Secret_History

Chapter 10: Who Wrote the Bible and Why? 407
Herodotus has left us a good description of the funerary customs of the Scythians.
The funeral was followed by purifications. Hemp was thrown on heated stones and
all inhaled the smoke; “the Scythians howl in joy for the vapour-bath.” […] The
howls compose a specific religious ensemble, the purpose of which could only be
ecstasy. In this connection Meuli cites the Altaic séance described by Radlov, in
which the shaman guided to the underworld the soul of a woman who had been
dead forty days. The shaman-psychopomp is not found in Herodotus’ description;
he speaks only of the purifications following a funeral. But among a number of
Turko-Tatar peoples such purifications coincide with the shaman’s escorting the
deceased to his new home, the nether regions.[…]
The use of hemp for ecstatic purposes is also attested among the Iranians, and it is
the Iranian word for hemp that is employed to designate mystical intoxication in
Central and North Asia.
It is known that the Caucasian peoples, and especially the Osset, have preserved a
number of the mythological and religious traditions of the Scythians.
Now, the conceptions of the afterlife held by certain Caucasian peoples are close to
those of the Iranians, particularly in regard to the deceased crossing a bridge as
narrow as a hair, the myth of a Cosmic Tree whose top touches the sky and at
whose root there is a miraculous spring, and so on. Then, too, diviners, seers, and
necromancer-psychopomps play a certain role among the mountain Georgian tribes.
The most important of these sorcerers are the messulethe; their ranks are filled for
the most part from among the women and girls. Their chief office is to escort the
dead to the other world, but they can also incarnate them. […] The messulethe
performs her task by falling into trance. 284
At this point, allow me to interject the comment that we see a curious parallel to
the fact that the Themosphoria was celebrated “only by women”. In other words, it
was very likely an archaic custom of what has been called “sacred prostitution”
but the sacred prostitution was clearly derived from archaic techniques of ecstasy
which we have surmised were actually disjecta membra of an ancient technology
that effectively modified DNA. Over millennia of transmission, the terminology
describing this DNA factor was corrupted to refer to sexual elements. We shall
also later see that what was once a “spiritual idea” was given a literal, physical
meaning. The role and participation of women is indeed important, but not at all
the way many occultists have interpreted it.
What is clear is that the very ancient idea of women as priestesses, or as socalled
“temple prostitutes”, was merely derived from the fact of the natural role of
the woman as true shaman. When women were extirpated from their role as
natural psychopomp for their tribes, a host of other items had to be invented to
take their place: trees, bridges (which is a word strikingly similar to “bride” and
284 Eliade, Shamanism, Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, pp. 394-6.