Gaze upon the face of evil and hear the voice of doom.
About 17 years ago The Orion Mystery, written by Robert Bauval and Adrian Gilbert, came out. It became an instant bestseller, maybe some of you even have it in your libraries. If so, burn it post haste, and pray to this blog for intellectual salvation and cosmic deliverance. To be honest, I never read the book (I got the information from a BBC documentaries-DVD I rented at the local libary in hopes of gaining some fresh inisghts on mythology from the established Anglican institution, all in vain of course) and I also don't know exactly who Adrian Gilbert is. In the documentary Bauval is joined by Graham Hancock, ever zealous embracer of cockamamy theories built on quick sand and pious defender of their negligible relevance, and the two are given ample opportunity to rave about the baffling coincidence between the alignment of the three pyramids of Giza and the three stars of Orion's so-called belt. Hancock is even given space to spew forth more simpering, quasi-intellectual conjectures about how the Great Sphinx of Giza was probably constructed before 10,000 BCE by a people that must have had something to do with Atlantis and that it is supposedly a reference to the constellation of Leo.
The correlation of the pyramids with the stars of Orion's belt. If only it was so unblemished in reality....
But do not despair, dear readers! They even had me fooled for a while with their sly fabrications and false hypotheses! Yes! Once upon a time I managed to stray off the rigtheous path, and great tragedy befell my poor, yet glorious soul. But anyway, the "perfect match" between the pyramids and Orion's belt claimed by Bauval (he was an engineer, for god's sakes! What the hell does he know about astronomy!?) and Hancock, was not quite so perfect, and in fact the correlation only existed in a mirror image. However, this small incongruence was quickly overcome by inverting the map printed in the book so that the parallel seemed exact, and Bauval and Hancock later claimed to have always meant that the analogy they spotted was in basis of the ground being a mirror-image of the heavens anyway.
So what? Maybe they could have gotten some details and calculations and specifications wrong, but the similitude exists, even if it is only a visual one. True, and I'll grant you that there is a definite astrological significance to the pyramids of Giza and countless other ancient (and not so-ancient) buildings, but this does not mean that the stars and their placements are the foundations from which every kind of artistic, religious or state-building impulse of ancient people arose and certainly not that by reconstructing the movements of the heavens you can also retrace the original meaning of myth and history.
We call this type of intellectual fumbling archaeoastronomy and it is one of the many great evils and heinous sins in mythography that you will come across on the road to redemption. Best to know and understand its malevolence early therefore, in order to properly repel its temptation, is it not? So you are forgiven, dear child, for calling into question my flawless insight earlier, for you are but a fledling who has yet to learn to fly, and it is therefore that I take pity on your small, inadequate soul.
Oh, and hey, what the heck, another apt Rainbow song!
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