Magic and Initiatory Practices of Ancient Egypt with Normandi Ellis

Thinking Allowed Conversations on the leading edge of knowledge and discovery with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Today we are going to look at the magic and initiatory practices of ancient Egypt. With me is Normandy Ellis, who is co-author with Nikki Scully of a wonderful book called The Union of Isis and Thoth. She is also the author of a number of other books, mostly focusing on ancient Egypt, including Awakening Osiris, Invoking the Scribes of Ancient Egypt, and Imagining the World into Existence. Welcome Normandy. Thank you, Jeffrey. It's good to be here. It's good to be with you again. I think it's been nearly 20 years since we've been in the studio together, but you're a dear old friend and a brilliant poetess and a shamaness and a transcriber. That's not even the right word. You are a person who makes ancient Egypt alive for people today in this modern world. Thank you. It is a blessing to be with you. It's good to be here. I'm really happy. When I think of our first interview about your book Awakening Osiris, let's start there for a moment. It was about the Egyptian book of the dead. Yes. And people think, even the ancient Greeks thought of the Egyptians as they're very morbid people always focusing on death. But the truth of the matter is, and I certainly got this from your work, is that the book of the dead is a book about life and joy and vitality. There is an enormous sense of living presence amongst these ancient Neteru, the nature gods of ancient Egypt. Yes, that's right. We call it the book of the dead because we found it in tombs with dead people. But truly, when the Egyptians translated it, it was called the book of coming into light or how to move as a light being through manifestation, not only in this realm, but in the next realm as well. So that's really what we call the so-called book of the dead is about. Well, you've just said something incredibly profound, so I don't want to let it pass by. Okay. You said moving as a light being. Yes. Let's start, let's define what you mean by that because that's a very powerful phrase and I think it gets to the heart of your work. Yeah. Okay. So, my perception, they had something that they called a sahu, and they had something that they called a kaibet. The kaibet is what we would think about as a shade or a shadow in terms of the way the Greeks used to think about it, okay? And a sahu is a light being. A sahu is one that's an awakened being. Osiris had a sahu because he was an awakened being as opposed to one who was an unconscious being that moved simply as a shadow through existence. And let's face it, there are people who are living who are moving as shadows through their own being. Yeah. And the whole point is for us to become awakened, enlightened beings. And so, I think that when you can operate in a sahu body, in a body of light, that you're able to tap into, you're more able to rise to higher dimensions than you are moving into the lower dimensions, into the realm of illusions and glamors, if you will. And that's that too attached to the world type things. So, I do think that there's a difference between those two states of alternative levels of being, if you will. Now, the ancient Egyptians, if I recall correctly, and you write about it, they had maybe ten different words for different aspects of what we would call the soul. Mm-hmm. They did. So, the cot is, the hieroglyph for a cot is a fish. It's like a lower base or matter. You know, when it decays, it doesn't smell very nice. You know, they had something, they had the kybet, they had the sahu, they had, I'm trying, there's another word, it'll come to me in just a minute, the heart, the ob. Yeah, the ob is the heart. We're moving up now into levels that have to do more with thought vibrations. So, the heart, the seat of consciousness. The sekem is more like your attachment to your will, your willpower as a vibration. There's a word named ren, that's your attachment to thought manifestation through language. There's the ka, which is your spirit, your animating principle. It's the spiritual part of you that's closest to the earthly part of you. You know, it has to be revivified, okay, if you will, like through prayers and thoughts and things like that. The ba is your eternal soul, and then you have the ak, which is your illuminated self, your phoenix self. Now, would you say that the ancient Egyptians understood all of these different words as sort of parts of us that separate from each other after death, or are they just different angles or viewpoints on a single unitary spirit or soul? I think it's more the second, where we're thinking about it as all parts of a living being. They're all together with us while we're walking this planet. They're all there. The only thing we lose is the ka at death, you know, and if we so choose, then we can lose the kaibet, the shadow, you know. But I think you're going to stay with the sahu as part of your spiritual being because that's how ascended masters contact us, is through that light being that comes closest to what we can perceive in a more astral or etheric, whichever way you see that realm, as being beyond this physical shell. Now, you used another phrase. I want you to amplify it. I thought I heard you say the ascended masters. Yes, you heard me say the ascended masters. You did. That's a term I would normally associate with theosophy, maybe not ancient Egypt, but tell me. I have come to understand that there are many ascended masters, more than just what we would think of in the Alice Bailey term of seven-ray masters. I do believe that I work with Isis, who is the master teacher that works with me, and I believe that Nikki works with Thoth as an ascended master. As an ascended master, as opposed to a deva or a deity. Well, I really think that Isis manifested in a physical form, and I think that's part of what makes something an ascended master, is that there's a physical form that that being has understood through lifetimes and lifetimes and lifetimes. You mean perhaps there was an ancient queen of Egypt who was a person named Isis who then became worshipped as a deity. I think there was a civilizing influence that inhabited a woman. I believe that that is the Isis persona. I believe that perhaps that same energy manifested through many lifetimes of this woman, not just particularly one queen, but perhaps, you know, if we look at her story, a lineage. That's exactly right. In the same way that we understand that, you know, you don't have one lifetime and then ascent, okay? You have many lifetimes in which you're learning many lessons, and I think that that's really part of what we're doing here, is learning our own chapters of the Book of the Dead, if you will, so that we can get through each chapter of our lives, and then move into that space where life on the planet is no longer needed, but we may be needed on the planet to assist others. You use the word ascent, and I have the impression from the way you said it that it has a special meaning for you. Well, I think that it's interesting to me because the Egyptians talked about ascension. The very first spiritual book that we have, which was the Pyramid Text of Unas, is an ascension text, and it talks about ascending the ladders of being, and the ladder of being is held in opposition by Horus and Set, like two opposing forces, and we have to learn to move up this chain of being in our lifetime. You can think of that in terms of incarnating, you know, male and female. You can think of it as incarnating as someone who hurts another person, and then incarnating as someone who is hurt by another person in some particular fashion. We have to learn our opposing experiences so that we come to understand that it's all one cloth, that the warp and the weft of our experience is one cloth, okay? And so I see that this ladder of ascension, which is in the Pyramid Text of Unas, really is about taking our experience from the base level, from that cot level, and integrating the sahu and the kaibet and all of the will and the language, and pulling it in through the heart, which is the center pillar, if you will, and moving it up through the levels of experience until we reach that point of illumination. And even in the Pyramid Text of Unas, you pierce the veil, he has pierced the sky. You know, he flies, he flies as a phoenix, he has pierced the sky, body to earth, soul to sky. Well, the culture of ancient Egypt was stable for thousands of years. I don't think Westerners appreciate how long the pharaonic culture of Egypt lasted. Many, many dynasties, thousands and thousands of years. And during this time, they built these magnificent temples along the Nile. And as you understand it, these temples served as homes of initiation to help the people of Egypt realize these higher potentials. Yes, yes. I see that when they built their physical houses, they built them out of mud. And so when the inundation came, they were washed away, sort of like our physical vessels, you know, eventually dissolved. They had to rebuild their houses every year. They had to rebuild their houses. They had to replot their land. But the temples were, for the most part, eternal. I mean, they still exist. They're stone. That's right. Many of them. That's right. They're made of stone. They did get covered up with mud, but they didn't get washed away. And so what you have over those thousands and thousands of years is a temple built on top of a temple, built on top of a temple, built on top of a temple, in what we might think of as lifetime built upon a lifetime, built upon a lifetime, built upon a lifetime. Okay, so these temples, when you go to Aswan, for example, which is one of my favorite places, it's in the island in the middle of the Nile, the island of Elephantine, and you're standing at the top of this temple, and what you're seeing is a place where there was a holy of holies. And you can see that the adenum has been pushed over, and the nows, which was made by, in this case, Hasheepsut. Now, the holy of holies, the inner chamber. The inner chamber. That's exactly right. And the nows is? The nows is the, sort of the shrine box in which the statue of the divine being is held. The sacred object inside the inner chamber. Exactly. So, when you're standing there, and you're looking out on this vast expanse at the top of this island, you look down, and you see layers of time that are being excavated at the present time, and they are, they go all the way down to the fourth dynasty. So we have, like, Queen Hasheepsut at the top, and we have the fourth dynasty of Egypt at the bottom in the old kingdom. It's entirely covered in mud, and all you can see is, like, you know, maybe 12 inches of the capitals that were the top of the temple. So we know that everything is built on top of everything else. Now, when they built something, they would take a stone, what's called a seed stone, and they would take it out of the old temple and reinsert it into the new temple, as if it were the seed idea of something that's being redeveloped. Or if we're going to talk about it in a physical term, it's like the monad that is reconstituted then into the physical body. Okay. The monad being another term for the soul or spirit. Another term for the soul, the spark, the God spark. Yes. I think, if I remember rightly, it's a term used by the German philosopher Leibniz. That's right. Now, what I would like to get and share with our viewers is the idea of the etheric temple that you and your co-author, Nikki Scully, helped to create using ritual and mystery school processes, in effect an invisible but yet very real temple built on Nikki's land in Oregon. Right. And I think that it's important to realize that that manifestation comes down as above, so below, we'll say. That's the maxim that we learn from the Hermetic tradition. The Hermetic teachings, which are derived from ancient Egypt. That's right. Meaning the spiritual planes are very much isomorphic with the physical planes. That's right. And so it begins there. Okay. The temple, the idea for the temple and the impetus for the temple already exists before the moment that you even have the thought that there's going to be a temple. Okay. And then the idea that you're going to create a temple and what's going to fill this temple and am I really the person to do this and how come and what's the use of this temple? And so you kind of dream on it and you think about it and that's still in the mental plane. That's not even in existence yet. And then it suddenly crystallizes as this vision. It's almost as if like something happens in the veils part and you suddenly go, oh, I see my part in this. All right. And I see how this all can fit together. And then when we created the temple, we realized that we wanted to keep the magic, the thought process that was from the God spark that started Egypt way before we could think about it. That was in the thoughts of those ancient Egyptians. That's another great word you just used, the God spark. Well, so and then we're just taking care of this spark. It certainly felt to you and Nikki that it was being guided by ISIS. By ISIS and thought. And that we felt very strongly that we were being given a directive to do this. And so for you and for your partner, Nikki, ISIS and thought are very real beings with whom you communicate, not just abstractions or myths. Right. And for me, they have acquired a sensibility that is teacher and companion and best friend. And truly, they are living beings. And I you know, they have their quirks in the same way that you and I have our quirks. And we have a relationship with them. And that's not something that you get from just having the idea of a God that you put up on a shelf and you just have it like on Sunday or, you know, it's where you take them off the shelf and they live inside you. That's part of it. You take them off the shelf and they live inside you and they're part of you. And you have conversation with them and a relationship with them that is very, very real. What intrigues me especially about what you're doing is that somehow you were drawn, I think, at a soul level, at a level of your life's purpose to invoke, to interact with these ancient Egyptian deity, is probably a Greek word that doesn't even apply, Neteru, which I think is from where we derive our word of nature. Right. These... That's right. Neteru, that's a plural of Neter. To do that as an American woman living in the Midwest of the United States, you're opening yourself up to something so entirely foreign and so exotic, and yet at the same time, obviously for you, so intimate and familiar. Right. Well, I mean, it has to do with, in a way, Egypt came to find me rather than I came to find Egypt. And there are several little steps along the way. And one of them is that when I was a child, I was very much impressed that there was God's wife standing outside my house and wanting to come in. And so, you know, my mother was this Episcopalian lady with some Catholic sisters. And I said, Mama, you have to let her in. Mother said, Who is she? And I said, Well, she says she's God's wife, and her name is the Ice Queen. I mean, I wasn't sure what I heard, but my mother invited her in. We poured her a cup of coffee. We talked to God's wife. I was five years old. And I became so fascinated with her that I would take these little planks that my daddy was building stuff with and put them in the crotch of trees and little ball jars with water and wildflowers and put them up. And spread a blanket on the ground, and I would just look up into the sky. And I thought I was staring at the blue hem of her dress. And so I had this vision of a sacred mother who was above me that was watching over me. And then I saw my aunt's statue of the Virgin Mary with her foot on the world and on the snake, you know. And I thought, Oh, so that must be Mary. And later, of course, I learned that Mary is an ancient Egyptian word that means the Beloved. So there are tons of Marys. And in fact, I believe many scholars have associated the worship of Mary as a divine being with the worship of Isis. That's exactly right. Right. And so many of the stories that we have and the rituals that the Catholic Church became involved in were rituals of Osiris and Isis. Indeed. Yeah. The resurrection of Jesus. Yeah. That's exactly right. A very strong parallel to the resurrection of Osiris that you wrote about so eloquently in Awakening Osiris. Thank you. Yes. So that happened. And then somehow I ended up with a friend. This was when I was in my 20s, who insisted that I read the Book of the Dead. He was a Rosicrucian. He was a wonderful man. He had many metaphysical talks. And he said, you have to buy the Book of the Dead by budge. I was like, really? Okay. So I'll do that. I remember that book. It's difficult to go through. He was a scholar and it's very dry language. I bought it. I thought it was gobbledygook and I just put it on the shelf until my friend died. And all of a sudden that book acquired a certain kind of resonance for me. That's what led to my deciding to learn how to translate hieroglyphs and read hieroglyphs. And so I worked on that project for 10 years and almost threw it away, totally almost threw it away until I'll call it the sahoo of my friend, who was in spirit, came physically, reached out and touched me until I just could feel every vibration in my body. I was driving my car up to the dump to throw my book away. And he stopped me and I looked in the rearview mirror and he's still sitting in the back seat next to the book. And I said, okay, don't ever do that again because you scared me. And then he's gone. It's like, okay, he got message delivered. So I hid the book in the wheel well of my car because my husband at the time wanted me to throw it away. So he wouldn't know. And two months later, someone asked me, do you still have that book? You know, and can I publish it? And that's Awakening Osiris. So really, truly, Egypt came to find me. I really feel that that's part of my spark that I came here to do. And this is all part of the process that led to what we were discussing earlier, the construction of an etheric temple. Yes. Because I did not understand why I was writing these hymns to the divine when I'm going through the book of the dead, okay, and I'm writing hymns to Osiris and hymns to Isis and hymns of transformation. And I'm doing these things very blindly, really not totally understanding how much I was at that time building an etheric temple already by writing these invocations constantly. My thoughts and my mind were sparking that temple that already existed. And so once it became alive, then it was time to begin working in that temple. And then I think that's when Nikki and I met, when we discovered that we needed to be working inside this temple. And you and Nikki have conducted mystery school programs with people who come to learn from you and you engage in various ritual procedures that have to do with both the construction of the temple and different initiation rites that take place in the temple. Right. And really the mysteries are teaching people about how the divine is all around us and we keep closing our eyes to it. And a lot of the work in mystery school is, you know, it started out just by naming the divine, the netter. And so when you look at a word netter, there's like ta-netter means like tantra is the earth of the God or the holy land. So the body itself is a holy land. You know, it's very tantric. Well, it's very tantric. It's very shamanic as well. We could have another long conversation about the ways in which the ancient Egyptian tradition has influenced global spirituality. Right. And it has. And been influenced by. Yes. I think so. As well. Well, Norman D. Ellis, it has been such a pleasure sharing this half hour with you. Jeffrey, it was so great to see you again. Thank you so much. This has been wonderful and I commend you on the work that you're doing and the spirit, the enthusiasm, the vitality that you have given to the netteru, that they come alive in your presence. Thank you. We thank you for this opportunity. Thank you for being with me. And thank you for being with us.