Dimensions of the Pyramid
By Peter Zusi
15 July 2020
As a diagram of power the pyramid stands most directly in contrast to the straight line. The pyramid’s verticality concentrates power higher up among ever narrowing circles (culminating in the singularity of the dictator), while the ‘democratic’ horizontal spreads power evenly along the straight and true line.
As a matter of empirical observation, however, structures that aspire towards horizontality show an inexorable tendency to become vertical—whether through power hierarchies that emerge from within or from the necessity of collaborating with wealthy or influential institutions, donors, sponsors, etc. The straight line becomes the pyramid; the horizontal becomes the vertical.
From La Description De L’Egypte, V, 1822
From Edgar and John Morton, The Great Pyramid: Passages and Chambers, Glasgow, 1910.
But pyramids have traditionally embodied another spatial opposition as well: Exterior v. Interior. For Hegel they embodied ‘symbolic art’: pre-eminently and unmistakably a symbol, yet completely ambiguous as to what they symbolized. The outer form allows no passage to the inner meaning. Hegel took this as a ‘shape of World Spirit’ that was still unable to connect (outward) matter and (inner) spirit—those crude Egyptians!—but that did at least express its fundamental contradiction in perfect form, through the crystalline enigma of the pyramid. In less recondite terms, architecturally the pyramid offers no clues as to what lies inside, since its outer form does not hint at the shape or layout of its interior spaces. The very simplicity of the pyramid’s geometry makes it all the more inscrutable.
From Edgar and John Morton, The Great Pyramid: Passages and Chambers, Glasgow, 1910.
As a diagram of power, the ‘exterior/interior’ opposition adds to the ‘horizontal/vertical’ opposition as follows. Vertical power structures at least have the virtue of clarity: you know who is on top and in charge. From that point of view they are transparent. But in actual fact, apparent powers vertical often hide the real power structures inside. Puppet presidents, financial machinations hidden behind clean spread-sheets, ‘tunneled’ corporations (to use a term from 1990s post-communist transition economies, which has a wonderful archaeological resonance), etc. The ‘exterior/interior’ opposition thus emphasizes the opacity of the pyramid in contrast to the transparency of the vertical. This adds a third dimension to the 2-D conception of power vertical. Herein lies the distinction between a true pyramid and a simple triangle (which is how we routinely schematize ‘pyramid schemes’).
From John Greaves, Pyramidographia, Oxford, 1646