Considerations XX:1
Measure, the divine recorder, before whom stood the Balance of Justice, wherein the light and darkness of man's mortal life were weighed, was lord, not of the sun, but of the moon, and so to that latter orb we are indebted for our fundamental standards ... of space and time....�. It is as if the designers are saying, "When you reach this Hall, your ordinary consciousness (w-e) begins to break down. Prepare for Illumination.'" The topmost corbel, representing i, the seventh or hidden planet, is right up there touching the solar ray, with its forty waves1: the gestation of Illumination. Forty is the number of gestation (forty weeks), and this number of "ratchet" teeth in the top of the i corbel thereby symbolizes the rebirth of the candidate's inner, or solar, center at Initiation. The groove of the lunar orbit?
Views of the Lower & Upper Ends of the Grand Gallery
1
Charles Piazzi Smyth, in Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid (fifth edition, 1890, p. 302) says that there are thirty-six overlapping roof-beams, in the Grand Gallery, but William Kingsland and Morton Edgar both counted them in 1931 and found forty corroborated by a third observer, as recounted in Kingsland's The Great Pyramid in Fact and Theory (1932, Part I, p. 71). The illustrations in the present article are reproduced from Kingsland.
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