With that idea, we come to some very interesting relationships that will go very far in providing clues to us in terms of asking some of the most interesting questions of all relating to our idea of the rites and myths of ancient man being the disjecta membra of a vanished civilization. Mircea Eliade writes:
Recent researches have clearly brought out the “shamanic” elements in the religion of the Paleolithic hunters. Horst Kierchner has interpreted the celebrated relief at Lascaux as a representation of a shamanic trance.[…]
Finally, Karl J. Narr has reconsidered the problem of the “origin” and chronology of shamanism in his important study. He brings out the influence of notions of fertility (Venus statuettes) on the religious beliefs of the prehistoric North Asian hunters; but this influence did not disrupt the Paleolithic tradition.[…] it is in this “Vorstellungswelt” that the roots of the bear ceremonialism of Asia and North America lie. Soon afterward, probably about 25,000 BC, Europe offers evidence for the earliest forms of shamanism (Lascaux) with the plastic representations of the bird, the tutelary spirit, and ecstasy. […]
What appears to be certain is the antiquity of “shamanic” rituals and symbols. It remains to be determined whether these documents brought to light by prehistoric discoveries represent the first expressions of a shamanism in statu nascendi or are merely the earliest documents today available for an earlier religious complex, which, however, did not find “plastic” manifestations (drawings, ritual objects, etc) before the period of Lascaux.
In accounting for the formation of the shamanic complex in Central and North Asia, we must keep in mind the two essential elements of the problem: on the one hand, the ecstatic experience as such, as a primary phenomenon; on the other, the historic-religious milieu into which this ecstatic experience was destined to be incorporated and the ideology that, in the last analysis, was to validate it. […]
Everywhere in those lands, and from the earliest times, we find documents for the existence of a Supreme Being of celestial structure, who also corresponds morphologically to all the other Supreme Beings of the archaic religions. The symbolism of ascent, with all the rites and myths dependent on it, must be connected with celestial Supreme Beings; […] This symbolism of ascent and “height” retains its value even after the “withdrawal” of the celestial Supreme Being — for, as is well known, Supreme Beings gradually lose their active place in the cult, giving way to religious forms that are more “dynamic” and “familiar” (the gods of storm and fertility, demiurges, the souls of the dead, the Great Goddesses, etc.) […]
The reduction or even the total loss in religious currency of Uranian Supreme Beings is sometimes indicated in myths concerning a primordial and paradisal time when communications between heaven and earth were easy and accessible to everyone; as the result of some happening, these communications were broken off and the Supreme Beings withdrew to the highest sky.[…]
The disappearance of the cult of the celestial Supreme Being did not nullify the symbolism of ascent with all its implication. […]
The shamanic ecstasy could be considered a reactualization of the mythical illud tempus when men could communicate in concreto with the sky.
It is indubitable that the celestial ascent of the shaman is a survival, profoundly modified and sometimes degenerate, of this archaic religious ideology centered on faith in a celestial Supreme Being and belief in concrete communications between heaven and earth. […]
The myths refer to more intimate relations between the Supreme Beings and shamans; in particular, they tell of a First Shaman, sent to earth by the Supreme Being or his surrogate to defend human beings against diseases and evil spirits.
It was in the context of the “withdrawal” of the “Celestial Being” that the meaning of the shaman’s ecstatic experience changed. Formerly, the activity was focused on communing with the god and obtaining benefits for the tribe. The shift of the function of the shaman associated with the withdrawal of the benevolent god/goddess was to “battling with evil spirits and disease”. This is a sharp reminder of the work of Jesus, healing the sick and casting out demons - the shamanic exemplar “after the Fall”.
There was, it seems, another consequence of this “shift”. Increasingly, the descents into the “underworld” and the relations with “spirits” led to their “embodiment” or in the shaman’s being “possessed” by “spirits”. What is clear is that these were innovations, most of them recent. What is particularly striking in the research of the historiographers of myth, legend, shamanism, etc, is the discovery of the “influences from the south, which appeared quite early and which altered both cosmology and the mythology and techniques of ecstasy”. Among these southern influences were the contribution of Buddhism and Lamaism, added to the Iranian and, in the last analysis, Mesopotamian influences that preceded them. Eliade writes:
The initiatory schema of the shaman’s ritual death and resurrection is likewise an innovation, but one that goes back to much earlier times; in any case, it cannot be ascribed to influences from the ancient Near East. But the innovations introduced by the ancestor cult particularly affected the structure of this initiatory schema. The very concept of mystical death was altered by the many and various religious changes effected by lunar mythologies, the cult of the dead, and the elaboration of magical ideologies.
Hence we must conceive of Asiatic shamanism as an archaic technique of ecstasy whose original underlying ideology — belief in a celestial Supreme Being with whom it was possible to have direct relations by ascending into the sky — was constantly being transformed by an ongoing series of exotic contributions culminating in the invasion of Buddhism. […]
The phenomenology of the trance underwent many changes and corruptions, due in large part to confusion as to the precise nature of ecstasy. Yet all these innovations and corruptions did not succeed in eliminating the possibility of the true shamanic ecstasy.
More than once we have discerned in the shamanic experience a “nostalgia for paradise” that suggests
one of the oldest types of Christian mystical experience. As for the “inner light”, which plays a part of the first importance in Indian mysticism and metaphysics as well as in Christian mystical theology, it is already documented in shamanism.
What seems to be most important about Central Asian shamanism in the history of mysticism is the role the shaman plays in the defense of the psychic integrity of the community. Shamans are pre-eminently the anti-demonic champions; they combat not only demons and disease, but also the black magicians. The shaman is the tireless slayer of demons and dragons. And here we find explication of the “military” elements of the Grail Ensemble. The Sword in the Stone that can only be withdrawn by the “Heir”, or the “Desired Knight”, was represented in the Steppe shamanic regalia as lance, cuirass, bow, sword, etc. These are accounted for in our study by virtue of the requirements of war against the demons, the true enemies of humanity. As Eliade points out, the shaman defends life, health, fertility, the world of “light”, against death, diseases, sterility, disaster, and the world of “darkness”. In short, the Shaman is a very early “type” of the Knight on the Quest for the Holy Grail - the Shamanic ascent to the Celestial Spheres.
We see that what is fundamental and universal to the shaman, to the heroes of myth, to the Quest for the Holy Grail, is the shaman’s struggle against what we could call “the powers of evil”. The knight/shaman’s essential role in the defense of the psychic integrity of the community depends above all on this:
men are sure that one of them is able to help them in the critical circumstances produced by the inhabitants of the invisible world. Here we come to a crucial characteristic of the knight/shaman: he must be able to SEE what is hidden and invisible to the rest and to bring back direct and reliable information from the supernatural worlds. In short, in the accounts of shamanic ecstasies, we find correspondence to the themes of the great epics in oral literature. The knight/shaman’s adventures in the other world, the ordeals and tests that he undergoes in his ecstatic descents below and ascents to the sky, describe in every detail the adventures of the figures in popular tales and the heroes of epic myths. This suggests that many epic “subjects” or motifs, as well as many characters, images, and clichés of these tales, are of ecstatic, or even other-worldly origin in the sense of interactions with hyper-dimensional realities.
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Certain ancient myths tell us that a battle takes place either between two brothers, or between father and son. The battle ends when the elder king is “wounded in the thigh”, or ritually castrated to symbolize his loss of potency. The kingdom, represented by the queen, is then given over to the winning brother, or from father to son because the queen symbolizes the land. It is interesting that this drama was enacted between Jacob, and an “angel of Yahweh”, playing the role of Set. In this way, the people understood that the kingship had been handed to Yahweh personally because he “Tabernacled with Jacob” playing the role of the goddess. Yahweh, the Boar god.
We need to understand here that
these ritual combats, dying kings, cannibalistic and sacrificial activities are only the extreme corruptions of an original, core idea that can be seen to represent an ancient technology. Indeed, the technology aspect emerges from time to time, but is often so disguised that it is difficult to sort out the many twists and turns in the threads of transmission. Among the most archaic representations of these ideas - even though we can consider it to still be a corruption of the truly ancient knowledge - are the rites of the Shamans of central Asia.
When we look to the function of the shaman, we discover: the shaman either descends to the underworld to save man, or he ascends to the heavens to intercede with the gods on behalf of his people. He is, in effect, the divinely chosen “knight” who has the “right stuff” to be able to make this journey. The symbolism of the stairs on which the shaman ascends and descends are typically shamanic. The “Tree of Life”, the symbol of the birth goddess, is a symbol of the shamanic ascent to the celestial spheres to receive the communication from god concerning the fate of the tribe. In this sense, the cosmic axis and the heavenly book have become joined in terms of symbolism. One can clearly see these elements in the story of Jacob’s ladder and his wrestling with the “angel”. Unfortunately, Jacob lost the match.
What is most fascinating in terms of shamanic studies is a mysterious “female sickness” that male shamans often suffered. One of the reported (and variable) symptoms of becoming a shaman is that the individual begins to dress as a woman, to act as a woman, and to generally begin a process of feminization. We see a hint of this factor in Jacob’s journey south to “build booths” which was a strictly female activity!
This feminization of the shaman directs us to consider the fact that the original shamanic/grail function was most likely fulfilled by women only, and at some point, men attempted to dispense with the function of the female and to acquire her attributes and natural shamanic capabilities.
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The clues to these transitions are held in the very words themselves: knight and mare. Knight is derived from the same root as yogi, or juga, which means “to join together”, and the word “mare” for “mer” or Sea of the mother is obvious. In order to get us a bit closer to some idea of how the transitions occur, Eliade remarks on the shamanic role in funerary rites, which have been described and observed. It is thought that these sorts of rites are very similar to the “secret rites” or functions that are hidden by vows of secrecy.
Herodotus has left us a good description of the funerary customs of the Scythians. The funeral was followed by purifications. Hemp was thrown on heated stones and all inhaled the smoke; “the Scythians howl in joy for the vapour-bath.” […] The howls compose a specific religious ensemble, the purpose of which could only be ecstasy. In this connection Meuli cites the Altaic séance described by Radlov, in which the shaman guided to the underworld the soul of a woman who had been dead forty days. The shaman-psychopomp is not found in Herodotus’ description; he speaks only of the purifications following a funeral. But among a number of Turko-Tatar peoples such purifications coincide with the shaman’s escorting the deceased to his new home, the nether regions.[…]
The use of hemp for ecstatic purposes is also attested among the Iranians, and it is the Iranian word for hemp that is employed to designate mystical intoxication in Central and North Asia.
It is known that the Caucasian peoples, and especially the Osset, have preserved a number of the mythological and religious traditions of the Scythians.
Now, the conceptions of the afterlife held by certain Caucasian peoples are close to those of the Iranians, particularly in regard to the deceased crossing a bridge as narrow as a hair, the myth of a Cosmic Tree whose top touches the sky and at whose root there is a miraculous spring, and so on. Then, too, diviners, seers, and necromancer-psychopomps play a certain role among the mountain Georgian tribes. The most important of these sorcerers are the messulethe; their ranks are filled for the most part from among the women and girls. Their chief office is to escort the dead to the other world, but they can also incarnate them. […] The messulethe performs her task by falling into trance.
At this point, allow me to interject the comment that we see a curious parallel to the fact that the Themosphoria was celebrated “only by women”. In other words, it was very likely an archaic custom of what has been called “sacred prostitution” but the sacred prostitution was clearly derived from archaic techniques of ecstasy which we have surmised were actually disjecta membra of an ancient technology that effectively modified DNA. Over millennia of transmission, the terminology describing this DNA factor was corrupted to refer to sexual elements. We shall also later see that what was once a “spiritual idea” was given a literal, physical meaning. The role and participation of women is indeed important, but not at all the way many occultists have interpreted it.
What is clear is that the very ancient idea of women as priestesses, or as so-called “temple prostitutes”, was merely derived from the fact of the natural role of the woman as true shaman.
When women were extirpated from their role as natural psychopomp for their tribes, a host of other items had to be invented to take their place: trees, bridges (which is a word strikingly similar to “bride” and “bridle” as is used for a horse!), ladders, stairs, drums, rattles, chants, dances, and so on; and most especially ritual combat instead of unification.
We have observed the striking resemblance between the other world ideas of the Caucasians and of the Iranians. For one thing, the Cinvat bridge plays an essential role in Iranian funerary mythology; crossing it largely determines the destiny of the soul; and the crossing is a difficult ordeal, equivalent in structure, to initiatory ordeals. […]
The Cinvat bridge is at the “Center”, at the “middle of the world” and “the height of a hundred men”. […] The bridge connects earth and heaven at the “Center”. Under the Cinvat bridge is the pit of hell.
Here we find a “classic” cosmological schema of the three cosmic regions connected by a central axis (pillar, tree, bridge, etc.) The shamans travel freely among the three zones; the dead must cross a bridge on their journey to the beyond. […] The important feature of the Iranian tradition is (at least as it survived after Zarathustra’s reform) is that, at the crossing of the bridge, there is a sort of struggle between the demons, who try to cast the soul down to hell, and the tutelary spirits who resist them.
The Gathas make three references to this crossing of the Cinvat bridge. In the first two passages Zarathustra, according to H.S. Nyberg’s interpretation, refers to himself as a psychopomp. Those who have been united to him in ecstasy will cross the bridge with ease. […]
The bridge, then, is not only the way for the dead; it is the road of ecstatics. […] The Gathic term maga is proof that Zarathustra and his disciples induced an ecstatic experience by ritual songs intoned in chorus in a closed, consecrated space. In this sacred space (maga) communication between heaven and earth became possible. […] The sacred space became a “Center”.[…]
Shamanic ecstasy induced by hemp smoke was known in ancient Iran. […] In the Videvdat hemp is demonized. This seems to us to prove complete hostility to shamanic intoxication. […] The imagery of the Central Asian shamans would seem to have undergone the influence of Oriental, and principally Iranian, ideas. But this does not mean that the shamanic descent to the underworld derives from an exotic influence. The Oriental contribution only amplified and added color to the dramatic scenarios of punishments; it was the narratives of ecstatic journeys to the underworld that were enriched under Oriental influences; the ecstasy long preceded them. [….]
We … have found the technique of ecstasy in archaic cultures where it is impossible to suspect any influence from the ancient East. […]
The magico-religious value of intoxication for achieving ecstasy is of Iranian origin. […]
Concerning the original shamanic experience … narcotics are only a vulgar substitute for “pure” trance.
The use of intoxicants is a recent innovation and points to a decadence in shamanic technique. Narcotic intoxication is called on to provide an imitation of a state that the shaman is no longer capable of attaining otherwise. Decadence or vulgarization of a mystical technique - in ancient and modern India, and indeed all through the East, we constantly find this strange mixture of “difficult ways” and “easy ways” of realizing mystical ecstasy or some other decisive experience.
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Over and over again we have seen our tracks of the Grail/Ark lead us to Russia, to Central Asia, to the Scythians, the Tribe of Dan. It is interesting to note at this point a prophecy of Edgar Cayce about Russia and China. In 1944, he prophesied that China would one day be, “the cradle of Christianity as applied in the lives of men”. “Through Russia”, he said “comes the hope of the world. Not in respect to what is sometimes termed Communism or Bolshevism - no! But freedom - freedom! That each man will live for his fellow man. The principle has been born there. It will take years for it to be crystallized; yet out of Russia comes again the hope of the world.” In reference to this, and the many other “Russian references”, Geoffrey Ashe writes in The Ancient Wisdom:
From Greece to the Indus Valley, we find people holding Ursa Major in reverence almost as far back as we can document… In various ways they introduce the Bear into beliefs that connect the centers Above and Below. […] We have enough to reconstruct a common myth that might underlie all primary versions of the seven-mystique […] from which the rest follow.
In the far north there is a high and paradisal place, peopled by an assembly of beings of superhuman longevity and wisdom. They have associates and contacts at lower levels. […]
iblical editing never quite censored out the northern mountain and Zion’s mystical identity with it. […] The prophet’s imagery is baffling, and rabbis in later ages claimed that it concealed a great secret, an occult wisdom. Only the wisest and holiest could expound the Work of the Chariot. Robert Graves has maintained that the God of the Chariot actually is Apollo.[…]
Is there reason to believe that the northern Something was literally there […] that a cosmic system was actually taught by the Rishis on a real Meru, and carried south and west along several routes? […] The inquiry has […] led to what no one ever identified before - an arguable locale, to which the search can be narrowed down.
[W]e are justified in reverting to Guthrie’s theory of Apollo. If this god was brought to Asia Minor and thence to Greece from a Siberian birthplace, a real Land of the Hyperboreans, then he implies a northern Something which actually was there: a center of an influential species of shamanism, with Hyperborean Apollo as one of its gods. […] If Apollo did make this journey from Siberia, the bear-goddess Artemis was probably paired with him at an early stage.
The story of Apollo and his twin sister Artemis is interesting and connects us back to Orion. Some sources say that Artemis fell in love with Orion and was going to give up her avowed virginity to marry him. Apollo, her brother, did not approve and tricked Artemis into shooting Orion who was swimming in the sea. In her grief, Artemis placed Orion in the sky to honor him.
Other sources say that Orion had raped one of Artemis’ female followers, and so Artemis killed him as punishment. She sent a scorpion after him, which stung him and poisoned him. When Orion and the scorpion were placed among the stars, they were given places opposite each other, so that Orion would be out of danger. When Scorpius is just rising, chasing after Orion, the hunter is just starting to disappear behind the western horizon.
The veneration of the bear is so ancient that we even find it in the French cave remains of almost unspeakable antiquity. The symbolism is deep here. A bear is supposedly born as a tiny shapeless lump and “licked into shape”. His winter sleep symbolizes death-and-rebirth - or, more significantly, “survival in an Ark”. The bear stands on his legs and is an omnivore, like humans.
The point is that the bear, Arca, Arthur, takes us back to his origins in Northern and Western Europe and Siberia. The Siberian shamans tell that in former ages all men had access to the gods, whereas now, only shamans have it and that Shamanism itself has been degraded. Shamanism presents itself as the remnant of an Ancient Wisdom teaching which once flourished across the Northern Hemisphere. The main feature of the Shaman’s universe is the cosmic center, an axis connecting earth with both heaven and hell. It is often represented as a tree, a ladder, or a pole. The shaman can utilize this tree to travel upward to commune with the gods, or downward to battle demons. Numbers are important: there are a fixed number of steps, or celestial stages. The cosmic tree can also be represented as a mountain with seven stories. The mountain is made of gold and the name “Altai” itself actually means “gold”. We note that the Scythians were famous goldsmiths. What is more, even the most untrained eye can see that the art of the Scythians is identical to the art of the French caves and the art of the Celts of Europe.
It is clear that shamanism, as it is known, has declined from its original unified and coherent system. One reason for thinking so is that, while there are many local terms for a male shaman, there is only one for a female shaman. Shamanism, it seems, was formerly a woman’s activity. In one Tartar dialect, utygan, the word for a woman-shaman, also means “bear”.
There is a place called Mal’ta, fifty-five miles north-west of Irkutsk, in country where the remnants of Altaic shamanism are still active. Carvings have been discovered there which include an oblong panel of mammoth ivory with designs on it. The dominant design is a spiral of dots which goes around seven times, and winds into or out of a central hole - a spiral maze. This is the oldest known heptad in the world - almost 30,000 years old.
There are claims that the Ancient Wisdom survives in Central Asia to this very day. We cannot confirm that. The only thing we do know is that out of Russia came the work of Georges Gurdjieff mainly through the efforts of another Russian, P. D. Ouspensky. The Third Man, Boris Mouravieff, has expounded on the Fourth Way material of Gurdjieff in significant ways that relate directly to the Grail Issue. Gurdjieff and Mouravieff have called this Tradition, “Esoteric Christianity, suggesting that it was the true teachings of the man we know as Jesus”. But we now suspect that what was originally taught by an obscure man in the area of the Middle East over 2000 years ago was a revival of a far more ancient Tradition - a Tradition that extends back into the mists of pre-history to a time when man interacted with his environment in an altogether different way - a Way that seems magical and mysterious to us in our present state of reduced capacities.
Let me find it... 
