THE PYRAMYDS CONSTRUCTION

THE PYRAMYDS CONSTRUCTION

Though Taylor initially found few devotees, his ideas came before the AstronomerRoyal of Scotland, Charles Piazzi Smyth. Smyth set out for Egypt to confirm Taylor's thesis. His measurements on site were by far the most precise to date, and again confirmed the hypothesis that the ancient Egyptians had precise advanced astronomical , mathematical and geodesic knowledge, which was embodied in a magnificent system of related weights and measures, whose remnants were still in wide use the world over in the form of bushels, gallons acres and other measures. But, as avid a fundamentalist as Taylor , Piazzi Smyth could not credit the Egyptians with high learning ; he, too, had recourse to divinity. Shortly thereafter, another religious enthusiast , Robert Menzies, proposed that the passage system of the Great Pyramid was intended as a system of prophecy from which the date of the Second Coming might be deduced. And at that point , pyramidology became a zealot's playground .

Curious as it may now seem, the AngloIsraelite the ory (that the British were descended fromone of the lost tribes of Israel) was one upon which many educated Victorians, not had finally been reached when the gods, Horus and Seth, were finally at peace The stage was set for the next great step in the development of human society, the creation of the state. The pyramid was going to provide the means of achieving it. Once it is realised that the main object of pyramid construction was a work programme leading to a new social order, the religious meaning and ritual importance of the pyramids recede into the background . If anything these manmade mountains are a monument to the progress of man into a new pattern of life, the national state, which was to become his social home for the next 5000 years. The state as created by the Fourth Dynasty was the nucleus from which , through an infinite variety of expansions , mankind has progressed to its present form. Author's italics. [Dr. Mendelssohn received his Ph .D . in Physics from Berlin University in 1933, an ideal time and place at which to learn that the national state represented the apogee of progress.

Is it a coincidence that a circle of 1,296,000 units has a radius of 206, 265 units and that 20, 6264 is the length of both an English and an Egyptian cubit, that the Hebrew shekel weighs 129.6 grams, and the English guinea 129.6 grains, and the measure of the Most Holy in Solomon's Temple is 1296 inches? Not only was the number 1,296,000 the numerical basis for astronomical measurements as far back as the records are traceable, it was also the favorite number in Plato's mystic symbolism.

Pyramidology was a hotly contested intellectual issue. But in Smyth's ostensibly scientific context, the theory stood or fell upon the validity of the 'pyramid inch' , a measure invented by Smyth and manifested in no other Egyptian monu ment or metric device. When this was disproved by the still more exacting measurements of W. M. Flinders Petrie, the the ory was undermined , though enthusiasts continued to read more and more detailed prophecies into the king's chamber. With the advent of the space age, spiritual descendants of the pyramidologists (Erich Von Danikin is the least credible, hence most successful of these) continue to propose new and fantastic uses for the pyramids : they served as landing pads for space ships or were protective baffles for ancient scientists tap ping the energy of the Van Allen belt.