From Greenwich to Giza: An Excursion to Pyramidiocy

The symbologist's destiny lies in the Orient. The Orient is where the Facile Wisdom of the Ancients lies, that virtus dormativa that will confirm the status quo and contain any threats to the symbologist's spontaneous understanding of himself and the world. Tom Martin's Pyramid provides in beautiful miniature an example of what gets our symbologists from Oxford to Giza and back. Consider the following passage where Catherine and Rutherford with Bezumov the secret and subversive world maps passed on to them from Professor Kent that provide proof of an advanced ancient civilization.

        Rutherford and Catherine leaned over to better see what was causing Bezumov’s excitement. It appeared to be a normal map of the world but in its top right corner it bore the legend ‘Implied Prime Meridian of Piri Reis Map – Property of US Air Force’. The map’s line of zero longitude, instead of running through the Greenwich Observatory in London, ran through the desert, just adjacent to Cairo.
Bezumov was salivating with joy, running his hands up and down the edge of the map.
        ‘Giza! Why didn’t I trust my instincts?’
        Catherine and Rutherford looked at each other in bewilderment.
        Catherine was the first to speak: ‘What does it mean?’
        With a wolf-like smile the Russian turned to her.
        ‘It means, my dear girl, that some kind soul in the American military has gone to the trouble of calculating where the original creators of the Piri Reis map located their degree zero, their equivalent of Greenwich Observatory, and it was Giza...’ (Pyramid p. 193)

This passage contains the crucial discovery that propels our symbologists toward the Great Pyramid. The only problem with Bezumov's discovery and the US Air Force's "calculations" is that it makes absolutely no sense of any kind.

Fig. 1 Piri Reis Map (1513)

Fig. 2 Prime Meridian 

The Piri Reis map (fig. 1) cannot have an "Implied Prime Meridian" because it is not constructed along meridian lines at all. Meridians are imaginary, arbitrary lines of longitude stretching from the North Pole to the South pole and intersecting lines of latitude to give each point on the Earth's surface a distinct numeric coordinate. The equator is the natural place to locate 0° latitude because it is equidistant from the Earth's poles, but the location longitude's 0°, the "Prime Meridian", is completely arbitrary. There has been significant debate about where to locate it, but today by convention the Prime Meridian passes through the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, UK (fig. 2). The lines that criss-cross the Piri Reis map connecting its compass roses do not correspond to lines of longitude and latitude, although three of the compass roses are placed roughly at the latitudes of the equator and the two tropics. Even if meridian lines were drawn on the Piri Reis map forming the familiar grid, unless those were notated with numbers indicating where the map makers were counting from, there simply would be no prime meridian. The location of a prime meridian uniformly transforms the figures of navigational charts, but it does not effect the appearance of a map projection. It simply does not even make sense here to talk of the existence of a prime meridian on the Piri Reis map, let alone its calculation. It would be as though one sketched a picture of a friends face in a notebook, then compared it to a photograph, drew a cross over their face and then claimed that the cross indicated the point of origin on a Cartesian coordinate system as calculated from the sketch.  Bezumov's relationship to the USAF map is analogous to this faux-coordinatized face.

Fig 3. Azimuthal equidistant
centered at Giza

As is always the case in Martin, what is immediately striking is the incongruous ignorance of the protagonists. While the reader cannot be expected to have seen the Piri Reis map or know what a meridian is, Catherine is an astronomer and has the Piri Reis map in front of her. Despite being the Youngest Ever Professor of Very Hard Sums at All Souls, she is apparently completely ignorant of all but the most superficial features of her own discipline. My colleague Dr. Sturgeron von Prandleforth has elsewhere developed the apophatic consequences of Rutherford and Catherine's radical and total ignorance of their own fields in connection with their programmatic recapitulation of 19th c. colonial British uses of antiquarianism, meridian astronomy and historical speculation that amounts to the existence officially endorsed Imperial Symbologists in the pay of the British East India Company. I enthusiastically refer the reader to his majestic synthesis of the critique of symbology with Simon Schaffer's indispensable work on the mutual support, condition and cause astronomy and colonial enterprise provided for each other in the 19th c. Here I wish only to point out the majestic elegance with which Tom Martin manages not to make sense on a number of levels at once. He rejects as his content the only conjecture about the Piri Reis map which, even though false, is at least visually convincing, viz. the not that it is a partial representation of an azimuthal projection with its center at  Giza. See The Mysteries of the Piri Reis Map for a more comprehensive treatment of this subject. My aim is not, however, to critique the conspiracy theorists but to point out that Tom Martin isn't even trying.

Fig. 4 Greenwich Observatory, Center
of the British Empire

But if none of the cartography makes sense, what does?

Giza... the pyramids. This was the apex of the old civilization. And in four days’ time, on Monday, at sunrise, it will be the spring equinox. I must be there! He who controls Giza controls the world...’ (194)

The military in the symbological universe is invariably a pure force of cacognosis, a power-hungry gang of soldier of fortune mythognostic symbologists fighting their way through South American jungles and Arabian deserts in search of lost artifacts that will convey fabulous temporal power (Prandleforth 2009c). In other words, they are the institutional versions of Bezumov, the cacognostic villain of Pyramid. The cacognostic believes that the code is literal. If the Great Pyramid at Giza is the heart of a global network of lay lines commanded by an ancient civilization, then the literalist cartographer would have to put Giza at its actual, visual center, no matter how useless this projection would be for navigation outside of north Africa. Bezumov's equation of Giza with Greenwich is absolutely correct: He who controls Giza controls the world. We use a prime meridian that passes through Greenwich because in the 18th and 19th centuries a cabal of worldly, covetous, power-hungry men based a sophisticated world civilization around the astronomical observatory there. This militant pack capitalists and soliders armed with the erudition of mythognostic symbologists was known colloquially as "the British" and  even though their star is no longer ascendent they have had a lasting impact on our maps. Bezumov is correct, he should have "trusted his instincts," but he cannot. "Instinct" is the masculine version of feminine "intuition" perverted by discursive reason.

All Bezumov can do is reverse the process of imperial cartography and misinterpret the code as referring to the literal center of ancient power rather than to the incongruous power of the ancients facile wisdom, an ideological power destined reinforce the hegemony of the present global empire whose riches Catherine and Rutherford enjoy from the confines of their universities. It is because Bezumov can only conceive of material correlates to the code that he has got hold of the wrong end of the symbological stick. It is as though a brilliant but insane 19th c. Scotish scientist and adventurer got hold of some maps and a copy of Newton's Principia Mathematic from which he concluded that he could take control of the British empire by annexing Greenwich and entering and occupying the Royal Observatory.