Pyramid Quest (24 page)

The first is the certainty that scripture itself connects the Bible to the Great Pyramid. For example, Charles Taze Russell (1852-1916), a founder of the Watchtower Society, which evolved into the modern Jehovah’s Witnesses, wrote biblical commentaries about the Great Pyramid. He put great stock on two verses from the prophet Isaiah: “That day, there will be an altar to Yahweh in the center of the land of Egypt and, close to the frontier, a pillar to Yahweh, which will be both sign and witness to Yahweh Sabaoth in the land of Egypt” (Isaiah 19:19-20). Russell argued that, even though this passage never uses the word
pyramid,
it can refer only to Khufu’s monument in Giza. The pyramid, Russell wrote,

Located as it is in the boundary zone between Upper and Lower Egypt, the Great Pyramid is in the center as well as on the frontier, as Isaiah prophesied. And Egypt stands for both a historical land and the souls who need to be saved. “Egypt,” Russell wrote, “represents the empire of Sin, the dominion of death . . . which for so long has held in chains of slavery many who will be glad to go forth to serve the Lord.”
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H. Spencer Lewis, whose 1936 book
The Symbolic Prophecy of the Great Pyramid
was published by the Rosicrucians, cites another Old Testament text: “You [Yahweh] performed signs and wonders in the land of Egypt” (Jeremiah 32:20). And a writer closer to our own time, Paul Lemesurier, the author of
The Great Pyramid Decoded
(1977), finds references in the New Testament as well as the Old. For example, the great messianic Psalm 118 contains the verses “It was the stone rejected by the builders / that proved to be the keystone; / this is Yahweh’s doing / and it is wonderful to see” (Psalms 118:22-23). The rejected stone mentioned in the psalm is the Great Pyramid’s missing capstone, or pyramidion, according to Lemesurier. In Matthew 21:42, Jesus quotes these lines in reference to himself and, according to Lemesurier, to the Great Pyramid’s centrality in the Old Testament prophecy predicting the arrival of the messiah. Lemesurier finds yet another reference to the Great Pyramid in Luke’s gospel. As Jesus was entering Jerusalem in the days leading up to his crucifixion, some Pharisees told him to silence his disciples, whose sung praises of Jesus as God struck them as blasphemous. Jesus snapped back, “If these keep silence, the stones will cry out” (Luke 19:40). The stones, Lemesurier argues, could refer to the stones of the Great Pyramid. He also thinks that the three magi, or kings, who visited the newborn Jesus in Bethlehem are veiled references to the three pyramids of Giza and that the guiding genius of the Hebrews’ escape from Egypt named as Yahweh in the book of Exodus is one and the same divine being as Khufu. Thus, saying that the Great Pyramid is the work of Khufu is the same as saying that it is the work of Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament.

Lemesurier discovers further validation of the correspondence between the Bible and the Great Pyramid in a bit of geographical geometry. Draw a true east-west meridian through the Great Pyramid, then take a northeast bearing off this line at 26° 18’ 9”, the angle of the Descending and Ascending passages. This line, Lemesurier asserts—as do many of his predecessors and contemporaries, including John and Morton Edgar, Charles S. Knight, A. J. Ferris, Adam Rutherford, Raymond Capt, and Thomas Foster—crosses the northern end of the Red Sea at the site where the waters parted to allow the fleeing Hebrews across and then rushed back in to drown Pharaoh’s army hot on their heels. Extend the line even farther, and it runs first through Bethlehem, where David and Jesus were born, then across the ford on the Jordan River where Joshua, Moses’ successor, first led his Hebrew army into the Promised Land of Canaan.

Lemesurier is demonstrating a second key belief among writers who share his point of view: the message of the Great Pyramid is to be found in its dimensions. “The Great Pyramid speaks to us,” Charles Taze Russell wrote, “not by hieroglyphics, nor by sketches, but only by its location, its construction, and its measurements.”
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The pyramid’s exterior gives us God’s divine understanding of the measures of our planet, as John Taylor argued, while the interior passages and chambers recount the story of salvation told in the Old and New Testaments with that precise chronology in which one inch equals one year. Following this logic, by one interpretation the Great Pyramid was calibrated with a datum point in 2144 B.C., as indicated by certain scored lines found in the upper part of the Descending Passage. The 630 inches down the Descending Passage between the scored lines and the junction with the Ascending Passage demonstrate that the flood that floated Noah’s ark occurred 630 years before the Exodus, when the Hebrews made their way out of Egypt with help from the Almighty. Another 1,542 years, or inches, passed between the Exodus and the birth of Jesus, which occurs at the opening of the Grand Gallery, the symbol representing the Christian age. Add in the inches for the rest of the Grand Gallery, and you get the year 1914. That, Charles Taze Russell said, would be a critical time in the history of our planet and the story of salvation. “Thus,” he wrote, “the Pyramid witnesses that the close of 1914 will be the beginning of the time of trouble such as there was not since there was a nation--no, nor ever shall be afterward.”
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Given that 1914 witnessed the beginning of World War I, which was until then the bloodiest and most apocalyptic struggle in history, Russell’s prediction appears eerily prescient. Of course, worse things have happened since.

Some writers have gotten vastly more explicit in the level of historical detail they see both predicted and recorded in the Great Pyramid’s inches. A prime example is H. Spencer Lewis. According to Lewis, the Great Pyramid recounts practically the whole of European history in the first half of the twentieth century nearly year by year. Without giving exact measurements, Spencer finds in the Great Pyramid the August 1909 agreements between Czar Nicholas of Russia and various European countries; outbreaks of violence in the Balkans in 1912 and 1913 that set the stage for World War I; the Treaty of Bucharest on August 10, 1913; England’s declaration of war on Germany in August 1914; the entry of the United States into the war in 1917; General Allenby’s capture of Jerusalem from the Turks on December 11, 1917; the founding of the Soviet Republic on January 18, 1918, in St. Petersburg; the kaiser’s flight into Holland on November 10-11, 1918, with the signing of the armistice ending World War I soon thereafter; the Big Four postwar conference in December 1919; the Treaty of Sèvres on July 11, 1920; the Turkish Treaty on August 10, 1920; and the world-renowned stock market crash of October 1929.

Writing in 1936, Lewis predicted that that very year would be a very big one, according to measurement signs given by the Great Pyramid. The United States would adopt a modified dictatorship with a strong tendency toward state socialism—probably a sign that Lewis was less than enchanted with Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal. Later that year, though, a major event would occur, something that would especially benefit the people of the United States, Great Britain, and Israel. (At the time, Israel was not a nation, only a passionate idea in the minds of Zionists with ambitions on British-controlled Palestine.) Lewis never said what that something was, and it’s hard to know which historical event would correspond to his prediction. He also put great stock in September 31, 1947, as the beginning of an era when church and state would be reconstructed in Great Britain and the United States. Lewis neglects any mention of World War II in the intervening years, the kind of oversight that leaves a reader wondering.

Indeed, that is but one of many things in this line of writing about the Great Pyramid as the product of divine inspiration that leaves the theory wanting.

Is the Great Pyramid really a monument conceived in the mind of the Judeo-Christian God? Is it mentioned in the Holy Scriptures? Let’s start with the Old and New Testament texts that supposedly mention the Great Pyramid. In every case, the verses have been taken out of context and twisted to support a predetermined point of view.

The best example is the key text in this argument, the second half of chapter 19 of the book of Isaiah, which supposedly names the Great Pyramid as a pillar and altar raised in the center and at the boundary of Egypt. Every reading of this text from Smyth down fails to notice a central fact about the passage: it is written in the future tense. “That day, there
will be
an altar to Yahweh in the center of the land of Egypt and, close to the frontier, a pillar to Yahweh, which
will be
both sign and witness” (Isaiah 19:20, italics added). The passage tells not of what God has done but of what God will do. That description hardly fits the Great Pyramid, which was close to two millennia old when Isaiah wrote in the middle of the eighth century B.C.

In addition, the passage contains clear references to the current events of Isaiah’s time. The kingdom of Israel was living under the threat of invasion by the Assyrians, who eventually occupied much of the Middle East, including Upper and Lower Egypt. Isaiah saw conflict between Assyria and Egypt looming, and he predicted its outcome: “Assyria will have access to Egypt and Egypt have access to Assyria. Egypt will serve Assyria” (Isaiah 19:23).

When the Old Kingdom pyramid builders set about their work, Assyria did not even exist. Isaiah is writing about a pillar and an altar in the Late Period Egypt of his time, not Khufu’s. He is describing a battle between the two international superpowers of his day and age, not of the Old Kingdom. This passage has to be removed from its historical context and reshaped into an anachronism in order to apply it to the Great Pyramid. It doesn’t fit.

As for Psalm 118, it doesn’t fit either. There’s nothing about a keystone—which is the central stone in an arch—that has anything to do with the Great Pyramid’s pyramidion. As for the story from Luke that says that the stones will cry out if the disciples are silenced, Jesus is obviously referring to the stones in the place where he was standing on the Mount of Olives, a notably rocky place in a stony land, and not to an ancient masonry building far away.

Lemesurier’s passage on the angle line rests on the same kind of speculation. No one knows where the fleeing Hebrews crossed the Red Sea. We don’t even know if they actually crossed the waters. The same, of course, goes for Joshua’s invasion into the Promised Land. Maybe it happened where Lemesurier says it did, and maybe not. The choice has more to do with faith than fact.

Then there’s the question of the inch. The prophetic view that begins with Menzies rests on the assumption that one inch equals one year. If you were using the metric system, then—assuming that the prophetic writers are right—a year would equal approximately 2.54 centimeters. That’s not a quantity that exactly rolls off the tongue; it lacks elegance. Smyth saw the metric system as atheistic, something he blamed on the anticlerical French. The inch was part of the Great Pyramid’s revelation, because the original Hebrew inch had come down to the British, practically intact and certainly sacred. H. Spencer Lewis takes this idea to its logical conclusion:

Where Smyth saw scientific sophistication as central to unraveling the Great Pyramid’s cryptic message, Lewis sees the inch. And it is one more proof that the monument has little to do with Egypt. “Later generations of the Egyptians looked with as much astonishment upon the mystery of the Great Pyramid as we do today, indicating that they lacked the wisdom which was required to build the Great Pyramid or it would not have so mystified them,” Lewis writes.
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In short, the Great Pyramid was meant for the British and the Americans, because they have the inch and the Egyptians didn’t have the brain power.

That probably explains why the inch prophecies in the Great Pyramid’s passages hold so true for European history in the first third of the twentieth century and for various predictions about the late 1930s and 1940s in the United States. Certainly, you would get very different results if the one inch, one year equation were applied to, say, Latin American or East Asia. Those regions of the earth, though, don’t rely on the inch. The God Lewis is writing about plays ethnic favorites.

This God also has a very specific focus. It is amazing that Lewis finds correspondences between lines and marks in the Great Pyramid’s passages and events like the czar’s 1909 agreements with the European powers, Allenby’s entry into Jerusalem, and the Treaty of Sèvres. Ask people on the street these days what the Treaty of Sèvres was about, and you’ll get one blank stare after another—unless you happen across a specialist in modern European history who knows that the agreement ended World War I between the Allies and Turkey and was later supplanted by the Treaty of Lausanne. At the time, these events appeared momentous, even defining. Now these are the stuff of footnotes in doctoral dissertations.

There is in all the prophetic writing about the Great Pyramid a presumption that divine energy focuses upon the writer’s time. Like Lewis finding the Treaty of Sèvres in the Great Pyramid, Charles Taze Russell was sure that the resurrection of souls predicted in the Great Pyramid and signaling the end time had begun in 1874, during his own lifetime. Smyth likewise argued that the Great Pyramid served a prophetic purpose for “these latter days.” He felt as if he were standing at the end of days and watching the prophecy come to pass while he lived. Lemesurier equates the Great Pyramid with the great “Messianic Plan.” He is waiting for the sign, and “when that sign comes it will be the final signal, hoisted upon the mountains, that the long-awaited Messiah and Great Initiate is at hand, and that the last great act in the present cycle of the human drama is about to begin.”
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