endings and inheritance at the Great Pyramids
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For Charles Piazzi Smyth, a British Astronomer who photographed the Pyramids in 1865, the structures had special significance. Based in part on measurements he took on his visit to Egypt and in part on a book by John Keats’ publisher called The Great Pyramid: Why Was It Built, & Who Built It?, Smyth believed that the architects of the monuments were not Egyptians but Israelites, and that they had used a unit of measurement almost identical to the inch of the British Imperial System. This, according to Smyth, was further proof that the British were actually the true descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, a belief not entirely uncommon in his day. In Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid, Smyth argues that “the hereditary British measures still preserve some very recognizable traces” of the ancient Biblical measurements. No surprise, then, that he viewed the metric system as a threat to British exceptionalism, “metrologically atheistic schemes” of the French that would replace the “primeval gift to our race.”1
Hopscotching selectively back through the past to legitimize present hatreds is a classic tactic of right-wing nationalists (cf. German fascination with the Aryans of the Rigveda, Dugin’s promotion of Eurasianism, etc.). Erich Fromm, a sociologist who fled Germany in the 1930s, wrote in Escape from Freedom that
The authoritarian character worships the past. What has been, will eternally be. To wish or to work for something that has not yet been before is crime or madness. The miracle of creation […] is outside his range of emotional experience.
Smyth, too, was fixated not on beginnings but endings. Going even further with his dubious calculations, he wrote that other measurements of the Pyramids indicated that the Rapture might be imminent:
Exactly when that Second Coming […] will put an end for ever to all wars and human authorisations for man to slaughter his fellow-men, women and children to promote his own so-called interests—is to take place, is a question towards which the Great Pyramid suggests in the Grand Gallery’s Southern low passage […] that a beginning of the Divine preparations for it may be, in 1879, within only three or four years.
Smyth pulls extensively from a pamphlet by “Dr. Watson F. Quinby of Wilmington, Delware,” in which Quinby looks to the book of Daniel for similar accountings of the end (Quinby settles on 1881 for Apocalypse). It turns out that Quinby’s pamphlet, Mongrelism, is not only an end-times rag but an anti-miscegenation screed that begins, “Away off in the North of China is Mongrelia, the land of the Mongrels. Well would it have been for the world, if Mongrelism had been confined to this land.” It is better that I don’t quote any further.
In the US, British Israelism—the notion, held by Smyth, that the British were the true descendants of the chosen people—morphed into the Christian Identity movement. The movement, which experienced a resurgence in the 1980s and is still active, holds a variety of wild beliefs that meld racist ideology with creative readings of Scripture: that only whites are the true sons of Adam, that Jews are the Satanic offspring of Eve and the Serpent, that non-whites are soulless mud people, and so on.
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The day after my COVID test, New York City was buried in smoke from the wildfires raging out west. It is tempting to treat the climate crisis with a kind of millenarianism, a certainty about the end: that once a certain temperature threshold is crossed, everything will at once be changed. There is a clarity in that kind of doom. But unmitigated climate change is not the end of the world; it is the slow, tragic impoverishment of it. It is something closer to suicide than armageddon, even if it often sounds like the latter: nights are getting hotter; regions of the Amazon are now releasing more carbon dioxide than they can absorb; an Oregon fire is altering the weather. Grand prophecies of apocalypse, in addition to being right-wing metanarrative tools, are also too simple: one day it will all be over. One day, soon, there will be triumph. Soon it will all be revealed. They are visions of the future that preclude you from caring about changing it.
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Before he died, Smyth arranged for a custom-built camera to be buried with him, one that would be able to withstand Judgment Day so that he could document it. But when he died, in 1900—with still no sign of the end—he was buried without his camera, beneath a pyramidal stone topped with a cross.
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