The mystery of the Great pyramid : traditions concerning it and its connection with the Egyptian Book of the dead : with numerous illustrations

ASTRONOMICAL CONCEPTIONS

during my late visit to Egypt, one of my principal objects was to test this relation; and I confess that the confirmation I obtained afforded me nothing less than amazement. For, in common with the rest of the world, I had always believed that no hieroglyphic is to be found on the exterior of the building. But, on arriving at the fifteenth step (the very step I had specially mentioned), where the entrance shaft, hidden from an observer standing immediately below, lies fully exposed to view, I saw a single immense hieroglyph, deeply sculptured, immediately over the entrance ; and that hieroglyph was no other than the hieroglyph of the ‘ Horizon of Heaven’. Had the founder of the building desired to confirm my views by a single stroke, in his own silent and absolute fashion, he could not have adopted a more efficacious plan than by placing that particular hieroglyph in that particular position.”’ Book of the Master, pp. 55-6.

“ From this point the first veil of secrecy begins. For so effectively was the opening concealed from the uninstructed eyes by a revolving stone,” that the position, once lost, was almost impossible to recover ; and . . . the building remained impenetrable until Caliph Al Mamoun ... forced an opening at random and hit accidentally upon the entrance passage.” (Ibid., pp. 111-12.)

In this inner entrance on the seventeenth masonrycourse we identify, in the seventeenth chapter of the Ritual, the ‘‘ Gate of Tchesert (or Taser)”, where the postulant

1 See page 21 of his House of the Hidden Places, written before his visit to Egypt: “‘ Reciting chapter by chapter as we mount . . . we approach at the fifteenth step a gateway two courses yet above us, just as the catechumen in the fifteenth chapter approaches the ‘ double gate of the horizon’, the double-arched gate which points towards the pole-star.” At page 17 of this same volume he gives a diagram to illustrate what is meant by the term “‘ horizon of heaven ” astronomically.

2 Compare another description of this gate in ch. xv, of the Book (“Hymn to the Setting Sun”): ‘‘ He shall enter in at the hidden gate with power ”’ (line 4).