Pyramidion

In the 1860s, a farmer’s wife built a shrine to the Egyptian sun god Ra in the sand bluffs behind their house. Inside it, she placed a relic she had received from the Egyptian explorer Sarah Belzoni: a genuine pyramidion.

When ancient Egyptians were building tombs for their royalty, they topped them with a pyramid-shaped stone. It symbolized a mound rising from primeval waters where the first gods settled. The original and most powerful one was a cone-shaped meteorite on an obelisk in the temple of the supreme sun god Ra. Every morning it would capture the first rays of the sun, representing Ra’s ascent from the underworld to start a new day. A cycle of day and night, light and dark, birth and death. Having a pyramidion watch over you meant that you were always protected by the omnipotent sun.

One morning, the woman woke up to find that the entire shrine had filled with sand. All that remained inside the pyramidion was a piece of yellow glass – a compound just like Libyan desert glass, a silica formation that was probably created by thermal radiation from a meteoric impact. From this glass, she heard an ethereal melody vibrating into the deepest parts of her soul. She listened in a trance and then ran to her husband, saying: “It’s the voice of the sun!”

The farmer dismissed her fancies. But he did wonder about the yellow glass. Could it be that the shape of the pyramidion and its mythic connection to the sun facilitated intense heat transfer and accelerated the production of glass? Over the next years, he secretly built a prototype tunnel behind the farm in the shape of his wife’s pyramidion. Decades later, the tunnels were developed into a sandstone quarry.

Errol, the astronomer studying a distant solar system abandoned by one of its planets, heard this story during a visit to a nearby observatory. He was intrigued: Was it possible that the unique pyramidion shape could impact the communicative properties of the sandstone? He set out to create chemical replicas of the yellow glass as receivers for electromagnetic emissions from “his” faraway solar system, focusing on how a potential deflection of waves by our own sun could have amplified the planetary narratives in the local silica compounds.

Did his experiments work? They did! We were able to recreate his processes inside the now abandoned sand mine. With the help of our audiences, we reconstructed the powerful compound, calibrated the conjoined frequencies, activated the transmission with a pickaxe, and brought the voices of the planets to life.

Participants

Aziza Knight, Christos Pathiakis, Dark Shadow, Derek, Dorothy Melander-Dayton, Dorothy Trojanowski, Eleanor Lovinsky, John Law, Julia Solis, Kim Couchot, Lo, Luc, Luna Knight, Miigun, Thelma, Tom Kirsch