Over the centuries, man has created structures and monuments of stone for their durability. The Great Pyramid of Giza, a gigantic stone edifice, was clearly built by very advanced and sophisticated beings who remain as mysterious today as the Great Pyramid itself.
Its significance is undeniable. Situated precisely at the centre of the earth at the intersection of the 30th parallel of both longitude and latitude, between the coast of Mexico in the west and that of China in the east, between the northern cape of Norway and South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, it remained the tallest building on earth for thousands of years.
The proportions of the structure itself are of critical importance: each side of its base, for instance, as measured in Hebrew cubits is 365.2422 cubits long, which is the precise number of days in the solar year. The perimeter of the base, namely 365.2422 x 4 = 14609.68, equals the circumference of a circle in which the diameter is twice the height of the pyramid, i.e. 232.52 x 2 x 3.1416 which also equals 14609.68.
The base of this huge building covers about thirteen acres and was built of approximately 2.3 million blocks of stone weighing between twenty-five to fifty tons each. The construction took place supposedly over a period of twenty-seven years but the time, labour and method remain unanswered and enigmatic questions. Originally, there was a capstone or slab on top of the pyramid, probably made of Tura limestone, which was stripped from the triangular faces of the construction, again no-one knows why.
The entrance at the north face of the Great Pyramid leads to a corridor three feet square, descending into an unfinished chamber at an angle of 26 degrees. There is a square pit dug into the trenched floor, a rough wall and an unfinished opening to a blind passage. Another shaft forming a descending corridor from the unfinished chamber could have been used as an air vent for the workers inside.
Sixty degrees down into the descending corridor is an opening to an ascending corridor 129 feet long and at the same slope as the descending one.
At the end of the passage, from the top of the ascending corridor is a room named by the Arabs as The Queen’s Chamber, which lies precisely midway between the north-south sides of the pyramid, directly under the original capstone. This, too, is unfinished: 17 by 18 feet, with a pointed roof rising to 20 feet high and a niche in the east wall, probably built for a statue. There are two dead-end shafts, one in the north, the other in the south wall, which may have been used for ventilation or else for astrological reasons in the survey process while the chambers were being built.
The continuation of the ascending corridor at the 129-foot mark forms the main wall, known as the Grand Gallery, an architectural feature over one hundred feet long, with thirty-feet long walls of polished limestone, up to seven and a half feet high. At the foot of each wall is a catwalk, two feet high, running along the length of the gallery, with a passage, three and a half feet wide between the catwalks, sloped at 26 degrees.
At the upper end of the gallery, a stone raised three feet high from the floor gives access to a low, narrow passage about four feet square, leading to The King’s Chamber. About a third of the way along this passageway of polished limestone, it becomes bigger to form a sort of antechamber made of polished red granite. The passageway then continues to narrow to its original aperture of four feet square and opens into The King’s Chamber.
This is built entirely of polished red granite blocks and is 17 x 34 feet wide and 19 feet high. The north and south walls contain shafts similar to those in The Queen’s Chamber and the unfinished room. One of these shafts penetrates the cover of The Great Pyramid and reaches the outer surface. Near the west wall stands a rectangular granite sarcophagus without a lid. It is about a foot wider than the four-foot corridor and, therefore, must have been placed in position while the Chamber was being built and not brought through the corridor.
Situated 532 metres or just over 1745 feet from The Great Pyramid of Giza is the equally mysterious Sphinx with a man’s face on a lion’s body. In Egyptian mythology, a lion was the guardian of sacred places, possibly because, according to the priests of Heliopolis who practised a solar creed, the lion guarded the gates of the underworld. The lion, symbolised by the Sphinx, remains as sentinel, its human features referring back to the early sun god, Atum.
The Sphinx was carved from a monolith left over from The Great Pyramid and in all likelihood was originally covered with plaster, painted in the royal colours with the snake or cobra on the forehead, the beard on its chin also a symbol of royalty as was the royal headdress. It measures approximately fourteen feet at its maximum width and is over sixty-six feet high, about two hundred and forty feet long, weighing hundreds or thousands of tons.
In ancient times, the Gaza plateau on which the Sphinx rests was known as Postau or “the mouth of passages.” These led to rooms rumoured to contain a mythical Hall of Records, comprising all lost knowledge of the ancients compiled before The Great Flood. This was recorded by the Greek historian Herodotus and called The Labyrinth, which was, in fact, an underground city or cities, accessed through the passages and tunnels believed to have formed a maze of paths, also containing many palaces.
The entrance to this underground tunnel system leading to cities, palaces etc. was thought to have existed between the forepaws of the Sphinx, though today the entrance is obstructed by sand and rubbish. The French engineer Baraize who was involved in the restoration of the Sphinx from 1925 to 1936 discovered a tunnel at the rump of the Sphinx, but the Egyptian authorities then banned him from the site.
In modern times, using electromagnetic sounding techniques, scientists have surveyed the Sphinx and found proof of a north-south tunnel under it as well as a pocket of water near its northern hind paw and a cavity near the southern back paw. And yet, on each occasion, the Egyptian authorities have rejected the theories and closed down the research in what appears to be an obvious cover-up and evasion.
Archaelogists investigating pyramids in South America are convinced that these were built as temples and not burial chambers. Psychics Edgar Cayce and Manly P. Hall also proposed in the 1920’s that the Egyptian pyramids were not built for entombment but as storage places for the history of mankind from the beginning, a record written in the language of mathematics, geometry and astronomy. Manly P. Hall believed they were built by the survivors of Atlantis. Atlantis was also described by Plato in one of his last works, Critias, in which he comments that at the height of Atlantean civilization, gods walked with men.
The Great Pyramid was the First Temple of the Mysteries, a Holy Mountain or High Place of God, its square base symbolic of Nature’s solid bedrock and her immutable laws.
The angles of the Great Pyramid represent Silence, Profundity, Intelligence and Truth. The south side denotes Cold, the north, Heat, the west side, Darkness and the east as Light.
Manly P. Hall believed The Great Pyramid of Giza was a repository of the secret truths, which are the foundation of all sciences and arts. The initiator or the illustrious one, dressed in blue and gold robe, carrying in his hand the seven-fold key of eternity lived in the depths of the Pyramid. Men entered the portals of Giza and left as gods, becoming the illumined of antiquity. The drama of The Second Death would be acted out in The King’s Chamber, where the initiate would be crucified symbolically and buried in the sarcophagus. During the ritual, the initiate experienced the room as a doorway between the material world and the transcendental spheres of nature. Part of the ritual was to strike the sarcophagus, which then produced a tone unknown in the musical scale. At the end of the rite, the initiate experienced a second birth and gained all the knowledge of the world.
A student of Eastern mysticism, Dr Paul Brunton decided to spend a night in The King’s Chamber, which is recorded in detail in his book A Search in Secret Egypt, 1936. With permission from the Egyptian bureaucratic hierarchy, he spent the night in The King’s Chamber, commenting early on that it was “cold as death” there. Being familiar with para-psychology, he had fasted for three days beforehand.
Striking the great coffin, he said, “there is an unusual sound which is omitted quite unlike anything ever heard by man.” (Dr Paul Brunton: A Search in Secret Egypt, p. 90)
Next to the coffin, he noticed a large marble slab, exactly aligned with the north-south axis. Sitting with his back to the coffin, he switched off his flashlight. In the dark, he intuited the presence of negative entities and wanted to leave. Then suddenly the feeling left him and he could make out two figures who looked like high priests. He heard one of them speak as if in his head, asking why he had come and whether the world of mortals was not enough for him. Brunton answered: “no, that cannot be.”
The priest replied: “The way of the dream shall draw thee far from the fold of reason. Some have gone upon it, and come back mad. Turn now, whilst there is yet time and follow the path appointed for mortal feet.” (Dr Paul Brunton: A Search in Secret Egypt, p. 90)
Brunton insisted on staying, after which the priest turned and vanished. The other priest motioned him to lie down on the coffin and soon he was overcome by a force, after which, within a few seconds, he was hovering outside his body. He could see a silver lustre connecting his new body with the one lying on the coffin. At the same time, he became aware of a feeling of freedom.
Later he found himself with the second priest who told him he must return with a message.
“Know, my son, that in this ancient fane lies the lost record of the early races of man and of the covenant which they made with the creator through the first of his prophets. Know too that chosen men were brought here of old to be shown this covenant that they might return to their fellows and keep this great secret alive. Take back with thee the warning that when men forsake their creator and look on their fellows with hate, as with the princes of Atlantis in whose time this pyramid was built. They are destroyed by the weight of their own iniquity, even as the people of Atlantis were destroyed.” (Dr Paul Brunton: A Search in Secret Egypt, p. 91)
When the priest had finished speaking, Brunton found himself back in his body. He got up, put on his jacket and checked the time as exactly 12 midnight, the bewitching hour. Perhaps his subconscious had been playing tricks on him. When morning came, he made his way to the entrance and, as he left, he gave thanks to the sun god, Ra, for his light.
The original concept of death and rebirth in connection with The Great Pyramid is the Papyrus of Ani, better known as The Egyptian Book of the Dead. It was usually regarded as a ritual book for processing the dead with detailed instructions for the behaviour of the disembodied spirit in the hand of the Gods. But the title also means The Book of the Great Awakening, containing rites for the neophyte looking to enter into a secret organization to gain admittance to all the worldly knowledge not available to the common man. Hence the speculation that the Giza Pyramid was a temple rather than a tomb. Nevertheless, the secrets of The Great Pyramid remain unfathomable.
The wisdom of Moses, Christ and St Paul were said to have been derived through the Egyptian initiation. Though largely altered, some of the lesser ceremonies are still practised by the Freemasons, the Rosicrucians and Christian churches. Plato, Sophocles, Pythagoras and Cicero were known to be individual Egyptian initiates.
Additional information, implications and dimensions have been revealed about the Sphinx as an ongoing process. In 1990 Edgar Cayce had already predicted that the mythical Hall of Records would be discovered underneath the forepaws of the Great Sphinx. Over and above this prediction was the startling revelation that the Sphinx was not 4500 old as had been suggested but 10,000 to 12,000 years or more. He proposed that its age may well be before the last Ice Age and that Khufu did not build The Great Pyramid of Giza or the Sphinx but only repaired them.
Cayce noted that the Sphinx is aligned with The Great Pyramid and the Nile River in a way which mirrors the orientation of the stars about 10,000 to 12,000 years ago in Sumerian times. The Sumerians had written about gods from the sky whom they called Anunnaki who brought advanced technological knowledge. This spurred on the development of man in modern times. Many believe the Anunnaki were not gods at all bult ancient aliens who came to mine gold on planet Earth.
The Anunnaki were thought to have built massive cities underground, entered through a tunnel, its entrance hidden by sand and protected by a monster they called Huwana, his teeth those of a dragon and his face that of a lion, which points to the Sphinx itself.
An Arab historian of the 10th century, Masoudi, wrote about the labyrinth of tunnels under the Sphinx leading to the paths and palaces of the cities under The Great Pyramid. According to him, these subterranean galleries contained written accounts of the wisdom of the various arts and sciences, hidden deep to remain as records for those who could understand them afterwards. He maintained the tunnels were guarded by mechanical statues with amazing capabilities, which today we would probably know as modern-day robots in science fiction or even in reality.
Bearing this in mind as well as modern-day sounding techniques, which point towards this underground maze, it is not surprising in the 21st century that the Egyptians have been building a huge system of walls round the site of the pyramid as well as round larger
unexcavated areas of Giza over an area of eight square kilometres. In some places, the wall is 22 feet or 7 metres high: construction on a deep and wide foundation of about 2 metres below the ground with iron supports at intervals along the trench have been dug for this foundation. Guards are stationed at intervals, which makes one speculate as to why and what the Egyptians need to hide or protect.
Ultimately, the Sphinx as well as The Great Pyramid of Giza remain as intriguing mysteries, yet to be solved.