An Interview with Andrew Collins, pt 1

I’m delighted to be able to bring you the first part of an exclusive interview with mysteries researcher and author Andrew Collins today. The internationally renowned author of “The Black Alchemist“, “The Cygnus Mystery“, “Ashes of Angels“, “The Seventh Sword“, “The Circlemakers” and many more, Collins has been researching historical, physical and psychic enigmas professionally for over thirty years. He is the founding father of the practice of psychic questing, and ran southern England’s ‘Earthquest’ mysteries investigation group for years.

Collins has recently rediscovered and entered a previously unknown cave system beneath the Pyramids of Giza. Its had long been rumored in myth and legend, and in 1817 Henry Salt, the then Consul General to Egypt, discovered its entrance west of the Great Pyramid. He and Italian explorer Giovanni Caviglia searched for several hundred yards before giving up, yet in that short time,  entered three large, interconnected chambers. Salt’s memoirs were never published and the site was lost, and it has remained no more than a rumour ever since. Following some incredible detective work in 2008, Andrew and a team entered Salt’s catacombs and for the first time in modern history, uncovered this lost world. It is the subject of his upcoming book “Beneath the Pyramids” (Fourth Dimension Press, 2009), where he will reveal all sorts of fascinating discoveries and their implications for our understanding of ancient Egypt.

GW: Thanks for agreeing to talk to us, Andy. You’ve had a long-established interest in Ancient Egypt, and you’ve made some startling discoveries about its history and underworld. What was actually going on out there?

AC: In 1985, I listened as a friend told me that he had experienced a dream in which he had disappeared beneath the plateau at Giza and entered a fantastic room with green stone walls and strange hieroglyphics. It was part of a huge underground complex, existing in the area of the Sphinx. We came to refer to it as the Crystal Chambers, but others call it the Hall of Records. We pursued his dream by conducting remote viewing and astral experiments in a meeting hall we converted into a mock Egyptian temple at a place called Malyons, in Basildon, Essex. The idea was for my colleague, Bernard, to attempt to enter Giza’s chthonic realm in astral form and try to ascertain its design and greater purpose.

The results of those sessions blew my mind, convincing me that there was something very important awaiting discovery beneath the sands of Giza. Yet I remember thinking at the time there is nothing I can do with this material – there is no one I can convince to do anything about it.

Some twenty-four years later I was in a position to do something about it, and in March 2008, with the help and support of the Edgar Cayce Foundation, our team uncovered a whole complex of caves and chambers beneath the Giza pyramid field that have been lost for nearly 200 years ago. They are likely to be the physical basis behind the idea of a Duat, or underworld, existing in Giza, something that ancient Egyptian creation myths and funerary texts allude to quite specifically. At its heart is a birth chamber, a chamber of first creation, called the Shetayet, quite literally the Tomb of God. Yet tomb as a term is inadequate. It is more like a place of rebirth, or ascension, in order that a person might become as they were in the beginning, quite literally starstuff. The Shetayet was the role model behind all later tombs, sarcophagi and coffins in ancient Egypt, which were designed to replicate its ability to transform the soul into what was known as an akh, a glorious spirit, or ascended being, at one with the chthonic womb’s celestial counterpart. This was thought to exist in the region known to astronomers as the Cygnus Rift, which is located on the Milky Way in the area of the constellation of Cygnus, the swan, known also as the Northern Cross. It was for this reason that, in my opinion, the Pyramids of Giza were positioned so as to mimic the astronomical positions of key stars in Cygnus.

The whole story is revealed in my book called Beneath the Pyramids: Exploring Egypt’s Lost Underworld for the First Time. It will be out in the States in September and the UK in November.

GW: You mention Cygnus, and there’s a strong vein running through your work about the origins of humanity and modern society, from the impact of Cygnus X-3 and the real nature of Atlantis right through to the Biblical Nephilim. How do you see the evolution of modern man and civilisation?

AC: I believe in Darwin, and the evolution of the species. However, there is something going for creationism as well. Both come together to create a metaphysical solution to life on earth that seems to be affected by waves and cycles of creativity. This said, I believe that human evolution has been influenced over the past 200,000 years or more by exterior forces, most obviously cosmic rays, both from deep space objects in our own galaxy and others much far away on the other side of the universe. Sometimes this influence is brutal, with the effects, for instance, of supernova that might well have blasted the earth with deadly cosmic radiation on several occasions. In contrast, the influence of cosmic rays can be more subtle, emanating like a pulse or signal from specific astronomical sources.

I think our earliest ancestors got on to the more subtle effect of cosmic rays a long time ago. They sensed and experienced cosmic radiation not in the open air, but deep underground, where in Europe the Palaeolithic cave art exists. It was down here that our ancestors first realized the existence of some kind of cosmic source influencing their lives, and over time they came to realize its direction. To me the most obvious source for the more subtle cosmic pulses is the neutron star, and possible microblazar, pulsar, black hole and quark star, called Cygnus X-3. It is around 30,000 light years from here, in our own galaxy, and sits invisible to the naked one right within the mass of stars forming the galactic plane, the centre line of our own Milky Way galaxy. This area of the sky has been universally considered the place of cosmic life and death, the stars of Cygnus being seen as a bird of creation that is present in stellar-based creation myths across the world. However, there might easily have been other cosmic sources of similar pulses, all having some kind of subtle effect on human consciousness. Such knowledge among our ancestors led to the world’s first sky religions, along with the yearning to reach the stars, almost as if there was a knowing somehow that we came from the stars, and would ultimately return there in death.

GW: You’ve just done a new book on crop circles, and certainly this year’s formations are amazingly precise and beautiful. Who or what do you think is behind them?

AC: Ninety-nine percent of modern crop circles are human made, yet there is still a mystery. Constantly, they are surrounded by reports of mysterious lights being seen, along with strange effects on electrical equipment, human bodily systems and the mind. Crop circles act in exactly the same manner as prehistoric sites, such as stone circles, barrows or dolmens, and are thus to be seen as temporary temples existing for just a few months, or even just a few weeks, before their destruction.

Those who make the crop circles, the human circlemakers, experience some extraordinary things when they go out at night. They witness strange lights, experience time slips and shamanic visions, and believe that they are guided to do what they do. These individuals are like the surrealist painters of the 1940s and 1950s channelling their higher mind or the spirit world to create beautiful art. This is what is taking place in the fields of Wiltshire each summer.

Having said all this, my book The New Circlemakers shows that crop circles have been around for at least 400 years. In England they were known as devils circles or fairy circles until the advent of the modern flying saucer craze, when suddenly they became “saucer nests”. In the past a lot of superstition surrounded their presence. People would avoid going inside them, lest they be struck down by illness or ill luck. The best recorded case of crop circles before the modern era is the mowing devil of Hertfordshire, which levelled wheat in circular patterns as fire was seen over the field in question. This event occurred in the seventeenth century, and shows that even by this time crop circles were being associated with infernal spirits. I have also found a very interesting report of crop circles in native American folklore. The Chippeways, an Algonquian tribe from Michigan and parts of Canada, preserve a legend in which swirled circles of grass were caused by a star car carrying beautiful maidens. Such stories show the relationship between circles and unusual aerial objects long before the modern UFO era. That connection is still very strong today.

GW: You’ve been described as the godfather of psychic questing. What actually is questing, and what sorts of things can happen on a quest?

AC: Psychic questing is working with raw psychic information given by a person and taking it on to some kind of ultimate goal, be it the retrieval of an artefact, or the solving of a landscape or historical mystery. The key to success is accepting that such information is genuinely inspired, and that it has come through for a reason, either from the person’s higher mind or from some kind of external influence.

The difference between spiritualism and psychic questing is that you go with the flow and follow the instructions of the psychic information. If it reveals a location, then you are meant to be there. If it tells you to create more energy by doing a specific ritual, or sketch, then you do it. You see the information as one part of an unfolding storyline that gradually makes more and more sense until eventually you achieve your final goal.

I tried to introduce Living TV’s Most Haunted programme to psychic questing, telling them that they would probably get much better results if they more closely followed the information being given by the psychics. However, they didn’t seem bothered, which is why the programme has got so boring these days – just the same old thing week in week out. Live questing on TV is definitely the way forward, provided that you are working with the right type of people, and the correct psychics.

GW: You’re running a psychic questing workshop in Avebury this year. What will that involve?

AC: I am doing a psychic questing weekender at Avebury Village Hall on Saturday/Sunday, 19/20 September. For more information go to http://www.andrewcollins.com.

It will include a crash course on how to do psychic questing, along with accounts of recent questing successes both in this country and in Egypt. Plus I shall be doing a special presentation of the Green Stone, or Meonia Stone, story, as it is 30 years since its discovery. This will include some brand new material, plus a meditation to link with the events of 1979. There will also be a coordinated psychic artefact retrieval, which proved such a great success last year. Yet this year, we shall make it a little more interesting, by changing the rules slightly. Test your own psychic abilities. Maybe someone out there is the next super psychic.

The second half of the interview can be found here.