Man is a fallen god who remembers the Heavens
— Lamartine, Meditations
Let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years
— Genesis i, 14
Seek him that maketh the Pleides and Orion
— Amos v, 8
I The Rise of Orion
It was early November 1983 and, as is usual at that time of year, the night skies in central Saudi Arabia were remarkably clear. This was the time of week-end camping by expatriates in Riyadh in the golden dunes about twenty kilometres outside the sprawling western suburbs of this sedate city.
My wife, Michele, had packed the usual gear: alcohol-free beer, plenty of drinking water, food and the sleeping-bags. My daughter, Candice, was only four years old, but already a seasoned desert traveller. Two other couples with their children joined us. The idea was to select a high dune so that the kids could play on the clean, golden-coloured sand while the adults relaxed over hot coffee and an elaborate barbecue. We were all looking forward to escaping from the hard work and no play mood of Riyadh and the stifling atmosphere of a deeply Islamic society. Night on the dunes can be very beautiful. Immediately after the spectacular display of the setting sun came the darkness, with the canopy of a star-spangled sky almost at arm’s length. Lying in my sleeping-bag, I counted the stars until I fell asleep.
For some reason I woke up at 3 a.m., perhaps subconsciously motivated. Once more I gazed up, at first unsure of where I was. High in the southern sky, arching over and almost marking for us the curve of the celestial equator, was a luminous band of light, resplendent against the inky black of space. It was the Milky Way and it looked like a great river in the sky. On its west ‘bank’ was a spatter of beautiful stars, brighter than all the others which surrounded them. I recognised them immediately as the constellation of Orion and went to wake up my friend Jean-Pierre, who shared my interest in astronomy and whose passion for sailing had necessitated his learning to navigate using the stars.
Silently, he came with me to the edge of the dune. Looking at the very bright star now high over the horizon, he let me into one of the secrets of astro-navigation. ‘Do you know’, he asked, ‘how to find the rising point of Sirius once Orion has risen?’ I shrugged my shoulders in ignorance. ‘Well, first,’ he said, pointing in the direction of the ‘river bank’, ‘you must find the three stars of Orion’s Belt. These three form a row and you extend the alignment downwards to the horizon. When the belt stars have risen about twenty degrees — roughly the height of an open hand at arm’s length and with fingers outstretched — they will be followed by Sirius at the place on the horizon where they point.’ He was now pointing towards the bright star on the horizon, which we both knew was Sirius. Then, almost as an afterthought, he uttered these words: ‘Actually, the three stars of Orion’s Belt are not perfectly aligned. If you look carefully you will see that the smallest of them, the one at the top, is slightly offset to the east and they are slanted in a south-westerly direction relative to the axis of the Milky Way. Also notice how …’ At this point I cut him short. He gave me a puzzled look as I quoted the words I remembered only too well from the Pyramid Texts: ‘The Duat has grasped the king’s hand at the place where Orion is … [PT 1717]. O Osiris King … Betake yourself to the Waterway … may a stairway to the Duat be set for you at the place where Orion is … [PT 1717].’ By now the others had woken up and joined us. ‘Je tiens l’affaire!’,1 I cried excitedly. I had deliberately chosen the words uttered by Champollion when he realised he had decoded the secrets of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing and I hoped that someone in the group, a few of whom I had involved in the aerial photo puzzle of Giza, would catch on. From their expressions it was obvious they had not.
Jean-Pierre kept on looking intensely at Orion. ‘What have you seen …?’, he inquired, amused.
‘The three pyramids of Giza’, I said calmly.
‘The what …?’ asked Michele. She had heard endlessly about the star religion of the Egyptians in those last few months. ‘Is this a joke …?’
‘No, I am quite serious,’ and I pointed to Orion’s Belt. Thus began a saga which was to run for another ten years.
II Rostau: Gateway to the Stars
The idea that the Ancient Egyptian Duat, or heaven, had a counterpart on the land is something Egyptologists know from the many funerary texts extant in the museums of the world. The location, however, was always thought to be arbitrary, with no specific correlation intended. I knew that what I was suggesting was quite different. I read that in the New Kingdom the Duat, or rather its entrance, was thought to be at Abydos, then an important centre of Osirian worship. But I had also found out that in the Pyramid Age the Duat had its counterpart near Memphis, and that, in all periods, the Duat was said to have a central entrance or gate in a place named Rostau.2
I investigated further, and what I came up with confirmed what I had stumbled on that night in the desert. The way the three stars were slanted in relation to the axis of the Milky Way, the offset of the small star from the alignment of the two brighter ones, the southern shaft in Cheops’s pyramid targeted to these very stars when the pyramid was built — all this was too much to be coincidence. Yet, if I was right, something as obvious as this had not only escaped the attention of Egyptologists but had probably done so because of the solar stamp given to the pyramids. It was not an easy consensus to break, so before rushing to proclaim my findings to Egyptologists, more research was required. The notion of Rostau was a starting point. If it could be shown that Rostau, the central gate of the Duat, correlated with the Giza necropolis, the central part of the Memphite-Duat, then we obviously had something. Naturally the deciding factor would be if other pyramids, especially those of the Fourth Dynasty, also correlated with other stars in the region of Orion. But first things first: where or what was Rostau?
Wallis-Budge, a former Keeper of Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum and a prolific author, had made the startling comment that during the Pyramid Age the Memphite Necropolis containing the pyramid fields was known as the Duat of Sokar of Memphis. This god Sokar, a man with a falcon’s head, was said to be the keeper of the Memphite Necropolis and, even more interestingly, was closely identified with Osiris during the Fourth Dynasty. This was confirmed by Dr Edwards who wrote that ‘by pyramid times, Osiris had become identified with Sokar, the god of the Memphite necropolis …’3 I also discovered that in many funerary texts the centre of the Duat was called Rostau. In the Shabaka Texts,4 for example, the Memphite region is described: ‘This is the land … [of] … the burial place of Osiris in the House of Sokar.’5
This prompted Selim Hassan to conclude that the centre of the Duat was not only identified with Rostau but with ‘the kingdom of Osiris in the tomb’.6 In the Book of the Two Ways, which contains funerary texts dating from the Middle Kingdom period (c.2000BC), we are also told that Rostau is the gateway to the necropolis and that it gives direct access to the Duat. The deceased tells us: ‘I have passed on the roads of Rostau on water and land; these roads are those of Osiris; they are in the Sky …’7
Jane Sellers, who has for many years studied the astronomy of the Egyptians in relation to their texts, writes that ‘the insistence in the Book of the Two Ways that the topography of the roads to Rostau, though in the sky, is on water and on land, hints at how the Egyptians conceived of the heavens’. She also suggests that ‘the paths by way of water could have been the area which we know as the Milky Way’.8
Rostau is also mentioned in the Pyramid Texts in conjunction with the god Sokar (or Sokar-Osiris): ‘For I am Sokar of Rostau, I am bound for the Place where dwells Sokar …’ [PT 445]. The ‘place where dwells Sokar’ was, of course, the Memphite Necropolis, but it seemed also to have an astral location in the vicinity of the Milky Way. So was Rostau in the sky, that is Orion’s Belt, to be correlated with the Giza pyramids?
So far there was good evidence that Rostau in the ‘place where dwells Sokar’ or Sokar-Osiris, was an actual place on land, somewhere in the Memphite Necropolis. This fitted the view of students of Egyptian symbolism, that it was ‘vital to the spirit of Egyptian religion that the symbolism should be twofold’, so that every affair of mankind was regarded as a ‘repetition of some mythical happening in the time of the gods’.9 The Egyptians believed that the gods, indeed the ‘wisdom god’ Thoth himself, had built the Giza pyramids during the golden age when gods lived on earth; the idea was later imparted to the Greeks, who also said that Hermes, the name they gave Thoth, had built the pyramids.10 I remembered, too, that in the famous Westcar Papyrus of the New Kingdom the pyramid of Khufu, called the Horizon of Khufu, was linked to the sanctuary of Thoth, supposedly somewhere in Heliopolis.
Looking at a recently published Atlas of Ancient Egypt,11 I was amazed to find that Rostau was near or indeed at Giza: a real place in the Memphite Necropolis, and the approximate location was given as ‘southern Giza’. Indeed, Rundle Clark calls the god ‘Sokar of Giza’ seeing this place as being the ancient Rostau.12 Many Egyptologists refer to Rostau as the ancient name of Giza. Goyon thought it was where the village of Giza is today,13 and Rundle Clark says that ‘Rosetau [sic] [is] … the modern Giza, the burial-place of Memphis and the home of a form of Osiris known as Sokar’.14 Miriam Lichtheim, an eminent philologist at the University of California, says that Rostau was ‘the necropolis of Giza’15 and Faulkner similarly identified it with the ‘necropolis of Giza or Memphis [and] later extended to mean the other world in general’.16 In the Middle Kingdom and New Kingdom Osiris is called the ‘august god in Rostau’,17 and it is implicit that Rostau was regarded as the place of great ritual where the reborn person can ‘go forth into the day’ as ‘one who follows the god (Osiris) in his procession in his festival of Rostau … here begin the spells of the Fields of Offerings and spells for going forth into the day: of coming and going in the realm of the dead [Duat] …’18
It was clear that it could be argued that Rostau was not a mythical place but was indeed Giza, and that it was considered the gateway to the Duat region. What I now needed to confirm was whether the correlation I could see between the three Giza pyramids and the stars of Orion’s Belt was part of a larger scheme.
III The Celestial River
As we have seen, the Pyramid Texts contain astronomical data in that they talk about observations made of Orion, of Sirius and other stars in the region of the sky the Egyptians called the Duat. What was thrilling and evocative was the way that the Ancient Egyptians correlated the Nile with the ‘celestial river’ i.e., the Milky Way, and this was known even by the Greeks. From the time of Homer, the Nile was associated with the mythical sky river called either Okeanos or Eridanus. The Hellenic historian, A. B. Cook, was of the opinion that Eridanus (which today is a faint constellation formed by a string of stars joining Rigel to Alchermar) was ‘at the outset none other than the Milky Way’, and that in pre-Greek times, Okeanos ‘simply meant the Galaxy’ i.e. the Milky Way. Cook also drew attention to a statement by Hyginus that the river Eridanus was identified with the Nile, and that it was also often called Okeanos (‘Eridanus: hunc alii Nilum, complures etiam Oceanum esse dixerunt’).19
The identification of the Nile with Eridanus or Okeanos seems to have been common knowledge in the classical world. Even Diodorus reported that ‘the Egyptians consider Okeanos to be their river Nile, on which their gods were born’,20 and the chronicler Eusebius says ‘the Egyptians believe that the river Nile is the ocean from which the race of gods has taken birth’.21 Much later Eridanus was identified with the River Po in Italy, and sometimes with the Rhine and even the Rhone, but as R. H. Allen remarks, ‘none of these comparatively northern streams suit the stellar position of Eridanus, for it is a southern constellation, and it would seem that its earthly counterpart ought to be found in a corresponding quarter.’22
It is not hard to see why a Nilotic people with a sky religion should see a correlation between their river and the Milky Way. Just as the Nile divides Egypt into two regions, so the Milky Way divides the sky. It is quite probable that this relationship between the Nile and the Milky Way was what first gave the Nile dwellers the idea that a cosmic Egypt existed in that region of the sky which their souls could reach after their earthly existence. Wallis Budge explains this rather well:
The Egyptians … from the earliest days … depicted to themselves a material heaven wherein Isles of the Blest were laved by the waters of the Nile … others again lived in imagination on the banks of the Heavenly Nile, whereon they built cities; and it seems as if the Egyptians never succeeded in conceiving a heaven without a Nile …23
Reading this, I was not surprised that the Pyramid Texts also tell us of an important ‘Winding Waterway’ in the eastern sky which closely resembles the Nile, with its own ‘great flood’ and ‘fields’ of reeds or rushes:
‘May you lift me [the dead king] and raise me to the Winding Waterway, may you set me among the gods, the imperishable stars …’ [PT 1759]
‘Be firm, O king, on the underside of the sky with the Beautiful Star upon the Bend of the Winding Waterway …’ [PT 2061]
‘I have come to my waterways which are in the bank of the Flood of the Great Inundation, to the place of contentment … which is in the Horizon …’ [PT 508]
‘The Winding Waterway is flooded, the Fields of Rushes are filled with water, and I [the dead king] am ferried over thereon to yonder eastern side of the sky, to the Place where the gods fashioned me, where I was born new [reborn] and young … Lo, I stand up as a star which is on the underside of the sky … my sister is Sothis, my offspring is the Morning Star …’ [PT 343–57]
It was now looking likely that I had stumbled upon the true mystery of the pyramids. The Duat, which stretched along the ‘west bank’ of the Milky Way corresponded to — indeed was seen as a mirror image of - that region we now call the Memphite Necropolis. It was, of course, not a necropolis at all in the Greek or western sense of the word; rather the Elysian Fields, the earthly counterpart of the heavenly abode of the king-gods of Egypt — the Egypt, that is, of the Pyramid Age.
IV Development of the Orion Correlation Theory
The evidence was now mounting that the Ancient Egyptians viewed the area of the Memphite Necropolis as a terrestrial image of the heavenly Duat. Throughout antiquity the Milky Way was looked upon as a celestial river analogous to the Nile and in Giza we had, quite literally, Orion’s Belt on the ground. What I now needed to check was what the Pyramid Texts had to say concerning the pyramids, not as metaphors for a religious idea or symbol but as material structures. It was then that I discovered something very curious: the Pyramid Texts make few direct statements concerning the pyramids themselves, and these are all huddled together in one long passage, known as Utterance 600.
In this Utterance Ra, the sun god, offered his benevolent protection to the monument in question. As head of the Heliopolitan pantheon and ancestral father of the gods, including Osiris, this was not unexpected, much as we might ask for the protection of God the Father while believing in our resurrection through Jesus Christ. Ra, the sun god, might indeed protect the pyramid and the whole Necropolis, but it was through Osiris that rebirth was deemed to be achieved. Finally in Utterance 600 I found what I was looking for: an unequivocal statement that connected the king and his pyramid construction to Osiris. The statement was an instruction to his son, the new Horus-king, to proceed to the pyramid fields: ‘O Horus, this (departed) king is Osiris, this Pyramid of his is Osiris, this construction of his is Osiris, betake yourself to it …’ [PT 1657].
To understand this better, we should remember that versions of the Pyramid Texts have been found in not one but several pyramids.24 It therefore makes sense to suppose that this Utterance is meant not only for one specific king but serves as a general liturgy for all departed kings. In the plural Utterance 600 reads: ‘O Horus, these (departed) kings are Osiris, these Pyramids of theirs are Osiris, these constructions of theirs are Osiris, betake yourself to them …’ [PT 1657].
I at last understood that we were being told, in plain language, that the pyramid constructions were to be considered Osiris. As I already knew that the celestial form of Osiris was Sahu, and that this figure corresponded with our modern constellation of Orion, the pyramids were indeed Orion too. The text writers could not have made their intent plainer or more straightforward, and it substantiated my theory that the three pyramids of Giza were symbols of Orion’s Belt.
My next step was to find further visual evidence. I had a good photograph of the three stars of Orion’s Belt and was able to place it against the aerial shot of the three Giza pyramids. The correlation was stunning. Not only did the layout of the pyramids match the stars with uncanny precision but the intensity of the stars, shown by their apparent size, corresponded with the Giza group: there were three stars, three pyramids, three Osiris-Orion kings.
As I read the word Osiris I began to conjure the sky image of Orion, the ‘soul of Osiris’. Utterance 600 was dealing with an afterlife ritual, not so much with the embalmed corpses of dead kings but with their souls, and more specifically their astral souls which joined Osiris-Orion in the celestial Duat. Osiris in this case was, of course, also Osiris-Orion. Thus, the passage would read: ‘O Horus, these (star souls of departed) kings are Orion-Osiris, these pyramids of theirs are Orion-Osiris, these constructions of theirs are Orion-Osiris, betake yourself to them …’
Suddenly I realised that not only the three Giza pyramids but others too might have stellar positions in the Memphite Necropolis. Now that the Giza group identified with Orion’s Belt, it could be used as a reference or datum point from which the relative positions of other stars of the Duat could be located. The two great pyramids of Dashour for example, and those which had been located at Abu Ruwash and Zawyat Al Aryan which flank Giza, might not these also correlate to stars of the Duat? Surely all Fourth Dynasty pyramids would have been involved in the master plan to forge the soul of Osiris on the sacred land of Memphis? I recalled excitedly that two of the pyramids in question, those of Djedefra at Abu Ruwash and Nebka at Zawyat Al Aryan, bore star names: ‘Djedefra is a Sehetu Star’ and ‘Nebka is a Star’.25 A ‘Sehetu Star’ meant a star of the Duat. What star might that be? The temptation to investigate further was compelling.
I laid out a map of the Memphis area and compared it with a picture of the region of the sky containing Orion. Carefully aligning the Giza group pyramids with the stars of Orion’s Belt, I saw that the pyramid of Djedefra at Abu Ruwash corresponded with the star Saiph or Orion’s ‘left foot’ and that at Zawyat al Aryan represented Bellatrix in his ‘right shoulder’. There were no known pyramids in locations to match other stars such as Betelgeuse and Rigel, so I could only conclude that these had never been built or that they had long since been demolished and had disappeared under the sands of the Western desert. Given the ruined state of the pyramids of Zawyat al Aryan and Abu Ruwash, this is not an unlikely supposition. Five of the seven bright stars of Orion were thus accounted for in the Fourth Dynasty pyramids.
The pyramids of Dashour, however, posed a problem. They were not part of ‘our’ modern Orion figure, and it was only much later that I worked out where they fitted. What was clear at this stage was that what we now call ‘the Orion correlation theory’ had generated a momentum of its own.
It now seemed like the right time to approach the experts and see what they thought about it.