25. THE WORD
How did the nuclear device actually work?
U-235 is radioactive, emitting neutrons. In a small quantity, most of the neutrons are emitted from the surface into thin air and nothing happens at all. In a larger quantity – the critical mass – some of the neutrons bump into other atoms of U-235 causing them to emit neutrons which bump into other atoms and so on. Causing an instantaneous chain reaction manifested as an explosion. A big explosion.
But that didn’t happen – the pyramids are largely intact so they were not blown up. The only way that scenario could occur is if the reaction was controlled or ‘moderated’, as it is in modern reactors by the use of water or carbon to absorb some of the neutrons.
The Old Kingdom lords of the pyramids achieved the same result by using lapis lazuli as a moderator to absorb neutrons from the chain reaction of enriched U-235. They worked out exactly the quantity and arrangement of lapis lazuli to moderate a certain quantity of U-235. That is why Thoth and Isis were so careful to count and measure and weigh everything in the balance, and they verified everything against the checklist of the Negative Confession until it was exactly right. That was the great secret of ‘heaven and earth’ – it was not only the conceptual knowledge but also the detailed mechanical knowledge of the precise quantity and arrangement of heaven (lapis lazuli) and earth (U-235).
That model of a strict checklist procedure passed down into human folklore and religion. At one level it passed into wizardry and witchcraft where complicated magic spells had to be recited exactly or else they wouldn’t work – or worse, they would go wrong. And later the same principle passed into modern religion where priests were trained to carry out specific rituals for the imaginary sacraments – otherwise the new magic wouldn’t work. Christ took bread and wine [cakes and ale] and said ‘do this [precisely] in memory of me’.
The lords recorded in the Pyramid Texts that it was the efflux of U-235 that gave power to the sun gods … who dwelt in the lapis lazuli. It was the divine ‘light food’ that provided the power that made the sun arise from a chamber of lapis lazuli:
the perfume of the Eye of Horus is in its kiln, you will have power by means of it
… the bread of eternity … live and have power through bread
[until] the King arose like the sun from a chamber of lapis lazuli.
This literal knowledge persisted into later ‘religious’ renditions of the Book of the Dead and even into early European translations. In the late 1800s Samuel Birch at the British Museum perhaps unwittingly captured [in English translation] the innocent reality of what actually happened in the pyramid when the ‘sun god’ was manifested in light:
…from the god in his box … shining in the crystal … indescribable was the colour of the transformation in the ether … the transformation in the waters … from the eternal substance … in the midst of the box … it was light at its birth … from the sun in its transformations … its drink [waves] poured out of the lapis lazuli … its water of fire … a foul flux emanating from Osiris. [1]
Ironically, this was before modern knowledge of radioactivity, and presumably Birch faithfully translated phrases such as ‘transformation in the waves of ether’, ‘foul flux’ and ‘birth of light’ without any inkling at all of the technical implications. He got the words nearly right but didn’t know what they meant. In the religious context of the times he thought this was all some weird pagan belief in magic libations of ‘flux’ causing a humanoid sun-god to ascend into the heavens. And it wasn’t just Birch. At the turn of the 20th-century, Wallis Budge the next head Egyptologist at the British Museum, translated a ‘Hymn to the sun-God’ in similarly plain language … the winds come forth from thy nostrils … the celestial water [waves] from thy mouth … beams of light are produced from thy eyes [which] shinest in thy crystal. [2] Again, Budge got the words right but didn’t understand the meaning – and ironically he was later criticised by modern scholars for translating too literally.
In another irony, at the very time at the turn of the 20th-century when Birch and Budge were translating strange concepts of ‘waves of flux’ from ancient papyrus scrolls in the British Museum, just 300 km away in her laboratory in Paris a young Marie Curie was the first [modern era] physicist to identify the strange invisible flux of radiation from radium. But the two did not meet.
In the original texts the old lords expressed all the technical details. They knew the mysterious ‘flux’ of ‘winds’ came from radioactive decay. The Pyramid Texts (in translation) expressed radioactive decay as ‘putrefaction’, as in … your water is yours, your efflux which issued from putrefaction of Osiris is yours. He dwelleth amid decay. They knew that the ‘efflux’ of radiation was caused by an internal chain reaction where the ‘food offering’ reacted with itself – expressed with difficulty as ‘self-copulation’. The sun god was perceived as humanoid, so self-reproduction had to be expressed in strained human terms:
Hail to ye gods …who have no evil in your bodies …who feed on your own substance.
The ‘King who copulates with [his own] semen’ …I am a soul who eats his own navel string, who lives on the friends of his foreskin and who eats his companions …I am this soul of Osiris whom the gods commanded to copulate with him …go forth and copulate with your soul.
All this caused a great deal of handwringing amongst earnest Victorian-era Egyptologists who struggled with the unmentionable humanised interpretations of self-copulation and self-cannibalism. But the simple technical explanation was that the foul flux was radioactive decay that caused an internal chain-reaction feeding on itself.
Finally, the Old Kingdom lords wanted to be sure we got the message. To round-off all the written details of atomic technicalities in the Pyramid Texts, they also left behind an apparently simple hieroglyphic inscription under the gable of the doorway of the Great Pyramid. There, for all to plainly see, they engraved for posterity the single expression that captured the very quintessence of the pyramid function: [3]
It was a four glyph expression – the ‘words of the lords’, which later became known as the Tetragrammaton in Hebrew literature – transliterated as YHWH – the ineffable, unknowable name of god.
The first symbol ‘V’ denotes duality or multiple (square) of itself.
The second symbol ‘O’ signifies the whole, completeness or entirety.
The glyph of three horizontal parallel lines conveys the usual meaning of ‘equals’ or equivalence.
And the final sign of a divided circle indicates something split or divided.
In non-European word order right-to-left, the expression may be interpreted as – ‘something split equals something entire multiplied by something doubled (squared). Since Einstein in 1905, we recognise that concept in the form of E = mc2 … the equation defining the relationship between mass and energy. In a single expression the lords captured the essential function of the Great Pyramid – to accomplish the transformation of mass into energy. The ‘word of god’ was the ineffable mechanism that made light … Send forth light, O mountain! Let radiance arise.
In modern parlance the pyramid was a nuclear reactor – a building structured to contain and manage the expression of atomic energy. So that we would understand, the lords left a label above the door – actually two labels. The sign 
(E = mc2) and the hieroglyph sign of two mounds (or waves), usually interpreted as meaning ‘place of the rising sun’ or more simply ‘place of light’. A reactor for producing radiance!
The great irony of it all was that everyone knew all along – they knew the words – but they either didn’t understand or didn’t believe. Or didn’t want to believe. The ancient Egyptian ‘Followers’, from the Middle Kingdom onwards, knew the old folklore of reality and the ‘truth’ engraved in the Pyramid Texts. They knew the pyramid was … the cavern, the cooking pot of Horus … [where] the king comes into being … by means of great magic. It was light at its birth. But they didn’t understand it technically and gradually muddled the memories into the quagmire of magic, alchemy and humanised polytheism that developed into the weird arcane rituals of the Book of the Dead. They lost the plot entirely.
When that enormous body of Egyptian literature and inscriptions was discovered by modern explorers from the 18th-century onwards, those earnest European Christian scholars also discerned the right words. But they didn’t understand and didn’t want to believe. Orthodox Egyptologists such as Edwards at the British Museum in 1947 said the pyramid was ‘an instrument or machine for transformation into ultimate union with the light of the sun god’. While Harvard Egyptologist Lehner in 1997 wrote that it was ‘an instrument that enabled that alchemy [of transformation] to take place’. [4] Of course, they were careful to write that this was what ‘Egyptians believed’, not that it was actually true. Even so-called ‘native accounts’ knew the right words – recording tales of ‘magic stones’ and ‘malevolent spirits’; and that ‘a [pyramid] chamber enclosed the secrets concerning disintegration of matter’. [5] But ‘native’ accounts were dismissed by Western science as fanciful and obviously unreliable.
What the early Egyptologists translated as the ‘Cooking Pot’ we would now call a nuclear reactor, a structure to produce and manage atomic energy. At first we didn’t understand, then we didn’t believe, then we preferred our own fantasy. The Egyptian tetragrammaton was transliterated into Hebrew as YHWH; which was verbalised as Yahweh, the ineffable name of the unknowable God; which became partially personalised as the Judaeo-Christian Jehovah; ‘who’ became fully humanised as the Christian’ God the Father’. According to modern theological scholars, Jehovah was the proper name of God, characterised as a glorious and terrible name, the hidden and mysterious name, and curiously ‘the name of the substance’.
Egyptians knew their ‘god’ was atomic energy, generated by ‘decay’ … I am the oldest and firstborn son of matter. I came into being from unformed matter. He dwelleth amid ‘decay’. But over time abstract atomic energy became humanised as ‘God’; the four words of the Egyptian tetragrammaton 
became the singular divine ‘Word’ of Biblical Christianity … In principio erat Verbum … in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God; his light shineth in darkness, but the darkness comprehended it not.
The monogene lords of the Old Kingdom – direct descendants of Aeneas who knew the sacred fire of the hearth – used the magic of alchemy to transmute substance into energy. They took a ‘child’ of the stars and manifested it on Earth. It was light at its birth.
A thousand years later the merely mortal Egyptian ‘Followers’ of the Middle Kingdom believed that if they observed certain arcane rituals, their dead Pharaoh – a son of the sun – would be transmogrified into glorious reunion with his father, the solar aura of Ra in the sky. Then, another two thousand years later, emergent Christians developed a new twist in which they believed a priest could utter a magic spell over a wafer of bread – hoc est enin corpus meum – and it would undergo the miracle of transubstantiation into the body of Christ – the son of God the Father. Really, it was the ‘Real Presence’.
Actually, the ‘mystery of faith’ doctrine of transubstantiation did not formally emerge until very much later via Thomas Aquinas in the 13th– century. But the early Church fathers, like Augustine of Hippo about 400 AD, were much more circumspect. In his youth he was an adherent of Persian Manichaeism, flowing from the ancient success of the [good] world of light over the [evil] world of darkness. He carried some of that real doubt into the new Christian construction of his prayer Panis Angelicus – now little more than a Church pop song set to haunting music by Caesar Franck …
O res mirabilis … fit panis hominum … Dat panis coelicus … duc nos quo tendimus …Ad lucem quam inhabitas. By what miracle does the bread of men become the bread of heaven, lead us to the light in which you dwell.
But in our darkness we comprehended not.
[1] Birch, Book of the Dead, in Bunsen, Egypt’s Place in Universal History
[2] Budge, Gods of the Egyptians
[3] Pochan, L’Enigme de la grande pyramide
[4] Edwards, The Pyramids of Egypt; Lehner, The Complete Pyramids
[5] Barbarin, Los Secretos de la Gran Piramide
A Different Story 