Pyramid, Chapter Ten

"But how come the conventional version of history still prevails?" Asked Rutherford, "Why don't you tell everyone about this map?"

Doctor von Dechend looked at him laconically.

"My boy, the world renowned physicist Max Planck once said the following:" von Dechend cleared his throat in a theatrical manner, "'A new scientific truth does not thrive by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.'"

If that were true, Catherine thought, then the past was awash with forgotten truths, long erased. And equally certain, people might simply be killed off, so that the world-view of the murderers might prevail. That idea startled her, and her thoughts turned to the Professor.

"People aren't murdered for their ideas, are they?"

Chapter Fifteen of Tom Martin's Pyramid, which of course contains the famous "Discourse on Gematria", has been widely accepted as the programmatic statement of the symbological project. While not wishing to detract from the general recognition which is justly accorded to this inimitable text, I hope briefly to draw attention to the short passage quoted above, as a salutory addition to the schema which emerge from its better-known sequel.

From the point of view of a rather simple-minded progressivism, one might understand that von Dechend is adducing this Planck's widely repeated bon mot to explain that, no matter how widely a piece of new scientific knowledge is disseminated, the rate-limiting step in scientific progress is the mortality of tenured champions of established orthodoxy.

Catherine, however, understands his meaning with characteristic celerity and lucidity. The point is not that hide-bound conservatives embarrass progress; rather, it is not the obstruction of "progress" which is to be mourned, but the loss of ancient wisdom which that so-called progress effaces, like so many hieroglyphs drawn in the sand before the advancing tide. In a flash of intuition, Catherine realizes that the reality of death must imply the consistent, accretive replacement of limpid primal wisdom with elaborate, ramifying falsehood. Moreover, she immediately sees that one, probably the most important, of the driving forces in this process must be the malevolent obscurantism of people who have something invested in an alternate (i.e., the conventional) version of history to the one which emerges without mediation from the most superficial study of any primary document. She realizes, to put it concisely, that contingency is conspiracy; that to the extent that the history of ideas diverges from the wisdom of the ancients, we can detect the action of patient, invisible hand of what has been called "the entropy of mythognosis".

Thus, her apparently moronic non-sequitur, "People aren't really murdered for their ideas, are they?" is apropos. She is not questioning the blatantly apparent fact that people are daily murdered for their ideas and have been for as long as is possible to document; rather, she has grasped the fact that to refer to the "entropy" of mythognosis is to naturalize the phenomenon, whereas, in fact, it is the result of a perennial, deliberate and articulate project of dysinformation, which we might instead simply call "cacognosis".