Egypt Reflections: The Crocodiles of the Mind
Dear Friends
As many of you know, I am recently returned from leading sixteen intrepid soul-adventurers on a profound 10-day journey through Ancient Egypt, with the support and wise counsel of my dear friend Mags Mackean and our brilliant Egyptian guide, Ashraf Amin. Over the coming days and weeks, I would like to share with you some personal reflections on my experience there, the things I have learned, the insights I have gleaned into ancient Egyptian astronomy and astrology, and more besides.
I’d like to start by sharing a powerful experience I had at the Temple of Kom Ombo, a beautiful Ptolemaic temple just north of Aswan, which activated a powerful moment of realisation and healing for me. Let me begin by setting the scene of my personal story, and then I shall return to why my experience at Kom Ombo turned out to be so meaningful.
As those within my inner circle of friends are only too well aware, I went through an extraordinary process of stress and anxiety in the months leading up to this trip, beyond anything I have ever experienced before in my working life. Despite having had many years of experience of successfully leading workshops, retreats and pilgrimages in the UK, this was my first ever experience of leading a tour in Egypt; indeed (being such a habitual soloist as a traveller) my first experience of even being part of an organised tour overseas! The pressure of being responsible for the successful execution of what I knew for many was being built up to be the trip of a lifetime became so great for me that I even came perilously close, on one occasion, to cancelling the tour altogether and giving everyone their money back!
A major part of this anxiety stemmed from the timing of the trip. When I first received the inspiration to do this, the message was very clear - I must go during the Spring Equinox of 2025, and be at the Giza plateau on that day. However, it so happened that this co-incided with an unusually potent astrological portal: the trip would begin on the back of a powerful lunar eclipse that would activate my own chart in a very challinging way, and would conclude on a solar eclipse that also triggered another important part of my own chart. It was also timed for the major lunar standstill, and with Venus and Mercury both retrograde, and conjuncting my own natal Sun-Chiron conjunction, at the moment of their own solar conjunctions, which would both occur during the tour! What?!!
Conventional astrological wisdom would surely have warned against going at this time, wouldn’t it? And yet there was a poetry and a beauty to it: it meant we could be at the Hathor Temple, at Dendera, on the day of the Sun-Venus star-point conjunction, we could honour Thoth in his shrine on the day of the Sun-Mercury conjunction, and we could be at the Isis temple in Philae on the day that Venus returned to the sky as the ‘morning star’. And most special of all, we could be nested between the paws of the Sphinx, with private access, pre-dawn on the morning of the Spring Equinox. The poetry of it all won over, and after a lot of two-ing and fro-ing, I finally confirmed the tour toward the end of April of 2024. The advert went out to my mailing list, and the tour was fully booked within two weeks! The initial high and evident rightness of it all lasted for a good couple of months but then, gradually, doubt began to creep in, the fear that I’d made a terrible mistake, that I was setting myself and others up for a big fall. Astrological superstitions took over: ‘John!! - what on earth are you doing running your first ever overseas tour under those kind of astrological influences??’
During the months that followed, I received news about my Egyptian organiser (who I thought I knew well) that made me doubt his competency, and persuaded me to change to a different organiser - to someone that I had only met for an afternoon in Luxor the previous January! It felt risky, but I had to trust my intuition. Then, as I was falling asleep one night last summer, worrying that this was all just too much for me to carry on my own, the face of my old friend Mags came into my mind, someone I had been to Egypt with before, but who I hadn’t seen for years! I somehow knew that she would be the right person to support me with the tour. So it turned out to be, and these two decisions turned out to be the two best decisions I could have made!
To cut a long story short, I managed to get through all the pre-tour anxiety. I found a wonderful cranio-sacral therapist in Glastonbury (Ewa Bell) to help settle my nervous system, and I organised a series of online gatherings with the group well in advance of our departure, at meaningful astrological moments to help us prepare inwardly as a group for the trip. I then journeyed to Egypt ahead of time to make offerings at Karnak to Osiris & Sekhmet, on the day of the lunar eclipse, and at the Thoth temple at Habu, on the day of Mercury’s disappearance from the night sky. I was there a week before the group arrived, and found myself, for the first time in months, in a relaxed state. I had done all that I could, and now all I could do was to trust.
Suffice to say, the tour went beautifully, almost without a hitch. Pretty much everything ran smoothly, the hotels were amazing, the food, the transport - it was all remarkably easeful. The members of our group journeyed deeply in the temples, profound healings occured, many people seemed deeply transformed by the end. Our Egyptian guide, Ashraf went beyond the beyond in what he gave. Mags was resolute in her support, stepping in at the right moments with the right offerings - we were rock solid as a team. And I actually managed to enjoy it! I mean, I deeply, deeply enjoyed it. I was on fire with passion at Saqqara as I introduced the shamanic dimension of the pyramid texts, and pointed out the astronomical alignments of the serdab monument on the north face of the Step Pyramid. Our ceremony at the Sphinx was one of the most profound moments of my life - our two hours private access at the Great Pyramid, journeying down to the subterranean chamber, our toning in the King’s Chamber, dissolving in sound in the sarcophagus, simply indescribable. Being in the crypt at Dendera, feeling the power source there, marvelling at its astronomical ceilings, having fiften minutes to meditate in complete darkness in the Tomb of Ay, being in the dreamy waters of the original Isis temple at Philae to mark Venus’s return from the Underworld - and on, and on. Every day was a wonder, so full, so complete, so magical! I know we all felt it. And yet it was only during a profound few minutes at Kom Ombo on day 9 of the tour, that it struck me, the extent of the initiation, I had had to go through to get to that point.
Kom Ombo temple carries a very special, powerful, and very ancient energy. Like many Egyptian temples, it would almost certainly have been built on the site of earlier temples, continuing an unbroken lineage of veneration that may hark back thousands of years earlier to the time of the Shemsu Hor, or Followers of Horus, who founded the temples long before the dynastic period of Egypt began.
What makes Kom Ombo unique is that it is the only temple in Egypt that is dedicated to two different Neters (gods) and, as such, has two separate entrance portals which lead to their separate shrines, located at the end of two parallel passageways. One of these is dedicated to the the fearsome crocodile-headed Sobek, and the other to the protective, falcon-headed Horus,. Being that Sobek (an ally of Set) and Horus are sworn enemies, this dual dedication is as intriguing as it is profound, and it tells us a great deal about the nature of ancient Egyptian spirituality, and it struck a deep personal chord for me, as I will explain.
To the left of the temple as you face it, there is a circular pit into which live crocodiles were placed in ancient times, and there is a tradition that initiates within the temple would be expected enter the crocodile pit as part of an initiatory rite - a daunting prospect indeed - and one that would require them to become so attuned to, and at-one with, the energy of Sobek that they might survive the ordeal unharmed. Unbeknown in advance to the initiates, however, the priest of the temple would have the crocodiles removed from the pit before the initiates actually entered it. So what they were having to face was not the actual crocodiles themselves, but their fear of them, and the likely fate that awaited them in the encounter in that pit. Ultimately, though, they were being protected from that fate!
Re-connecting so deeply with this tale at this moment cut right into the heart of my own story. I realised that I had been forced to face the crocodiles in my own mind, while all the time, a benevolent opposing force, the power of Horus, was protecting me. As this realisation was dawning upon me, I processed along the Sobek corridor to his shrine, and I found myself offering up my thanks, my deepest gratitude to the crocodile god, for having initiated me during the months of preparation for the tour. I then moved to the Horus shrine and thanked Horus for his protection, touching to the stone the eye of Horus pendant that I had worn throughout the trip, and that had been gifted to me at Abydos four months earlier by a trusted Egyptian friend and guide. I then processed back along the Horus corridor with the Sun beating down on my face, feeling the immense grace of it all.
And as I sat and contemplated the profound realisation of my initiatory journey, I was put back in mind of a unique statue, that we had all become transfixed by in Cairo Museum a few days earlier. It is a statue of Amenhotep III, originally from Luxor Temple, and it depicts the peaceful-looking pharoah, standing strong and resolute, with Horus on one side, and Set, his most famous adversary (and of whom there are relatively few depictions) on the other. The two neters are stand at the same level, each looks intently at the pharoah, with a powerful, yet peacefeul gaze. Each has holds the ankh, the key of life in one hand, while the other hand is placed on the pharoah’s crown. It is a profound scene that speaks for itself: good and ‘evil’, light and shadow, protection and power - in balance - each necessary for the other to exist, each vital to life, each one essential to our becoming.
I will leave it there for now, though there is much more that I could say about all of this: indeed, there are deeper realisations coming to me every day in relation to it - not least of which has to do with my relationship to astrology and the way we engage with it - it is such a powerful reminder for myself (that, ironically, I always instil in my own students!) never to be afraid of any astrological signature, or to pre-judge it as being for good or ill. I wouldn’t have missed this trip for the world! And I wouldn’t have wanted any members of our group to miss it either. Thank the gods that we didn’t!
With love and blessings to all,
John