A couple of days ago, I eluded to the question of pyramid power as an attempt at a joke, then went on to talk about pyramid schemes. It then occurred to me that I could actually talk about pyramid power itself, and also about pyramids.
Whatever else may be true, no-one can deny that the Egyptian pyramids are dead impressive. They’re so old that when they were built, there were still mammoths. The mammoths in question were a few inbred individuals who were rife with birth defects on an island in the Arctic Ocean, but they did exist. Their population was just too low for them to be viable. It’s said that the six million tons of masonry in this single building is greater than the combined mass of building materials in every church in the world. It was the tallest building in the world for forty centuries. It was not, however, built by slaves. Rather, people were expected to volunteer their time to create the thing. Nor did it require mysterious alien or otherwise advanced technology to construct. The ground was levelled by digging a series of interconnected ditches and filling them with water, then chipping away until everything was at the same level. A ramp was then built and gradually steepened and lengthened to put the blocks in place. The planning is impressive, to be sure, but as is often the case it’s a testament to human ingenuity and organisation rather than extraterrestrial intervention or lost high technology.
The Great Pyramid is also said to be at the junction of the lines of longitude and latitude which cross the most land. The line of latitude passing through its apex is said to match the speed of light in kilometres per second, since it’s supposed to be 29.9792458 decimal degrees north of the equator and the speed of light is 299792.4562 kps. Although the idea of decimal degrees might at first sound like shoehorning, it does make sense because the length of the metre was originally defined as a ten millionth of the distance between the North Pole and the Equator. This in fact involves a bit of jiggery pokery because it isn’t actually the position of the apex, although it’s an interesting coincidence. It’s also been said that there is a “pyramid zone” around the planet, which is a narrow range of latitudes within which the older pyramids were built. This always reminds me of the linguistic “click zone” – a narrow range of latitudes within which languages with clicks are spoken. This last has turned out to be completely untrue because for some reason it used to be thought that certain Mesoamerican languages had clicks when they haven’t, so outside Afrika that just leaves the two unusual registers of Chinese and Australian aboriginal languages with them as proper phonemes used as parts of words. Likewise, there are in fact many pyramid-shaped buildings away from this zone, and many of the buildings made out to be pyramids for the purposes of constructing the zone are not really that similar: they’re ziggurats or pagodas. That said, there are many roughly pyramidal buildings from days of yore, probably because it’s such a stable shape. The maximum height of a pyramid of granite on this planet is 13.4 kilometres, whereas a column of granite, i.e. a cuboid or cylinder, is less than five kilometres. It’s also notable that hills and mountains are usually roughly pyramidal or conical. In that sense, pyramid power does exist.
The other famous pyramids are the Mesoamerican ones built by the Mayans and Aztecs.
These are a little different although they’re still roughly the same shape, probably for the reasons given above. There seem to be about three dozen surviving Mayan pyramids, which may have evolved from burial mounds, so their function was similar to the Egyptian ones, of which there are 118. This also links them to the Western European barrows. It seems that, left to ourselves, we humans will eventually get around to burying our dead in pyramids with spiritual overtones.These are a little different although they’re still roughly the same shape, probably for the reasons given above. There seem to be about three dozen surviving Mayan pyramids, which may have evolved from burial mounds, so their function was similar to the Egyptian ones, of which there are 118. This also links them to the Western European barrows. It seems that, left to ourselves, we humans will eventually get around to burying our dead in pyramids with spiritual overtones.
Tenochtitlan, the pre-Columbian Mexico City, was also known for its pyramids:
The steps here interest me because they look rather like they could’ve been used as a ramp which was left there, unlike with the Egyptian examples although those do have the remains of their ramps next to them. I seem to recall that the Aztecs built a larger pyramid around the smaller one every fifty-two years because they expected the world to end every time their calendar cycle came to an end. In fact, it more or less did because their final cycle ended in 1519 when the Conquistadores arrived. It’s interesting to observe the number of similarities between the Mesoamerican and Egyptian civilisations, such as the use of hieroglyphic writing in both, their Sun worship and of course their pyramids. I think this indicates some kind of commonality in human life rather than communication, but it has been used to justify the idea of Atlantis (as has the Aztec idea of Aztlan). There are quite a number of oddities about Mesoamerican culture which are very hard to explain naturalistically, but I won’t go into that here.
Getting back to the Great Pyramid, it has been claimed that the structure has encoded prophecies in its height, including the exodus of Moses from Egypt, the birth of Jesus, the outbreak of World War I and the foundation of the modern state of Israel, and downward into the Christian End Times, measured using “pyramid inches”, which was a twenty-fifth of a cubit. These units were actually used in part of the debate about adopting the metric system.
The burial chamber in the Great Pyramid is a third of the way up. This is where the believers in pyramid power put their objects. The basic idea behind pyramid power is that square pyramids can keep razor blades sharp, preserve food, improve health and boost libido, and also act as “thought form incubators”. I don’t know what this last bit means. I used to believe in pyramid power as a child but have grown out of it. In fact I used to own Bill Schul’s famous book ‘The Secret Power Of Pyramids’. Among other things, this contains a series of photographs comparing, for example, grapes kept inside a pyramid and kept in a cuboid box, noting that the former appeared to dry them out whereas in the latter they just went mouldy. They were also said to boost the growth of plants, control pain, purify water and rejuvenate. The whole idea was triggered when someone called Antoine Bovis claimed to have seen a bin full of dead animals in the Great Pyramid who had become trapped inside it and died, but had not decomposed, although it later emerged he’d never even been to Egypt. Now here’s the thing: I do not believe in pyramid power because I can’t see how it would work, so I’m skeptical, but note that that is spelt with a K. It isn’t actually respectable scepticism spelt with a C. There is of course an established scientific system into which the idea of pyramid power doesn’t seem to fit, and I’m confident it doesn’t exist, at least in the sense claimed in Schul’s book, but I’ve never tested this myself. I just take it on faith that it doesn’t happen because I can’t see how it would, but maybe I’m being too dismissive.
I’m prepared to accept that a square pyramid made of magnetised iron might have interesting effects on oxygen and water. Oxygen is magnetic, but at temperatures we’re used to surviving in there is too much arbitrary vibration of molecules due to heat for it to become concentrated near a magnet. Liquid oxygen, on the other hand, behaves very differently because its molecules move around less randomly, and is visibly attracted to a magnet, unlike nitrogen. Magnets repel water slightly, so magnetic pyramids of various orientations would in fact have various effects on it, such that if, for example, they were built of sheets polarised through their thickness, it would increase water vapour concentration around the point where the tomb was placed in the Great Pyramid, which is, however, not made of ferromagnetic material. Likewise, extremely cold air would have its oxygen concentration boosted near the walls of such a pyramid and lowered near the centre. There’s also the question of the angles of the vertices, and in this case the idea is more straightforward and links into general geometrical principles.
The shape of a square pyramids slightly offends my sensibilities because it isn’t a Platonic solid. Platonic polyhedra consist entirely of spaces enclosed by faces which are regular polygons – polygons whose every angle and side are the same. I find it disappointing that neither Mesoamerican nor Egyptian pyramids are tetrahedral, and if they were their vertices would be more acute. Many houses have mouldy corners, particularly ones in the British Isles (Boreonesia?). If these corners were more acute, they’d be damper and they’d attract more mould. In an arid climate, presumably the opposite applies: acute corners are drier than right angled ones. This probably also means that in a tetrahedral greenhouse, plants needing more water would do better in the corners if the air is humid outside it and it isn’t watertight. A tetrahedral loaf would also be crustier than a cuboid one. A tetrahedral bar of soap would dissolve faster and a sugar tetrahedron would sweeten coffee quicker than a sugar cube. Similarly, a vegetable stock tetrahedron would dissolve faster, and if it were in an inverted tetrahedral container which was properly heated, that would cook faster.
Continuing to maintain my doubt, there are a couple of problems with the idea of pyramid power. Firstly, there’s no requirement that the pyramids be made of any particular material. As far as Earth’s magnetic field is concerned, with which they are supposed to be aligned, this seems likely to invalidate any special properties they might have. Secondly, they’re square pyramids, which are less “extreme” than tetrahedra, and therefore likely to have less interesting properties. However, with this I’m attempting to connect the idea of pyramid power with an established scientific paradigm, which is not guaranteed to be true, and which is in fact guaranteed to be false.
All of this reminds me of attitudes to homeopathy. I should state that my position on this is that I neither use nor recommend homeopathy, because I’m not aware of a mechanism whereby it could be said to work, but that’s not the same as believing that it doesn’t. I think the established scientific fact that both sharks and moths can detect scents when probability suggests the compounds concerned are not sufficiently concentrated in the medium concerned for them either to encounter a single molecule or work out which direction they’re coming from is interestingly similar to homeopathy, but the responsible position is to remain agnostic. This is because all the studies I’ve seen from an apparently scientific perspective regarding homeopathy lack good ecological validity and are not undertaken within the environment of a protocol which has been agreed between homeopaths and the scientific researchers. This could for all we know be a special case of Dunning-Kruger. But I’m not knowingly a homeopath and I have my doubts, even given apparent double-blind provings.
In the case of pyramid power, I feel more confident that there’s nothing in it, and as such I would count as a “K” skeptic rather than a “C” sceptic. This is because I haven’t personally encountered any research on the matter which is well-designed, but even so feel the urge to reject it because it doesn’t fit into the current general scientific world view. This could also be compared to astrology, where I have specifically rejected it owing to the opportunity to undertake a research programme using thousands of subjects and personally crunched the numbers statistically to establish that in that situation, there was nothing in it, at least regarding sun signs. Hence my position on pyramid power is that I don’t believe in it, but that may be unfair because I haven’t tested it experimentally. That would be true scepticism.
A Box Of Chocolates 