Pyramidology


Pyramidology refers to various religious or pseudoscientific speculations regarding pyramids, most often the Giza pyramid complex and the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt. Some "pyramidologists" also concern themselves with the monumental structures of pre-Columbian America, and the temples of Southeast Asia.
Some pyramidologists claim that the Great Pyramid of Giza has encoded within it predictions for the Exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt, the crucifixion of Jesus, the start of World War I, the founding of modern-day Israel in 1948, and future events including the beginning of Armageddon; this was discovered by using what they call "pyramid inches" to calculate the passage of time where one British inch equals one solar year.
Pyramidology reached its peak by the early 1980s. Interest revived in 1992 and 1993 when Rudolf Gantenbrink sent a remote-controlled robot up the air shafts of the Queen's Chamber.

Types of pyramidology

The main types of pyramidological accounts involve one or more aspects which include:
  • metrological: theories regarding the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza by hypothetical geometric measurements
  • numerological: theories that the measurements of the Great Pyramid and its passages have esoteric significance, and that their geometric measurements contain some encoded message. This form of pyramidology is popular within Christian Pyramidology.
  • "pyramid power": claims originating in the late 1960s that pyramids as geometrical shapes possess supernatural powers
  • pseudoarchaeological: varying theories that deny the pyramids were built to serve exclusively as tombs for the Pharaohs; alternative explanations regarding the construction of the pyramids ; and hypotheses that they were built by someone other than the historical Ancient Egyptians.

    History

Metrological

Metrological pyramidology dates to the 17th century. John Greaves, an English mathematician, astronomer and antiquarian, first took precise measurements of the Great Pyramid at Giza using the best mathematical instruments of the day. His data was published in Pyramidographia which theorized a geometric cubit was used by the builders of the Great Pyramid. While Greave's measurements were objective, his metrological data was later misused by numerologists:
Abu'l-Barakat Al-Baghdadi
The Arab polymath Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi studied the pyramid with great care, and in his Account of Egypt, he praises them as works of engineering genius. In addition to measuring the structure, alongside the other pyramids at Giza, al-Baghdadi also writes that the structures were surely tombs, although he thought the Great Pyramid was used for the burial of Agathodaimon or Hermes. Al-Baghdadi ponders whether the pyramid pre-dated the Great flood as described in Genesis, and even briefly entertained the idea that it was a pre-Adamic construction.

John Taylor and the golden ratio

In the mid-19th century, Friedrich Röber studied various Egyptian pyramids which he linked to the golden ratio. This led pyramidologist John Taylor to theorize in his 1859 book The Great Pyramid: Why Was It Built and Who Built It? that the Great Pyramid of Giza is related to the golden ratio as well. Although the Great Pyramid's measurements have been found to be within the margin of error, the connections between ancient Egypt and the golden ratio have been explained by modern scholars as coincidental, as no other knowledge of the golden ratio is known from before the fifth centuryBC.
Taylor also proposed that the inch used to build the Great Pyramid was of the "sacred cubit". Taylor was also the first to claim that the pyramid was divinely inspired, contained a revelation and was built not by the Egyptians, but instead by the Hebrews, pointing to Biblical passages to support his theories. For this reason Taylor is often credited as being the "founder of pyramidology". Martin Gardner noted:

Christian pyramidology

British Israelism

Taylor influenced the Astronomer Royal of Scotland Charles Piazzi Smyth, F.R.S.E., F.R.A.S., who made numerous numerological calculations on the pyramid and published them in a 664-page book Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid followed by Life, and Work in the Great Pyramid. These two works fused pyramidology with British Israelism and Smyth first linked the hypothetical pyramid inch to the British Imperial Unit system.
Smyth's theories were later expanded upon by early 20th century British Israelites such as Colonel Garnier, who began to theorise that chambers within the Great Pyramid contain prophetic dates which concern the future of the British, Celtic, or Anglo-Saxon peoples. However this idea originated with Robert Menzies, an earlier correspondent of Smyth's. David Davidson with H. Aldersmith wrote The Great Pyramid, Its Divine Message and further introduced the idea that Britain's chronology may be unlocked from inside the Great Pyramid. This theme is also found in Basil Stewart's trilogy on the same subject: Witness of the Great Pyramid, The Great Pyramid, Its Construction, Symbolism and Chronology and History and Significance of the Great Pyramid.... More recently a four-volume set entitled Pyramidology was published by British Israelite Adam Rutherford. British Israelite author E. Raymond Capt also wrote Great Pyramid Decoded in 1971 followed by Study in Pyramidology in 1986.

Joseph A. Seiss

was a Lutheran minister who was a proponent of pyramidology. He wrote A Miracle in Stone: or, The Great Pyramid of Egypt in 1877. His work was popular with contemporary evangelical Christians.

Charles Taze Russell

In 1891 pyramidology reached a global audience when it was integrated into the works of Charles Taze Russell, founder of the Bible Student movement. Russell however denounced the British-Israelite variant of pyramidology in an article called The Anglo-Israelitish Question. Adopting Joseph Seiss's designation that the Great Pyramid of Giza was "the Bible in stone" Russell taught that it played a special part in God's plan during the "last days" basing his interpretation on Isaiah 19:19–20: "In that day shall there be an altar to the Lord in the midst of the land of Egypt, and a pillar at the border thereof to the Lord. And it shall be for a sign, and for a witness unto the Lord of Hosts in the land of Egypt." Two brothers, archaeologists John and Morton Edgar, as personal associates and supporters of Russell, wrote extensive treatises on the history, nature, and prophetic symbolism of the Great Pyramid in relation to the then known archaeological history, along with their interpretations of prophetic and Biblical chronology. They are best known for their two-volume work Great Pyramid Passages and Chambers, published in 1910 and 1913.
Although most Bible Student groups, which branched off from the original, continue to support and endorse the study of pyramidology from a Biblical perspective, the Bible Students associated with the Watchtower Society, who chose ’Jehovah's Witnesses’ as their new name in 1931, have abandoned pyramidology entirely since 1928.

Pyramid power

Another set of speculations concerning pyramids have centered upon the possible existence of an unknown energy concentrated in pyramidical structures.
Pyramid energy was popularized in the early 1970s, particularly by New Age authors such as Patrick Flanagan, Max Toth and Greg Nielsen and Warren Smith. These works focused on the alleged energies of pyramids in general, not solely the Egyptian pyramids. Toth and Nielsen for example reported experiments where "seeds stored in pyramid replicas germinated sooner and grew higher".

Modern pyramidology

Alan F. Alford

Author Alan F. Alford interprets the entire Great Pyramid in the context of ancient Egyptian religion. Alford takes as his starting point the golden rule that the pharaoh had to be buried in the earth, i.e. at ground level or below, and this leads him to conclude that Khufu was interred in an ingeniously concealed cave whose entrance is today sealed up in the so-called Well Shaft adjacent to a known cave called the Grotto. He has lobbied the Egyptian authorities to explore this area of the pyramid with ground penetrating radar.
The cult of creation theory also provided the basis for Alford's next idea: that the sarcophagus in the King's Chamber, commonly supposed to be Khufu's final resting place, actually enshrined iron meteorites. He maintains, by reference to the Pyramid Texts, that this iron was blasted into the sky at the time of creation, according to the Egyptians' geocentric way of thinking. Alford says the King's Chamber, with its upward inclined dual "airshafts", was built to capture the magic of this mythical moment.
Alford's most speculative idea is that the King's Chamber generated low frequency sound via its "airshafts", the purpose being to re-enact the sound of the earth splitting open at the time of creation.

India

Various spiritual organizations in India have used pyramids as a means to promote theories of their potency. Numerous papers have been published in an Indian science journal called the Indian Journal of Traditional Knowledge by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research.

Pseudoarchaeology

in his An Encyclopaedia of Occultism summed up the earliest pseudoarcheological claims:
Ignatius Donnelly and later proponents of the hyperdiffusionist view of history claimed that all pyramid structures across the world had a common origin. Donnelly claimed this common origin was in Atlantis, while Grafton Elliot Smith claimed Egypt, writing: "Small groups of people, moving mainly by sea, settled at certain places and there made rude imitations of the Egyptian monuments of the Pyramid Age."