Drew audience and attention still as night
Or Summer’s noontide air.”
He said that in order to find the fullest measure of symbolism in this, as in other Temple mysteries, we must go further than the Temple walls and question the inner chambers of the pyramids—we must ask of the Shepherd Kings what Solomon and the two Hirams told them not. The point was beautifully elucidated both in itself and in its relation to others, so that its increased richness of allusion and teaching became at once surprisingly manifest.
Evidently all present felt that a master of the mysteries of the buried centuries was among us—and in gesture and expression all asked “the old man eloquent” to continue, and to give his views upon the work of those Shepherd Kings to whom he had so appositely alluded.
So far as I can remember the facts which he laid before us, and fill up gaps in my memory, by reference to standard authorities, he spoke as follows:—
“The Hykshos or Shepherd Kings came suddenly into this land of mystery; came with a purpose, which purpose accomplished, they departed speedily. That purpose, for which they travelled so far, was to build the great pyramid, a unique, symbolic, and prophetic structure, ‘star-y-pointing,’ raised on a site chosen from the whole surface of the earth by reason of its unique, its solitary fitness. That building, type of the ever-during gates of heaven, wonderfully symbolized the mystic wisdom of its time; imperishably recorded the principal facts in metrology, meteorology and astronomy, and prophetically embodied the discoveries of ages then to come. Temple and town have gone to the ground, but it has endured. It was the precursor of the great symbolic Temple of Solomon, built by the descendants of those shepherd builders, students of the heaven’s wide pathless way, and which although destroyed, could be reconstructed by the measures and dimensions familiar to our mystic craft, and recorded in that great book of symbols, the Bible.
“Now, the dimensions and rhythmic proportions on which Solomon, on which Hiram, King of Tyre, and on which Hiram Abiff builded the wondrous Temple, were enshrined in the Great Pyramid just five hundred years before.
“The Temple diagram, conceived under the starry cope of heaven, is made by drawing on a diameter of 1,000 inches, a circle, about which and in which is described a square, again a circle and a square circumscribed. The areas of the various squares and circles here drawn, equal those of the porch of Solomon’s Temple (125,000 square inches), of the holy place (500,000 square inches) and the Holy of Holies; the latter of which is encircled in a nest of circles and squares and the original radius of which, five hundred inches, was the whole length of the Holy of Holies itself.
“Now let us retrace our steps through five centuries and enter the great monument of Chem, to obey the prophetic mandate of the angel to the holy St. John, and ‘arise and measure the temple and its altar.’
“In the king’s chamber the volume of a certain portion of the room equals fifty times that of the coffer—the relation of the ark to the brazen sea in the Temple. Drawing the diagram of the pyramid to a scale having as the height, the mean height of the king’s chamber (232.52 inches), the magistral line is 412.13 inches, or the length of the chambers. The base of the triangle is the number of days in a year, 365.24 inches, and the radius of that circle having an area of 365.24 inches squared, is 206.06 inches, or the width of the chamber. Constructing a pyramid triangle of height equal to the width of the chamber, the magistral line of the completed pyramid is the year number 365.24 inches—the perimeter of the base, double the two other important chamber dimensions—the length, 412.13 inches, and the second height, 235.24 inches. The entire pyramid design comports with that of the chamber, and those of the coffer and of the ante-chamber, which is in fact the ante-chamber to modern civilization.