Odyssey and Exodus: the Long Journey Home

Homer’s heroic tale The Odyssey recounts the adventures of the brave and sharp-witted Odysseus as he voyages home from the Trojan War to his native island of Ithaca across ‘the wine-dark sea’. Some of the incidents in the story have become so familiar that you might know of them even if you have not read the narrative.

During his protracted ten years-long journey, Odysseus must face the alluring but deadly song of the sirens, is forced to confront the sorceress Circe who turns his crew into swine, must  [1]outwit the one-eyed rock-hurling giant cyclops [2]Polyphemus, and at one stage even journeys down to the very Underworld. In another episode, the travelling hero and his crew are cast onto an enchanted isle where they must face a powerful sorcerer who demonstrates his powers by turning his magician’s staff into a writhing snake. Or does he?

Well, you might recognise all of the above incidents as being from The Odyssey – except the last. To have encountered this particular ‘sorcerer’ Odysseus would have had to journey to Egypt and another culture. And Homer would have had to have written, not The Odyssey, but the Book of Exodus, in which Moses’ brother [3]Aaron demonstrates the powers of his Deity to the Pharaoh by turning his staff into a serpent. If (as I have just done) we give this scriptural incident a non-scriptural setting, we have no hesitation in recognizing it as a fantasy element in an adventure story. Not for a moment would we seriously consider that it actually happened.

So why is it that we can be entertained by (but do not for a moment seriously believe in) the spell-casting of the bewitching Circe and the sirens and other supernatural and fantasy elements in Homer, while (if we are believers) we uncritically accept the veracity of such supernatural scriptural incidents as the parting of the Red Sea, the [4]burning bush, and even a [5]talking donkey. All these incidents in scripture (and others like them) clearly defy the natural order. They are as fantastic as the crew-devouring sea monster Scylla, whom brave Odysseus also encounters. In short: what makes the scriptural sea monster [6]Leviathan so fundamentally different from the Homeric sea monster Scylla?

The simple answer is of course: context. As soon as something crosses that crucial line into scripture, different rules apply. Faith, not entertainment, is what willingly suspends our disbelief. Faith, for reasons which I’m writing this blog to try and figure out, makes a rational mind accept irrational things. And context is the simple answer, yes. But if we dig a little deeper, the apparent gap between the scriptural and the secular proves not to be as wide as we might have thought. Homer’s first book, The Iliad, covers the events of the Trojan War which, like Odysseus’ voyage home, lasted ten long years, and almost ended in a grinding [7]stalemate.

The first two books of the Bible (and of the Torah) are Genesis and Exodus. The two Homeric books are The Iliad and The Odyssey. The author of the first two is traditionally Moses, although ‘Moses’ turns out to be as elusive an historical figure as Homer himself. Both of these sources originally belonged to a Bronze Age oral tradition, and were passed down by word of mouth from generation to generation before finally being committed to writing in the Iron Age – hundreds of years after the events which they relate, which purportedly took place in the Late Bronze Age: historical novels of a sort, if you will.

If we extract suitable tag words from The Iliad we might choose: transgression, forced detention and exile (of Helen of Troy, who is rightfully Helen, queen of Sparta). If we do the same for Genesis we might have: transgression, forced expulsion and exile (of Eve from Eden). Doing the same for The Odyssey we could choose: long voyage home, full of trials. And for Exodus: long journey home, full of trials.

The pattern is clear. But is the pattern more than coincidence? That the ancient Mystery Schools of Greece and Egypt had contact with each other can be established readily enough. Sacred proportions used by both cultures can be found both in the [8]Great Pyramid and in the Parthenon. But did these teachings find their way into scripture? The very [9]name of Moses (who traditionally was an initiate of the Egyptian temple mysteries) is Egyptian, and various of our earliest surviving Biblical texts are in Ancient Greek. The teachings of the Mystery Schools of Pythagoras can even now be found in [10]scripture – and these extant examples are only those which slipped between the fingers of those church fathers who were all too eager to expunge them.

One way in which these Mystery Schools sought to instruct was to use a [11]female character to represent the soul, and to follow that soul’s journey from the innocence of a heavenly ‘home’ through transgression into the incarnation (represented by some sort of exile or incarceration) of a material earthly existence (that is: a human life) to an eventual return (a homecoming) to a heavenly state once that life is over. All of human existence was – and is – bound up in these stories, and even those who did not know of their deeper meanings would still feel the powerful tug of their true intentions. Many hundreds of years later they still do – which is why these timeless stories continue to speak to us.

Hawkwood

Notes:

[1] Although possessing great physical strength, Odysseus tends to use his cunning and sharp wits to win through in these encounters: attributes which clearly appealed to Homer’s audience.

[2] The historian Robin Lane Fox has persuasively suggested that Homer’s cyclops could have been based upon the folk memory of a Mediterranean volcanic eruption. The description of a one-eyed giant (the huge volcanic crater) hurling rocks at shipping (the ejected lava bombs and pumice) certainly seems to fit the job description.

[3] Exodus 7:10. In a secular context this episode would read as a typical duel between two sorcerers to see who commands the most power. 

[4] Please see my post The Burning Bush.

[5] Numbers 22:28. Even for those who read their Bible it sometimes comes as a surprise that it contains a story with a talking donkey. For me the most charming aspect of this story is the way in which, when his own donkey suddenly begins to talk to him, not only is Balaam totally unphased, but he engages the animal in conversation as if it's the most normal thing in the world. The inevitable secular comparison is the talking donkey in the animated film franchise Shrek (right). With the latter, we happily suspend disbelief in the name of entertainment. With the former, we seem equally happy to suspend it in the name of faith.

[6] Job 41:1-34 contains a stirring and detailed description of the monster. Isaiah 27:1 chronicles its destruction by the Lord’s ‘sore and great and strong sword’.

[7] If you read The Iliad expecting to thrill to the episode of the wooden horse, you’ll be disappointed. Contrary to what Hollywood might have led you to believe, the famed wooden horse does not appear in The Iliad, but in the later writings of the Roman poet Virgil, although Homer briefly mentions it in The Odyssey.

[8 and 10] Please see my post Vesica Piscis: The Tale of a Fish.

[9] Please see my post The Amarna Heresies.

[11] Please see my post Eve’s Story. The story of Sophia (‘Wisdom’) is another example.

Sources:

Homer: The Iliad, translated by E.V. Rieu. Penguin Classics.

Homer: The Odyssey, translated by E.V. Rieu. Penguin Classics. 

Homer: The Odyssey, translated by T.E. Lawrence. Wordsworth Classics.

Robin Lane Fox: Travelling Heroes: Greeks and their Myths in the Epic Age of Homer. Allen Lane/Penguin.

Zondervan King James Study Bible.

The Paintings:

David Bergen: The Siren, 21st-century. So often the sirens are portrayed as winsome damsels, although it is not their physical beauty but their song which lures sailors to their deaths. When I read in Homer that the sirens' isle is strewn with the bones and decaying corpses of their victims then I knew that the way to go with my own siren was dark, dangerous and very predatory.

J.M.W. Turner: Odysseus Deriding Polyphemus, 19th-century. This master of light wisely reduces the rock-hurling giant to a half-glimpsed figure wreathed in clouds and mist. The sun’s gold on the water, the billowing sails… the artist might not have snagged it with the historical accuracy of the Greek ships, but when art gets this good who really cares?

J.W. Waterhouse: Circe offering the Cup to Odysseus, 19th-century. The sorceress is here comfortably transformed into the quintessential Victorian femme fatale. Behind her the large circular mirror allows us to glimpse what we cannot see directly: cunning Odysseus who will succeed in turning the powerful sorceress into his ally. 

Gustave Doré: Leviathan, 19th-century. Inset: a 5th-century b.c.e. Greek carving of Scylla. These two writhing sea monsters, the one scriptural, the other Homeric, bring us to the threshold of what it is that divides a Biblical monster from a mythic one. Since both are equally fantastic, it falls to the faith of the individual to untangle any difference – if indeed one exists.

Herbert Draper: Odysseus and the Sirens, 19th-century. The ears of his crew having been stopped with beeswax, Odysseus struggles to free himself from his willing bonds to leap overboard and follow the sirens’ irresistible call. But the ropes hold, and he becomes the only man to have heard the sirens and live, although perhaps always to hear them forever echo in his dreams.

David Roberts: The Israelites leaving Egypt, 19th-century. The beginning of the Exodus and the journey through the wilderness to the land promised by God. Roberts had a thorough grounding in architecture, visiting and painting many of the ruins in Egypt and the Levant, from Karnak to Petra. It shows. This single painting has inspired more than one Biblical film epic.

W-A. Bouguereau: Homer and his Guide, 20th-century. Age accepting the guiding hand of youth. That Homer was blind is a tradition as impossible to establish as his actual appearance. What we do know is that the lyre slung across his back would have been used to accompany the recitations of his epic verse, with the performance seamlessly blending the sacred and the secular.

PLEASE NOTE: I have produced the timeline here with some misgivings: the dating of these events is so contentious that sources can at times wildly disagree. It nevertheless seemed worthwhile to make the attempt, because producing such a graphic is a way of underscoring the centuries-long gaps between the recording of the events and when those events were supposed to have taken place. Archaeology has established the existence of Troy, but the siege of Troy as described by Homer hovers between history and possible fiction. Even with the best of intentions, virtually no evidence for the Exodus exists outside of scripture, and even dating it remains as speculative as the pharaoh whom scripture leaves unnamed, and whose identity otherwise would provide us with a time frame for the event. 

Vesica Piscis: The Tale of a Fish

This is the tale of a fish. This particular fish can be found swimming in the most unlikely and unexpected seas, and its territory is expansive enough to cover radically differing beliefs and worldviews. So you will realise that one thing that this fish is very good at doing is surviving. In our own 21st-century world, it frequently can be seen swimming happily along in traffic on the [1]bumper of many a car whose occupants choose to signal their allegiance to the Christian faith. It’s use as a Christian symbol is usually assumed to date back to the beginnings of that religion, and for adherents of that faith is perhaps second only to the Christian cross in symbolic significance.

The truth, as generally happens, is something different. The Christian fish stems from an anagram in Greek – the language of the Gospel texts – formed from the first letters of the phrase ‘Jesus Christ of God, Son, Savior’, which spell out the word ‘ICTHYS’, meaning ‘fish’. While this appropriately references various passages in scripture, and the written word in Greek was used by followers of the new faith, the actual use of the stylised fish symbol is absent. So the story that it was used as a secret sign among early Christians seems to be no more than that. Instead, an eight-spoked wheel was used (below), sometimes with the letters written within the spokes of the wheel. Surprisingly, the first use of the currently-familiar Christian fish formed from a double arc seems to date, not from a historical source, but from its appearance in a mid 20th-century [2]Hollywood Biblical epic, and it has gained in popularity since then.

Clearly the way in which this stylised fish is drawn must have come from somewhere. The prototype of all the various current bumper sticker and key ring fishes can be traced back to a diagram which has been known since antiquity as the Vesica piscis (literally: ‘vessel of the fish’). Formed simply-enough from two circles which overlap at their centers, this basic diagram can be expanded upon in a number of intriguing ways. In the diagram below left, a line is drawn between the centers of the two east-west larger circles (which contain six-sided hexagons). The sizes of the two smaller north-south circles are determined by this same line, but this time containing the line not six times but five, making a polygon. And now, out of the overlapping area of the two smaller circles… the fish emerges! Voila!

This involved-looking diagram can be drawn with nothing more fancy than a basic pair of compasses and a straight edge of some kind – simple tools and methods whose use has been known for millennia. Just how far back in time we can push things is seen in the image below. This time, we enclose a second Vesica piscis within the first, bounded by the overlap. Simply by using the north-south points of overlap as the apex and base, we now join the dots to construct a triangle – which, having an exact base [3]angle of 51°51', is a perfect match for the angle of slope of the Great Pyramid of Giza! And where the two inner dotted lines meet the intersecting circles, another triangle with an exact base angle of 60° is formed – which in turn gives the exact proportions of each of the pyramid’s four sides. If there is one thing that plays no role in all which the Great Pyramid involves, it is chance.

If we view the overlapping area of the Vesica piscis on it own, we now have a shape known as the [4]mandorla. The mandorla is truly ubiquitous, and can be seen in both Islamic and Christian illuminated manuscripts (below), and even in the cards of the Tarot (below center, which at its corners repeats the same four evangelical symbols seen in its Christian neighbour). As part of the Vesica piscis its form is found in [5]architecture, on Masonic symbols, and on secular city crests, and designed variations also can be seen on company logos such as those of CBS and Gucci. The Vesica piscis and its mandorla clearly are forms which speaks powerfully to the human mind.

To come to a deeper understanding of the Vesica piscis and its power, we need to reach beyond those beliefs which burden themselves with sin and guilt, and the way in which they regard the human body as something intrinsically shameful. The traditional carved figure known as a Sheela na gig (below, left), which seems to be Celtic in origin, shows a little goggle-eyed female displaying her open vulva. The vulva is in the form of a mandorla, and her goggle eyes echo this form. Over a hundred of these figures are found in churches and castles throughout Ireland, and a few scattered examples are still to be seen in England, although most were defaced by prudish minds in the intervening centuries. The meaning of these little figures is disputed, although they were possibly associated with birth and fertility, or to ward off evil. The goddess [6]Isis-Aphrodite, an early Egyptian-Greek hybrid deity (below, right), seems to radiate the secret harmonics of the Vesica piscis in her proportions.

Enclosing the mandorla of the pentagon (the same mandorla used for the ‘fish’) within the mandorla of the Vesica piscis (below) reveals a form which mirrors the female [7]vulva. The word used in Sanskrit is yoni, which is interpreted as meaning the source of life: of a divine passage, in the sense of being a passage of the soul from spirit to matter. From the yoni emerges new life – a powerful symbol for the spirit of the feminine, for the cosmic goddess, and for the journey from the womb which we all have made to come into this world.

Returning to the scriptural setting with which I began this post, in the [8]Gospel of John we read how the risen Christ asks Simon-Peter to bring his net bursting with ‘great fishes’. In what seems to be a curiously-precise detail, the Gospel tells us that there were exactly ‘an hundred and fifty and three’. Why is the specific number of the catch given? It seems irrelevant alongside the greater message of the story. But seemingly-irrelevant details often conceal greater truths within them. The number 153 relates directly to the Gnostic mystery schools and to [9]Pythagorean teachings, and the proportion known from that time as the [10]‘Measure of the Fish’.

As with Pythagoras’ famed [11]theorem, the proportions of the mandorla within the Vesica piscis are constant, and always can be measured as 265 units high by, yes… 153 units wide (that is: the length of the fish’s body). These figures express the square root of three – for millennia regarded as the sacred Trinity. All these ideas pre-date the Gospels by centuries. The Church fathers thought to expunge these secret teachings completely from scripture. The fact is that such Gnostic knowledge is so deeply embedded in scriptural texts that the only way to eradicate it completely, as the frenzied zeal of the [12]early Church fathers strived so hard to do, would be to scrap the whole Bible and start again from scratch. And this mystic number 153 apparently flew under the radar of the uncomprehending early Gospel editors to land in the orthodox canon, and in the words of Jesus himself, to be read, interpreted and understood in a mystic sacred language ‘for those with ears to hear’.

One person who apparently has ears to hear is the author Margaret Starbird. She has calculated that the numerical value of the Greek letters which spell out η Μαγδαληνή (the Magdalene) also total exactly 153 (also remembering that the lingual root of the name Mary means ‘the Sea’). This system of ascribing numerical values to letters was known as gematria: a logical practice in written languages (such as Hebrew and Greek) which had no numbers. The true role of the Magdalene is a subject which I’ll leave for another post, but Dan Brown aside, she clearly was someone considerably more than the simplistic redeemed scarlet woman, as orthodoxy would have us believe. And the true worth of the disciples’ [13]catch was clearly something more significant than the going market value of fish, otherwise stipulating such a specific number would serve no purpose.

The Vesica piscis is itself so deeply embedded in world culture that at times it appears to become a door, with the two circles representing the worlds of matter and spirit, and their mandorla becoming an opening between these, creating a portal between different realities or dimensions (above). And perhaps, having read this post, you will never see that bumper sticker fish in quite the same way again!

Hawkwood

PLEASE NOTE:

If you would like to read and see more about the Yoni and the Chalice Well and their associations with the Vesica piscis, you are welcome to visit the post on Emma's blog: The Goddess in the Well.

Notes:

[1] The now-familiar bumper sticker whose stylised form has its origins in the sacred geometry of the pre-Christian Gnostic mystery schools and in the vulva of the cosmic goddess. This sticker (left) is in the exact same proportions as the female labia of the yoni and the fish mandorla shown in my above images.

[2] Incredibly, the earliest example which I have been able to trace of the stylised fish symbol being used as a secret sign by early Christians is not a historical source, but one that was used in the 1951 Hollywood Biblical epic Quo Vadis?, in a scene (right) in which Deborah Kerr as the pagan-to-Christian convert Lygia draws the symbol in the sand. It is both startling and sobering to realize that the whole Christian bumper sticker tradition apparently began as the idea of a Hollywood scriptwriter!

[3] This angle is quoted from the text of John Michell’s book The View Over Atlantis. Other sources give the angle either as 51°50' or 52°, but chapter 2 of Michell’s book explains why the correct angle is so critical. It is difficult to over-estimate the insights which this book offers. I still have the now rather worn paperback edition which I bought thirty five years ago, and it has influenced my thinking ever since. A revised edition titled The New View Over Atlantis is currently available. Mind-bending stuff.

[4] From the Italian, meaning ‘almond’.

[5] The famous chalice well cover in the gardens below Glastonbury Abbey has done much to raise contemporary awareness of the Vesica piscis. It was designed in 1919 by Frederick Bligh Bond, and copies are now widely seen on jewellery (right) and other items. The Vesica piscis is utilized in various other philosophies and beliefs, such as the Jewish Kabbalah’s Sephirot, or Tree of Life, and the overlapping Vesica piscis circles comprising the figure known as the Flower of Life, seen in the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci. 

[6] Please see my post The Emperor and the Eye of Horus for more about Isis-Aphrodite and other hybrid gods and goddesses.

[7] To be clear: I am here comparing the form of the yoni with the two mandorlas of my text. The Sanskrit yoni actually has its own symbols, of which the one here (left) is a widely-used example. It could be my over-heated imagination, but does anyone else notice its (presumably coincidental) resemblance to a certain popular spaceship? J

[8] John 21:10-11. This appearance of Jesus is his fifth appearance after the resurrection.

[9] We now tend to think of Pythagoras of Samos, who lived several centuries before the events of the Gospels, primarily as a mathematician. But in his day he was seen as a profound sage and mystic. His ideas, both spiritual, philosophical and intellectual, have impacted Western thought ever since. It is possible that the term philosophy, meaning ‘lover of Sophia’ (Wisdom personified as the goddess) was actually coined by Pythagoras. The word philosophy as well has subtly changed it meaning through the ages. In ancient times it was a worldview, a way of life in which the striving after a true perception of things could lead to an experience of the divine.

[10] The number 153 in the Measure of the Fish is therefore the exact length (right) of the fish’s body. Remember: this is the identical fish which appears above on the Christian bumper sticker, whose source lies in an ancient pagan past stemming from the Gnostic mystery schools.

[11] As every schoolboy can (or should be able to) quote: ‘The square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides’.   When constructed using the Vesica piscis, it gives the perfect proportions of 3:4:5 (left), and is known as the Sacred Triangle. This triangle and its measurements, as with so much that is associated with the Vesica piscis, can among other places be found not only in the proportions of the Great Pyramid, but also in the ground plans of Stonehenge and Glastonbury Abbey.

[12] Please see my posts The Gospel According to Somebody and The New Church.

[13] Of the various commentaries which I have read about the Gospel’s inclusion of this number, none mentions the apparently overlooked fact that, for a haul which the Gospel describes as so great that it was surprising that the fishermen’s net did not burst from the weight, one hundred and fifty three fish is hardly a large quantity. The number of fish caught does not match the description of the haul which, if we were not given the number, we would assume to be a catch of several hundred. The specific number given must therefore be for reasons other than mere description. And the net did not break, because it was - and is - the unbroken net of life (above), and of the cosmos itself. Like the Buddhist Indra’s Net, each pearl of water at the intersection of the weave perfectly reflects the completeness of all the other parts of the net. The net is an image of the Gnostic ‘many in One’. A net which remains mysteriously intact, the inclusion of the specific number 153, are both examples of secret Gnostic knowledge 'hidden in plain sight' in orthodox scripture. 

Sources:

John Michell: The View Over Atlantis.

Margaret Starbird: Magdalene’s Lost Legacy: Symbolic Numbers and the Sacred Union in Christianity.

David R. Fideler: Jesus Christ, Sun of God: Ancient Cosmology and Early Christian Symbolism.

Fishermen's boat on Lake Tiberius, Galilee, from U.S. Historical Archive. Dead Sea scroll: Great Isaiah scroll from the Shrine of the Book Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Sheela na gig: replica of the original from a church in Kilpeck, Herefordshire, England. Isis-Aphrodite: a Roman statue from Egypt, 2nd-3rd-centuries, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Tarot card: Arcanum 21: The World, from the Marseille Tarot, reissued in 1930 by Paul Marteau from an earlier 18th-century deck, facsimile edition published by ©U.S. Games Systems. Millennium Falcon spaceship from Star Wars by Lucasfilms. Quo Vadis? film still from M.G.M. Photo of the bust of Pythagoras from the Science Photo Library, with the background of a Greek manuscript on Pythagorean calculations from the Vatican Library. Portrait of Mary Magdalene by Bernadino Luini, with the background of a fragment of the Gospel of Mary in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and a rosette from the 18th-century Order of the Magdalene engraved by Hugh Clark. Portal entity created with Chaoscope and Mehdi software. Thanks to my wife for the use of her chalice well pendant! All graphics and other artwork © Hawkwood.

A Night Inside the Great Pyramid

Anyone reading this who enjoys browsing around second-hand bookshops will know the satisfaction that comes with making a real find – especially when that find turns out to be a snap at the [1]price. That’s how it felt for me when in a second-hand bookstore in Rotterdam I discovered a [2]1936 edition of Paul Brunton’s A Search in Secret Egypt. Now, I already have on my bookshelf a dog-eared paperback [3]edition of this book from the early sixties, but the original hardcover edition, with its photographs by the author, was a prize indeed.

Brunton’s book is rich in vivid descriptions, both of the country and its monuments and also of his varied experiences, which include practicing the art of snake charming with Egyptian cobras. But the book’s main claim to fame rests principally with the chapter in which he describes his night spent in the King’s Chamber in the heart of the Great Pyramid of Giza; the first person to report on this since Napoleon tried the same experiment while on his Egyptian campaign in 1798 (below) – and apparently emerged the next morning from the interior gloom ashen-faced, silent, and refusing to answer questions about what he had experienced.

As far as I know, nobody has been allowed to repeat this experience since Brunton – although today’s [4]police guards stationed at the edifice are apparently not above a little palm-greasing. Locked at dusk inside the Pyramid at his own request by the obliging guards, the author resolves ‘To sit, awake and alert, for twelve hours in the King's Chamber, while the slow darkness moved across the African world'.

In the increasing cold and the all-pervading shadows of the granite-lined King's Chamber (above), the author reports a series of harrowing encounters with a virtual parade of frightening phantasms and ‘monstrous elemental creations’, after which he undergoes an initiatory experience under the guidance of apparently more benign beings. Brunton’s book as a whole convinces me that he was a man of sincerity and integrity. Indeed, he was clearly someone of a contemplative nature who valued his own personal spirituality. So what are we to make of the author’s encounter with these ancient ghosts? I personally am convinced that he certainly had some kind of an experience. But perhaps the nature of that experience was other than it seemed.

Almost by chance, on a [5]website unconnected with paranormal issues, I came across a description of the Great Pyramid that appeared to offer a possible explanation. It seems that the long galleries that run inside the Pyramid, from deep beneath its base up to the King’s Chamber (highlighted, above), act as resonators that keep the ‘background sound’ of the Pyramid vibrating at a steady 6 hertz, which is well below the audible threshold of human hearing. In other words: the Great Pyramid is virtually awash with inaudible [6]infrasound.

Infrasound is strange stuff. The naturally-occurring presence of infrasound (the signal, above) in an environment can induce in the human mind a strong sense of being in the company of an unseen (and usually threatening) 'presence' and provoke inexplicable feelings of deep unease - even outright fear. It has been detected deep underground in the stations and tunnels of subways, and at locations which have been described as ‘haunted’ – and it even has been utilized in film soundtracks as a subliminal audio signal deliberately to provoke feelings of disquiet in an audience. If you saw it in a theatre, do you remember that feeling of dread when in Jurassic Park the unseen T. rex was approaching in the dark? You were being subjected to infrasound.

This understanding of infrasound and its effects has only come long after Brunton’s day. Does it explain his experience (and indeed, whatever it was that evidently rattled Napoleon in the same circumstances) as a trick of the mind? It might. Settling down for the night in the granite-lined Chamber, Brunton describes experiencing an 'undefinable feeling of uneasiness' - which exactly fits the effects of exposure to infrasound. Sensed ghostly presences, both in ‘haunted’ houses and inside the Great Pyramid of Giza, might be no more than these mischievous low-frequency sound waves messing with our minds. The setting itself – a ‘creepy’ old house at night, or the cold and echoing gloom of the Pyramid’s interior – does the rest. But trust me: when you are actually in the situation and these things are coming straight at you, all the reassuring science goes straight out the window!

Hawkwood

Notes:
[1] The current eBay price is around €45. I bought my copy for €8!

[2] Paul Brunton: A Search in Secret Egypt. Pub. Rider, 1936.

[3] Paul Brunton: A Search in Secret Egypt. Pub. Arrow, 1962.

[4] Graham Hancock: Fingerprints of the Gods. The author describes bribing the guards to allow him to make a dangerous night ascent to the Pyramid’s summit (left, in the background). Anyone who actually believes that the Great Pyramid was ‘just’ a pharaoh’s tomb, as orthodox archaeology insists, can be helped out of their dream by reading this book. John Michell’s The View Over Atlantis is also recommended for the same reason, as is John Anthony West’s Serpent in the Sky. All three titles are now classics in their field.

[5] By the author Christopher Dunn.

[6] The audible threshold for human hearing is above 20 hertz, so any sound wave below 20 hertz is in the infrasound wave spectrum. The presence of infrasound in the Great Pyramid begs the question as to whether the infrasound there is a natural phenomenon – a side effect caused by the internal tunnels and chambers – or whether the architecture was deliberately contrived to generate the sub-audio effects. Having read the above three books, I would be totally unsurprised if it was the latter. The Great Pyramid is the most remarkable structure ever built, and as it is entirely possible that its purpose was at least in part for some sort of initiatory rituals, then these would only be enhanced by the presence of the infrasound phenomenon. 

Sources:

The top image is adapted from a period postcard in my collection dating from the 1930's. The image of the interior of the King's Chamber is adapted from a photo at CultureFocus. The 'ghost lights' in this photo are my own enhancement to suggest the atmosphere which Brunton experienced.

Thanks to T.M. Harte at M.E.S.A. for reviewing the infrasound aspects of this post for me.

A well-reasoned appraisal of the infrasound phenomenon in relation to alleged paranormal activity can be found at Shaun Underwood's Infrasound, from which the image of the infrasound signal has been adapted. This author also mentions that infrasound can cause visual hallucinations, and can be generated by such natural phenomena as thunderstorms. The feelings of apprehension which many experience during a thunderstorm (even when in a safe situation) could be due to the infrasound phenomenon.