A Short History of Pyramidology

Page 2 of 6

• 1. Fringe beliefs
• 2. Occultists
• 3. Atlanteans
• 4. Extra-terrestrials
• 5. New Agers
• 6. Find out more
• Print entire article

Occultists

Looking into the early days of investigation and enquiry into the Great Pyramid, it is hard to separate the genuine scholars from those who would now be regarded as cranks, since the radical split between scientific method and religious faith that characterises modern societies had not yet taken place.

'Sir Isaac Newton...a keen pyramidologist...'

Sir Isaac Newton, for example, himself a keen pyramidologist, notoriously spent as much time on alchemical experiments and biblical interpretation as he did on the work in mathematics and physics for which he is now honoured.

Many of those inquisitive Europeans who made the trip to Giza in the 17th and 18th centuries were drawn by the promise that it in some way embodied mysterious ancient wisdom; and though modern Egyptology, born of Napoleon's invasion of the country at the end of the 18th century, gradually became more scientific as time passed, even a reputable scientist such as Scotland's Astronomer Royal, Charles Piazzi Smyth (1819-1900), working in the 19th century, was convinced that the structure's proportions were inspired by the Christian God.

Others, like the sometime structural engineer David Davidson, went still further. Davidson persuaded himself that the Pyramid demonstrated a knowledge of the structure of the universe vastly superior to that of 19th-century science: 'the whole empirical basis of civilisation', he wrote, 'is a makeshift collection of hypotheses compared with the Natural Law basis of that civilisation of the past'.

Egyptology came of scientific age with the accurate and painstaking excavations of Sir Flinders Petrie and others from the late 19th century onwards. At the same time 'pyramidiocy', as it is sometimes called, reached epidemic proportions, with countless cranks purporting to explain just how the Giza structure predicted the First World War, the Second Coming of Christ, the Third Reich and what have you.

Not surprisingly, the Pyramid was also seized on by just about every one of the mystical cults that thrived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries - above all by the Theosophists, an influential group founded by one Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-91). In her widely read, if all-but-unreadable, books, The Secret Doctrine (1888) and Isis Unveiled (1877), she explained to her followers that the Pyramid was 'the everlasting record and the indestructible symbol of the Mysteries and Initiations on Earth'.

'...Aleister Crowley claimed to have spent his honeymoon in the Pyramid...'

Thanks to Mme Blavatsky, the Pyramid became an essential point of pilgrimage for all self-respecting occultists. Among the notable necromancers and magi who made the journey were the Russian mathematician and mystic PD Ouspensky, whose cult is still alive in various forms today; the largely innocuous self-appointed guru 'Dr' Paul Brunton, who wrote a bestselling book, A Search in Secret Egypt (1935), where he recalled his conference with weird spirits inside the Pyramid; and the most famous of all Black Magicians, Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), who claimed to have spent his honeymoon in the Pyramid, bathed in supernatural light.

NextPrevious

Published: 2002-09-18