Pyramid Quest (27 page)

It is this difference between the sides that allows the Great Pyramid to incorporate both pi and phi into its exterior design. The western face of the Great Pyramid was designed with the factor pi, the northern face with the factor phi.

Here’s how the math works out for the western, or pi, side of the Great Pyramid. Let
Z
be the horizontal length from the middle of the western side at the base to a point directly under the apex of the Great Pyramid, which equals 115.090 meters, according to the Cole Survey. To say that the western face was designed with pi in mind means that 2 times value
Z
times 4 divided by 2 times pi equals the height of the Great Pyramid, or (2 × 115.090 meters × 4) / (2 × 3.14) = 146.6 meters. If a more accurate value of pi is used in this equation, such as 3.14159, then the calculated height is 146.537 meters. Using the approximation of 3.1420 for pi, the calculated height is 146.518 meters.

Now let’s look at the north side, which Stecchini says is based on phi. Let
Y
be the horizontal length from the middle of the northern side at the base to a point directly under the apex of the Great Pyramid.
Y
equals one-half of the standard base length of 439.5 cubits divided by 2. In metric terms, that is 230.363178 / 2, or 115.181589 meters. To say that the northern face was designed with phi in mind means that
Y
divided by the square root of 1 over phi, √1/Φ, equals the height of the Great Pyramid, or 115.181589 meters / √1/Φ = 146.512 meters.

That is only 0.006 meters from the pyramid’s height calculated from pi on the western wide. Both calculations prove themselves empirically by coming out to values within such a small margin. Stecchini’s final analysis suggests powerfully that both pi and phi are part and parcel of the design of the Great Pyramid.

The Egyptians of the Old Kingdom were doing more than relying on the handy-dandy
seked
to calculate the slopes of the Great Pyramid. They understood pi and phi as important mathematical constants. But why were they using them? Was there something they were trying to tell us?

MYSTICS, ESOTERICS, AND INITIATES

SECRET KNOWLEDGE

THE GREAT PYRAMID WAS HARDLY THE MOST BURNING ISSUE on the mind of Edward Said when he wrote
Orientalism
in the 1970s. A Palestinian born in Jerusalem and a highly regarded American professor of comparative literature, Said wanted to explore the complex and painful relationship between the imperial powers of Europe and North America and the regions of Asia and Africa those western nations colonized. Said uncovered two important aspects of western academic and popular thinking about the East that bear strongly on our interest in the Great Pyramid. The first was that even serious students of the Orient were interested less in what existed now than what had gone before, in what they saw as a time of classical greatness. In other words, the present represented a decadent descent from a magnificent past. It fell to the scholar, thinker, and writer to resurrect that past and pass it on despite the depredations of the present. Hence, Napoleon’s
savants
thought it their duty to rescue an accurate image of ancient Egypt from a miserably poor, degenerate Egypt that lacked both motivation and intellect to understand its own patrimony. This same Orientalism also explains the many attempts to interpret the pyramids as something other than Egyptian and to make them the handiwork of an Old Testament God, colonizing extraterrestrials, or wandering Atlanteans.

This assumption contributed to the second aspect of Orientalist thinking. The East existed less in itself than in books and accounts that described it, often in imaginative, even fictional terms. This writing upon writing upon writing created a self-fulfilling universe that bore only a passing relationship to the East in reality. What mattered wasn’t what scholars, writers, or thinkers saw or experienced in that great stretch of colonized earth from Egypt to China. Rather, what mattered was what they read about it, and what they took away from their reading:

In other words, facts from the Orient too often matter less than stories and beliefs about the Orient. In the case of the Great Pyramid, what we believe about Egypt and its monuments commonly trumps what we empirically determine.

To give an example, let us return to John Greaves (1602-1652), the English geometer and antiquarian. We encountered Greaves in chapter 8 as he conducted the first survey of the Great Pyramid and launched the numerological legacy that enthusiasts of a biblical interpretation have found so intriguing. On the one hand, Greaves was dedicated to the facts. He approached his work with an exquisitely calibrated and verified 10-foot measuring rod, and he recorded his measurements of the inside and outside of the pyramid with meticulous care. On the other hand, Greaves sometimes put as much stock in the manuscripts of antiquity as he did in his own observations. Regarding a causeway to the Great Pyramid that Diodorus Siculus said had disappeared in his day, the first century B.C.—even though observers from as late as the eighteenth century A.D. reported its existence—Greaves agreed with Diodorus, without taking a look for himself. In Greaves’s work, fact and belief about the Great Pyramid tug at one another. It is a struggle that has been going on for a long while.

Egypt as the source of ultimate wisdom; the ancients as bearers of sacred, mystical, and practical knowledge that has been lost to time; a Golden Age pre-dating recorded history—each of these are themselves very ancient and longstanding concepts that have been drawn upon by thinkers through the ages. And who is to say with certainty that these traditions are wrong? Indeed, their robustness and continued reoccurrence would suggest that there is more than a grain of truth underlying such notions. Egypt has beckoned to thinkers of all stripes for thousands of years.

When Herodotus (484-425 B.C.) arrived in Egypt in the fifth century B.C. with his ear tuned for good stories from the past, Egypt’s difference from the rest of the world he knew impressed him. Its lifestyle, culture, and animal worship looked strange even to a well-traveled Greek. “Concerning Egypt,” he wrote, “I will now speak at length, because nowhere are there so many marvelous things, nor in the whole world beside are there to be seen so many things of unspeakable greatness.”
²
Ever the historian, Herodotus stood in awe of a land where historical memory reached more than a hundred generations into the past.

In part because of this long history, Plato (427-347 B.C.), who wrote his dialogues well after Herodotus, saw Egypt as a primary cultural source. In the
Timaeus
and the
Critias,
the dialogues that lay out the story of Atlantis, Plato says that Solon (died 559 B.C.), the great Athenian lawgiver of the sixth century B.C., journeyed to Egypt to learn from priests who claimed a 9,000-year-old tradition. (Given what we know of the age of the Sphinx, that may have been no idle boast.) In the
Phaedrus
and the
Philebus,
Plato tells of an Egyptian god or divine man who gave the human race numbers, calculation, the alphabet, mathematics, and astronomy. Plato calls him Theuth, a corruption of the Egyptian Thoth.

Diodorus Siculus (c. 80-20 B.C.) extended the tradition of Egypt as a source of Greek learning by listing all the famous men of ancient letters and sciences who, like Solon, spent formative time along the Nile. Some of these figures were mythical. One was Orpheus, the son of Apollo and Calliope and the god of music who tried to rescue his lost love from the underworld; another was Musaeus, a minor Greek deity who was either the son or the pupil of Orpheus. Others in the list were historical, beginning with Homer (c. 800 B.C.), the poet of the
Odyssey
and the
Iliad;
Lycurgus (c. 600 B.C), the father-king of the militaristic Spartan state; Thales (c. 624-547 B.C.), the philosopher and mathematician; Plato, of course; Pythagoras (c. 569- 475 B.C.), reputed to be the world’s first pure mathematician; and Eudoxus (c. 400-347 B.C.), the mathematician and astronomer known as the first Greek to map the stars.

Whether these great men of Greece actually went to Egypt is irrelevant. What matters is that Greek speakers of the Hellenistic and Roman periods saw Egypt as the source of learning central to what we call civilization. In addition, some of this knowledge came from a particularly ancient tradition—the 9,000 years Plato cites, for example—and it was often considered secret. Pythagoras, who sought to merge mathematics and philosophy, swore his students to a pervasive silence that cloaked his work in a continuing mystery.

The god the Hellenistic Greeks saw as the divine embodiment of wisdom and the fountain from which this secret Egyptian knowledge sprang was Thoth, the very name Plato had misheard as Theuth. In the most ancient Egyptian myths, Thoth sprang from the head of Seth after he inadvertently ingested the semen of Horus. Thoth carried within him the conflicting traits of these eternally battling opposites, Horus representing order and justice, Seth chaos and greed. In the Old Kingdom, Thoth’s violent characteristics predominated. He was described as a lord of killing who overthrew the armies of Asia and trampled his enemies underfoot. The Pyramid Texts, which were inscribed on tombs at Saqqara during the Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth dynasties, describe him slicing off heads and cutting out hearts, a fierce butcher of Egypt’s enemies. But Thoth, often depicted with the head of an ibis or baboon on the body of a man, also served as a judge and messenger of the gods and the guardian of the eye that Horus lost in his epic struggle with Seth, an eye that came to symbolize knowledge and wisdom. During the Twelfth Dynasty, the priests of Thoth’s temple in Hermopolis created the
Book of the Two Ways
(part of the larger collections of writings commonly referred to collectively as the Coffin Texts), a volume of esoteric learning that described the afterlife and was a precursor to the better known
Egyptian Book of the Dead.
The Coffin Texts, which consist of spells written on the coffins of Middle Kingdom officials, add to the reputation of Thoth as the author of sacred texts. By the time of the New Kingdom, Thoth had grown from a devotee of violence into the god who created all culture, the role from which Plato recruited him into his dialogues.

The
Book of the Two Ways
is often described as the earliest hermetic writing—that is, it is associated with the teachings of a figure, sometimes human and sometimes divine, that began as Thoth and eventually evolved into the personage known as Hermes Trismegistus. When the Greeks encountered Thoth, they were reminded of their own god Hermes, but Thoth seemed greater still. Hence they referred to the Egyptian Thoth as the “thrice-great Hermes,” or Hermes Trismegistus, thus creating the Greco-Egyptian Thoth-Hermes. The root
Hermes
appears in both
hermetic
and
Hermopolis,
the latter meaning “city of Hermes” in Greek. Like Thoth, Hermes is the messenger of Olympus, the one who carries word from the gods and goddesses on high to humans below. The Romans took Hermes into their pantheon as Mercury, giving him winged sandals to speed his flight between heaven and earth. They attached his name to the planet that circled closest to the sun as a way of symbolizing Hermes-Mercury’s proximity to divinity and his quick movements (the planet Mercury has the shortest and fastest path relative to the sun).

By the time Hermes Trismesgistus received his full name, Egyptian spirituality was already making its way out into the wider world, first the Hel lenized eastern Mediterranean, then the larger Roman Empire. Osiris, who had become not only the god of the underworld but also the lord of the sun, took on a new name: Serapis. Serapis assumed aspects first of Zeus, top god of the Greeks, then of Jupiter, top god of the Romans, turning into a divinity who blended Egyptian, Greek, and Roman elements.

Isis, Osiris’s wife, likewise took on an expanded divinity. She went from being the mother of Egypt to the mother of the world, a universal goddess who was, according to a Roman inscription from the Italian city of Capua, “the one who is all.” In
The Golden Ass,
written by Lucius Apuleius (c. 123/124?-after 170? A.D.) toward the middle or end of the second century A.D. and the only surviving Roman novel, Isis appears to the protagonist and describes herself: