NovKMiiKR 9, 188;5.| 



SCIENCE. 



625 



PROCTOR'S GREAT PYRAMID. 



The Great Pyramid : observatory, tomb, and temple. 

 By R. A. Pkoctor London, Chatto $• Windus, 

 188a. 323p., illustr. 8°. 



This last work of !Mr. Proctor's fertile and 

 ingenious mind is of uncommon and enduring 

 interest. To begin j^-ith, it concerns the most 

 uncommon and the most enduring work of 

 man, — the Pyraniid of Cheops, whose mighty 

 form has for nigh five thousand years remained 

 the least changed and the least comprehensible 

 of all man's great deeds. Then it comes hap- 

 pily' into a discussion which is by far the most 

 curious that has recently vexed the minds of 

 learned men. There are plenty of paradoxi- 

 cal folk on the lower confines of science, — 

 circle-squarers, Symms'-hole hunters, and the 

 like ; but men of learning, especially astron- 

 omers and mathematicians, are a hard-headed 

 lot. The crack-brained do not often find their 

 way up to their upper heights, for evident 

 reasons. But it is a set of these really learned 

 people that has given us the sect of the pjr- 

 amid worshippers. — the most extraordinary 

 cult of a century, that, of all the Great Pyr- 

 amid has ever seen, has been the most fertile 

 in religious whims. 



Active proselyting not j-et having begun, 

 perhaps for want of needed martyrs, the gen- 

 eral public has as yet heard little of the p3-ram- 

 idalists or their faith. This is surprising ; for 

 their faith has more miracles ' to the acre ' 

 than Mormonism, and these miracles are as 

 solid and ponderable as the pyramid itself. 

 They are before our ej"cs : hundreds of pages 

 of mathematics are needed to express them, 

 and they have all the cheap look of certainty 

 which tlie public associates with algebraic for- 

 mulae. The following is in brief the history of 

 P3Tamidalism, the only mathematical ism of the 

 nineteenth centur}-. Many .years ago a Mr. 

 John Taylor, pondering on the matter of the 

 Great Pj-ramid, — which, b}- the waj-, he had 

 not seen, and never saw, — came to the ex- 

 traordinary conclusion that the architects of the 

 structure recorded in its proportions, and in 

 the arrangement of its chambers and passages, 

 certain religious and astronomical truths, 

 which the}' intended should, after thousands 

 of years of secrecy, be divulged in our day. 

 Mr. Taylor, being otherwise unknown to fame, 

 though clearly entitled by this tour of imagina- 

 tion to rank high among speculators, found 

 no able advocates of his notion, until his book 

 came in the way of Professor Piazzi Smyth, 

 astronomer royal of Scotland, one of the most 

 distinguished astronomers of our time. Cap- 



tivated with this daring liyi)othesis. Professor 

 Smyth visited the Great Pyramid, spent many 

 months in a careful and costly survey of the 

 structure, and, in his successive writings on 

 the subject, has not only re-affirmed the con- 

 elusions of Taylor, but immensely extended 

 the range of his conclusions. Briefly stated, 

 his position is this : some three thousand years 

 or more before our era, a Semitic prince, 

 probably Melchizedek, that vast shadow of the 

 time, inspired by God, went to Egypt, gained 

 an intellectual mastery over King Cheops, and 

 forced him to build this pyramid, which was 

 designed to ' • keep a certain message secret and 

 inviolable for four thousand years, . . . and 

 in the next thousand years it was to enunciate 

 this message to all men ; . . . and that part 

 of the pyramid's usefulness is now beginning." 

 This ' message ' is thus summed up b\- Mr. 

 Proctor : — 



"The Great ryramid was erected, it would seem, 

 under the instructions of a certain Semitic king, 

 probably no other than Melchizedel;. By supernat- 

 ural means, the architects were instructed to place 

 the pyramid in latitude 30° north; to select for its 

 Sgure that of a square pyramid, carefully oriented; 

 to employ for their unit of length the sacred cubit, 

 corresponding to the twenty-millionth part of the 

 earth's axis; and to make the side of llie square base 

 equal to just so many of these sacred cubits as 

 there are days and parts of a day in a year. They 

 were further, by supernatural help, enabled to square 

 the circle, and symbolized their victory over this 

 problem by making the pyramid's height bear to the 

 perimeter of the base the ratio which the radius of a 

 circle bears to the circumference. Moreover, the 

 great processional period, in which the earth's axis 

 gyrates like that of some mighty top around the per- 

 pendicular to the ecliptic, wjis communicated to the 

 builders with a degree of accuracy far exceeding 

 that of the best modern determinations; and they 

 were instructed to symbolize that relation in the di- 

 mensions of the pyramid's base. A value of the sun's 

 distance more accurate by far than modern astron- 

 omers have obtained (even since the last transit of 

 Venus) was imparted to them, and they embodied 

 that dimension in the height of the pyramid. Other 

 results which modern science has achieved, but which 

 by merely human means the architects of the pyramid 

 could not have obtained, were also supeniaturally 

 communicated to them ; so that the true mean density 

 of the earth, her true shape, the configuration of land 

 and water, the mean temperature of the earth's 

 sinface, and so forth, were either symbolized in the 

 Great Pyramid's ])osition, or in the shapt? and dimen- 

 sions of its exterior and interior. In the pyramid, 

 also, were preserved the true, because supernaturally 

 communicated, standards of length, area, capacity, 

 weight, density, Iieat, time, and money. The pyra- 

 mid also indicated, by certain features of its interior 

 structure, that whenit was built the holy influences 

 of the Pleiades were exerted from a most effective 

 position, — the meridian through the points where 

 the ecliptic and equator intersect. And as the pyra- 

 mid thus significantly refers to the past, so also it 

 indicates the future history of the earth, especially 

 in showing when and where the millennium is to 



