New Agers Channel Ancient Egyptian Spirits
Pastor Dale Morgan
New Agers Channel Ancient Egyptian Spirits*
Apr 29th, 2007 6:23 AM
By ETHAN TODRAS-WHITEHILL
NO sound was heard in the burial chamber of the Great Pyramid as a tall,
slender woman lay down in the pharaoh’s pitted granite sarcophagus, her
flowing silver hair spreading beneath her. Her dozen or so companions in
the dank room lifted their arms, palms upward, eyes closed in meditation.
As was prescribed in the training of priests in pharaonic Egypt, the
woman had said, each member of the group had taken a turn in the
sarcophagus; now she, their spiritual leader, occupied the space.
Suddenly, her lips quivered, and a guttural moan escaped them, bouncing
off the smooth stone walls and ceiling like an angry pinball. She
climbed out of the sarcophagus, her face creased with determination, and
formed the group into a circle, sitting cross-legged. In a deep voice,
she read from the Emerald Tablets of Thoth, which she believes were
translated from the ancient tongue of Atlantis.
The leader’s name is Shari Billger, and her home is near Colorado
Springs. But on this January day, she was leading a group of Americans
and Japanese who had come to the pyramids to connect with the unique
spiritual energy that many Western visitors to Egypt believe they will
find there.
Earlier, Ms. Billger had explained the group’s mission this way: When
the advanced civilization of Atlantis fell more than 30,000 years ago,
the accumulated knowledge of the ancients — sort of a spiritual Library
of Congress — was placed on the site of the Great Pyramid. These modern
travelers were there to make that wisdom accessible to all mankind. But
to harness the energies required for this task, their spirits would
temporarily have to leave their bodies.
Ms. Billger had everyone lie down. “When ye have released the self from
the body, rise to the outermost bounds of your earth-plane,” she
intoned, “and speak ye the word Dor-E-Lil-La.”
“Dor-E-Lil-La,” the bodies replied.
This was not a cult; the participants had met only two days before. They
were in Egypt on a package tour.
New Age-style sacred travel, or metaphysical touring, is a growing
branch of tourism, particularly in countries like Egypt with strong
ancient-civilization pedigrees. Tourists with an adventuresome spiritual
focus — predominantly middle-aged, upper middle class and female — come
together to improve themselves and the world, as Ms. Billger’s group
intended. Their ideas are best understood as an extreme on the continuum
that includes yoga, tarot and astrology, and the rituals they perform at
sites deemed sacred can vary widely.
“Other groups will be in there with bells and candles, jumping up and
down like somebody’s going through their bodies,” Wael Khattab, this
group’s Egyptian guide, commented as he observed their ritual from close
by. “This is actually quite tame.”
More than a mere sales gimmick, spirituality tours are taken very
seriously by their participants, who are commonly pantheistic, choosing
to believe in truths of every religion rather than just one. They also
invoke the whole panoply of New Age beliefs, finding power in crystals,
aromatherapy and, of course, pyramids. They are home inspectors,
copywriters and managers, but also mediums, psychics and shamans. Ms.
Billger, who is 62, worked in sales for companies like Xerox and
Honeywell before becoming a spiritual teacher and healer.
In Egypt, metaphysical tours are a thriving business, bringing in about
5,000 visitors a year, according to Mohammed Fayed, whose company,
Guardian Travel, organized Ms. Billger’s tour. The price, usually a few
thousand dollars per person, includes the expense of securing private
time at the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx — sometimes thousands of
dollars a group for an hour. Mr. Fayed’s business grew 45 percent from
2005 to 2006, and he expects another double-digit increase this year.
Even as Ms. Billger’s group had climbed the stairs to enter the Great
Pyramid for their ceremony, the most important of their tour, they had
passed two women not of their group standing at the base, eyes closed in
meditation.
Other popular destinations also tend to be places of mystery. Sites
built by ancient civilizations whose construction techniques are not
settled fact — like Stonehenge and the perfectly fitting but mortarless
walls of the Inca at Machu Picchu, as well as the pyramids — are
embraced as evidence that those civilizations had mystical powers.
Places with a Christian focus but an overlay of competing spiritual and
religious claims — like the sites of the so-called Black Madonnas of
France and Italy or the Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland, which took on
mystical meaning in “The Da Vinci Code” — are also attractive to
spiritual tourists.
“They know that whoever built them, built them on places that were
already places of power on the earth — the acupuncture points on the
earth’s body that hold powerful energies,” said Andrea Mikana-Pinkham,
who lives in Sedona, Ariz., a place known for its own energy hot spots,
and has led over 50 metaphysical tours since 1993. Body Mind Spirit
Journeys, a company that she runs with her husband, Mark Amaru Pinkham,
organizes about 25 tours a year to sites around the world. The couple
are also the North American grand prior and prioress of the
International Order of Gnostic Templars, a group that claims connection
to the medieval Knights Templar.
Ms. Mikana-Pinkham, who is also friendly with many of the smaller tour
operators — who like Ms. Billger run only a few trips a year — traces
the birth of sacred travel as a business to the Harmonic Convergence of
1987, a widely publicized New Age event that supposedly corresponded
with a great shift in the earth’s energy from warlike to peaceful. Many
in the metaphysical community traveled to sacred sites around the world
then for prayer, meditation and ceremonies.
Ms. Mikana-Pinkham herself attended only a meditation session near her
home, but it led to “one of the peak spiritual experiences of my life,”
she said. The theories behind the Harmonic Convergence state that in
2012 the world will make another great shift, and sacred travel has
taken hold in the 25-year period between the two dates — a kind of
global awakening, in her view.
To an outsider, spiritual tourists look like any others. They carry
cameras, wear comfortable clothes and athletic shoes, travel in private
buses and purchase souvenirs. Over time, though, the distinctions
manifest themselves.
On Ms. Billger’s tour, Sandra Zimmer, 43, remarked how much she had
enjoyed herself the last time she was in Egypt. But Ms. Zimmer had never
been to Egypt before, at least not in her current body; she was
referring to a memory from a past life.
As the group moved through its tour, the mundane often became magical.
During the ritual in the Great Pyramid, a draft was occasionally felt,
and the voices of the participants echoed and rebounded in every
direction. Ms. Billger took a number of photos to commemorate the
experience. Later, the group interpreted the breezes to be the presence
of spirits, the multiple echoes the product of disembodied voices. And
Ms. Billger’s pictures were full of bright circles of light, possibly
lens flares or the refraction of her flash off the dust in the air, but
she proudly displayed them to everyone as proof that “orb beings” had
been present for their ceremony, inspiring and guiding them.
Some of the beliefs of spirituality tourists will strike nonbelievers as
pseudo-science, like Ms. Billger’s claim that the cinnamon leaf oil
sniffed by her group before entering the pyramid would make viruses and
bacteria “completely unable to live in your bodies.” Others will sound
more like mythology or the stuff of fantasy novels.
MR. KHATTAB, the guide, was apparently not exaggerating when he called
Ms. Billger’s tour tame. He recalled a Dutch group — touring in the
early ’90s, he said — whose members each incarnated as a different
Egyptian deity each day. This extended to sleeping arrangements, so if
one tourist was possessed by the god Osiris, and another by the goddess
Isis, Osiris’s wife, those two tourists would spend the night together.
The only problems Mr. Khattab had with this were logistical. “You had
bills signed with ‘Seth’ and ‘Osiris’ and ‘Horus,’ ” he said. “You had
to sort out which person was who on which day. It was a hassle.”
Still, Mr. Fayed, the Egyptian organizer of the tour, invites those who
might be judgmental to take a longer view. “Look at the world nowadays,
look at the number of wars in the world, look at the number of people
who are being killed every single day,” he said. His tourists, he noted,
are different: “They are trying to spread peace and love throughout the
world.”
Because their beliefs and practices differ so from those of the average
tourist, tour organizers are careful to keep the metaphysical tourists,
who call themselves “awake,” separate from the regular tourists, whom
they refer to as “asleep.” Ms. Billger requires prospective clients to
fill out an application in which they agree to support “the group energy
for the greatest good of all.”
Samone Myers, an event coordinator for Luminati Egyptian Travel, another
sacred travel operator that runs tours to Egypt, knows firsthand the
friction that arises when the two categories of tourist mix.
On a trip to Hawaii to swim with dolphins, which are a powerful draw for
metaphysical tourists, the captain combined the “awake” tour group with
an “asleep” group, she said. Each time they got in the water, the two
groups would segregate themselves, choosing to swim on opposite sides of
the boat. The dolphins, which she described as “in tune,” swam only near
her group, Ms. Myers said. The other group was angry, but she and her
friends found it amusing. “It was a great demonstration of how out of
touch unconscious people are with themselves, others, animals,” she said.
Ms. Billger, who also organizes swimming-with-dolphins excursions in
addition to Egypt trips, has been leading spirituality tours for eight
years and spiritual workshops for 12. Living near Colorado Springs, she
is based in a center of New Age culture. She wears clothing she knits
herself, like her amazing technicolor sweater coat. She owns a llama
named Hopi, whose wool she shears, spins and dyes for her knitting. When
she first meets people she hugs them; she does not flinch when flies
land on her; and staring in her eyes too long is apt to make her cry
“from sheer beauty.”
She left her business career after having a conversation at a party 12
years ago with a man involved in spiritual practices. She hadn’t wanted
to attend that party, she said; her guides, other-dimensional beings
without physical bodies, had had to prod her. (A specific person’s
guides depend on what dimension they belong to, Ms. Billger said, and
hers are from the 17th dimension. “They call themselves the Choir, and
they swirl in circles of color,” she said. “They can do amazing things.”)
But she does not regret the time she spent in the corporate world. “I’m
not airy-fairy,” she said. “In the business world, I can talk that
lingo, too. I feel that I have a really good balance of left brain and
right brain.”
Traveling with her group in Egypt, I concluded that spirituality
tourists feel more in control of the normal hassles of traveling than
other tourists. When hawkers at the pyramids bothered Claudia Plattner,
60, a bank operations supervisor and psychic channel with spiky blonde
hair and large glasses, she gave them mixed-berry granola bars, which
confused them enough so that they left her alone. When I complained of
back pain, Ms. Billger, who also practices spiritual healing, meditated
over the injury to realign my energy (alas, no luck).
Even with Cairo’s throw-up-your-hands traffic jams the day before the
pyramids ritual, they took a proactive approach.
Their bus was halted for 20 minutes, mere blocks from the hotel where
they were headed, next to a wrought-iron gate overhung with blood-red
bougainvillea. All around, the idling vehicles choked the air with
exhaust, and a fusillade of frustrated beeps and honks pelted the bus
from every direction. But inside, in comfortable seats and behind shaded
windows, the group was blissfully unaware, discussing the day to come.
They finally noticed their predicament. At Ms. Billger’s suggestion,
they began to direct their energy to clear a path in the traffic — some
meditating with eyes closed, others staring intently ahead. After three
or four minutes of quiet focus, the traffic began to move. Ms. Billger
looked up triumphantly. “Let’s just give it a little extra oomph here,”
she called out, eyeing their approaching hotel. She giggled, a
high-pitched tinkle that belied her years. “You guys are good!”
In the pyramid the next day, after returning to their bodies and
completing the ritual in the burial chamber, they had gone down to the
lower chambers to anchor the released energy, so that their work would
not be wasted. The trip down was arduous: they first had to walk with
bent backs through a crawl space, then carefully made their way down a
set of steel stairs through a tall chamber with a peaked roof like
converging staircases. Then came the hard part: backs and knees bent,
hands on smooth wooden banisters, they stepped backward 200 feet down a
steeply inclined passageway no more than four feet high and wide,
stopping frequently to catch their breath.
When they reached the bottom, they met with a pleasant surprise: they
would be allowed into the unfinished burial chamber, the lowest
accessible point in the pyramid, which the pharaoh had abandoned in
favor of the upper chamber. This was significant. In the ceremonies Ms.
Billger had performed on two earlier trips to the Great Pyramid, she had
never gotten so far down, and the closer they could bring the energy to
the spiritual treasures below, the more accessible the wisdom of
Atlantis would become to the rest of the world.
But the extra climb would be almost the length of a football field, in a
corridor as steep and tight as the one they just emerged from,
concluding with a stomach crawl for the last few feet. Ms. Zimmer, the
woman who had been in Egypt in a previous life, is a larger person and
her brow shone with the perspiration of the last climb. She craned her
neck to see down the passageway, which had no discernible end.
“I’m just going to stay,” she announced as the others stooped to enter
the corridor, “and anchor the energy from here.”
VISITOR INFORMATION
Here are some tour agencies that specialize in New Age-style
spirituality tours and some of the tours planned for this season.
Body Mind Spirit Journeys (www.bodymindspiritjourneys.com; 800-231-9811):
In England, a Holy Grail Pilgrimage and Conference in Mystical Avalon,
July 6 to 13; $3,220 a person double occupancy, not including airfare.
In Peru, an Incan Shamanic Journey, June 14 to 19; $2,999 a person
double occupancy, not including airfare, with an extension from June 19
to 22 to Lake Titicaca to celebrate the solstice for an additional $699.
Luminati Travel (www.luminati.net, 888-488-1151) is trying to gather
hundreds of travelers to circle the Great Pyramid “with unconditional
love in their hearts” on Sept. 9 as part of the Circle the Pyramid Event
and Global Peace Conference, Sept. 5 to 11; $1,800 a person for the
tour, not including airfare or most meals.
Guardian Travel, with offices in Virginia Beach and Cairo
(www.guardiantravel.net; 757-422-5568), is helping organize these tours:
Ancient Egypt, Awakening the Initiate Within, Oct. 28 to Nov. 10; $4,795
a person, all inclusive. Conducted with A.R.E. Travel,
www.edgarcayce.org/tours.
Grand Sextile Tour, Return to the Nile, Oct. 21 to Nov. 2; $4,440 a
person, all inclusive. Conducted with Queen of Cups Inc.,
www.queenofcups.com.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company