what had happened when they returned that evening. 

In a state of some anxiety I spent the afternoon cleaning up. The house had been trashed so it took me hours to make it presentable, but by nightfall I was left only with the kitchen. I didn’t expect my parents back until late. There was still time. So I rolled up my sleeves and started in on the huge pile of dishes, cups, glasses, and empty bottles littered around the sink. A lot of water had been spilled on the floor. I would find a mop and deal with that as soon as the dishes were done. 

I was barefoot, hands and arms wet, and standing in the water around the base of the sink, when it occurred to me to check whether the refrigerator was properly plugged in. I’m quite obsessive and often push the back of a plug to make sure it is securely in its socket. The plug was close, I knew exactly where it was—having done this many times before—and without looking I reached for it. 

What I didn’t realize was that the back of the plug had been smashed off  during the night and the live terminals were exposed. When I touched them with my wet hand while standing in a pool of water there was a tremendous BANG, a huge searing jolt lashed through my body, and I was thrown across the kitchen, hitting the wall behind me and slumping down to the floor. 

I knew I was slumped on the floor because I saw my body clearly but from a completely new perspective. I was no longer “in” that body! I was up around the light, hovering like a bird, looking down on myself. 

“Hmm,” I remember thinking, “how interesting.” My body lying there below me seemed a heavy, cumbersome thing now. Quite unnecessary, really. It was no great loss to be rid of it, and I liked the feeling of lightness and freedom. 

“What happens next?” I wondered. 

But then just as suddenly as I’d left my flesh, with just as little choice in the matter, I was within it again, stirring, groaning, coming back to consciousness on the floor. 

I was okay. Just fine, in fact! I’d had a nasty electric shock, that was all. 

I was young and strong then, and quite soon I was back on my feet. I finished the dishes, mopped the kitchen floor, and did a final check of the whole house. Finally, around 10 pm, with my parents still not returned, I took Rusty, my Irish terrier, for a walk. The moon was full and huge in the sky, dimming the stars with its cold, clear light and casting eerie shadows on the ground. Although I don’t remember the exact date in May 1968 on which I was electrocuted, a quick internet search confirms it could only have been the night of Sunday, May 12, when the moon was indeed full. 

My migraines began quite soon after that and have continued ever since. I think there’s a pattern where they occur more frequently around the time of the full moon than at other times of the month, but I’ve never bothered to keep a detailed record that would confirm or refute that theory. I could just as easily be imagining the connection. 

One thing my near-death experience in 1968 and my experiences of seizure and induced coma in 2017 have taught me, however—one thing I’m sure of —is that the borderline between life and death is filmy, fragile, and as permeable as a breath of air. 

We feel firmly fixed in our lives but any of us may cross over at any time. 

Sometimes, very rarely, we come back. 

But when we don’t? What happens then? Is that the end of us, or is it possible—as every religion in the world asserts—that some part of us, some immaterial essence, survives the grave? 

A faction of scientists (Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett are notable members), scoff at the very suggestion that there might be anything more to us than our material, mortal parts—and they could be right. It may really be the case that there is no transcendent meaning in the universe, no purpose to the human experience, no such thing as the soul, and therefore no possibility of any kind of “life after death.” It’s important to be clear, though, that such ideas are not proven, evidence-based, scientific “facts” arising from experiments and empirical research. On the contrary, they are unproven assumptions and as such, even if voiced by eminent figures like Dawkins and Dennett, they’re of no greater or lesser value than the unproven assumptions that underlie all religions. 

Regardless of one’s own opinions on such matters, moreover, there is one undeniable fact on which I think everyone can agree, and this is that ancient civilizations, just like our own, had religions and that these religions, just like our own, concerned themselves very deeply with the problem of death. 

REALM OF THE DEAD 

I WAS RAISED IN A Christian family, and being by nature rebellious I committed myself to atheism at around age fifteen. 

After that, I think can safely say that I took no interest in spiritual matters whatsoever until I encountered the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead in my early forties. I was ready for it then, in a way I wouldn’t have been in my twenties or thirties, and I was so intrigued by its contents that over a period of years I also delved extensively, with growing fascination, into the more ancient Pyramid Texts and the less well known Coffin Texts, Book of Gates, Book of What Is in the Netherworld, and Book of the Breaths of Life. 

I’ll refer to these texts in what follows sometimes by their specific titles and sometimes, collectively, as the “books of the dead” or as the “funerary texts.” They are the surviving treasures of an ancient and profound inquiry into the mysterious nature of reality. I first began to describe what I drew from them in Fingerprints of the Gods, published in 1995, and then had the  opportunity to go into greater detail in two subsequent books, Message of the Sphinx (titled Keeper of Genesis in the United Kingdom), published in 1996, and Heaven’s Mirror, published in 1998. 

An enigma that I explore in all those books, but in the greatest detail in Heaven’s Mirror, is that traces of the same spiritual concepts and symbolism that enlighten the Egyptian texts are found all around the world among cultures that we can be certain were never in direct contact. Straightforward diffusion from one to the other is therefore not the answer, and “coincidence” doesn’t even begin to account for the level of detail in the similarities. The best explanation, in my view, is that we’re looking at a legacy, shared worldwide, passed down from a single, remotely ancient source. 

There are many aspects to this legacy, but I believe its hallmark, as the reader knows by now, is a system of ideas in which geometry, astronomy, and the fate of the soul are all strangely entangled. The geometrical and astronomical memes by which the system replicates itself across cultures and epochs are plentifully represented in the circles, squares, rectangles, and triangles, and in the solstitial, equinoctial, and lunar alignments, of the great mounds and geoglyphs of the Amazon and the Mississippi River basins. 

But what about the fate of the soul? 

For the entire span of more than 3,000 years that it endured, this question was the preeminent focus of the astonishing high civilization of ancient Egypt and of the remarkable religion that seems to have been born fully formed with it in the Nile Valley in the late fourth millennium BC. Within that religion, expressed in the books of the dead, certain key symbols and ideas stand out, involving most prominently the constellation of Orion, the Milky Way, and the notion, intimately connected to beliefs about both, that the soul must make a perilous postmortem journey on which it will face challenges and ordeals and be judged on the choices that it made during life. 

The constellation Orion, on the west bank of the Milky Way, was seen in ancient Egypt as the celestial image of the god Osiris, Lord of the Realm of the Dead. A narrow shaft cut though the body of the Great Pyramid targets Zeta Orionis, the lowest of the three stars of Orion’s belt. IMAGE: ROBERT BAUVAL. 

Seemingly with the intention of preparing its initiates for this afterlife journey, as Robert Bauval and I showed in our coauthored book Message of the Sphinx, the funerary texts also called for the construction of large-scale geometrical and astronomically aligned structures that were to “copy” or imitate on the ground a region of the sky known as the Duat—the ancient Egyptian name, often translated as “Netherworld,” for the realm of the dead.1 

The ruler of this Duat realm was the god Osiris, Lord of the Dead, whose figure in the sky was the majestic constellation that the ancient Egyptians called Sahu, and that we know as Orion.2 It is therefore not surprising, as a manifestation of this “as above so below” cosmology, that the three great pyramids of Egypt’s Giza necropolis are laid out on the ground in the form of the three stars of the belt of Orion. This correlation was first discovered and put on the public record by my dear friend Robert Bauval in his groundbreaking 1994 book The Orion Mystery. 3 As early as the mid-1960s, however, Egyptologist Alexander Badawy and astronomer Virginia Trimble  had recognized that a mysterious narrow shaft constructed at an angle of about 45 degrees through the body of the Great Pyramid would have pointed at the belt of Orion at meridian transit some 4,500 years ago.4 With the use of accurate inclinometer data provided by a robotic exploration in 1992, Robert Bauval was able to refine Badawy and Trimble’s work and to confirm that in the Pyramid Age, circa 2450 BC, the shaft had been precisely targeted on Zeta Orionis, the first of the three stars of Orion’s belt, counterpart in the sky of the Great Pyramid on the ground.5 

This, too, makes perfect sense from the perspective of ancient Egyptian beliefs. An invocation often repeated in the Pyramid Texts states of the deceased pharaoh: 

O King, you are this great star, the companion of Orion, who traverses the sky with Orion, who navigates the Netherworld with Osiris. … O King, navigate and arrive.6 

Since the shaft emanates from the so-called King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid, within meters of an empty granite sarcophagus, it’s therefore difficult to disagree with what is now the prevailing scholarly opinion concerning its purpose—namely that it must have been designed to serve as a portal, a “star-shaft,” through which the soul of the deceased could ascend to Orion and thence begin its navigation of the Duat.7 

ANCIENT EGYPT IN ALABAMA? 

FOLLOWING MY FIRST BOUT OF seizures in New Mexico in May 2017, Santha and I flew to New Orleans and enjoyed a few days of rest, recreation, and good Cajun food in one of the most laid-back cities in the world while I recovered my strength. Then we were on the road again, driving north to explore the mound-builder sites of the Lower Mississippi Valley, heading ultimately for Serpent Mound in Ohio on the summer solstice. 

We stopped first about 4 hours north of New Orleans at the incredible geometrical and astronomical earthworks of Poverty Point, described in chapter 20. 

We then went on to visit Emerald Mound, also in Louisiana, and the Winterville Mounds in Mississippi, and on the fourth day of our journey reached Moundville in Alabama. 

Here, in addition to the geometry and astronomy I’d come to expect, I found myself plunged most unexpectedly into an ancient Egyptian déjà vu moment after we’d climbed to the top of Mound B. A good vantage point for Santha’s photography, this mound is pyramidal in form, 18 meters high, and dominates the whole rather spectacular site that extends southward from the Black Warrior River. The expansive grand plaza lay at our feet, edged by more than twenty mounds laid out, somewhat like Watson Brake, in the pattern of a great ellipse. At the center of the plaza, presently the focus of Santha’s camera, stood a large rectangular platform mound—Mound A—and while she photographed it I stepped aside to read the official archaeological marker. 

Much of what it had to say was standard stuff about the building of the site, most of which apparently had been completed over a period of about 100 years in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. There was some predictable speculation that religion must have been used to coerce, cajole, or convince the population to do all that work. But then suddenly things got interesting. “At Moundville,” I read, 

an excellent example of a powerful religious image was the hand and eye motif. Moundville’s “Rattlesnake Disk,” pictured on this noticeboard, offers us the best known version, although numerous variations occur in pottery, copper, stone and shell artifacts. 

Stories passed down among various tribes tell of the dead entering the afterlife through an opening marked by a great warrior’s hand in the sky. One account describes that hand as the constellation we know as Orion with Orion’s belt as the wrist, its fingers pointing downwards. A faint cluster of stars in the center of the palm is a portal to the path of souls or path to the land of the dead. Researchers speculate that the hand and eye represent this constellation.8 

I was nonplussed. I try to prepare thoroughly, but it looked like I’d missed something important in my background reading before starting out on this trip. The connection of the constellation of Orion to the land of the dead was a fundamental aspect of the ancient Egyptian religion and it felt weirdly like coming home—that comfortable intimacy of familiar territory—to find it here in a Native North American religion.

Moundville: Rattlesnake Disk with “Hand-and-Eye” symbol. PHOTO: COURTESY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA MUSEUMS, TUSCALOOSA, ALABAMA. 

But I should have known about this! 

The Rattlesnake Disk was in the museum we’d passed through briefly on our way into the site, intending to see the exhibits properly at the end of our visit. 

Now suddenly it was top priority, so 10 minutes later we were standing in front of its display case. 

It’s a mysterious, complex image on a disk of dark gray sandstone, 32 centimeters (just over 12 inches) in diameter. Seventeen notches, creating a coglike effect, are chiseled at equal distances around the perimeter of the disk. Next, intaglio, come two intertwined rattlesnakes, their long tongues flicking forward, their bodies knotted together. Curiously, these serpents have horns. An oval enclosure formed by their coils frames a human hand with what indeed appears to be an eye engraved at its center. 

“The hand and eye,” I read in the accompanying description: 

is a prominent Moundville motif and is thought to represent a part of the constellation that we identify as Orion. As a group the knotted serpents and the hand and eye are believed to be a representation of the night sky. The serpents are the ropes that join the earth and sky. In the palm of the hand is the portal or doorway through which the spirits of the dead can ascend the path of souls … a road or ribbon of light, the Milky Way, stretching out before the traveling souls. This river of light … deposits the souls, after a series of trials, into the realm of the dead. Families from all over the Moundville chiefdom brought and buried their dead here because they believed that Moundville was the appropriate place for the  spirit to start its journey along the path of souls. Thus over time Moundville became, in the minds of its people, not only the symbolic gateway to the realm of the dead but also the materialized image of that sacred domain on earth.9 

So not only was the constellation of Orion part of the Moundville story, not only was a journey to the realm of the dead part of it, too, but now I knew also that a series of trials would have to be faced on that journey, that the Milky Way was involved and, last but by no means least, that Moundville itself had been thought of as an image, or copy, of the realm of the dead on earth. Every one of these were important symbols, concepts, and narratives in the ancient Egyptian funerary texts that I’d been fascinated by for more than 20 years. It would be striking to find even two of them together in a remote and unconnected culture, but for them all to be present in ancient North America in the same way that they were present in ancient Egypt, and serving the same ends, was a significant anomaly. 

In the museum there were other superb examples of the art and iconography of Moundville. It is all indisputably Native American art, the work of the same Mississippian culture responsible for Cahokia. Every piece on show in the display cases had been produced between about AD 1150 and 1500 when Moundville was abandoned, and the archaeologists had done their work so well that there could be no doubt whatsoever about the dates. This ruled out any possibility of direct influence since ancient Egypt breathed its last under Roman occupation in the fifth century AD, at least 500 years before the Mississippian culture came into existence. 

How, then, to explain the fact that some of the fundamental symbols and ideas of the religions practiced at Moundville and in ancient Egypt—ideas and symbols specifically concerning the afterlife journey of the soul—appear to be the same? 

23

THE PORTAL AND THE PATH 

THE BOARD AT THE TOP of Mound B said there was “one account” linking the constellation that we know as Orion to traditions of “a great warrior’s hand in the sky.” This turned out not to be the case. There are in fact dozens of such accounts specifically referencing an ancient Native American constellation in which the stars of Orion’s belt form the wrist of this hand—sometimes said to belong to a great warrior chieftain and sometimes to a malevolent celestial being called “Long Arm,” who used it in an attempt to block a portal between earth and sky but lost the hand when it was chopped off by a human hero.1 

Other than their underestimation of the sheer numbers of such accounts, it took me no more than an hour on Google to confirm that the information about the Mississippian afterlife beliefs displayed at Moundville, though scant, was based on solid research and accurately reflected the views of leading scholars in the field. 

The Milky Way, the connection with Orion, the perilous afterlife journey of the soul, and the notion of creating an image or copy of the realm of the dead on the ground were all genuinely present in the Mississippian religion, just as they were in the ancient Egyptian religion. No one familiar with the Pyramid Texts and the Book of the Dead could fail to notice these obvious resemblances. I’m not the first to do so. Andrew Collins and Gregory Little made passing mention of them in 2014 and there was earlier brief recognition of the same issue by others in 2012.2 To my knowledge at the time of this writing, however, no in-depth comparative study has ever been undertaken to determine whether there’s a real connection between these two otherwise very different cultures, separated not only by geography but also by time. 

Is it all just coincidence? 

Or can coincidence be ruled out? 

The issue, it seemed to me, was important enough to justify a thorough investigation, and I already had a head start since the ancient Egyptian funerary texts, though never “easy,” were home turf for me. I’d been through them so often while researching previous books that I had no difficulty in reengaging with them. As a bonus I still had hundreds of pages of detailed notes I’d made on all the key recensions over the years and most of those notes, with page references to the heavily underlined and tagged print editions in my shelves, were in searchable electronic form. 

The ancient Egyptians left us immense numbers of documents in their beautiful hieroglyphic script and we’ve been able to read them since Champollion deciphered the Rosetta Stone in the nineteenth century. We also have historical accounts of the ancient Egyptians and their religious beliefs written in antiquity by eyewitnesses to their civilization such as Herodotus. So we have a lot to go on. 

In the case of North America, on the other hand, there are no eyewitness reports to provide a pre-Columbian historical record, and since Native North Americans possessed no written languages, they left no documents. Even had they done so, if the example of the organized burning of the Mayan codices during the Spanish conquest of Mexico is anything to go by,3 precious few of them would remain for us to study today. Such wholesale destruction was visited upon the indigenous cultures of North America that it is a miracle any of their painted and engraved images on pottery, stone, copper, shell, and bone have survived at all. 

We can only guess at what has been lost and work with what remains. In this respect, as anthropologist Mark Seeman explains, while sites like Watson Brake, Serpent Mound, and even the Hopewell earthworks are so old that “historical connections are extremely difficult to make,” it’s quite a different matter with the Mississippian culture, which is “close enough in time to connect it to the religious practises and oral traditions of historical groups such as the Chickasaw, Creek, Caddo and Osage.”4 

Similar connections with the Lakota, Mandan, Hidatsa, Crow, Arapaho, Oglala, and other Siouan speakers, as well as with the Ojibwa and other speakers of Algonquian languages, have added further vital information to the inquiry.5 

With these resources at hand, and through a sustained exercise of interdisciplinary detective work involving archaeologists, anthropologists, and ethnologists, the code of Mississippian ideas and iconography has been comprehensively broken. The crucial realization, as anthropologists Kent Reilly and James Garber inform us, is that much of the imagery “has a linkage to ethnographic material that describes the location of the realm of the dead and the journey of dead souls to the underworld.”6 

There is “variation in ethnographic details from one tribal group to another, as might be expected,” adds Professor George Lankford, an internationally recognized authority on Native American folklore, anthropology, religious studies, and ethnohistory.7 Nonetheless: 

There is a unifying metaphor which argues for a common core of belief across the Eastern Woodlands and Plains, and probably far beyond that area. That unifying notion is an understanding of the Milky Way as the path on which the souls of the deceased must walk.8 

Elsewhere Lankford reiterates that this belief system was by no means confined to the Plains, the Eastern Woodlands, and the Mississippi Valley. It is better understood, he argues, as part of “a widespread religious pattern” found right across North America and “more powerful than the tendency towards cultural diversity.”9 Indeed, what the evidence suggests is the former existence of “an ancient North American international religion 10 … a common ethnoastronomy … and a common mythology. Such a multicultural reality hints provocatively at more common knowledge which lay behind the façade of cultural diversity united by international trade networks. One likely possibility of a conceptual realm in which that common knowledge became focused is mortuary belief [and] … the symbolism surrounding death.”11 

SOULS OF ANCIENT EGYPT

IN BOTH ANCIENT NATIVE NORTH America and ancient Egypt the universe was believed to be “layered”—with This World, the everyday material realm, inhabited by humans, sandwiched between an Underworld below (often with powerful Underwater aspects) and an Upper World, or Sky World, above. In both ancient Native North America and ancient Egypt the afterlife journey was envisaged as unfolding in the Sky World, among the stars. But in both this apparently celestial setting had contradictory Below World characteristics, including bodies of water and other obstacles to cross, architectural spaces to navigate, and monstrous adversaries to face. 

Ancient Egyptian notions of the soul can seem extremely complex at first glance. Indeed, according to the great authority on the subject, Sir E. A. Wallis Budge, formerly Keeper of Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum, it’s not just a matter of one soul but of multiple souls—all of them separate from but in some way connected to the khat, or physical body—“that which is liable to decay.” 12 

In Budge’s summary, these separate, nonphysical “souls”—perhaps “aspects of the soul” would be a better description—include notably: 

The Ka, or “double,” that stays earthbound after death in the immediate vicinity of the corpse and the tomb. 

The Ba, depicted as a bird or human-headed bird that can fly freely “between tomb and underworld.” 

The Khaibit, or shadow. 

The Khu, or “spiritual soul.” 

The Sekhem, or “power.” 

The Ren, or “name.” 

The Sahu, or “spiritual body,” which formed the habitation of the soul. 

The Ab, or heart, “regarded as the center of the spiritual and thinking life. … It typifies everything which the word ‘conscience’ signifies to us.” The heart, and what its owner has imprinted upon it by his or her choices during life, is the specific object of judgment in the Netherworld. 13 

It would be possible to write an entire book, perhaps several, on the complexities of ancient Egyptian soul beliefs. In my opinion, however, once the baroque flourishes, dramatic elements, and multiple iterations are dispensed with, the eight “souls” or “soul aspects” listed above can be boiled down to two, reflecting the ancient Egyptian view of the fundamentally dualistic nature of the human creature as both a spiritual and as a material being. 

On the one hand, there is that nonphysical, spiritual aspect of ourselves that is potentially eternal and immortal, aspiring to the “life of millions of years,” as the funerary texts put it. Having worn the body like a suit of clothes, it is this “soul” that is liberated from it at death and can ascend to the stars, specifically to the constellation of Orion, to begin the next stage of its journey. 

On the other hand, there is the physical body and the animating force believed to have attended to the vital functions of that body during life. Also seen as a kind of “soul,” a supernatural entity in its own right, it is the lot of this ghostly, nonphysical presence—combining most notably the characteristics of the Ka (“double”) and of the Khaibit (“shadow”)—to remain on earth with the corpse. 

Inevitably in such a system of ideas, earth and sky become opposed dualities symbolizing the material realm that is to be left behind and the spiritual realm to which the potentially immortal, nonphysical aspect of the deceased ascends. Thus we read in the Pyramid Texts: 

Earth is this King’s detestation. … This King is bound for the sky.14 

The spirit is bound for the sky, the corpse is bound for the earth.15 

The King is one of those … beings … who will never fall to the earth from the sky.16 

In a similar vein, with some complexity regarding the activities of the “shadow,” the Book of What Is in the Duat has this to say: 

Let thy soul be in heaven … let thy shadow penetrate the hidden place, and let thy body be to the earth.17 

Many other examples could be cited but the summary is that the ancient Egyptians believed in two souls, or two fundamental aspects of the soul. One of these (let us not quibble about its several different avatars) remained bound to the physical remains and the tomb. The other, again in its several forms, was free to ascend to the sky and begin the journey to the realm of the dead. 

SOULS OF ANCIENT AMERICA 

WHAT NOW OF NATIVE NORTH AMERICAN conceptions of the soul? 

Here, too, we find at first a bewildering multiplicity. 

The Quileute people of the US northwest coast believe that within every living human body there reside several souls that “look exactly like the living being and may be taken off or put on in exactly the manner as a snake sheds its skin.”18 

These souls are an inner soul, called the “main, strong soul,” an outer soul, called the “outside shadow,” a life-soul, referred to as “the being whereby one lives,” and the “ghost” of the living person, “the thing whereby one grows.”19 

Let’s note in passing that the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead declares in chapter 164: 

I have made for thee a skin, namely a divine soul.20 

Returning to North America, it was believed among the Yuchi of Oklahoma that the individual “possesses four spirits … one of which, at death, remains on the spot where the disembodiment took place, while two others hover in the vicinity of tribes folk and relatives. … The fourth starts upon a four-days” journey … to the haven of souls.21 

In other accounts gathered from among the widely spread Ojibwa people of northeastern North America, the ethnographer Vernon Kinietz was told that humans have seven souls—only one of which, “the real soul,” goes to the realm of the dead.22 Another Ojibwa group reported that, according to their traditions, the human being consists of three parts: 

The body (wiyo), which decays after death, the soul (udjitchog), which at death departs for the realm of the dead in the West, and the shadow (udjibbom), which after death becomes a grave-ghost.23 

Expressing the same idea in a slightly different way, the Menominee of Wisconsin say there are two souls in every human being: 

One, which is called “a shade across,” resides in the head and is the intellect; after death it becomes a grave ghost. The other is the real soul, tcebai, which has its seat in the heart and at death betakes itself to the realm of the dead.24 

For the Choctaw, also, humans have two souls—the shilombish, “the outside shadow,” and the shilup, “the inside shadow,” or ghost, which at death goes to the land of ghosts. The shilombish remains on earth.25 

And Indeed, when the unnecessary details and confusingly ambiguous terminology are stripped away, it becomes clear that the fundamental Native North American belief across a vast geographical area, like the fundamental belief of the ancient Egyptians, was in the existence of two souls, one bound to the body and the earth, the other free to ascend to the sky. “Soul dualism,” concludes renowned Swedish anthropologist Ake Hultkrantz in his immense and still widely cited 1953 study, Conceptions of the Soul Among North American Indians, “constituted the predominant type of soul belief in North America.”26 

At the heart of this widespread belief system stand twin concepts defined by Hultkrantz as the “free-soul” and the “body-soul.” The latter, also sometimes referred to as the “life soul,” represents “the forces that keep the body vital and active.” The “free-soul,” on the other hand, represents “the person himself in his extracorporeal form” but with the added power of limitless movement.27 

To what end was this freedom of movement used? 

Among ancient Native North Americans, as George Lankford explains, it was believed that 

at a crucial point in the dying process the “free-soul,” the one that is self-aware and has an identifiable personality in relation to the deceased, separates from the body, leaving behind the life-soul, a mindless force which can be dangerous to the living, trapped in or near the physical remains. The free-soul remains present in the vicinity for a brief time, then … sets off towards the west on its final journey. … If at any time along the route the free-soul gains the power or will to return to earthly life, then it may retrace its steps and re-enter its body. … Mortuary rituals must therefore include at least two different tasks, taking care of two different souls.”28 

Exactly the same care and attention paid to two different “souls,” and for the same reasons, also characterized ancient Egyptian mortuary rituals.29 It seems clear that these separate ancient Egyptian “souls” are essentially identical to, and interchangeable with, Native American notions of the “body soul” and the “free-soul.” 

THE ROAD TO THE WEST 

IN THE ANCIENT EGYPTIAN PYRAMID Texts, line 1109, a soul reaches the realm of the dead only to hear a voice telling him: 

Turn about, O you who have not yet come to the number of your days.30 

A legend of the Ottawa, a Native American people who lived in Michigan and Ohio before migrating to Oklahoma where most members of the tribe are now found, tells of a person who enters the realm of the dead although he himself still lives. A voice, “as if it were a soft breeze,” whispers in his ear: 

Go back to the land from whence you came. Your time has not yet come.31 

The free-soul can become detached from the body not only in death, but also in dreams, visions, and comatose states. From the Native American perspective, “death” has therefore not definitively occurred until there is certainty that the absent free-soul will not return. It is for this reason, explains Lankford, that “the ‘dead’ are almost never buried immediately, and most people have a ritually specified time of waiting.”32 The Ojibwa were particularly known for their “habit of keeping the dead four days, in the hope that the soul in the spirit world would return and the person come back to life.”33 

But when the soul does not return, where has it gone and how did it get there? 

A legend of the Native American Tachi Yokut people tells of a husband whose deeply cherished wife had died. Grieving, he went to her grave and dug a hole near it: 

There he stayed watching, not eating. … After two nights he saw that she came up, brushed the earth off herself, and started to go to the [land] of the dead.34 

Similarly, in the ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, lines 747–48, we read the following invocation to the deceased: 

Arise, remove your earth, shake off your dust, raise yourself that you may travel in company with the spirits.35 

In ancient Egypt the first stage of the journey to the realm of the dead was to ensure that the mortuary rites were properly observed. The purpose of these rites, Wallis Budge explains, was to enable the “disembodied spirit … to pass through the tomb out into the region which lies immediately to the west of the mountain chain on the west bank of the Nile, which we may consider as one mountain and call Manu, or the mountain of the sunset.”36 

In the case of the Native American afterlife journey, likewise, as Lankford summarizes: 

The path leads towards the west, the place of the setting sun, the end of the east west cosmic passage, the point of transition from day to night.37  

Returning to ancient Egypt, it is clear that the first stage of the afterlife journey unfolds on the earth plane and brings the soul to a special location in the west, described as beyond “the mountain of sunset.” At this place, Budge continues, 

are gathered together numbers of spirits, all bent on making their way to the abode of the blessed; these are they who have departed from their bodies during the day.38 

In Native America, too, a place is reached at the western edge of the “earth-disk” where the dead gather and where they, too, must await the right moment, after nightfall, to make the transition from the earth plane to the Sky World. “There may be a camping-place for the free-soul,” Lankford tells us: 

For there may be a wait until conditions are right to continue the journey.39 

ORION, THE “LEAP,” AND THE 

PORTAL IN ANCIENT AMERICA 

IN ANCIENT EGYPT, THE CONSTELLATION of Orion, located prominently on the west bank of the Milky Way, was seen as the celestial figure of the God Osiris, Lord of the Realm of the Dead, and the funerary texts explicitly and repeatedly urge the soul to ascend to the sky and unite itself with Orion. A few examples: 

You shall reach the sky as Orion.40 

May a stairway to the Netherworld be set up for you in the place where Orion is.41 

I have gone upon the ladder with my foot on Orion.42 

The Netherworld has grasped your hand at the place where Orion is.43 

May Orion give me his hand.44 

The intention, confirmed in architecture by the star-shaft of the Great Pyramid (see previous chapter) is unmistakable. After completing its westward journey on the earth plane, and gathering with other souls at a staging point, the spiritual form of the deceased must find a way to gain access to the “place where Orion is” from whence the remainder of its journey to the realm of the dead will unfold.

But how to get to Orion? 

The means suggested in the utterances quoted above include a stairway, a ladder, and the “hand” of the constellation itself. Another utterance tells us more vaguely, “There is brought to him a way of ascent to the sky”45 and fifty lines later we read: 

Here comes the ascender, here comes the ascender! Here comes the climber, here comes the climber! Here comes he who flew up, here comes he who flew up.46 

How was the transition to the Sky World achieved in the Native American afterlife journey when the soul had reached the staging point at the edge of the earth-disk? Lankford draws on his vast store of knowledge of the ethnography surrounding this subject when he tells us that in order to continue its journey to the realm of the dead: 

What the free-soul must do … is to make a terrifying leap. The realm of the dead … can only be reached by walking the Path of Souls, the Milky Way, across the night sky. To get to the path, however, one must leave the earth-disk and enter the celestial realm. The portal that is appointed for the free-soul at death is to be seen on the edge of the Path of Souls. It is a constellation in the shape of a hand, and the portal is in its palm.47 

As I learned at Moundville, this Native American “Hand” constellation is none other than the constellation we know as Orion, with the three prominent belt stars forming the wrist. Beneath these stars, identified as part of Orion’s sword by the Greeks, is a bright sky object known as Messier 42, or the Orion Nebula. In the “hand-and-eye” motif it is this nebula, regarded by modern astronomers as a “stellar nursery” where new stars are constantly born,48 that represents the “eye.” Its description as such is, however, a misleading and long outdated label that only remains in use out of habit. The truth, as scholars are now agreed, is that in Mississippian iconography it does not represent an eye at all but “a hole in the sky, a portal,”49 through which the free-soul must pass in order to reach the realm of the dead. 

LEFT: Native American “Hand” constellation in which the three stars of Orion’s belt form the wrist. CENTER: Orion’s belt and the Orion Nebula. RIGHT: An example of the Moundville “hand-and-eye” motif. The Orion Nebula is represented by the “eye,” and was conceived of as a portal through which the soul must leap on its afterlife journey. 

George Lankford clarifies the muddle: 

The hole in the sky is indicated as a slit being pulled apart, and the fact that it is celestial is frequently elaborated by the inclusion of a star circle or dot. The resulting double sign thus gives the appearance of being an eye, but … it is a coincidental similarity. The “eye” is but a portal with a star at its center. The hand and-eye combination thus indicates the beginning of the spirit journey, the entry of the soul into the Milky Way at Orion.50 

In ancient Egypt the hieroglyphic representation of the Duat Netherworld (likewise accessed via Orion and the Milky Way) made use of exactly the same concepts expressed in locally appropriate symbolism. Whereas in Mississippian art it was customary to depict a star in the form of a circle or dot, the star symbol in ancient Egypt was very much like the five-pointed version we still use today. Likewise, in Mississippian art the sky portal was depicted as an aperture in the form of an open slit while in ancient Egypt it was represented by a circle. 

ORION, THE “LEAP,” AND THE 

PORTAL IN ANCIENT EGYPT 

THE TOP HALF OF “ORION” above the belt stars is important in the ancient Egyptian Sahu constellation but isn’t part of the “Hand” at all. The stories behind the imagery that were told in the Nile Valley and the Mississippi Valley are also very different. Nonetheless, it’s bizarre that the same constellation plays such a key role in both Native American and ancient Egyptian beliefs concerning the afterlife journey. 

Moreover, although ladders and stairs are among the “means of ascent” suggested to the soul in the ancient Egyptian funerary texts, they are by no means the only ones. Particularly close to the Native American notion of a “leap” for the portal is Utterance 478 of the Pyramid Texts, line 980, in which the deceased states: 

I leap up to the sky into the presence of the god.51 

Likewise in Utterance 467, lines 890–91, we read: 

Someone flies up. I fly up from you, O men; I am not for the earth, I am for the sky.52 

And again, almost technologically, in Utterance 261: 

The King is a flame moving before the wind to the end of the sky.53 

Such references, and numerous other examples that could be cited, leave little room for misinterpretation. As with the Native Americans, so, too, with the ancient Egyptians—a “leap” by one means or another from the earthplane to Orion was an essential stage in the afterlife journey. 

It might be objected that the constellation Sahu/Orion for the ancient Egyptians was the celestial figure of Osiris, Lord of the Realm of the Dead, and therefore in no way a “portal” in the Native American sense. That, however, does no justice to the possibility, in so subtle a system as the ancient Egyptian funerary texts, that symbols might be encoded with multiple levels of meaning. A close study of the texts reveals that the passage of the soul through a portal in the sky was indeed a fundamental stage of the ancient Egyptian afterlife journey. 

The Pyramid Texts again: 

Portal of the Abyss, I have come to you; let this be opened to me.54 

The doors of the sky are opened for you, the doors of the starry sky are thrown open for you.55 

The doors of iron which are in the starry sky are thrown open for me, and I go through them.56 

Open the gates which are in the Abyss.57 

The aperture of the sky-window is open to you.58 

The celestial portal to the horizon is open to you.59 

I am he who opened a door in the sky.60 

The door of the sky at the horizon opens to you.61 

“The Orion Nebula,” clarifies Susan Brind Morrow in a new study of the Pyramid Texts, “is in the door of the sky.”62 

And in case there is any remaining doubt, the celestial address of this portal through which the deceased must pass in order to enter the Duat Netherworld is also repeated on multiple occasions in the Pyramid Texts, for example: 

The Duat has grasped your hand at the place where Orion is.63 

And, as we’ve seen: 

May a stairway to the Netherworld be set up for you in the place where Orion is.64 

THE TIMING OF THE “LEAP” 

FOR THE ANCIENT EGYPTIANS, ARRIVAL at the top of the metaphorical “stairway,” the accomplishment of the “leap” to the sky “in the presence of the god,” was to be timed to coincide with the moment when: 

Orion is swallowed up by the Duat. 65 

According to R. O. Faulkner, translator of the Pyramid Texts, this occurs when “the stars vanish at dawn.”66 More broadly the “swallowing” of Orion by the Duat can be linked to the setting of the constellation in the west at whichever time of day or night this happens. 

Let’s now return to George Lankford’s authoritative account of the Mississippian afterlife journey and the soul’s leap to the portal in the Orion Nebula in the constellation that Native North Americans called the “Hand.” The leap can only be attempted when that constellation makes its closest approach to the edge of the earth-disk, setting low in the west under the Milky Way just before it vanishes beneath the horizon—the precise moment, for both ancient Egyptians and ancient Native Americans, when the door of the sky, “the celestial portal to the horizon,” was believed to stand open. As Lankford makes clear: 

The portal in the Hand must be entered by a leap at the optimum time, which is a ten-minute window which occurs once each night from November 29, when the Hand vanishes … in the West just at dawn, to April 25, when the Hand sinks at dusk, not to be seen again for six months. During that winter period the portal is on the horizon for a breathless few minutes each night, and the free-souls must enter at that time or be lost. Free-souls who do not make the transition remain in the West and can eventually become unhappy threats to the realm of the living.67 

Likewise in ancient Egypt, Budge informs us, it is the fate of those who have not prepared adequately for the afterlife journey to remain trapped on the earth plane—where their lot, “having failed to present themselves in the Judgment Hall of Osiris,” is an unhappy one.68 

And in both ancient Egypt and ancient North America it was also believed that those souls that had successfully ascended to Orion must then continue their long and arduous journey, now transposed from the earth plane to the Sky World. On that journey they would meet monsters and terrors for which it appears that the ancient Egyptian books of the dead and the parallel oral and iconographic traditions of the Mississippian civilization were designed to prepare them.69 

Before we explore these further similarities between the supposedly entirely unconnected religions of the Mississippi and the Nile, let’s reflect in passing on the spiritual system that has evolved in the Amazon rainforest around the use of ayahuasca, the “Vine of the Dead.” The reader will recall that it has that name because in the “indigenous context” ayahuasca is “intimately related to death.”70 The visions received in the ayahuasca trance are considered to resemble death and to give foreknowledge of the death process and thus, at the level of experience rather than of study, the “Vine of the Dead” appears to be performing the same function as a “Book of the Dead.” 

Ayahuasca shamans in the Amazon speak of “dying” when they drink the brew. It’s again suggestive of hidden connections that thereafter, as we saw in chapter 17, they experience “ascent to the Milky Way” in a “single soaring flight” (which sounds very much like a “leap”) in order to reach the “Otherworld” that lies “beyond the Milky Way.” 

Sometimes, as they make these journeys, the shamans encounter trials and adversaries that will test them: 

Terrifying monsters … jaguars and serpents that approach and threaten to devour the person who, terror stricken, will call out in anguish.71 

TERRORS AND OBSTACLES OF THE 

ANCIENT EGYPTIAN NETHERWORLD 

NO ONE IN THE NORTHERN Hemisphere who pays any attention to the sky can fail to notice the presence of the majestic constellation of Orion during the winter months or the fact that it stands at the western side—indeed one could say on the west bank—of the glowing band of supernal light that is our own disk-shaped galaxy viewed from within. We call that band of light the Milky Way. To the ancient Egyptians it was the “Winding Waterway,”72 the great celestial river that, as Wallis Budge informs us, 

flowed through the Duat much as the Nile flowed through Egypt. There were inhabitants on each of its banks, just as there were human beings on each side of the Nile.73 

Moreover, the soul’s leap to Orion was not an end in itself, but simply its means of entry to the Sky World. Once there, it was the Winding Waterway that would provide the setting for the next stage of the afterlife journey. “May you take me and raise me to the Winding Waterway,” as the Pyramid Texts put it.74 

It is therefore intriguing that in ancient North America the Milky Way was most widely known as the “Path of Souls,”75 and it was on this path, after passing through the Orion portal, that the spirits of the deceased found themselves. Lankford takes up the story again: 

When the free-soul has entered the celestial realm, the Path of Souls stretches out before it. By most accounts it is a realm much like the earthly one left behind, but some describe it as a river of light with free-souls camped alongside. The free-soul must journey down the Path to the realm of the dead.76 

Inevitably, with a great river flowing through it, the Duat “had the shape of a valley.”77 However, unlike the Nile Valley, which it otherwise resembled, this ancient Egyptian realm of the dead was “shrouded in the gloom and darkness of night … a place of fear and horror.”78 

It was, moreover, a place filled with obstacles and fearsome challenges including: 

abysses of darkness, murderous knives, streams of boiling water, foul stenches, fiery serpents, hideous animal-headed monsters and creatures, and cruel, death dealing beings of various shapes.79 

A few hours with the vignettes and tomb paintings and you begin to get the idea. 

The Duat is an utterly eerie parallel universe that is at once a starry “otherworld” and a strange physical domain with narrow passageways and darkened galleries and chambers populated by fiends and terrors. There are entities whose work is “to hack souls in pieces.” There are serpents of enormous size, serpents with legs and feet, serpents with multiple heads, serpents with wings. There are serpents that breathe fire and that are depicted as flooding corridors with fire. There is in particular the monstrous serpent Apep and a specially dedicated company of nine gods whose work is to slay Apep. There are firepits where souls are roasted, in some cases head down. There are bodies of water to cross and “abysmal depths of darkness.” There are torture blocks. There are gods armed with knives who will kill inadequately prepared souls.80 And one particularly curious vignette shows “a goddess standing upright with her hands stretched out to the top of the head of a man who is kneeling before her, and is cutting open his head with a hatchet.”81  

The vignette 82 captured my attention for reasons that I will explain below. Budge expresses no opinion in his description and since I don’t read hieroglyphs I couldn’t be sure exactly what was going on. One interpretation that occurred to me was that the goddess was trying to stop the kneeling man from bashing his own brains out. But the scene had an uncanny, rather ominous, quality that suggested a very different possibility. From the way the outstretched arms and hands of the goddess were portrayed it looked more to me as though she was encouraging him to take that hatchet to his own head —or even perhaps exerting some kind of divine will to force him to do it. 

Since there are repeated references to a menacing female figure, usually called the “brain-smasher” or the “brain-taker” in accounts of the Native American afterlife journey, it occurred to me there was an opportunity here to test the mettle of my evolving theory of a deep structural connection between the spiritual systems of ancient Egypt and the ancient Mississippi Valley. All I had to do was find an Egyptologist to translate the hieroglyphs in the vignette for me. If the translation showed no relationship whatsoever between the goddess in this vignette and the Native American “brain-smasher,” then my theory would be weakened. If, on the other hand, a clear relationship emerged, then my theory would be strengthened.

Egyptologists in general avoid me, but I was fortunate that Louise Ellis Barrett at the British Museum was prepared to accept the commission. She was curious as to why I wanted a translation at all but I was determined that this should be a proper blind test, in which no preconceptions were inserted into the translator’s mind before she began work, so I declined to tell her. 

A few weeks later, after investigating the matter thoroughly, Louise came back to me with her translation of the group of hieroglyphs describing the role of the goddess in the scene: 

She lives from the blood of the damned 

And from what these gods provide her 

That Ba-soul who belongs to the damned 

The demolishing one, who cuts the damned to pieces.

For clarification Louise added that the Book of What Is in the Duat is “divided into Hours—each of which is a unit of text and illustration.” The vignette occurs in the Fifth Hour of the journey through the Duat (often also referred to as the “Fifth Division of the Duat”) where, as we shall see, the ancient Egyptian judgment scene was also set. Moreover, although the vignette itself is not a formal part of the judgment, the entire burden of the Fifth Hour, as Louise expressed it in the document she prepared for me, is:

its indication of the turning point in life. Here, life will either be renewed or annihilated. The last scene of the upper register [where the vignette is located] demonstrates the task of the deities whose responsibility is annihilation, the goddess demonstrating how the damned will be dealt with. 

They will be dealt with, in other words, just as in the ancient Native American belief system, by having their brains smashed out. 

TERRORS AND OBSTACLES OF THE 

ANCIENT AMERICAN NETHERWORLD 

ANTHROPOLOGIST AKE HULTKRANTZ NOTES TRADITIONS among the Ojibwa and the Huron of northeastern North America concerning: 

the so-called brain-smasher [who] … deprives travellers to the land of the dead of their brains. … There is in general something demoniac about the brain-catching guardian. … In the eschatological conceptions of the Sauk and Fox Indians … the deceased perishes altogether if he is unable to save himself from the “brain smasher.”83 

George Lankford gives an overview of such myths across North America and confirms the very widespread nature of the “fearsome image of a ‘brainsmasher,’ usually a woman, whose task is to destroy memory (and humanity?) by removing or smashing the brain.”84 

An interesting variant, documented by the ethnologist Alanson Skinner in the early 1920s, comes from the Sauk people, who speak of an obstacle on the Path of Souls where the celestial river must be crossed: 

A log serves for a bridge, and this is guarded by a being called Po’kitapawa, “Knocks-a-hole-in-the-head,” or “Brain Taker.” Brain taker has a watch-dog who barks the alarm whenever a new soul approaches and the fleeting spirit must be swift indeed to avoid having his brains dashed out. If this happens, he is destroyed or lost forever.85 

It seems, therefore, that the Native American “brain smasher” and the ancient Egyptian goddess in the vignette from the Fifth Hour of the Duat both serve exactly the same function, namely, the annihilation and permanent destruction of unworthy souls on the afterlife journey. There are differences in the traditions, to be sure, as one would expect if they descended from a remote common ancestor many millennia ago and then evolved separately, but the fundamental similarities of the role are unmissable. 

A further point arising from this material has to do with the more general issue of the trials and tribulations faced by the soul on its postmortem journey. That the precise character of these obstacles should vary between ancient Egypt and ancient Native America is only to be expected. Even so, the striking similarities in the core structure of the “story”—physical death, a journey of the soul on land, a leap to the sky involving Orion followed by a further journey with perils and challenges to be faced, through the valley of the Milky Way—all argue for some as yet unexplained connection.

In the case of Native America a bridge, sometimes shaky, sometimes thin as a blade, from which the soul can easily fall and be lost forever in the raging torrent below, is one among several ordeals consistently documented in the ethnographic accounts.86 Another regular character (who, along with the bridge, appears in one of the recensions of the brain smasher tradition cited above) is a dog, often monstrous and ferocious, described by the Algonquin as “the dog with the bloody mouth that devours the souls.”87 

In some accounts the bridge has the power to transform into a serpent,88 thus further challenging spirits on the Path. Indeed the Native American afterlife journey is almost as filled with monster serpents as the ancient Egyptian Duat. Most notable in this respect is the presence of the Great Horned Water Serpent, sometimes described as “Master of the Beneath World” and sometimes as “the Great Serpent with the Red Jewel in its Forehead:”89

If the free soul knows how to deal with the Serpent and is permitted to pass, then it enters the realm of the dead.90 

In the ancient Egyptian tradition, too, the guardians of various gates and passageways in the Duat, often in serpent form, would permit the soul to pass so long as it had “knowledge of certain formulae, or words of power, and magical names.”91

THE UNDERWATER PANTHER 

AND THE GREAT SPHINX 

OTHER NOTABLE CURIOSITIES INCLUDE THE fact, noted earlier, that the serpents of the Duat are very often winged 92 and, in addition, are sometimes depicted with legs and feet.93 The same goes for the Great Horned Water Serpent, almost always winged,94 and in addition, in a Sioux account, described as a “water monster which … resembled a rattlesnake, but he had short legs.”95 

Because we have the benefit of copious documentation and painted and engraved images, the descriptions of the Duat that have come down to us from ancient Egypt are more vivid and detailed than the descriptions of the Path of Souls that have survived from the Native American oral tradition. Nonetheless, enough remains to confirm that as well as serpents, many of the other monsters and fiends of the Duat also have their counterparts in the Native American afterlife journey.96 

Of particular interest in this respect is the Underwater Panther, a bizarre hybrid figure, described by the Ojibwa as “a curious combination of cougar, rattlesnake, deer and hawk”97 and understood to be an avatar, or alter ego, of the Great Horned Water Serpent.98 

Different Native American peoples gave different names and aspects to the Underwater Panther—Mishebeshu and Michibichi are the most common —but it was also known among the Algonquian-speaking tribes as Pizha, meaning “panther.”99 On account of this latter name, and of an ancient image of it that was once visible painted on a bluff above the Mississippi at Alton, Illinois, the Underwater Panther became known to interested European travelers as the “Piasa” and was described confusingly both as a “tiger” and as an “animal of the dragon species.”100 In 1839 Arenz and Company of DÜsseldorf published a line drawing of it “taken on the spot by artists from Germany,” which is reproduced above. The original petroglyph no longer exists, as the whole face of the bluff on which it was depicted was quarried away in 1846–47.101

Other imagery of the Underwater Panther, long since lost, was seen by Nicolas Perrot in 1664, who called it the “Great Panther,” while the Ojibwa today describe it as a “sea tiger,” preserving its watery associations, and as a “huge brown cat.”102 In some accounts it is said that the Piasa has “a human head.”103 

If the variety of descriptions is bewildering we should not be surprised, for we are dealing with the Netherworld and its shape-shifting denizens here. That the Underwater Panther was seen as having feline characteristics, however, is certain from a number of surviving images of the creature.

Among them is a pottery figure, reproduced in the collage below, that I was able to see for myself in the museum at Moundville. Although the scale is completely different, I suggest that it bears more than a passing resemblance to the Great Sphinx of Giza. The Sphinx, of course, has a human head, not the head of a feline, but let’s keep in mind those traditions in which human-headed Piasas are described. Also possibly of relevance here is the evidence that the original prehistoric Sphinx, perhaps more than 12,000 years old, had the head, as well as the body, of a lion. After suffering severe erosion over several millennia the leonine head was recut into human form during the early Dynastic period.104 Last but not least, Native American traditions of the Underwater Panther speak of a time when “four Piasas existed, each associated with its own cardinal direction.”105 Is it a coincidence that the Great Sphinx of Giza, with its strong family resemblance to the Underwater Panther, is an equinoctial marker, oriented precisely to one of the four cardinal directions to face the sun as it rises due east on the equinox?

DOGS AND OTHER “COINCIDENCES” 

FEROCIOUS DOGS THAT APPEAR AS obstacles and challenges on the Native American afterlife journey have their counterparts among the monsters of the Duat described in the ancient Egyptian books of the dead. “That god who lives by slaughter,” for example, in Spell 335 of the Coffin Texts, “whose face is that of a hound.”106 

Nor is that the only curious nexus involving dogs. 

As an exception to the general rule among Native American peoples, the Cherokee do not describe the Milky Way as the “Path of Souls” but refer to it, rather, as “Where the Dog Ran.”107 This is on account of a myth of a giant mill standing on one side of the earth-disk where corn was ground into meal. The store of flour was kept in a great bowl and on several mornings the people who attended the mill found that some of the flour was missing. When the thefts continued they investigated and found the tracks of a dog. The next night: 

They watched, and when the dog came … and began to eat the meal out of the bowl they sprang out and whipped him.108 

At this, the dog, who lived on the opposite side of the earth-disk, leapt to the sky and fled “howling” across it to his home, 

with the meal dropping from his mouth as he ran, and leaving behind a white trail where now we see the Milky Way, which the Cherokee call to this day Gi’li-utsun’ stanun’ yi, “Where the dog ran.”109 

What’s strange is that in ancient Egypt, too, where the Milky Way was the Winding Waterway, there is an exception. It’s found in a curious “spell” from the Coffin Texts in which no dogs are mentioned but where the deceased declares: 

I am made a spirit. … I am he who is in charge of secret matters. … I have come equipped with magic, I have quenched my thirst with it. I live on white emmer, filling the Winding Waterway.110

White emmer is, of course, one of the domesticated varieties of wheat, and one, moreover, that was particularly favored in ancient Egypt.111 As with maize in the Americas, it must be milled to produce usable flour. In this variant ancient Egyptian tradition, as in the variant Cherokee tradition, the path in the sky on which the afterlife journey unfolds is likened to a white trail of milled flour. 

There are other curiosities. 

Take the case of the hero-deity known as the “Birdman,” of whom multiple depictions have survived in the Mississippi Valley. He is unmistakably part falcon, part man, just like the god Horus of the Nile Valley. Just like Horus, the Birdman’s celestial associations include both the Morning Star and the Sun.112 And just like Horus, the fundamental role of the Birdman is to symbolize the triumph of life over death. “Although everyone must die eventually,” explains Professor James Brown of Northwestern University, 

life is the victor through the survival of one’s descendants. The avatar of this struggle of life to reassert itself in the face of inevitable death is the falcon, and one of his guises is the Morning Star. In the pre-dawn light the Morning Star beats back the darkness to make way for the life-sustaining sun. The fact that the [Native American myth of the] Birdman has embedded within it the diurnal progress of night and day, the passage of the heavenly bodies and the cardinal directions tells us that they are properties of a particular cosmology. These elements are not loosely connected.113 

This is not the place to elaborate further on the Birdman myth, or on the extensive traditions surrounding the god Horus, one of the most famous and complex figures in the ancient Egyptian pantheon. Entire books could be, and have been, written about each and there are great differences between the two as well as some rather striking similarities. What remains to be resolved is whether these similarities are purely coincidental or whether there is some deep, hidden, and previously undetected connection. 

Then there’s the question of pygmies and dwarfs. They enjoyed special favor in ancient Egypt, where their mummified remains have survived in a number of tombs. They were regarded as possessing more than human powers—there is even a pygmy god named Bes—and they were given positions of importance in the funerary texts.114 For example, in a vignette to chapter 164 of the Book of the Dead we see a goddess flanked by two dwarfs,each of whom is depicted with two heads, one of a man and one of a falcon.115 And in the Pyramid Texts, the deceased on his afterlife journey declares:

I am deemed righteous in the sky and on earth. … I am that pygmy of “the dances of god” who diverts the god in front of his great throne.116 

Likewise, dwarfs and pygmies enjoyed special favor and respect among ancient Native Americans. Hultkrantz reports “a widespread belief in dwarves on the land, at times associated with the concept of a more or less extinct ‘prehistoric’ race, at times linked to the concept of spirit beings.”117 

As in ancient Egypt, the skeletons of dwarfs have been found in ancient Native American tombs, and as in ancient Egypt, dwarfs were believed to possess superhuman and magical powers. There is even evidence of the existence of dwarf shamans in the Mississippi Valley.118 

Also worthy of note is the appearance and manifestation of souls, and we have seen already how, in ancient Egypt, the free-flying Ba soul was depicted as a bird or as a human-headed bird. “He opens for you the doors of the sky,” the Pyramid Texts declare: 

he throws open for you the doors of the firmament, he makes a road for you that you may ascend by means of it into the company of the gods, you being alive in your bird shape.119 

In the case of ancient Native America, the free-soul was likewise very often pictured and spoken of as a bird. Among the Modoc tribe, for example, a boy training to become a shaman fell into a deathlike trance. In this condition he met a female spirit who took out his heart. The boy then heard the spirit talking to his heart, which she held in her hand: 

After a while she opened her hand and let go of the heart. Then the little boy thought he saw a bird coming from the west. It came to him and lighted on his breast. That moment he jumped up.120 

Hultkrantz reports that among the White Knife Shoshoni the soul has the appearance of a bird while “the Huichol identify it as a little white bird and the Luiseno know that it is a dove. The Kootenay believe that the free-soul can show itself as a tomtit or a jay.”121 … The free-soul of the Bella Coola is like a bird enclosed in an egg [the physical body]; if the shell of the egg breaks and the soul flies away its owner must die.”122 

Once again, then, it seems that some of the fundamental ideas and imagery of the death process were held in common in ancient Native America and in ancient Egypt and once again the only question we must decide is whether this is a coincidence or not. 

           JUDGMENT 

BOTH THE ANCIENT EGYPTIAN AND the ancient Native American afterlife journeys involve a strong element of judgment. Indeed, in a sense, the entire ordeal in both cases concerns the judgment of the soul for its choices—for what it has done and not done, for the use that it made of the gift of life— during its physical incarnation. In both cases the unworthy soul can face annihilation by gods, demons, and monsters at any point on the journey (for example, at the hands of the “brain-smasher” figure) but in both cases also, for those who have progressed thus far through the Netherworld, a specific judgment awaits. 

In the ancient Egyptian system the judgment scene occurs in the Fifth Division (or “Hour”) of the Duat, in the Judgment Hall of Osiris, also known as the Hall of Maat—a location that can be reached only by those who are sufficiently provided with spiritual protection to make it through the first four divisions. 

I have described the scene at length in previous books, and will not repeat all the details here. In summary, however, the deceased is ushered into a great hall or chamber at the head of which, in partially mummified form, sits Osiris, the high god of death and resurrection, identified in the ancient Egyptian sky religion with the constellation Orion. Also present, wearing a feather headdress, is Maat, the goddess of truth and cosmic justice, and forty two dispassionate figures, crouched in the manner of scribes poring over papyrus, each wearing the feather of Maat, which symbolizes truth. These are the forty-two Assessors of the Dead, before each of whom the deceased must be able to declare himself innocent of certain acts of moral wrongdoing— notably the act of murder. 

Having completed this stage of its examination the soul now finds itself confronted by an immense pair of scales beneath the arms of which are to be seen representations of Anubis, the jackal-headed guide of souls, and Horus, the falcon-headed son of Osiris. One pan of the scales contains an object, shaped like a small urn, symbolizing the heart of the deceased, “considered to be the seat of intelligence and thus the instigator of man’s actions and conscience.”123 In the other pan is placed the feather of Maat, symbolizing, once again, Truth.

If the soul is to triumph in the judgment, heart and feather must stand poised in equilibrium and the prize of eternal life in the Osirian kingdom of the dead beckons. But if the heart is heavy with wickedness and willful waste of the gift of life, if it does not balance with the feather of Truth, then eternal annihilation awaits. To remind us of this, beyond the scales in every depiction of the judgment scene we see the agency of the soul’s extinction—a monstrous hybrid, part crocodile, part lion, part hippopotamus, who is known as Amit, the “Devourer,” the “Eater of the Dead,” in whose slavering jaws the “unjustified” soul is utterly destroyed.124 

In the ancient Native North American afterlife journey the judgment scene is nowhere so formalized and elaborate as it is the ancient Egyptian version but there is nonetheless—and unmistakably so—a judgment. In the early 1900s, for example, Francis La Flesche, a member of the Omaha tribe of Nebraska and Western Iowa, cooperated with Alice C. Fletcher of Harvard’s Peabody Museum to record the traditions of his people. The result, published by the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1911, includes the following account of a crucial moment in the afterlife journey: 

It was said that at the forks of the path of the dead (the Milky Way) there “sat an old man wrapped in a buffalo robe, and when the spirits of the dead passed along he turned the steps of the good and peaceable people toward the short path which led directly to the abode of their relatives, but allowed the contumacious to take the long path, over which they wearily wandered. …” The simple and ancient belief seems to have been that the Milky Way is the Path of the Dead. It was said also that the spirit of a murderer “never found his way to his relatives but kept on endlessly searching but never finding rest.”125

Likewise the late Joseph Epes Brown, founder of the Native American Studies Program at Indiana University, gives this account of the afterlife journey of the Sioux: 

It is held … that the released soul travels southward along the “Spirit Path” (the Milky Way) until it comes to a place where this way divides. Here an old woman, called Maya owichapaha, sits; “She who pushes them over the bank,” who judges the souls; the worthy ones she allows to travel on the path which goes to the right, but the unworthy she “pushes over the bank,” to the left.126 

In 1967 Ake Hultkrantz joined Fletcher and Brown in linking such traditions to the fact that: 

the path of souls is not always one and undivided. In the northern hemisphere the Milky Way splits into two streaks. Not unexpectedly, the Indians have associated this phenomenon with concepts of different passageways to the other world and of dissimilar fates after death. Tradition has it that one road … leads to the blessed land of the dead and the other brings downfall and annihilation.127 

To this George Lankford adds a crucial insight that Hultkrantz missed, namely that there is “a bright star—Deneb—that is placed right at the fork in the path and thus could serve as a marker for the decision point or a figure who does the deciding.”128 

Again a long story must be cut short here, but what Lankford goes on to demonstrate is that a ferocious bird, a raptor with a hooked beak, is a very distinctive “opponent” or “adversary” on the afterlife journey, as portrayed in Moundville pottery. In his view this “Moundville Raptor” is the Mississippian equivalent of the old woman who pushes souls over the bank or the old man who condemns the souls of murderers to endless wandering without rest. And to reinforce his argument, he draws our attention to the Alabamas and the Seminoles, “two groups who are major candidates for descendants of the prehistoric inhabitants of Moundville,” who indeed place an eagle in the role of an adversary on the Milky Way path of souls.129 

Deneb is of course Alpha Cygni, the first-magnitude master star of the Cygnus constellation, which the Greeks identified as a bird, and specifically as a swan. “It is a satisfying coincidental possibility,” writes Lankford, “that the people of Moundville saw it the same way, but with the identity of an eagle rather than a swan.”130

Since his specialty is Native American religions, there is no reason why Lankford should have studied the ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts. Had he done so, however, he would surely have been struck by Utterance 304, in which the soul on its journey through the Duat is confronted by a bird adversary that apparently has the power to block its path. It’s difficult to give any other interpretation to this encounter since the soul is made to declare:

Hail to you, Ostrich which is on the bank of the Winding Waterway! Open my way that I may pass.131 

An ostrich is not a swan and a swan is not an eagle. Nonetheless, it is surely noteworthy that in both the ancient Egyptian and the ancient Mississippian religions we encounter a bird, with the power to block the further progress of the soul, poised on a bank of the Milky Way. 

What else but recognition of the same fork in the Milky Way that was regarded as so ominous in Native American myth can be expressed in Utterance 697 of the Pyramid Texts, where we read: 

Do not travel on those western waterways, for those who travel thereon do not return, but travel on the eastern waterways.132

ASTRONOMER CHIEFS 

IN THE COFFIN TEXTS, IN a passage that addresses the deceased, we read: 

May you recognise your soul in the upper sky while your flesh, your corpse, is in On.”133 

The latter location, now a suburb of Cairo 12 miles to the northeast of the immense Old Kingdom burial fields and world-famous pyramids of Giza, was the center of the religious cult that served the Giza necropolis in antiquity. It was the Biblical Hebrews who called this cult center On—there are references to it in Genesis, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel.134 Its original name in the ancient Egyptian language, however, was Innu—“the pillar”—and the Greeks would later know it as Heliopolis, “the City of the Sun.”135 

The Pyramid Texts, from which the Coffin Texts and all the later funerary texts descended, are often referred to as the “Heliopolitan Recension of the Book of the Dead”136 because they are thought to have originated in the archives of the cult center of Heliopolis. The archives have not survived the millennia, but the texts themselves are convincing evidence that something such must have existed since they “contain formulae and paragraphs which, judging from the grammatical forms that occur in them, must have been composed, if not actually written down, in the earliest times of Egyptian civilization.”137 

Let’s note in passing that the High Priest of Heliopolis bore the title “Chief of the Astronomers” and is represented in tomb paintings and statuary wearing a mantle adorned with stars.138 It is therefore of interest, when ethnographers recorded the customs and beliefs of the Skidi Pawnee of Oklahoma in the nineteenth century, that they were reported to have shamans, raised to the rank of chiefs, who specialized in astronomy. In the archives of the Smithsonian Institution there is a photograph of one of these individuals, named His Chiefly Sun, and notably he is shown wearing a mantle adorned with stars.139 It was also the custom of the Skidi Pawnee to wrap a newborn baby in a speckled wildcat skin. This, ethnographers were told, 

was equivalent to saying, “I wrap the child with the heavens,” for the hide represented the sky and stars.140

In the case of the Heliopolitan “Chief of the Astronomers” we can see clearly from surviving depictions that the mantle he wore, upon which stars were embossed, was in fact a leopard skin. When the leopard skin was left undecorated the spots of the leopard itself were believed to have symbolized stars.141 A specialized class of priests, the Sem Priests, also wearing leopard skin mantles, played a key role in mortuary ceremonies for the deceased.142 

There is no dispute that the great Mississippian religious centers like Cahokia and Moundville were primarily focused on a cult of the dead, and while not every mound in these sites contains a burial, or multiple burials, the vast majority do. This is also the case at many other mound and earthwork sites in North America. Even some of the very earliest, such as Monte Sano, contain evidence of the postmortem processing of bodies.143 The Adena mounds are largely burial mounds.144 And as to the Hopewell earthworks, William Romain writes:

By far the vast majority of known … remains are interred in mounds located within the geometric enclosures. Necessarily, then, the physical relationship between the remains of the dead and the enclosures tells us that the Hopewell did, indeed, associate the geometric enclosures with the passage of the individual from life to death.145 

It may even be, Romain adds, 

that the Hopewell considered the geometric enclosures to be actual gateways, or doorways, to the otherworld. Certainly the idea of architectural structures being used to create entrances to the otherworld was known throughout North America. The circular hole in the top of the Ojibway shaking tent, for example, was specifically meant to allow for “soul-flight travel to the Hole in the Sky and across the barrier to the spirit realm.”146 

Though different in degree in terms of the engineering required, there is no difference in kind between the hole in the Ojibwa tent and the star-shaft in the Great Pyramid—which likewise appears to have been intended to facilitate soul-travel to the sky across the barrier to the spirit realm. 

Similarly, although there is again a marked difference of degree, there is no difference in kind between the geometric, astronomically aligned structures of the Giza plateau and the geometric, astronomically aligned structures of the Mississippi Valley. All of them seem bound together by the single purpose of the triumph of the soul over death and by the means deployed to achieve that purpose. 

But why were structures required at all? And why these specific kinds of structures?

next

ASTRONOMY AND GEOMETRY IN THE AFTERLIFE

source and footnotes here

https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/archivos_pdf/america-before-key-earth-lost-civilization.pdf

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