“In Egypt, the Temple of Queen Hatshepsut still sits captivatingly against the hills of Thebes (Luxor) in an area known as Deir el-Bahri. It was built three and a half thousand years ago… there set in a garden among the colonnades and terraces of the temple enclosure, was a sanctuary where initiates indulged in a practice known as Incubation. … They invoked the name of Imhotep, one of the earliest luminaries in their already well-established history.”
“The Greeks accepted the ‘baton’ of esoteric teachings from the Egyptians and… the Greek version of it was to lie down in an enclosed space, often a cave, and enter a trance-like state that was somewhere between sleeping and waking. They likened it to the hibernation of animals and called the place where they lay down a lair.”
“The Greeks recognised the Underworld (Hades) to be a gateway to the higher realms. And not only was it a state to be reached upon dying – it was indeed possible to achieve a state of Death before Dying. The Greek name for an initiate of this practice was Iatromantis, someone who had been to the Underworld and returned to this plane. … The figurehead invoked by the Iatromantis was Apollo.”
The plane referred to here corresponds with the higher dimensional plane on which Solar beings dwell – among them, the ancient leaders Imhotep and Apollo.
Credit for image (R): Temple of Apollo, http://www.crystalinks.com/TempleApolloRome.jpg