Demon Box

Listening to these two old American alchemists one can better understand why Wendell Berry, an M.A. from Stanford and a full professor with tenure two days a week at the U of Kentucky, busts his butt the rest of the time farming with the same antiquated methods the land of his forefathers; there is a wisdom in our past that cannot be approached but with the past’s appurtenances. Think of Schliemann finding ancient Troy by way of Homer.

On the way back down from the ridge I tell Wendell of the team of scientists from Berkeley who tried probing the pyramids with a newfangled cosmic ray device in search of hidden chambers. “What they found was that there was something about the pyramids that thwarted our most advanced gadgetry. The only thing their ten tons of equipment accomplished was to electrocute a rat that tried to nest in the wiring.”

“Killed a rat, did they?” says Wendell, tromping the brake to keep the wagon from overrunning the mares down the steep slope. “For Berkeley scientists, that’s a start.”

October 4, Friday. Dateline Paris (Kentucky, that is).

Looking for the Bible in the drawer of my ancient hotel room, I find a phone number penciled onto the unfinished wood of the drawer bottom, a dark number, etched deep and certain, after which is penciled even darker this rave review:

EPIK FUCK!

The phone is on the nightstand right next to the drawer and I must admit I’m housed upstairs alone with the classic traveling-salesman horniness. I look at the number again, but farther back in the drawer there’s the Bible, after all. Besides, I have hired out to do an article, not an epic.

The passage I am seeking is Isaiah, chapter 19, verses 19 and 20. It is a pivotal quote in the first volume of a four-volume set on pyramidology that I bought in S.F. for sixty bucks, but the author has written the passage in its original Hebrew, fully aware that your usual reader will have to refer to the Bible to find out what is said. The only thing else he lets you know about the passage is that it contains 30 words and 124 Hebrew letters, and that when the numerical value of these ancient words and letters is added up by a process known as gematria the sum total of the passage equals 5,449, which is the height of the Great Pyramid in pyramid inches.

The pyramid inch is a unit so close to our own inch (25 pyramid inches = 25.0265 of our inches) that I will henceforth refer to these units simply as inches: 5,449 is also the weight of the pyramid in tons times 100. Comparisons continue ad infinitum. Compressed within the scope and accuracy of the Great Pyramid’s angles and proportions seem to be all the formulas and distances pertinent to our solar system. This is one of the reasons we don’t want to switch to the metric system. It’d be like cutting off our feet so we can get Birkenstock transplants.

The book falls open to Psalm 91—“He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty”—which is one of the Egyptian verses written, according to the Urantia Book, by that first great teacher of monotheism, King Akhnoten, who, according to Enoch, was schooled personally by Melchizedec himself, who, according to Cayce blah blah, you see what I mean? The path to this pyramid can lead you down endless alleys of rumination. On to Isaiah.

Here it is, chapter 19, and underlined in the same dark pencil as was used to record the phone number on the drawer bottom:

19 In that day shall there be an altar to the lord in the midst of the land of Egypt, and a pillar at the border thereof to the lord.

20 And it shall be for a sign and for a witness unto the lord of hosts in the land of Egypt; for they shall cry unto the lord because of the oppressors, and he shall send them a saviour, and a great one, and he shall deliver them—

Wait a minute. That way lies the musclebound madness one sees caged behind the isometric eyes of the Jesus freaks—not the way I wish to wander in this quest. I don’t need a course in spiritual dynamic tension. I return the gift of the Gideons to its drawer and shut it away along with the secret gematria of the Epik Fuck. All very interesting but I don’t need it. Being raised a hard-shell Baptist jock I consider myself still fairly fit faithwise. Besides, going to the Great Pyramid to find God strikes me as something of an insult to all the other temples I have visited over the years, an affront to the words of spiritual teachers like St. Houlihan and St. Lao-tzu and St. Dorothy who, perhaps best of all, sums it up: “If you can’t find God in your backyard in Kansas you probably can’t find him in the Great Pyramid in Egypt, either.”