Paranormal and parapolitical journalist Martin Ebon edits this anthology of pyramid power which offers us a striking cover image and three options for what the pyramids represent: a message from the gods, a storehouse of history, or a psychotronic machine generator for forces beyond our wildest imagination! Thankfully, the actual content inside is a little more balanced. Ebon opens things up with a brief history of modern pyramid power ideas, stemming from research by Parisian artisan Antoine Bovis and Hungarian radio technician Karel Drbal. Drbal is the primary source for the modern fascination with model pyramids sharpening razor blades left inside, and he claimed great results, tallying hundreds of shaves with blades that should have dulled long ago. From this modest seed grew the modern pyramid craze, and Ebon astutely notes the snowballing of esoteric topics around pyramids, citing psychic writer Ruth Montgomery's bundling in of reincarnation with pyramid powers and Edgar Cayce's dreams of telekinetic pyramid construction. It's a sort of variation on crank magnetism, with a subject attracting more and more cranks around it who add their imprimatur, with each additional idea adding another layer of kookiness. From Ebon we learn how skeptical writer Martin Gardner skewered this addled miasma with his satirical character Dr. Matrix, a numerologist who takes pyramid number crunching to its extreme. Gardner claims that Dr. Matrix received plenty of supportive fan mail from people who didn't get the joke, and that a major New York publisher offered an advance to expand Dr. Matrix to book length, saying that Gardner could later reveal the hoax for additional income! Ebon also name drops big pyramid gurus Max Toth, G. Patrick Flanagan, and the authors of Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain, Lynn Schroeder and Sheila Ostrander. Finally, Ebon warns of pyramid power's faddish appeal and the massive waste of resources and time that might result should poorly controlled experiments in pyramid power spiral out of control into fields like industrial agriculture. He strikes an even keel here, preparing us for a varied volume from multiple perspectives.
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| Cool pyramid dudes |
Chapter two is a thoughtful travel memoir from academic Bob Brier, who took some of his students on a tour of the pyramids in Egypt. They get there via discounted tickets from a Coptic church group, just one interesting fold in Brier's narrative. Brier expounds upon Egyptian history for a spell, saying that most modern pyramid enthusiasts lack any real grounding in the true story of the pyramids. Then he gets hustled by a street scammer! The guy browbeats Brier into a late night "pyramid tour" which ends with his "guide" waving a lit candle in the general direction of a possible pyramid in the distance and demanding money! Brier flips him a measly quarter and things could have gotten ugly if an armed guard hadn't intervened. Brier ends his story with descriptions of forged ushabtis, copies of ancient funereal dolls sold by modern day street merchants to tourists. Your ushabtis could stand in for you whenever you had to do labor in the afterlife, something to be avoided for sure.
Chapter three sees Gordon Thistlewaite tackling King Tut's curse, wavering a bit in tone. We get some fact checking on the mystery but Thistlewaite also ponders the possibility of some unknown pyramid energy being cultivated by the ancient Egyptians, with tomb curses being negatively charged psitron particles! After this we get another memoir in chapter four, this one by James E. Kinnear. Kinnear, formerly of New Zealand, settles in Cairo in the shadows of the pyramids, where he runs an Arabic publishing house for two decades. Kinnear writes on the many curious customers he had coming around with pyramid queries, including the Rosicrucians, and ends with a sweet story of he and his wife awestruck beneath the pyramids and confessing their love for each other.
Chapter five is an excerpted chapter by Martin Gardner, originally published in his Facts and Fallacies way back in 1957. It's a history of pyramidology which dates the modern strain to the 19th century and includes Christian Identity adherents crediting Moses with their construction, along with the various strains of numerology kicked off by English publisher John Taylor and his 1859 title The Great Pyramid. Back in the 20th century Christian Identity adherent George Riffert says pyramid power will overthrow our corrupt "Babylon-beast-gentile civilization" by 1953! Next up in chapter six, James Randolph Wolfe experiments with pyramid power. He skips trying out razors, saying he doesn't see them as a "promising" research choice. Instead, he leaves some meat out on the counter for ten days under a pyramid, and then eats it! It's unspoiled and faintly edible, and Wolfe sees this as proof of the amazing powers locked within the pyramids, powers that he thinks were first unlocked by some lost precursor civilization that vanished 10,000 years ago when our moon first came screaming into orbit around us, causing earth shaking cataclysm and leaving a ruined record for the Johnny-Come-Lately ancient Egyptians, who only renovated the pyramids. This is a colorful chapter with flash frozen mammoths, Reich's orgone theories, Kirlian photography, and the conclusion that the Great Pyramid is a gigantic charging lens for the lost pyramid builder's advanced technology. Wolfe warns against believing any and all pyramid "featherheads" you come across, but it's cheap posturing to cover his own goofy shit. This is the chapter with Napolon's bad trip inside the Great Pyramid, mentioned on the back cover.
Chapter seven is by pyramid power superstar Max Toth, detailing his research odyssey from a childhood fascination with Charles Fort, John Keel, and Frank Edwards onward to his career as an electronics technician interspersed by perusal of the Eileen J. Garrett Memorial Library, joining the Society for Psychical Research, and meeting inspirations Karel Drbal and Zdeněk Rejdák in Hungary. A Dr. Pavlita has also built a psychotronic generator, if you believe it. Daniel Loxton has an excellent 2005 interview with Toth published in the Junior Skeptic, wherein Toth reminisces on his shaky relationship with rival pyramid guru G. Patrick Flanagan and the way things seem to fall apart ... the interview is worth reading in full! Flanagan was shameless in hocking any and all pyramid power junk, whether it was even pyramid shaped or not:
And [Flanagan] started doing experimentations with “pyramid energy plates.” To this day, he has never really explained to me how he was energizing these purple, painted plates that he was selling as being “pyramid-energized.”
Chapter eight is a report on a 1972 pyramid power conference in Moscow, by attendee Benson Herbert, head of the Paraphyscial Laboratory at Downton, Wiltshire. The conference was organized by the Association for Humanistic Psychology and features heavy hitters like Drbal and Rejdák, as well as Max Toth! Herbert quotes Drbal wondering if witches' conical hats have some kind of pyramid-esque energy properties. Herbert also mentions orgone box therapy as practiced by countryman Hugh Lodge. Herbert gave it a try but felt claustrophobic, and believes the box shape is all wrong! Pyramids are where it's at! He also mentions Russian psychic Nina Kulagina, saying that her mysterious powers may be a new form of energy similar to pyramid power. After this we get a short, waggish chapter by one Russ Martin, working out how much it would cost to be a replica Great Pyramid in the USA. Martin tallies up to $1,130,390,000 in 1976 dollars.
The next chapter is much more substantial, by Iris M. Owen of the New Horizons Research Foundation of Toronto. It's a meaty and skeptical appraisal of pyramid power experiments, opening with the claims of one "Colonel Musselwhite" as to the sharpening effects of laying your razors along a north/south axis. This claim somehow combined with pyramid ideas to create the supposed effect so beloved by Drbal and others. Owen also reveals that "Colonel Musselwhite" was actually Reginald Victor Jones of Aberdeen University, known for his work for British intelligence during WWII and for being a general prankster! Owen lays out how so many crank ideas have accumulated around the pyramids "like a party game of telephone," and how hard it is to even begin to clear them out. For starters, the NHF runs a series of rigorous tests and finds absolutely zero effect on organic decomposition or razor blade sharpness via pyramids. Owen theorizes that the real deal, the Great Pyramid, may have preserved some animal carcasses as reported by Antoine Bovis due to its general properties as a cool, dry, dark space. Bovis swore the Great Pyramid was a humid hothouse inside, but that may have been due to his huffing, puffing, heavy breathing entry into the confined space. Owen cites the gruesome "Wales Mummy Murder" case for an example of naturally retarded decomposition, as a murdered woman's body hung in a locked closet for years without offending the new tenants! Nasty and illustrative. Owen ends with a panoramic view of the modern mail order empire of cardboard pyramids and self help courses, all built on this shaky foundation of inconclusive, poorly run tests.
We're on a roll now as Wanda Sue Childress spends chapter eleven on a tour of pyramid power in the American West, in another beefy piece that ranges far and wide, from famous UFO contactee George Van Tassel to a mysterious tape recording by "Kla-la" detailing ancient alien pyramid masters to Beaverton, OR psychic Tenny Hale, who almost got on local KATU news with her pyramid models - but then the channel cancelled and to add insult to injury, one of the pyramids fell off a truck and shattered! The other, larger pyramid is drafty and leaky, and Hale reports that she is watching for mold. Childress tries out pyramid power for herself when she visits contactee Daniel Fry and his lovely wife Florence and spends the night in their out-building pyramid. The result? An out-of-body experience! Fry wrote The White Sands Incident about his 1949 UFO contact, available to read online. Another couple, Elmer and Shirley Daarud, of Kachemak Bay, AK, live inside a pyramid structure they built of wood. It's complete with Arizona sandstone siding and they've added a toilet so it can be zoned for habitation. If that sounds like too much work, the Cheops Corporation of California will build your pyramid house for you, with attractive options at the Cheops, Ramses, and Tut levels. Or if you want to build your own smaller meditation pyramid, Childress informs us that the color of your pyramid can change the effect: red is stimulating, even sexually so, blue is a "peaceful relaxer," and yellow will "stimulate, yet relax the body." This is a powerhouse chapter and earns its title of PYRAMIDS, WESTERN STYLE!
Onward to chapter twelve, as Alexander Ross writes on PYRAMIDS, MAGNETISM, AND GRAVITY. It's a relatively brief chapter focusing on London, Ontario based Eric McLuhan (son of famous culture critic Marshall McLuhan) and his experiments in pyramid power. He and his friend DJ John Rode (who also owns an occult bookstore) are seeing great results, but Ross wonders if it isn't just wishful thinking. McLuhan provides a diagram to build your own pyramids, previously seen alongside an illustration from Childress' chapter as an entry in Cosmic Debris. After this otherwise thoughtful article Ross does end on a mystical note, wondering now if maybe there was some unknown force harnessed by the ancient Egyptians within the pyramids ... who can say, Ross?
Pyramid power writer Serge V. King explores whether an "oraccu" can be like a pyramid ... what's an oraccu, you ask? It's a constructed box for charging objects with orgone rays! Layers of non-conductive material create "folds" which magnify the orgone ... Wilhelm Reich warned never to go three fold. King believes that orgone and pyramid power are simply other labels for that mystical force known throughout history as chi, mana, and most recently "psychotronic energy." He references Schroeder and Ostrander's Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain and asserts that the Russians are 20 years ahead of us in psi research - a common refrain from paranormal writers of the era. A short, eclectic chapter.
Ebon saved the wildest chapter for last, as your friendly neighborhood bullshit artist Warren Smith serves up one of his patented mystery melanges. An American airman spots a gleaming white, 1,000 foot tall pyramid with a crystal capstone while over the hinterlands of China! You'd be forgiven for thinking this is another one of Smith's totally invented fictions, but the story has a true core: airman James Gaussman really did see a huge pyramid while over China, though its real dimensions wound up being a little more down to earth, and sans crystal capstone: it's actually a flat-topped burial mound, not quite as fantastical as Smith's story but still an impressive monument. Smith leaps from this secret Chinese "pyramid" to secret Alaskan pyramids to matter-of-fact conclusions about the pyramids as outposts of Atlantis, psychotronic energy generators, and transmitters for ancient astronaut voyagers! Or maybe the pyramids were just what they seem, Smith hedges at the last moment. This crazy chapter was reprinted from the October, 1973 issue of Saga magazine.
Warren would also chop up pieces of this article to use in his inaugural Zebra Books special The Secret Forces of the Pyramids, dropping out a passage on Helena Blavatsky, swapping out some different tall tales of mystery pyramids in South America and miniature mummies in the Old West, and dropping the final summation of pyramid "facts" for flow. One more example of how the sausage is made ... and now, the end!
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| Reused text from Smith's Saga/Pyramid Power article |
After all is said and done, Ebon tags on some additional reading, including Warren's powerhouse pyramid primer and Max Toth's blockbuster bestseller Pyramid Power. I always like when authors give us a bibliography or further reading.
Across fourteen chapters in 160 pages, Martin Ebon has left us a tome for the ages, a snapshot of pyramid power in the '70s: the hope, the promise ... and the deflation. From Egypt to Toronto to inner space and outer space, we see the almost unfathomable scale of human experience, and how.
Signet Books, 1976
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