Pyramid Quest (51 page)

In a conversation with Graham Walker (a British police officer with a passion for Egyptology) on the evening of November 29, 2003 (in Elena Konstantinou’s room in the Sheraton Sharm Hotel, Al Pasha Coast, Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt), he said he viewed the Great Pyramid as the “House of Osiris,” which was used for initiatory rites (see Adams, 1895, 1898, 1933; Holbrook, n.d.; Purucker, 2003). Walker also believes that both the Great Pyramid and the
Book of the Dead,
when properly interpreted and decoded, point to a cavern (“Hall of Records”?) in the Sinai (see Walker, 2003). We drove out to Walker’s “cavern” (or more specifically, what he believes is a mound over the entrance to the cavern) on November 30, 2003. Once off the road, it is a distance of about 35 kilometers (according to Walker) up the wadi through sand and rocks, with four-wheel drive necessary at times. The cavern mound is essentially, as far as I could tell, a heavily weathered, probably pre-Cambrian, granite mound, with other debris (all the rocks are igneous and metamorphic in this area, except for later Tertiary/Holocene sediments). I was not convinced that it is artificial, to Walker’s disappointment. Still, I cannot completely dismiss Walker’s analysis. He may be onto something—perhaps there is a cave or underground chamber or simply a sacred site near the area/site he has located, or perhaps he is correct in his interpretation that the Great Pyramid and sacred writings of the ancient Egyptians points to a location but has misinterpreted the clues and come up with the wrong location.

View of the Subterranean Chamber, facing toward the southwest corner. In the ceiling can be seen a couple of examples of what some writers have interpreted as carved symbols in the rock. Photograph courtesy of Robert M. Schoch.

In a conversation in Al Mamun’s forced passage on November 24, 2003, Emil Shaker (who has studied Egyptology and works for Mohamed Nazmy of Quest Travel, Giza, Egypt—Mohamed made the arrangements for us to enter the Great Pyramid and was there with us) expressed his opinion that, looking at a map of Egypt, the outlines of the country can be compared to a man (specifically Osiris) with raised and outstretched arms. The head of Osiris is the Great Pyramid, the body and legs are the Nile stretching to the south, the delta is the up-stretched arms that touch the Mediterranean Sea, representing the sky.

The Orion Theory of Robert Bauval (see Bauval, 2000; Bauval and Gilbert, 1994; Hancock and Bauval, 1996; see also DeSalvo, 2003, pp.105-106) suggests that the three major pyramids of the Giza Plateau and the Nile River form a map on the ground of the three stars in Orion’s belt plus the Milky Way in the sky. Orion represented Osiris for ancient Egyptians, and in the King’s Chamber, the southern so-called airshaft pointed to Orion (Osiris); the southern shaft of the Queen’s Chamber pointed toward the star Sirius, associated by the ancient Egyptians with Isis (the sister and wife of Osiris). The Great Pyramid is thus seen as a way for the deceased pharaoh to be ritually sent to the constellation of Orion and be transformed into Osiris.

Although many believe that the Tarot dates back to no earlier than late medieval times, there is a tradition in some circles that the Tarot has its origins and predecessors in ancient Egypt and the wisdom of Thoth/Hermes:

(See also Benavides, 1974; Mebes, n.d.; Ouspensky, 1928, 1976 [originally published in 1913]; Uxkull, 1922).

Cornish (1986, 1990) explicitly ties together the Tarot, initiatory rites of the ancient Egyptians, the Great Pyramid, and Christianity. Quotations from this author explain how.

“Let it be said at the outset that The Gospel According to St. Matthew is based and structured directly upon the mystery initiations of the Great Pyramid” (Cornish, 1986, p. 13), and Jesus the Christ himself passed through the Isiac-Osirian mysteries, as revealed in the Great Pyramid and Tarot. “The mysteries are in two parts, the Isiac and the Osirian, dealing with man’s outer and inner consciousness, respectively” (Cornish, 1986, p. 13). In other terms, one can refer to these as matter-consciousness and spirit-consciousness.

Some authors have attempted to link the Jewish mystical writings and secret teachings of the Kabbala (Kabala, Caballa, Cabala, Quabalah, Quabala, Quabbala, Quabbalah), and the Kabbalistic interpretation of the Hebrew scriptures, with the Great Pyramid (see, for instance, Doreal, 1938; see Hall, 2003, for a discussion of the Kabbala more generally). A key method of kabbalism is to use gematria, “the art of discovering the secret sense of a (Hebrew) word by means of the numerical equivalents of each letter, each letter in Hebrew being also a number” (Kingsland, 1935, p. 86). Given the emphasis that researchers from Greaves (1646) to Smyth (1867) to Petrie (1883) to Cole (1925) to Stecchini (1971) have placed on the exact measurements of almost every aspect of the Great Pyramid, this is a subject that would inevitably cry out for Kabbalistic interpretation. J. Ralston Skinner supplied this in the nineteenth century (Skinner, n.d., but originally published in 1875 according to Kingsland, 1932, p. vii). Skinner developed an elaborate correlation between numbers of Kabbalistic significance and various measurements of the Great Pyramid. Kingsland (1935, pp. 85-92) reviewed Skinner’s work along these lines, concluding that the basic measurements he used for the Great Pyramid were incorrect, and therefore any correspondences Skinner seems to have found between numerical values of Hebrew words and scriptural passages and measurements of the Great Pyramid do not, at least in their specifics, hold up well to scrutiny. However, Kingsland (1935, p. 92) did say that personally he was “inclined to believe that there should be a connection on the basis of both the Kabala and the Pyramid containing to a certain extent a numerical and geometrical symbolism as Key to the Cosmic Principles taught in the Ancient Mysteries.”

On the evening of November 24, 2003, Elena Konstantinou, Leila Makeeva, John Anthony West, I and my students (Logan Kaye Danielle Yonavjak [Logan] and Jessica Brady Hahn [Brady]), the documentary film crew working for Elena and Leila, and various other persons that joined the group had the opportunity to spend over four hours in the Great Pyramid, leaving shortly after midnight. We had a chance to go through almost all of the passages and chambers of the Great Pyramid; unfortunately, we could not view/enter the Well Shaft, the Grotto, or the passage from the Grotto to the lower portion of the Descending Passage (these have been rather permanently blocked off and are not currently accessible—I have never been in them).

West propounded his version of the theory that one of the major reasons the Great Pyramid’s interior was built the way it was is for resonance purposes—to carry or transmit sound throughout; essentially it can be viewed as a giant musical instrument (my analogy). The chambers above the King’s Chamber would be for resonance purposes, and he suggested that the oddly cut pit or Subterranean Chamber at the bottom of the descending passage may have been a way to “tune” the pyramid; bits of rock would be carved out here and there to tune it precisely, thus giving rise to the odd, higgledy-piggledy floor of the pit. We tested the resonance theory after a fashion, by having West go to the King’s Chamber and chant an “Om” while I stood in the pit; even with my poor hearing (I suffer a hearing loss from when I had the mumps as a child), I could hear West chanting. (Logan Yonavjak has independently suggested to me that perhaps priests may have stood in each of the chambers simultaneously to meditate and hum, setting up mutual resonance of sounds throughout the pyramid.)

Later that evening, standing in Al Mamun’s forced passage, Elena astutely suggested that if the Great Pyramid has, or had, resonance properties, if it acted as a musical instrument, then it has been damaged by the forced passage and also by the forced entry into the Relieving Chambers, such that it can no longer function properly. She suggested that in order to test the resonance theory, these later forced passages should be filled in or at least stuffed and blocked off acoustically. At that point we were all assuming that the Well Shaft and Grotto, with the passage from the Grotto down to the Descending Passage, were part of the original construction of the Great Pyramid.

On November 27, 2003, John Anthony West and I were talking in the Temple of Osiris (Seti I, Nineteenth Dynasty) in Abydos and looking at the reliefs on the walls of the temple that apparently, methodically and systematically, had certain portions chiseled out and defaced, while other portions have been left untouched suggesting that this is not late vandalism or Christian defacing but specific or ritualistic defacing that was done purposefully by the ancients to “kill” the temple or neutralize its magic when the end of the life of the temple, or when the cycle of the temple, came to a close. Quick inspection on my part suggested that the same chisel was used with fair accuracy to take out only certain portions of the reliefs, such as the faces, hands, or feet of particular deities and figures, across a wall, not just random smashing with hammers or mallets. It then occurred to me that perhaps the Well Shaft and Grotto complex of the Great Pyramid served a similar function. If the Great Pyramid served resonance functions, if it is was essentially a huge “musical instrument,” then it may have been decommissioned purposefully in ancient times at the end of its life cycle by the opening up, carving out, and/or unsealing (was it partially already dug/carved out previously?) of the Well Shaft and Grotto complex; this would have the effect of disrupting the resonance and harmonic properties, and so on, of the Great Pyramid and making it relatively “useless” for such purposes. J. A. West immediately took to this suggestion and thought it fit in well with the “resonance” theory of the Great Pyramid.

All of the foregoing is, I believe, compatible with an initiatory function for the Great Pyramid. Although they did not study the Great Pyramid, Jahn, Devereux, and Ibison (1995) report on acoustical resonance behaviors that they found in various ancient structures.

Besides the suggestions summarized heretofore relating to the purpose of the Great Pyramid, a number of other suggestions have been offered (many of which are succinctly summarized in Bonwick, 1877). A few of these include:

Giovanni Battista Caviglia (1770-1845) was arguably one of the most colorful explorers of the Great Pyramid in modern times, and possibly the person who had in some respects the best intuitive feel and understanding for this structure in modernity. A Genoese mariner and owner of a vessel based on Malta, Caviglia took an interest in Egypt in the early nineteenth century and explored the Great Pyramid and Sphinx, undertaking excavations; it was he who cleared out the complete passage from the Well to the Descending Passage near the Subterranean Chamber. He also worked with and for Howard Vyse (Vyse, 1840), in charge of several hundred excavators (see Tompkins, 1971, p. 386). For a time Caviglia even lived in Davison’s Chamber, just above the King’s Chamber in the Great Pyramid.