Mysteries of the Great Pyramid (Part 3 of 3: The King’s Chamber & Beyond)

This is the final edition in a new three-part blog series, delving into the mysteries of the Great Pyramid of Giza. In Part 1, I looked at the claims Egyptologists make regarding its creation. In Part 2, I discussed the theories regarding how the Great Pyramid was built and the extraordinary suggestion that it may once have been a power plant. In this week’s instalment, however, I’m going to be discussing my own experiences of visiting the Great Pyramid, offer a few travel tips and explore the supernatural elements of its design.

Mysteries of the

Great Pyramid

Part 3 of 3:

The King’s Chamber

& Beyond

When is the best time to visit the Great Pyramid?

I was lucky enough to visit in November of 2017 with a group of fellow shamans and psychically-aware explorers. Coincidentally, for those interested in numerology, we happened to be in the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid on 11/11 at 11:11. Generally, the winter is the best time to visit, as it is far less crowded and the summer months’ heat is too intense for most tourists.

Can you climb the pyramids?

You used to be able to but now it is illegal and you might find yourself being ejected from the country and banned from returning, which surely is not worth it? I have heard of substantial bribes being paid to guards all around the perimeter late at night in order to make the climb but it is a tough and dangerous exploit. It also seems disrespectful to me, in the same way that I do not like to see people climbing on Stonehenge at the Summer Solstice.

Can I take a camera inside?

No. Our bags were searched and our possessions were stripped away from us at the entrance, we could not take cameras inside (in my case, that included a phone, a Nikon, a video camera & a 360/VR camera!), so we had to leave them with our guide. That’s something to think about if you are travelling alone or without a guide because the only option is to leave your items at the entrance and trust that thieves do not help themselves!

What about taking mesas or ceremonial items inside?

We weren’t allowed to take our mesas in either. The guards and police are suspicious of anything that looks ceremonial, presumably fearing that you might start performing a weird ceremony but, as ever, a ‘donation’ may lead some guards to overcome their scruples. Or, more likely, a prior arrangement to have exclusive access to the Kings’ or Queens’ Chambers would grant you such privileges.

Even quietly meditating outside, near the pyramid, led to a frankly scary encounter with the police and, ultimately, our guide encouraging us to leave the site rather sooner than we had intended – so beware!

What’s it like inside?

You enter via the Robbers’ Tunnel, allegedly the result of Caliph al Ma’mun’s workers using a battering ram to loot the pyramid in 820 AD.

The Ascending Passage is quite steep and claustrophobic. It is architecturally astonishing and more akin to a strange factory than an ancient mausoleum.

I have heard of plenty of tourists who turn back mid-tunnel, not being able to cope with the cramped, steep conditions. I also felt considerable fear. Indeed, I experienced horribly violent images of people being trapped inside and machine-gunned, which I sincerely hoped was not prophetic. Later, I wondered if something within the pyramid intentionally provoked such fears, in order to discourage grave-robbers?

It is possible that the strange acoustic or electrical properties of the pyramid might account for such feelings. Professor Richard Wiseman, the arch-debunker of the supernatural, suggests ‘infrasound’ (low frequency sound) can cause feelings of anxiety and geomagnetic fields have been shown to affect the brain’s temporal lobes – both of these phenomena are present in the Great Pyramid and might even be enhanced by the pyramid’s design.

And inside the King’s Chamber?

It is odd to crawl into the room but, once inside, I felt more at peace. It is about 10 by 5 metres, with a flat roof and it is faced in granite. The only object inside is a rectangular granite sarcophagus, which is larger than the passage, so it must have been placed inside before the 400 tonnes of roof slabs were put in place. It is rough-finished and ugly. One has to ask why such a key element of the design, the supposed final resting place of the Pharaoh who ordered the pyramid’s construction was not more elaborate – it’s not even centred at the end of the room!

What did you do inside the Chamber?

There were enough people talking loudly that I could experiment with intoning in different areas of the room and I found that, when I pressed up against one of the walls, there was an extraordinary resonance, with the walls themselves seeming to reverberate, but it was not easy to replicate – my position had to be exact.

I had only experienced such extraordinary resonance in stones once before, intoning in one of the ‘windows’ of the ‘Enclosure of the Ten Niches’ (see photo below) at the Incan fortress of Ollantaytambo, Peru. It is as if the dense stone has suddenly become plastic and you can feel a resonance deep behind them. It is quite unnerving to perceive solid stone as suddenly hollow, merely by intoning.

Although I did not know it at the time, I have since discovered that King’s Chamber’s optimum resonant frequency is 114-122Hz, almost perfectly synchronizing with the pitch of the male voice. One has to wonder, then, if it was specifically constructed with male intoning in mind? Was it always designed as a place of ritual, perhaps to push initiates into an altered state of consciousness?

Could the King’s Chamber have been a place of healing?

I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that certain stones have healing properties – perhaps that’s not surprising when, as a shaman of the Incan tradition, I carry a mesa of healing stones! But, beyond the shamanic practices of transfiguring stones into talismans of healing, there are some interesting scientific theories about the innate healing properties of some stones.

In fact, it’s one of the theories regarding Stonehenge – that the bluestones were brought 200 miles precisely because of their acoustic properties. Indeed, researchers from the Royal College of Art found that the bluestones ‘clanged’ distinctively when they were struck. Perhaps the stones picked for the interior of the Great Pyramid also had certain desired acoustic or healing properties, necessitating their re-location from such a remote location?

Is there a secret chamber in the pyramid?

In the same year that we visited the Great Pyramid, advances in muon radiography allowed scientists to detect cavities within the pyramid by utilising cosmic rays. The scan indicated that there was a previously unknown chamber at least a hundred feet long.

Egyptologists claim that any drilling to discover the new chamber would damage the structural integrity of the building. In addition, Hawass stated that the pyramid is riddled with hidden holes and chambers (something he had never attested to before) but that they were merely part of the building process. The idea that a major discovery awaits future archaeologists is obviously very exciting. 

Any final thoughts?

I’ll leave you with a final mystery! The Greek historian, Herodotus, described a maze ‘beyond words’, which, ‘even surpasses the pyramids’. Clearly, it was still there in 448 BC, since Herodotus wrote that he had seen it with his own eyes. He claimed it consisted of 1, 500 underground rooms, including 12 tombs of kings. No trace of the labyrinth has been found but it is just one further indication that there are still many miraculous discoveries to be made in the area.