Passages to the Otherworld:Light Vision Myths in Australia, Egypt, and Mesoamerica

© 2010 Philip T. Nicholson

Introduction

This paper demonstrates that the application of a new, neurologically-grounded template depicting the characteristics of meditation-induced light visions makes it possible to detect symbolic references to light visions in myth-related materials. The explanatory power of this new template has already been demonstrated in an analysis of light vision metaphors in ancient Indian, Tibetan, and Chinese texts [Nicholson, 2010] and in ethnographic reports of shamanic practices current among contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes [Nicholson, 2006; Nicholson and Firnhaber, 2003]. In this paper I apply this new template to three myths that are generally-recognized as being critically important for understanding the myth-systems in which they are embedded but that have so far elude adequate interpretation: (1) the “Rainbow Serpent” in the myths of Australian Aborigines, (2) the “The Eye of Horus,” in ancient Egyptian myths, and (3) the “Plumed Vision Serpent” in classical Mesoamerican myths.

The explanatory power of this new template comes from the fact that each vision can be linked to the activation of slow wave sleep rhythms or to the destabilization of sleep rhythms. These neural mechanisms are such that they effectively constrain the amount of variation that can occur in light visions generated in this manner; therefore, it is possible to predict the characteristics of the light visions that meditators will see, and, conversely, it is possible to detect hidden references to these same characteristics in myth-related material in which the context described is consistent with the practice of meditation-like behaviors. The neurophysiological capacity to induce meditative or self-hypnotic states is widely distributed among humans [McClenon, 2002], and, moreover, it is relatively easy to learn how to induce these states even without instruction. These qualities make it likely that light visions have played important roles in the evolution of the world’s major myth-systems. In this paper we’ll test whether or not that hypothesis is plausible as an explanation of the origins of three key myths.

Characteristics of Early-Onset Light Visions

The First Light VisionThe threshold sequence of meditation-induced light visions often begins when

yellowish-green “mists” or “clouds” seem to coalesce spontaneously in the visual field and then drift aimlessly about for a very brief appearance before they evaporate just as suddenly as they appeared. These mists and clouds look very much like the pyrotechics of the Northern Lights (aurora borealis) in the arctic region. But these amorphous mists are only the early harbingers of a more coherent phenomenon, and in the case of

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meditators who are experienced at inducing light visions, these preliminary mists seldom appear and instead the first image the meditator sees is also green but quite different in appearance, timing, and motion. In this paper, when I speak of the first light vision in the paradigm meditation-induced sequence, it is the next image that is my subject.

The first coherent light vision, then, is a bright green ring that sweeps in from all sides of the peripheral rim of vision and then shrinks steadily in diameter as if moving away from the viewer. The ring continues to shrink for 4 seconds, then abruptly disappears. This is followed by a refractory interval of 1 second when nothing appears, then, precisely 5 seconds later, the next light-ring sweeps into view. This clock-like sequence terminates automatically after a set that contains, on average, 3 to 6 light-rings.

The clues that indicate a mythical symbol might be pointing to this first type of light vision are (1) a description of the lights having a green color, (2) a description of lights that have a ring-shape, especially if there is a set of 3 to 6 ring-shaped lights, and (3) a description stating that the rings move away from the viewer or that they “fly” through space.

The Second Light VisionThe light visions that appear after the automatic termination of the threshold light-

ring sequence present very different characteristics: instead of a symmetrical ring, one sees a “mist” or a “cloud” of light suddenly coalesce within the visual field, a light that is dark blue or purple (rather than the green mists mentioned above). The dark blue or purple cloud drifts to the center of the visual field and hovers there for a brief interval before it evaporates. When experienced meditators are able to keep this blue or purple swirl of light hovering near the center of the visual field for a longer period of time, the internal structure of the “cloud” undergoes certain predictable fluctuations: first, the center of the “cloud” develops a nodule of light that is much brighter and more opaque than the mist-like cloud, and, second, this bright, central, disk-like nodule undergoes fluctuations that set up an alternation between an “eye-like” image and filling back in of the “eye” which reconstitutes the original, disk-shaped nodule. The “eye” is formed when a tiny dark space opens up at the very center of the bright central node so that instead of an opaque disk there is an “iris-like” ring of brightness surrounding a dark “pupil-like” space. The dark “pupil” quickly fills in as many tiny promontories of bright light shoot down into the dark center from the bright “iris” ring surrounding it; these promontories of light then coil about and merge, filling the dark pupil with blue or purple light. To someone viewing this process, it is as if he or she were seeing a disembodied “eye” staring back at them from the center of the visual field. The amorphous blue or purple visions (and their associated “eye” images) arrive at intervals that are largely unpredictable and that vary depending on the skills of the individual meditator, but, having said that, it is important to add that someone who is not a skilled meditator might see this same image if he or she were to wake up out of a sound sleep in the middle of the night and spend some time staring into the darkness, waiting for sleep to descend again.

The clues that suggest a mythical symbol might be pointing to this second type of

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light vision are (1) a description of seeing “mists” or “clouds” or “waves” of light with amorphous boundaries that hover near the center of the visual field, (2) references to seeing an “eye-like” image, and/or (3) a specification that the color of the light is dark blue, violet, or purple.

Readers interested in seeing illustrations of these green, blue, and purple colors before or after the conference presentation can find examples on the back cover of the presenter’s new book, Meditation and Light Visions: A Neurological Analysis [2010], which can be inspected at this website: www.philipnicholson.com.

The “Rainbow Serpents” and “Sacred Waterholes” of Australian Aborigines

The Rainbow Serpent is one of the most important myths common to all of the aboriginal tribes of Australia. Its spirit is said to possess an awesome power which can be used for good or ill, so native people are careful to be vigilant for signs of its presence, especially when traveling in an unfamiliar region or when a rainbow is visible in the sky. Here’s the story of how the Rainbow Serpent came into being based on a book recently published by an anthropologist who lived with the Lardil tribe on Australia’s Mornington Island [McKnight, 1999]. In the time of the ancestors, the onset of the rainy season was a time of great suffering: the people had to take refuge in primitive shelters for days on end, enduring wet, cold, and hunger because they were unable to hunt. In just such a situation the ancestor who became the Rainbow Serpent (called Thuwathu in Nardil dialect) had holed up in a primitive refuge he’d built for himself just before the first storm broke overhead. He refused to let anyone else join him—in particular, he refused the request of his sister who begged him for help to take care of her sick infant. By the end of the storm, the baby had died, and the mother, seeking revenge, set her brother’s shelter afire with her brother inside. As flames spread and he writhed in agony, his thrashing about gouged out the channels of big rivers and formed many other geological features in Australia. At last the burning man saw a waterhole and plunged into its depths. With this he disappeared into the Otherworld of the Dreamtime where he has lived ever since as one of the ancestral spirits of the Aboriginal tribes.

While the Rainbow Spirit inhabits the Dreamtime, the Aborigines call him an “eye-thing,” which is to say, a luminous spirit seen with the mind’s eye, but of course he can also manifest during daylight as a rainbow, in which case the Nardil people call him Warrkubarrin, or “Day-Crawler.” And when the Nardil see shooting stars at night, they regard this strange light from another dimension as yet another manifestation of the Rainbow Serpent, in which case they call him by the name, the Kuwayarburr, or “Eye-Animal.” One particularly interesting observation mentioned by McKnight is that when rainbows appeared while he was doing his fieldwork, his aborigine companions would sometimes say to one another, “Poor old man. Look at him all burnt, crawling up in the sky [p. 195].” (From this one might extrapolate that the actual body of Thuwathu would have to be colored green, blue, and purple, since these are the colors remaining if the fire-colors of red, orange, and yellow are removed from the spectrum of a natural rainbow—

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an inference that does not match any testimony given by the aborigines but which is consistent with what comes next.)

When the spirit of the Rainbow Serpent moves back and forth between the world of the Dreamtime and the natural world, it flies through a “waterhole.” This can be a natural waterhole or a quasi-magical portal conjured up for that purpose, and the Nardil say that waterholes are actually manifestations of the Rainbow Serpent, i.e., they are his “eyes.” McKnight’s informants told him that some humans had acquired the special knowledge needed to create similar portals which they could then use to project themselves into the world of the Dreamtime. Among the Nardil, these men are called nhuyin “doctors” [McKnight, Ibid., p. 208], but readers familiar with studies of aboriginal culture will recognize that these are the same practitioners as the “Men of High Degree” mentioned by Elkin [1977]. When these individuals want to enter into the Dreamtime, they separate themselves from the rest of the tribe and decorate their bodies with red ochre and patches of white bird down in preparation for the ibantera (“sacred waterhole”) ritual. The “doctors” use more white bird down to construct a series of concentric rings on the ground, thereby creating a symbol of a “waterhole” that they can use as a focus for the meditation that moves them into the Dreamworld. A particularly interesting example of three aborigine “doctors” performing the ibantera ritual appears in an old photograph reproduced in Lawlor [1991;Fig. 89, p. 108]: on the ground in front of the men is a drawing of concentric rings, and, indeed, there are six of these rings. For many years anthropologists have tried to coax their aboriginal informants to tell them more about the symbol of the sacred waterhole, but the responses have always been vague (e.g., that waterholes are “energy centers” or “camping sites”); recently one anthropologist lamented in print that no one knows what is really meant by this symbol [Morphy, 1999]. But now McKnight’s recent publication has uncovered new details that are critically important for determining the meaning of this symbol: McKnight reports that a doctor can use the symbol of the concentric rings to focus his concentration in a manner that allows him to pass through the thin barrier that separates the natural world from the Dreamtime. When the “doctors” return to earth after having crossed this barrier and projected themselves into the spirit-world, they claim that they saw the Rainbow Serpent in the Dreamtime in his guise as an “eye-thing,” and that, moreover, what they see is just like a “little rainbow” except this rainbow confers special powers on the seer:

A well or waterhole is also said to be Thuwathu’s eye. Thuwathu dwells in these places (although only his eye, and occasionally his reflection, is seen), and hence they are dangerous places for markirii sickness But they are also places where aspiring doctors may obtain a small rainbow and so acquire healing powers [p. 194].

Now we’re in a position to propose a new hypothesis about the meaning of the concentric circles used to depict “sacred waterholes” and also the characteristics of the “Rainbow Serpent” in its spirit-guise as an “eye-thing.” Based on what we know about the nature of meditation-induced light visions, we can assume with a high degree of confidence that a Aborigine “doctor” who meditates with the intent to enter into the “eye”

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of the Rainbow serpent will, as a consequence of his actions, likely induce a series of green light-rings, that his consciousness will “fly” away as it accompanies these “receding” light-rings, and that eventually he will also see mists of blue and purple, so that, in effect, he will indeed have seen a “little rainbow,” although its components will appear in serial fashion and not all at once. As I mentioned earlier, the green, blue, and purple colors are the same colors one sees in the lower half of a natural rainbow, and if we accept the inference that the fiery colors—the red, orange, and yellow—that appear on the upper side of a rainbow depict the mythical scene of fire burning along the Rainbow Serpent’s back, then it would be appropriate to say that the “doctors” do see light visions that replicate the actual green-blue-and-purple “body” of the Rainbow Serpent. In this scenario, the “doctors” in their trance state see what they expect to see based on their familiarity with the symbol of the sacred waterhole—with the image of concentric rings which is a static representation of the motion observed, namely, each light ring in a series becoming smaller before the new and bigger light ring enters the visual field.

This analysis suggests that the “best fit” hypothesis to explain the hidden meaning of the “Rainbow Serpent” (and its various manifestations as “eye-things,” “waterholes,” and “shooting stars”) is that these myths were originally formulated to explain the relationship between some awesome and important external event—in this case, the appearance of a meteriological event, a rainbow, that was an important sign to be reckoned with in that particular environment at that time in history—and an internal event in which “doctors” who are able to conjure the vision of rainbow-like lights in the mind’s eye believes that, by so doing, they prove to themselves and to others that it is possible to exercise some small measure of control over the forces of nature and the spirit-beings that animate nature. In this view, the myth of the Rainbow Serpent and the symbol of the concentric circles that represent the Rainbow Serpent’s “Eyes” is an account of how the world is brought into being by the on-going collaboration of nature, the ancestral spirits of the Dreamtime, and the activities of the human race.

The “Eye of Horus” in Early Egyptian Myths

The walls of Egyptian pyramids are covered with paintings that depict the gods living in the Underworld (Dwat). With few exceptions the skins of these gods are painted green, the same green color as fresh papyrus reeds, or, if the skin happens to be painted with some other color, the clothing will have swatches of green so conspicuous that they can’t be missed. By contrast, the skins of the Ba-souls of dead kings or nobles who have arrived at the Place of Judgment to have their good and bad deeds weighed in the balance are painted with natural skin colors that clearly distinguish them from the gods in attendance. The only prominent exception to this rule that gods have green skin or green clothing is Amun, a sky-god considered so remote as to be unknowable—hence the names, “mysterious of form,” “that which is concealed,” and “the invisible one” [Wilkinson, 2003, p. 92]—whose skin is often colored the dark blue of lapis lazuli.

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Before we move on, it is important to note that there was no word in ancient Egyptian that specifically denoted the color green; the word, w3t, which is usually translated as “green,” actually refers to colors in the green-to-blue spectrum. If speakers wanted to specify a dark blue color, they used the Egyptian word for lapis lazuli. This detail will not have much importance in our analysis, at least not in the early stages, because the paintings on the temple walls are unambiguous in their use of papyrus-green to depict the gods.

Among professional Egyptologists, the leading theory put forward to explain why the gods have green skin or prominent green swatches on their clothing is that this is a symbol that represents their embodiment of the vital forces of regeneration that one sees in nature, forces exemplified by the sprouting of new vegetation that was observed every year after the flood waters of the Nile receded. By extrapolation, the same vital forces of regeneration infused the gods so that they were immortal. Since the reigning pharaoh was considered to be a quasi-divine being, it was his privilege to be reborn into a new life in the Underworld (Dwat) if his human soul—his “Ba”—could fly to the Place of Judgment and survive the challenges it would face in that forum. The king’s soul would then become a “transfigured spirit” (Akh) who lived on in the Akhet region of the Dwat known as the “Great Green,” a heaven-like paradise where all the earthly privileges of a king would be replicated. With the passage of time, it became acceptable for Egyptian royalty and high-ranking figures, even women, to aspire to having their souls transformed after death in the manner that had formerly be reserved for kings, but this would happen only if they could afford the enormous cost of constructing a tomb, carving a elaborate set of coffins, and commissioning high-ranking priests to perform the extensive funerary rituals that were thought to insure the safe passage of the deceased’s soul. This generally-accepted theory that the gods are depicted as green because green symbolizes the forces of regeneration has the virtues of being common-sense and persuasive, and in this paper I certainly do not intend to challenge its appropriateness; however, it does seem to me that the theory is incomplete and that what’s missing is important. The missing element is this: the forces-of-regeneration theory does not address the questions of why so many different gods, each with different attributes, got painted with the same brush, so to speak, and, more important, the theory either neglects or rejects outright the possibility that “mystical” experiences might have also played a role in influencing the Egyptian priests to choose the colors of green (i.e., w3t, “green-to-blue”) and lapis lazuli attributes of the gods (see, for example, the arguments adamantly rejecting the “mystical” hypothesis by Jan Assmann [2001, 2005]).

My goal in this section of the paper is to assemble evidence that shows there were at least some priests in ancient Egypt who claimed that they were able to project their consciousness into the Dwat, priests who claimed that, once there, they could see visions of green light that were unlike any natural phenomenon and thus appeared to be manifestations of the gods themselves. To demonstate this hypothesis, we’ll look at one god in particular, namely, Horus the falcon-god, and, to be more specific, at Horus’ ability to manifest as a disembodied, green-colored “Eye of Horus” with the capability of

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flying into the dark of the Dwat, bearing the soul of the dead king in its wake. Before we take a closer look at this god, Horus, it’s important to first consider evidence obtained from independent sources that suggest the priests did indeed know how to induce visions.

There are some Egyptologists who have written articles on this subject. Assem [2008] reports that the statues of several “High Priests” who lived during the Old Kingdom had inscriptions which included among their titles the appellation, “Chief of Seers (wr m3),” where the two hieroglyphic symbols in this compound phrase mean “to see” (m3) and to see “secrets” (wr, which denotes a plural object). More about what it might mean to”see the secrets” can be found the work of two other scholars. In an article entitled “The ‘Transformations’ in the Coffin Texts: A New Approach,” Federn [1960] counted the number of times that the Egyptian word meaning “transformations” (or perhaps just “formations”) appeared in The Coffin Texts. This source is a compilation of inscriptions written on the walls of tombs constructed during the First Intermediate Period that occurred relatively early in Egyptian history. Federn found that two-thirds of the spells incorporated in The Coffin Texts included the word, “tranformations.” After studying the content of these spells, Federn concluded that they must have been intended primarily for use by the living, although he acknowledges that they were also important in funerary contexts. In his view, people would recite these spells as a way of “identifying” themselves with a particular god or as a rite of “initiation” into the cult of a god, a practice that would buttress their confidence that the priests were right when they claimed that the same spells would protect the survival of one’s soul after death: “I find it extremely implausible,” Federn writes, “that the Egyptians should have entrusted their well-being in the hereafter to magic spells without testing their efficacy in some way on earth . . . [p. 245].” These spells also catalogued the variety of earth-like goods and services that the deceased could expect to find in the Underworld, a recitation that reassured people there would be “a continuation of the enjoyment of mental food the mind had already known and enjoyed on earth, in exactly the same manner as the enjoyment of food and drink was expected to continue in the other world—not as a novel experience [Ibid., p. 248].” Federn’s ideas influenced another Egyptologist, Edward Wente [1982], to explore a similar subject in his article, “Mysticism in Pharaonic Egypt?” Wente searched for descriptions of what the detached soul of a recently deceased person might encounter once it entered the Dwat, and he found some interesting material in two texts, The Book of the Underworld (Amduat) and The Book of Gates. Both of these books were written during the dynasties of the New Kingdom, which places them at a relatively late stage in Egyptian history but long before Roman influences would have been present. In these offering texts, Wente found many references to priests having visited the Underworld and having returned with special knowledge that empowered them to mediate between the world of humans and the world of gods and spirits. Here are some relevant offering texts in Wente’s translation:

The one who offers to them [i.e., the gods] on earth is one who hears Re’s voice in the netherworld [Book of Gates, p. 171].

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(It is only) the select who can know this design without the knowledge of which the Fierce Faced One (i.e., Apopis) may not be repelled [Amduat, p. 165]

There are even allusions to priests having seen visions or having become light-forms:

The one who offers to them on earth is one who perceives light in the netherworld [Book of Gates, p. 171; emphasis added].

The one who gives them their offering gifts is among those whose linen is light-colored in the netherworld [Book of Gates, p. 173; emphasis added].

Wente believes that it is most likely that the offering texts compiled in the Amduat and The Book of Gates, like the spells in the Coffin Texts studied by Federn, were “originally been composed for use in this world and were not designed solely for funerary use in tombs. In these offering texts the living officiant himself becomes a member of the various netherworldly groups to whom he offers [p. 174].” In his view, it is the religious specialists who pursue these extraordinary experiences, not the king or his nobles who would likely be much too busy with worldly affairs to be able to practice meditation, if even they were so disposed. But the king and his nobles do benefit, nonetheless, because the priests’ visionary exertions on behalf of the king and nobles would have given the priests the self-confidence they needed to reassure their clients that the “eternal verities” proclaimed in the traditional myths were indeed true—that the priests themselves had projected their consciousness into the dark recesses of the Dwat, and that there they had seen green lights that were so unnatural that they could only have come from the gods, that these were glimpses of the green skin of the gods.

More support for the concept that Egyptian priests were able to see visions of green light-rings can be found in the spells that the priests recited during the all-important “Opening of the Mouth” ceremony performed over the mummified body of a dead king. In this ceremony, Horus the falcon-god is, for all practical purposes, the central figure whose cooperation is essential. My source for this analysis of the “Opening of the Mouth” ceremony will be The Pyramid Texts [Allen, 2005], a collection of funerary spells recited on behalf of kings from the 5th and 6th dynasties of the Old Kingdom, which means these spells were used during a very early period in Egyptian history. These spells were recited during the funeral rituals for Unis, the last king of the 5th Dynasty, and for 6th Dynasty rulers named Teti, Pepy I, Merenre, and Pepy II-Neferkara. The same spells were also written in hieroglyphic script on the inner walls of tombs so the soul of the deceased king would have them working magically on his behalf after the tomb was sealed.

In the “Opening of the Mouth” ceremony, a sem priest wearing a leopard skin used a specially-carved flint “spreader” to pry open the mummy’s mouth so the dead king’s Ba-soul, whenever it returned from the Dwat, could reinhabit the corpse and consume the offerings of food and drink that had been left in the tomb. Next the sem priest used green and black paint to trace the outline of a symbol that represented the “Eye of Horus” on the mummy’s forehead. This symbol is called the Wadjet, a name

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usually translated as “The Green One” (based on the root, w3t, “green-or-blue”). The Wadjet is a composite symbol that requires some explanation: the upper half of the symbol is an abstract outline of falcon’s eye which represents Horus, the falcon-god, who had been recognized as the chief protector of the kings of Upper Egypt long before those kings conquered and assimilated the agricultural settlements in the delta region of Lower Egypt. The lower half of the Wadjet symbol consists of two parts: a straight line extending down at a perpendicular angle from the falcon eye which represents a stalk of the papyrus reed, and a curved line that slants down from the falcon eye in a backward direction and ends with a tight curl. This curled line represents the tail of the ancient cobra goddess of the Nile delta who was also known, in her own right, as Wadjet, “The Green One.” This same name was applied to the composite symbol that represents the “Eye of Horus” soon after the unification of Egypt into a single kingdom as a recognition that the pharaohs could now rely on the protection of both deities, the cobra goddess formerly worshipped in the northern delta region and the falcon god formerly worshipped by the kings of the south. This unification was also recognized by a redesign of the pharaoh’s crown so that it combined the distinguishing aspects of the two crowns that had been used when the Upper and Lower kingdoms were still separate. For the purposes of our inquiry, these subtleties don’t matter, because the Wadjet symbol had already been well-established in its composite form long before the 5th dynasty of the Old Kingdom, when King Unis ruled. When the sem priest used green and black paint to trace the Wadjet symbol on the forehead of the deceased king, he was invoking the protection of Horus the falcon-god, and, more specifically, he was recognizing that in practice the protective services of Horus were delegated to the disembodied “Eye of Horus”—hence the painting of the green-and-black Wadjet on the mummy’s forehead.

After painting the “Eye of Horus” Wadjet on the king’s forehead, the priests chanted spells asking the “Eye” to carry the dead king’s Ba-soul safely through the Dwat, and, at the same time, they exorted the king’s Ba-soul to accept that help and then fly with the “Eye” to the Place of Judgment where the gods were waiting to weigh the earthly deeds of the dead king’s soul in a balance that measured good deeds versus bad. Here are examples of these spells, each recited for the benefit of a different king:

Osiris Unis, Horus’s eye has been painted sound on your face [U spell 27, p. 20].

Ho, Osiris Teti, stand up! Horus has come, and he will take account of you from the gods . . . Horus has painted his eye on you. Horus has parted your eye, that you might see with it [T 196, p. 80].”

Ho, Osiris Pepi Neferkare! Accept Horus’s one eye and see with it . . . it shall lead you in the world . . . . it shall ascend and lead you on the path . . . wear it and it will give life to your forehead [N 104, p. 253].”

Many of these spells explicitly state that the “Eye of Horus” is green, as would be expected given that Horus the falcon-god is often referred to as the “lord of Malachite.” But what other inferences can we make about the appearance of this “Eye”? What would

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come to the mind of ancient Egyptian priests when they thought about a falcon eye? Or what came to mind when they thought about the eyes of other kinds of raptor species, since many tombs contained mummified bodies of many different types of raptors, an observation that suggests the ancient Egyptians did not worry about distinguishing between the various types of raptors?

First we’ll look at the eye structures of the lanner, peregrine, and Barbary falcon species, all of which migrate into Egypt on an annual basis. In these species, the eye itself is a simple black disk, but there is also a ring or oval of very bright yellow skin that surrounds the eye itself, a structure called a “cere.” It is the combination of the dark eye and the bright yellow cere that attracts the attention of an onlooker. The shape of the cere varies somewhat between the different types of falcons, but the impression one gets is that the dark eye is “ringed” with bright yellow, and in the earliest statues of Horus which were carved at a time when the god was still represented as a wholly avian being (i.e., before the falcon head was transplanted onto a human body) this combination of features—a central disk surrounded by a thin, symmetrical ring—is clearly depicted. If we now look at the eyes of raptor species other than falcons, we see that there is a bright ring embedded in the eye itself, forming the “iris” of the eye, and these bright ring-shaped irises of raptors make a dramatic and compelling impression on a viewer. Having looked at the eyes of real falcons and real raptors, it is reasonable to make the following inference: the only difference between the real avian eyes and green light-rings, the vision that appears first in the paradigm meditation-induced sequence, is that the avian eye-complex contains a bright yellow ring whereas the meditation-induced light-ring is bright green, and, therefore, when the priests of ancient Egypt conceived of a disembodied falcon eye, green in color, that could “fly” away into the dark of the Dwat carrying the king’s Ba-soul, they must have created this concept by assimilating the appearance of a real falcon eye and the appearance of the meditation-induced light ring. One might also extend this line of argument by asserting that this creation of the “Eye of Horus” myth, which would have been based on the actual experiences of priests, was then generalized to apply a green color to other gods—that perhaps it was in this manner that Horus the falcon-god came to be seen as being the green “lord of Malachite.”

To summarize, we have now documented references describing the “Eye of Horus” that satisfy all three of the criteria we established at the outset as clues that meditation-induced light visions were embedded in a mythical symbol. The Wadjet “Eye of Horus” is a symbol that refers (1) to a ring-shaped light similar to what’s seen in (or around) the eyes of falcons and raptors, (2) to a light-ring that can seem to “recede” in space as if it were “flying” away, and (3) to a papyrus-green color. It is reasonable to conclude, based on the striking resemblances in shape, color, and movement between the attributes of the Wadjet and the attributes of meditation-induced light-rings, that at least some group of priests in ancient Egypt must have had the experience of seeing visions of lights with these characteristics. If so, they must have known how to use meditation to induce light visions. Having had the personal experience of seeing a strange green light in the dark space they conceived as the Underworld, the priests would naturally assume

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that the light was emanating from divine beings and that, by being privileged to view it, they were acquiring magical powers to mediate between the spirit-beings of the Underworld and the world of humans. It is understandable, then, that they gave the “Eye of Horus” such an important role in their religious myths. One might speculate that this phenomenon was also a contributing factor that led the priests to claim that the skins of the gods should be depicted as green or blue, (except for Amun, the Unknowable, the sky-god whose skin was depicted as the dark blue lapis lazuli of a cloudless desert sky. In this view, the current theory that the green skin of the gods is a symbol of rebirth pointing to the annual regeneration of new plant growth should be supplemented by a recognition that the “best fit” hypothesis for how the priests came to “know” that the gods were as green as fresh papyrus reeds is that they believed they were able to see for themselves and thus testify to the truth of this depiction.

The “Plumed Vision Serpent” in the Myths of Classical Mesoamerican Culture

Classical Mayan civilization flourished in the Yucatan peninsula and Guatemalan Highlands between 250 and 900, CE. The walls of temples and free-standing stellae constructed by the Mayans contain many hieroglyphic symbols that scholars were unable to decipher until quite recently. Now there are many studies that reveal new details about that culture and its mythological concepts [e.g., see Coe, 2005 (1966); Miller and Taube, 1993; and Markman and Markman, 1992]. In my analysis, I rely primarily on Friedel, Schele and Parker’s excellent and wide-ranging study, Maya Cosmos: Three Thousand Years on the Shaman's Path [2001 (1993)].

One of the most important mythical beings in the Mayan pantheon was K’awil, the god of the life-force and transitional states. Given that meditation-induced light visions clearly fall into the category of transitional states, the attributes of K’awil will obviously have important implications for our investigation. A particularly interesting depiction of K’awil appears in a temple carving at Palenque (reproduced as a drawing in Friedel et. al., op.cit., Fig. 4:9, p. 194, and also in Markham and Markham, op.cit., p. 348). In this carving, a recently-deceased king named Pakal is shown falling backward off a pedestal, but the iconography of the carving indicates that King Pakal is in the process of being transformed as he falls, which is to say, this is a carving, not of Pakal the man, but Pakal-as-K’awil in the first stages of the journey into the Otherworld that will result in the king’s eventual transformation into one of the divine beings who has taken his place as one of the stars shining in the night sky. The iconic signs that indicate this transformation is already underway is that Pakal’s body has already acquired two attributes that the Mayans commonly associated with the god, K’awil: one of Pakal’s feet is depicted as the head of a snake, signifying that Pakal is falling backward into the mouth of a Vision Serpent, and Pakal’s forehead is pierced by a flint axehead (celt) that is emitting smoke. Both of these symbols have important implications for our analysis, as does the fact that the two symbols are also interrelated. We’ll begin by taking a closer look at the mythical ideas associated with Vision Serpents, then move on to examine the

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mythical ideas associated with smoking flints.For the soul of a dead king or other notable to become a star, it had to first enter

the gullet of the Vision Serpent where it would be propelled toward a dark place in the night sky that the Mayans called the “Black Transformer” or “Black Dreamplace” [Freidel et.al., p. 84]. The gullet of the Vision Serpent was a conduit that conveyed spirit-beings in both directions: moving the souls of humans into the night sky but also providing a channel that gods and spirits could use to descend to earth: “In Classic-period imagery, the Vision Serpent was involved during the ritual of communication between this world and the Otherworld. It was the embodiment of the path to and from the Otherword, and ancestral figures were often shown leaning out of its open jaws to communicate with their descendants [Ibid., p. 140].” An interesting and relatively decipherable image of a Vision Serpent is carved into the wall of a temple at Yaxchilan: it shows a spirit-being who was once an ancestral warrior emerging out of the mouth of a Vision Serpent that is depicted as “a frightening, double-headed beastie with a half-flayed body decorated with feather fans [Ibid., p. 208].”

The detail of “feather fans” is important because it reveals that even in the classical era the Vision Serpents were thought to have feathers, but in the classical sources there are, to my knowledge, no descriptions of what these feathers looked like. However, we do know that Vision Serpents continued to play a role in post-classical Mayan civilization, which gave the Vision Serpent the name, K'ukumatz, and, much later in history, the Mayan myth was adopted by the Aztecs of central Mexico. The Aztecs called their version of the Plumed Serpent by the name, Quetzalcoatl, a name that adds an important new detail about what the priests in these cultures thought the feathers of the Plumed Serpent ought to look like. The quetzal is an elusive avian species that lives in the tropical forests of the Mesoamerican lowlands. Its feathers shine with an iridescent green and blue that resulted in their being highly prized by the kings and nobles of all the Mesoamerican civilizations. The kings would direct their hunters to capture a few birds each year but then to only pluck a few feathers and release the bird back into the wild so that it could be caught again at some future date. To kill a quetzal was a capital offence. So for the Aztec priests to call their version of the Plumed Serpent, Quetzalcoatl, clearly indicates that the feathers wreathing the Vision Serpents’ bodies were thought to shine with the same iridescent green and blue colors of quetzal feathers. (For those who have never seen a quetzal, these greens and blues are almost exactly the same as the green and blues in the “eye” image at the tip of a peacock’s feather.) If the Plumed Serpent of the Aztec empire was quetzal green-and-blue, can the same be said for the Mayan myths of feathered Vision Serpents? That would seem to be a reasonable inference, and there are several other important myths that are related to the myth of the Vision Serpents that also associate the Otherworld of spirit-beings with these green and blue colors. Before we move on to examine those symbols, we should ask what would be the significance of a determination that the Vision Serpents in the classical era and K'ukumatz in the post-classical era were thought to be wreathed in quetzal feathers—what is the significance of this observation for our investigation? How would the Mayan priests have come to

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believe that the spirits of dead kings began their journey to the Black Transformer that would transform them into stars by first falling into the mouth of a snake that could be recognized because of its distinctive green and blue feathers?

The inference that the priests associated the green and blue colors of quetzal feathers with visions of light is supported by information preserved in the Popol Vuh, the earliest written accounts of the ancient Mayan myths which was compiled after the Spanish Conquest. The author of the Popol Vuh states that the Mayans believed that before the world was created there was nothing but water, darkness, and silence, except hidden beneath the water was a green and blue light that protected the spirit-entities who would eventually emerge to become “the Creator, the Maker, Tepeu, K'ucumatz and the Forefathers" [Goetz and Morley, 1950, pp. 81-83]. Green and blue lights also figure in other Mayan myths: for example, each of the Four Directions is said to have its own color, and the color assigned to the intersection where the axes of the Four Directions meet is quetzal green and blue. This same combination of colors is assigned to the vertical axis that extends out of this intersection—the axis of the "world-tree"—which is said to rise above the earth in order to support the sky and to descend below the earth in order to sustain the Underworld [Coe, op.cit., p. 203]. And in the murals on the palace walls at Palenque there is a color code that differentiates between humans and gods: "the exposed skin of humans was painted red, while that of gods was covered with blue [Coe, p. 131]." So we have multiple sources pointing to the association of quetzal green and blue with the spirit world, but there is another symbol with the same connotations that is even more important for our investigation.

As I mentioned earlier in this section, the carving at Palenque shows King Pakal-as-K’awil with a smoking flint axehead implanted in his forehead. How does adding this symbol to the mix add to what we already know? The Mayans believed that flints were created when lightning bolts struck the earth, so the smoking axe is a symbolic reference to lightning, and, therefore, a reference to Jurakán, one of the Mayan gods of storms and lightning [Friedel et al., ibid., pp. 199-200]. This god, Jurakán, could manifest as any of three different types of lightning (caculhá): (1) as "one-legged lightning," a phrase which suggests the familiar spectacle of jagged bolts shooting down to the ground; (2) as "little lightning" or "dwarf lightning," a phrase that has interpreted in different ways but which probably refers to the diffuse flashes of sheet lightning that can illuminate a stormcloud from within; and, finally, (3) as Räxa-Caculhá, a phrase that has so far resisted interpretation. Several translations have been proposed, but none are generally-accepted, and, what’s worse, some proposed translations directly contradict others [e.g., see Freidel et al., 2001, p. 199 & fn 50, p. 444; cf. Goetz and Morley, 1950, p. 82 & fn 7; and also see Preuss, 1988, p. 76]. To illustrate the problem, there is one proposed translation in which Räxa-Caculhá would mean “Sudden or Violent Lightning,” but it would seem unlikely that the Mayans would specify that there was third type of lightning and then use a word that could be applied with equal force to the other two types of lightning—all natural lightning is “sudden and violent.” By contrast, Edmonson’s proposal that Räxa Caculjá means “green lightning” [1971, p. 12] does establish a distinct category, and so

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does the proposal by Pruess [op.cit., p. 76] that Räxa-Caculhá is amenable to three different translations—that it might be used to specify “green lightning” or “blue lightning” or "precious lightning.” If we combine the three alternatives proposed by Pruess, we get a composite phrase, “Precious Green-and-Blue Lightning.” This translation diverts attention away from lightning as a natural phenomenon (which is neither “green” nor “blue” and certainly not “precious”) and focuses instead on the Otherworld and the spirit-beings that inhabit it. Pruess explains that the color blue is often linked with human sacrifices and death in Mayan culture, an observation which leads her to conclude that Räxa-Caculhá is a reference to death and a soul’s transition to the Underworld [Ibid., p. 76]. This interpretation fits well with the Mayan creation myth described in the Popol Vuh that the gods were protected from the primeval chaos that existed before the world began because they were able to hide beneath a light that had quetzal green and blue colors. The lightning in both these examples is not a phenomenon observed in nature; rather, it is something that appears only to those persons who claim to be able to project their consciousness by simulating death and thus entering into the dark transitional space that leads to the Otherworld—falling into the dark gullet of the Vision Serpent the blue and green lightnings—the “feathers” of the Plumed Serpent—could appropriately be called “precious” lightning.

If we bring together the observations and inferences that we’ve discussed so far in this section, we discover a striking convergence in the meanings associated with the Mayan symbols that are the focus of our investigation: (1) the symbol of the smoking flint celt in the forehead is consistent implies that humans who are transforming into spirit-beings can see visions of light and that these visions remind viewers of sparks or smoke clouds; (2) the flint celt also has another symbolic function, which is to point to Jurakán, god of lightning, and, to be more specific, to that one guises in which the god appear as a “precious green and blue light” in the mind’s eye; (3) the symbol of a foot transformed into the head of a Vision Serpent points to a K’awil, god of transformations, and thus to the transformation of King Pakal as his soul falls into the gullet of K'ukumatz, the Plumed Serpent, so, once again, we find a symbol that ultimately points to green and blue light, the color of the Vision Serpent’s quetzal feathers; and, finally, (5) the creation myth recounted in the Popol Vuh points to a time when the forces that would eventually create the world were all hidden inside a green and blue light. All of these mythical ideas point to the same conclusion: that the Mayan priests were able to use meditation to induce visions of green and blue lights that were unlike anything that appeared in the natural world, lights that they believed were manifestation of spirit-beings from the Otherworld, so they could claim with great confidence that they themselves had seen these emanations from the gods, a belief they could then use to construct new myths or to reinterpret the meanings of old myths.

Conclusion

In this examination of three myths, each of which played a central role in the

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religion of the culture that cultivated it, I’ve demonstrated that there is good evidence to support the following inferences: (1) that religious specialists in all of these cultures were familiar with the use of meditation-like behaviors to induce visions of pure light; (2) that by virtue of their having had visionary experiences they claimed to have acquired special powers to mediate between the worlds of the living, the dead, and the divine beings; and (3) that they incorporated hidden symbolic references to their visionary experiences when they created or revised the mythological ideas supporting each culture. If one adds to these three specific examples the more general observation that virtually all of the world’s major religious traditions, including idiosyncratic shamanic practices, past and present, incorporate at least some key references to the same kinds of light visions—a claim that I’ve begun to document in a series of publications [Nicholson, 2010, 2004, 2003, 2002]—then clearly it is important for scholars who work in the related fields of comparative mythology, comparative religion, and anthropology to recognize the importance of taking the phenomenon of meditation-induced light visions into account in their analyses and interpretations of human cultures.

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