xiv. The Well of Souls

Ancient Egyptian cosmology talks about a bird known as the Great Cackler, a cosmic goose, who brings the universe into manifestation by letting out a divine honk or call. It lays the sun-egg from which the creator god emerges, his name altering depending on which cult centre the myth is attached.

On the famous round zodiac of Denderah, created as late as c. 50 BC, there appears a cosmic goose, and careful analysis of its position in the night sky shows that it formed part of a constellation composed of the stars of Cygnus and the bright star Altair in Aquila, the celestial eagle, an area of the Milky Way dominated by the dark nebulous region known as the Great Rift. This indicates that the Ancient Egyptians saw the point of creation as located in the vicinity of Cygnus. In addition to this, the Great Cackler was a totem of Geb, the earth god, whose wife/lover was Nut, the sky-goddess. Occasionally, the Great Cackler is shown at the feet of Nut as she is prised apart from Geb in order to form the sky and earth.

American astronomer and Egyptologist Dr Ronald Wells has put forward a unique theory. He has determined that Nut was most probably a personification of the Milky Way, with her vulva and birth canal corresponding to the stars of Cygnus. This would make the Great Rift, which extends from Cygnus down to Sagittarius, the place of emergence of the sun-god, reborn at dawn on the winter solstice, as he was also in Maya cosmology.

Wells further determined that the Fifth Dynasty pharaoh Userkaf aligned his sun-temple at Abusir, built within sight of the Giza pyramid field, to Deneb, when it rose heliacally, i.e. with the sun. Wells believed that Userkaf chose this particular star as it held some special importance to him. Beyond this is the fact that here was firm evidence of Deneb and Cygnus's importance to an Old Kingdom pharaoh who lived within just three generations of Khufu, and took the throne only a few years after the death of Menkaure, the builder of Giza's Third Pyramid.

An obscure local legend asserts the entrance to an underground 'palace' beneath Nazlet-el-Samman, the village east of the Sphinx, was once guarded by a holy man named Hammad el-Samman. He lived in a 'hole', or well, shaded by a sacred sycamore fig, a direct descendant of one known to have existed in dynastic times. Yet this legend is most certainly a corruption of a far older belief in sacred texts found on the walls of the Graeco-Egyptian temple at Edfu in Southern Egypt, and brought to the world in 1969 with the publication of Egyptologist Eve A E Reymond's wonderful book THE MYTHICAL ORIGIN OF THE EGYPTIAN TEMPLE. They speak of a subterranean domain, called the Underworld of the Soul, accessed via a well-shaft, which once existed in the vicinity of Giza. Mythical beings, known as the Primeval Ones, led by an individual called the Falcon conducted entered this chthonic realm to embrace its divine radiance known variously as the Embryo, Seed , Lotus, or Sound Eye.

The Underworld of the Soul of the Edfu Building Texts, as they are known, is synonymous with the hidden domain of Sokar at Rostau. Even though this subterranean realm has long been thought to be mythical, new evidence uncovered during my research into THE CYGNUS MYSTERY clearly indicates that the gateway to this complex, the Place of the Well as it was known in the Edfu Texts, lay in the vicinity of a hill to the south of the Gebel Ghibli, once seen as a physical representation of the Mound of Creation.

The existence of this pre-dynastic structure, associated in legend with the god Sokar, and thus Cygnus, unquestionably inspired the modern-day search for the so-called Hall of Records, alluded to in the prophetic life readings of American psychic Edgar Cayce (1877-1945). On the aforementioned Giza-Cygnus overlay this rocky outcrop is marked by Albireo, the star signifying the mouth or beak of the cosmic bird in Arabian star lore, recalling Giza's name of Rostau, meaning 'mouth of the passages'.

Ancient Egyptian funerary texts speak of a Well of Souls located beneath a sacred sycamore, a symbol of the goddess Nut, or Hathor, the latter being a female patron of the plateau. It enabled the soul of the deceased to ascend via the underworld to the sky-world. According to prehistorian and philosopher Mircea Eliade, this was a magico-religious belief of shamanic origin that pre-dated Dynastic Egypt. Arguably, it went back beyond the Neolithic era to the Palaeolithic epoch when Deneb and the stars of Cygnus occupied pole position. Yet where else could this same shamanic root be traced? We journey next to India in search of further clues.