René Guénon - The Reign of Quantity and The Signs of the Times

Use is also made, along with appropriate interpretations, of predictions more suspect in origin but nonetheless fairly old; these were perhaps not originally made in order to be of use in present circumstances, although the powers of subversion had evidently acquired some considerable influence at the time of their origin (the time in question being that at which the modern deviation may be said to have begun, from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries), and it is not impossible that those powers then had in view, not only some more special and immediate objective, but also the preparation for a work not intended to be accomplished until after a long interval. [155] Anyone who may be desirous of learning some details of this aspect of the question might usefully consult, in spite of the reservations that would have to be made on certain points, a book called Autour de la Tiare by Roger Duquet, the posthumous work of a man who had been fairly closely involved in some of the ‘underground’ work referred to above, and who wanted at the end of his life to give his ‘testimony’, as he himself says, and to contribute to some extent to the unmasking of these mysterious undercurrents; the ‘personal’ reasons he may have had for doing this have no importance, and in any case clearly do not detract in any way from the interest of his ‘revelations’. [Full reference: Roger Duquet, Autour de la Tiare : Essai sur les prophéties concernant la succession des papes du XIII e siècle à la fin des temps : Joachim de Fiore , Anselma de Marsico , St . Malachie , le ‘Moine de Padoue’ , etc . (Paris: Nouvelle éditions latine, 1997). Ed.] This preparation has in fact never ceased: it has been carried out in other modalities, of which the ‘suggestion’ applied to modern ‘seers’ and the organization of ‘apparitions’ of a very unorthodox kind represent an aspect in which the direct intervention of subtle influences is most clearly shown; but this aspect is not the only one, and, even when it is a question of predictions apparently manufactured ‘from start to finish’, similar influences may very well come into play to no less an extent, firstly for the very reason that their original inspiration emanates from a ‘counter-initiatic’ source, and secondly because of the nature of the elements that are taken to serve as ‘supports’ to their elaboration.

These last words are written with an example in mind that is quite astonishing, as much in itself as in the success it has had in many quarters; for those reasons it deserves rather more than a mere mention: the example is that of the so-called ‘prophecies of the Great Pyramid’, widely disseminated in England and thence to the whole world for ends that are perhaps in part political, but which certainly go beyond politics in the ordinary sense of the word. They are closely linked to another piece of work undertaken in order to persuade the English that they are the descendants of the ‘lost tribes of Israel’; but here again it would be impossible to go into details without getting involved in developments that would be out of place here. However that may be, here is the gist of the matter in a few words: by measuring, in a manner not wholly free from arbitrariness (all the more so because nobody is in fact quite sure about the measures actually used by the ancient Egyptians), the various parts of the corridors and chambers of the Great Pyramid, [156] The Great Pyramid is in truth not so very much bigger than the two others, especially than its nearest neighbor, so that the difference is not very striking; but without any very evident reason all the modern ‘seekers’ have been as it were ‘hypnotized’ almost exclusively by this one; to it are always related all their most fanciful hypotheses, many of which could better be described as ‘fantastic’, including, to give only two of the queerest examples, one that attempts to find in its interior arrangements a map of the sources of the Nile, and another that makes out that the ‘Book of the Dead’ is no more than an explanatory description of those same arrangements. an attempt has been made to discover ‘prophecies’ in the form of correspondences between the numbers thus obtained and the dates of history. There is in this an absurdity so manifest that one cannot but wonder how it is that nobody seems to notice it; it only shows the extent to which our contemporaries are victims of ‘suggestion’, for even supposing that the constructors of the Pyramid really did build some sort of ‘prophecies’ into it, there are two things that would on the whole be plausible: either that the ‘prophecies’, which would necessarily have to be based on some knowledge of cyclic laws, should be related to the history of the world in general and of humanity, or that they should be adapted so as to deal more particularly with Egypt; but in fact neither turns out to be the case, for all the information extracted is in a form related to the point of view of Judaism in the first place, and of Christianity in the second, so that the only logical conclusion would be that the Pyramid is not an Egyptian monument at all, but a ‘Judeo-Christian’ monument! This alone should be enough to put this unlikely story into its proper place; but it is worth adding that the whole is conceived in accordance with a so-called ‘chronology’ of the Bible that is highly contestable and conforms to the narrowest and most Protestant ‘literalism’, doubtless because the material had to be adapted to the special mentality of the environment in which it was to be chiefly circulated in the first place. Many other curious features could be noted: thus it appears that no date since the beginning of the Christian era can have been of sufficient interest to be recorded before that of the invention of railways; if that were so one would have to believe that these ancient builders brought a very modern perspective to bear on their appreciation of the importance of events; in this appears the element of the grotesque never lacking in that sort of thing, and it is precisely that which betrays their real origin: the devil is no doubt very clever, but he can never help being ridiculous in one way or another! [157] Before leaving the subject of the Great Pyramid, attention should be drawn to another modern fantasy connected with it: some people attach much importance to the fact that it was never finished; the summit is in fact missing, but all that can be said for certain about it is that the most ancient authors whose evidence is available, but who are nevertheless relatively recent, all describe it as truncated, as it is today; but it is a long step from this to the claim, as expressed word for word by an occultist, that ‘the hidden symbolism of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures is directly related to events that took place in the course of the building of the Great Pyramid’; indeed, this is another assertion that seems singularly lacking in plausibility on all counts! It is a strange fact that the official seal of the United States bears the truncated pyramid, and over it is a triangle with rays, separated and isolated from it by a surrounding circle of clouds, but apparently intended to replace the summit. There are other decidedly strange details in this seal as well, and the ‘pseudo-initiatic’ organizations rampant in America try to make good use of them by interpreting them in conformity with their own ‘doctrines’; they certainly seem to indicate an intervention by suspicious influences: thus, the number of the courses of the Pyramid is thirteen (this number reappearing somewhat insistently in other features, notably that of the letters of which the motto E pluribus unum is composed) and is alleged to correspond to the number of the tribes of Israel (the two half-tribes of the sons of Joseph being counted separately), and no doubt this has some connection with the real origin of the ‘prophecies of the Great Pyramid’, which, as we have seen, tend to treat the Pyramid as a sort of ‘Judeo-Christian’ monument, for reasons that are somewhat obscure.