Pyramid Quest (7 page)

The same precision applies to the Great Pyramid’s orientation. The four sides each point to one of the cardinal directions. The orientation to the north-south axis is just over 3 arcminutes to the west of true north—just over one-twentieth of a degree. Again, the Great Pyramid’s orientation is about as perfect as human engineering can achieve.

Near perfection implies both intention and attention; such things do not happen by accident. The builders wanted the pyramid’s squareness and cardinal orientation. They also wanted the slight concavity of its sides.

The Great Pyramid’s sides do not run straight from one corner to the next above the base courses of masonry. Rather, they slope slightly inward, joining at the midline in a very shallow angle—the two planes of each “face” of the Great Pyramid meet at an angle of about 27’ (about 0.45°) different from a perfectly flat plane. This slight concavity is virtually imperceptible to the human eye from ground level. It apparently transforms the pyramid into an indicator of the spring and fall equinoxes, those two singular days of the year when night and day are of equal length. At about 6 a.m. on the equinox, the rising sun striking the Great Pyramid briefly lights the west half of the south face, while the east half is still dark; then the entire face is in the light. At about 6 p.m. the lighting pattern is reversed, as the east half remains lit yet the west falls dark; then both sides fall dark. This phenomenon is sometimes referred to as the “flash” or the “flash effect.” In ancient days, when the Great Pyramid’s outer layer of white limestone was intact, the flash effect must have filled the exact day of the equinox with an extraordinary brilliance.

A final oddity of the exterior: alone of the three major pyramids on the Giza Plateau, the Great Pyramid lacks an apex. Instead of coming to a peak, it ends in a small rough platform. Some scholars argue that the pyramidion, the pyramid-shaped stone that should have capped the pyramid, and the uppermost core and casing stones were removed along with the rest of the outer white limestone centuries ago. This did not occur to the other two major pyramids on the plateau, however, despite their short stature and therefore presumably easier accessibility. It makes me wonder whether the builders of the Great Pyramid ever intended a sharp apex capped by a pyramidion. If they did not, then it is but another bit of evidence pointing to the uniqueness of the Great Pyramid and the failure of the standard story to account for its fascinating singularity.

The Giza Plateau photographed at sunset from 4,000 feet; early twentieth century. Note the concavity on the south side of the Great Pyramid. This unusual photograph caught the light of the setting sun on the Great Pyramid at just the correct angle to show that there are actually two “faces” on each side of the Great Pyramid. Photograph by Brigadier General P.R.C. Groves, British Royal Air Force. (
From Groves and McCrindle, 1926, p. 314.
)

THINKING OUTSIDE THE SARCOPHAGUS

T HERE IS NO DOUBT THAT THE GREAT PYRAMID IS NOT A tomb alone, and may not be a tomb at all. This insight has come to any number of contemporary writers who have pondered the mysteries and peculiarities of this much-studied monument and realized that the standard story simply fails to bear the weight of all the questions.

But if the Great Pyramid isn’t just a tomb, then what is it? The many answers to this question add up to an intriguing range of speculation about the true purpose of the pyramid Khufu is said to have built. As we will see in later chapters, some writers have sought the answer not strictly in terms of burial rites but in the context of a broader mythological and religious significance. Perhaps the Great Pyramid was not a tomb but a temple or, as some posit, a site of initiatory rites, reflecting the liturgy found in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, as suggested by Marsham Adams in 1895 (and discussed further in chapter 11). Or, as researcher Alan Alford has suggested in his 2004 book
The Midnight Sun,
the Great Pyramid was part of an ancient “cult of creation,” the primary aim of which was a celebration and reenactment of the myth of the creation of the cosmos. Other researchers have sought an explanation for the Great Pyramid outside the realm of ancient Egyptian religious belief. This way of thinking often shares a common starting point: minimizing or totally dismissing the structure’s religious and mythological import. What if the Great Pyramid is something altogether different from a tomb and religious monument? What if it served a practical, even utilitarian function? In our own days of the early twenty-first century, immense building structures tend to serve useful secular functions, whether to generate energy (such as a hydroelectric dam or a nuclear power plant), or serve as a factory, or simply house people, as in an office building or apartment complex. Looking at ancient structures with modern eyes, many writers have asked: might not this have been the case thousands of years ago for mighty structures like the Great Pyramid?

A common notion, and one that has made it into mainstream popular culture, is the idea of “pyramid power.” In essence, the concept of pyramid power is that the very shape of a pyramid, especially one with the exact scale of the Great Pyramid, somehow can capture energy and perform practical functions, such as preserving food. As discussed in the section entitled “Pryamid Physics” in the appendices, a small but committed group of scientists takes this idea very seriously, and there may exist some empirical evidence, to a limited degree, supporting the concept of “pyramid power.” Realistically, though, the jury is still out.

The modern concept of “pyramid power” begins with a Frenchman by the name of Antoine Bovis, who in the 1920s or 1930s stumbled onto something curious inside the Great Pyramid that no one else had ever noticed before. Bovis observed this phenomenon in the garbage cans set up inside the monument to handle the trash and castoffs of the tourist trade. Dead, discarded animals—sometimes a cat, sometimes a mouse, sometimes both a cat and a mouse, according to which version of the story you read—had dried into perfect mummies without putrefying and giving off the nauseating stench of death. Certain that this alteration of the usual physical reality of death came from the shape of the pyramid, Bovis returned to France, built a scale model of Khufu’s monument, and deposited a dead cat inside. Sure enough, the phenomenon he had seen in Giza repeated itself, and the animal mummified without rotting. Bovis supposedly got similar results with slices of cheese and chunks of raw meat.

As far as I have been able to determine, Bovis never published his experiments. Yet word of them somehow made their way to Czechoslovakia, where, in the late 1940s, they caught the eye of Karl Drbal, a radio engineer interested in the regeneration of energy. Drbal attempted his own mummification experiments with meat, eggs, flowers, and small reptiles and amphibians, and reportedly found that the pyramid worked as Bovis advertised. Intrigued, Drbal located Bovis at his ironmonger’s shop in Nice, on the French Riviera, and exchanged letters with him. Although Drbal found Bovis “‘too magic’” for his taste,
¹
he continued his own experiments. In the course of that work, Drbal made one of the longest logical leaps recorded in intellectual history: he decided that Bovis’s work on dead cats had major implications for the sharpness of razor blades.

It all went back to Drbal’s army service years earlier. Prankster soldiers got the best of one another by leaving straight razors out in the moonlight. According to military folklore, such treatment would dull the razor and turn the morning shave into a nick-filled misery. Drbal reasoned that a pyramid that dried a dead cat into a mummy without rotting would surely keep a razor blade from dulling after a few shaves, as the razor blades of those pre-stainless steel days did. How Drbal made this particular jump, from cats to razors, he himself has yet to explain.

Drbal built a model of the Great Pyramid and placed a used razor blade in it. Sure enough, he claimed, its sharpness returned. Once restored to its original keenness, the blade could be kept sharp for up to 200 shaves, just by storing it in the pyramid-shaped regeneration device between shaves. Drbal became so fascinated by this effect, and so convinced of its commercial possibilities, that he filed for a patent. Although initially unimpressed, the patent office in Prague eventually granted Drbal patent no. 91304 in 1959, 10 years after the original application, for a “device for maintaining the sharpness of razor blades and razors.”
²
In the course of presenting evidence for his pyramid device, Drbal explained how it worked. “There is no magic involved in the functioning of the razor-blade pyramid,” he wrote later, “nor of the mummification model pyramid. Rather, there are two main factors at work here.”
³
One was fast dehydration; rapid drying saved the steel of the blade from rust and drew moisture out of the cat’s tissues. In addition, the pyramid affected the microscopic structure of materials both living and dead, reorienting the steel to its original state and preventing the growth of microorganisms in the feline carcass. Both processes occurred, Drbal maintained, because the cavity of the pyramid resonated with cosmic microwaves concentrated by the earth’s magnetic field. This is not an entirely implausible idea.

When word of Drbal’s work penetrated the Iron Curtain and worked its way west, pyramid power extended beyond razor blades. Soon all kinds of people interested in the unusual and the paranormal were experimenting with pyramids for every purpose from preventing mold to preserving food without refrigeration. Pyramid-shaped tents became popular for meditation, and one New Age entrepreneur experimented with pyramid-shaped hats to boost brainpower. Erik von Däniken, the writer whose ideas about the extraterrestrial connections of pyramids appear in chapter 5, claimed he could use a pyramid to turn ordinary Bordeaux wine into a
grand cru.
Yet another writer reported that putting a pyramid under her boyfriend’s chair transformed his fatigue into a pleasing sexual athleticism.

There are a number of problems with the pyramid power concept in terms of understanding ancient Egypt. If it worked, the mummification effect would clearly have been of value to the pharaohs and their people. But it’s hard to imagine inhabitants of the Old Kingdom using pyramids to boost the longevity of copper razor blades, make bad wine good, or set the stage for an evening of romance—particularly when there are no depictions of such uses from ancient Egypt. There’s good reason for that absence: a relative lack of solid and replicable evidence that all, or even most, of the positive effects attributed to pyramid power are real.

Most of the stories told about the power of pyramids to preserve dead critters or regenerate dull blades are anecdotes, tales told by one person to another, without any scientific control. They are as ephemeral and unreliable as the folklore of moonlight dulling army-issue straight razors. Moonlight has no known special property that dulls steel. More probably, leaving old-fashioned carbon steel out all night rusted the edge and stole its sharpness. When researchers from the Stanford Research Institute conducted experiments inside the Great Pyramid in 1977, biological samples deteriorated at predictable rates. There was no mummification effect. Still, this does not mean that there is absolutely nothing to the notion of pyramid power in a general sense. As I mention in the appendices under “Pyramid Physics,” there exist some reportedly legitimate scientific studies supporting the concept of “pyramid power” to sharpen razors, affect biological materials, and so forth. Honestly, however, I have my doubts and believe more replication of such studies is needed before we can consider such affects verified. Furthermore, these modern studies of pyramid physics no more explain the true function and purpose of the Great Pyramid than the modern study of electricity explains the ancient respect for the power of lightning.

Whatever the deep power and allure of the Great Pyramid for many people, it has little to do with dead cats, bad wine, or dull razors.