I like to classify the books I read in to three categories: Great Fiction (1984, Atlas Shrugged, Dune), Great Non-Fiction (Outliers, The Righteous Mind, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), and a third category I don’t have a good name for. The following review pertains to a book of the third category.
This third category is made up of books that, I believe, are written and read in earnest, though by a section of the population I do not normally associate with. I relate to these books like outsider art, a glimpse in to a world that the literary mainstream does not acknowledge often. They concerns themselves with conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, ancient aliens, that sort of thing.
I think it’s important and healthy to engage with these works. It helps broaden my perspective and helps me relate to people who I believe are falling through the cracks of modern society; some of whom are close friends or loved ones. Reading these books helps me live in their world for a little while, and helps build empathy across an ever-widening gap between “us” and “the other”. But I don’t want to get ahead of myself.
First, I want to tell you about this funny little book about the Pyramids.
The central thesis of The Orion Mystery revolves around the Memphis necropolis, which for simplicity sake can be thought of as “the place where all the cool, super old stuff in Egypt is”. The author proposes that Ancient Egypt had a more pronounced stellar cult (a religion based on the stars) than Egyptology at the time of their writing recognized, instead of the solar cult (a religion based on the sun) contemporary Egyptology often attributed findings to. This thesis is based on the placement of the pyramids, which corresponds conspicuously with the Orion constellation (hence the title), among other supporting evidence that the stars were pivotal to the society of Ancient Egypt.
I want to pause for a moment to qualify what I mean by “Ancient Egypt” in this context. It’s easy to conflate the Ancient Egypt that built the pyramids with, say, Egypt of the Roman Empire era - but these two cultures are millennia apart. I once read that Cleopatra lived closer to the creation of the iPhone than the Great Pyramid, which helps put the time period we’re discussing in to perspective. Similarly, if we anchor our mental timeline on the probable lifetime of one of the other well-known Egyptian rulers, Tutankhamen, we’re still short by over 1000 years. It’s easy to forget how ancient “Ancient Egypt” is, which for our purposes is ~4500 years ago.
I highlight the time that has elapsed from the creation of the pyramids to our modern day to give the benefit of the doubt to some of the theories proposed in this book. It’s important to remember that, what might seem ridiculous to a modern mind, could have been truth to someone living in Ancient Egypt. So the proposition that massive stone structures were built by a culture that didn’t have sandwiches to align with tiny lights in the night sky cannot be dismissed out of hand. I state all this because, without at least accepting plausibility, this whole analysis falls apart.
Aside from the admittedly simple observation that the pyramids do look like they correspond to Orion’s belt when viewed from above, in both orientation and size, the author has several other supporting pieces of evidence. A good amount of the book focuses on the Egyptian religion and direct references in ancient sources that relate Gods to particular stellar concepts: Osiris-Orion and Isis-Sirius are two good examples. The author makes a compelling argument that some of the religious stories were actually predicated on the movement of stars across the heavens, based on which Gods mapped to which stars and how those stars would have appeared to move to the Ancient Egyptians (don’t even get me started on precession).
However, I have also heard a compelling argument made that the pivotal stories of the Ancient Egyptian religion (those that involve Osiris/Isis/Horus/Seth, the scattering of Osiris’ body, Horus’ fight with Seth, and Horus losing his eye) are the same moral teachings found in every world religion. The professor making this argument then traced the evolution of this teaching through to Christianity, which, as I am familiar with it, was convincing.
I’ll say it again: it’s hard to interpret what we humans meant 4500 years ago. It’s possible both of these parties are somewhat correct. But it also makes me think that both parties may have been seeing what they wanted to see in the ancient religious texts that fit whatever narrative they personally were working on. A sort of historical Rorschach test.
Admittedly, a lot of the “Gods related to the stars” analysis started to get away from me by the end. I am by no means an expert on Egypt; I’ve been exposed to the same zeitgeist interpretation as most of us. The part that was easier to follow was the author’s supposition that the Egyptian’s obsession with the stars was predicated on the Benben stone.
From what I could gather, the Benben stone was partly a mythical artifact from the Egyptian creation myth, and also probably a meteorite that landed in Egypt. I can imagine a meteorite screaming down from the night sky being impressive enough to push a society over the edge from “stars are neat” to “all hail Orion lord of the stars!” The author suggests that the Benben stone was a conical meteorite, and that it related to the mythical Egyptian phoenix (again, this sort of got away from me), which lent it religious significance, and was another link between the stars and pyramid-shaped things.
The last piece of evidence I’ll touch on is how the author extended the observation that three of the pyramids seemed to reflect the structure of Orion’s belt to the idea that the whole Memphis necropolis was a reflection of the night sky. They related the Nile to the Milky way, drawing parallels to other pyramids based on these two anchor points.
I bring this point up because it’s a theme I see play out in lots of these “third category” books I read: the idea of the Master Plan. These kinds of books can’t seem to help themselves. No matter how disparate their theories, they go full “Always Sunny in Philadelphia Pepe Silvia” levels of convinced that it’s all part of the plan.
Which I find odd as a phenomena. To give some other examples, I’ve read a book of this kind about the Mayan calendar (the one that was supposedly predicting the end of the world in 2012) and one about ancient civilizations across the continents. Both concluded with a Master Plan chapter or two where they alleged that someone had some plan, and that “we” were having the wool pulled over our eyes. It’s consistent enough that I believe it to be a feature of these categories of books, not a coincidence (oh no now I’m doing it, too).
To jump ahead a bit, I base my claim that it’s a feature on the kind of person I think these books are written for (and by). There’s a personality type that wants to believe that there is Order in the world, be that in the form of shadow governments or aliens or lizard people. The idea of a plan, any plan, is comforting to someone who thrives on consistency and rules. It’s this reconciliation of (what I believe to be) the inherent chaos and entropy of the universe with a predisposition to law and order that creates these kinds of works, and the people who buy them.
If there is a Master Plan, then there is a reason your father/mother/sister/brother/cousin/best friend died/became an alcoholic/developed a mental illness/insert tragedy here. It wasn’t random. Because if it’s random, it could happen to anyone, even you, and that’s fucking terrifying.
But, if you know the secret Master Plan, maybe you can save everyone. Maybe you can save yourself.
I’m certain I’ve already let on to my opinion of these kinds of books, but to state it plainly: I think they’re flawed. I balance this against the respect I have for anyone who can successfully get a book published, and the doubtless countless hours of research and thinking that goes in to writing any book worth reading. Which is why I don’t want to flatly label them as “bad”. I want to explore now why I think they’re flawed, and hopefully articulate what people might feel when they experience these kinds of works (either in audio, video, or written formats), but can’t place their finger on why they feel that way.
I couldn’t tell you when or how this happened, but intelligence is now in vogue. Specifically, intelligence as it’s measured by schools (the distinction of which is a whole other topic I’m not going to get in to right now). The problem with that being that not everyone is good at school. In fact, I’d say the majority of people do not excel in their academic careers, which has created and is creating countless problems for the education systems of different countries and society as a whole.
Academic success aside, there used to be more of a balance where the “nerdy” kids were re-assured with daytime specials telling them their time will come, whereas the “dumb jocks” were shown as living it up in school but having the rest of their life be mediocre. With this change of having intelligence be the sole determiner of social success both during and after your school career, people who struggled in school were destined to a lifetime as an outsider.
But what if the nerds were wrong?
I think these kinds of books (okay I just need to give them a name: let’s go with Speculative Non-Fiction) appeal to this outsider group who struggled through school both socially and academically (now that those two skill-sets have effectively become one). My first assumption about the popularity of these Speculative Non-Fiction books is that they treat “the establishment” as the outsider. They start asking questions like: What if all those people who gave you C’s and D’s were backed by institutions who were wrong? What if all the peers that shunned you are wasting their time with academia? What if the tables were turned, and you knew things they didn’t?
The Orion Mystery spends a good amount of time at the beginning to establish that there are competing theories about different aspects of Ancient Egypt, and that “the experts” don’t have all the answers. This dovetails in to a well-deserved point that, if there are competing ideas in the space, maybe the pyramids could have been built to align to the stars. I mentioned before that when we try and infer the intentions of humans from over four millennia ago, it can get a little hazy.
The irony of Speculative Non-Fiction books pointing out that the mainstream thought of a particular discipline is built on human understanding and is therefore fallible, to then turn right around and propose another theory built on human understanding, without at least glimpsing in the mirror, is what frustrates me. I do think it’s reasonable that you don’t spend the entirety of your own book contradicting yourself. However, the author should at least acknowledge that they are as fallible if not more so than other thinkers in their field.
Why more so? Because fringe/alternative theories to the mainstream do not have the benefit of collective critique. The more broadly known an idea is, the more opportunity there exists for someone to come along and poke holes in it. This doesn’t always happen, and there are cases where a field endlessly defers judgement to another colleague, to the point where it’s wholly the opinion of a small handful that craft the broader narrative, but I digress.
The phrase “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” comes to mind. From my experience with Speculative Non-Fiction, the authors tend to hone in on outlier (or should I say outsider) data points, and craft a narrative around those data points, dismissing the rest of the data. This is where the philosophy of these books starts to fall apart. These books often feel like they arrive at a certain conclusion (the pyramids were built to align to the stars), and then work backwards collecting evidence that supports this theory. This is the opposite direction you want scientific thought to move in.
Often there are competing theories in any given discipline because academics are working with an incomplete set of puzzle pieces, and are trying to see the whole. These books grab a couple pieces, decide they have figured out what the whole is, and then start placing other pieces down in ways that support this view. Compounded by the fact that we will never have all the puzzle pieces, these works can flourish because they are compelling. Great stories can be written by starting at the conclusion and working your way backwards to the beginning, giving an author opportunity to weave foreshadowing and hints in to their narrative to reinforce the story.
But science isn’t a story. Sometimes the truth is boring.
Boring doesn’t sell well, though. So the most popular Speculative Non-Fiction books end up being overly dramatized, weaving traditional story-telling elements in to what is often at least positioned as an academic work. One element I’ve noticed that is rather popular is to weave an air of mystery in to the work.
I’ve often found that these books advertise themselves as having unlocked “secret knowledge” of one kind or another, and that by reading this book, you can join their secret club (see above about the outsider status of the author and audience and why that might be appealing). There’s also an almost tribal element to it, as they use phrases like “passed down” to lend a sense of kinship between author, audience, and subject. I can imagine that sense of greater connection would be powerful to someone who was a perpetual outsider.
We can take this one step further. When you bring in the context that most of these books have where the “insider” knowledge is of questionable veracity, we can start justifying that it’s good to be uneducated. By casting doubt on “mainstream” thought in general, and putting in its place this secret knowledge that only you, the inquisitive mind, seek out, you can justify poor academic/social performance. Not because of a poorly built system (which is what I personally believe is the problem), but because the fundamental knowledge blocks the system is built on top of are wrong.
Now these books aren’t simply teaching you something new (that only you and a select special few were curious enough to seek out), they are also fixing a potentially painful part of your personal history. They let you step out of the mainstream and look at it as one might look at a group of children playing a game of make-believe. “Ah, the innocence of youth,” you might say to yourself.
I don’t think any one book does this intentionally. I think most people slip, little by little, out of society and (somewhat ironically) in to a world of make-believe. Almost all Speculative Non-Fiction reinforces this thought pattern, as do the communities that form around it. Taken as a whole, they present an exciting, welcoming alternative to a system that is failing people on the academic margins.
I’ll acknowledge right now that this could start to sound about as conspiratorial as one of these books. I don’t mean to imply that any of this is deliberate. I think it’s a subculture that has gained popularity over the last couple decades due in part to social success now being tied to academic success in early life. “Light” versions of these books start coming out in the 80’s and 90’s, with harmless propositions about the pyramids, but it leads inexorably to anti-vaxxers and Q-Anon.
Because it’s right to be wrong.
But why should you care? If you’re not taken in by these books or these lines of thinking, what harm do they do in merely existing? More over, what can one person do to pull people out of a subculture they have willingly submitted to?
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, one of the problems that Pirsig raised that stuck with me was the problem with hypotheses. As I understood it, his problem was that people have limited time and limited resources, but there are infinite hypotheses one could propose to be an explanation of a particular phenomenon. How do you choose which hypotheses to pursue? Which do you choose?
In Speculative Non-Fiction, the audience and the author are often defined as being part of the same out-group, either implicitly or explicitly. They define the out-group loosely as “not the in-group; the outsiders”. But there are infinite properties a group does not have. Which do you choose?
My problem with this definition the subculture often leans in to is that it’s infinitely malleable. The subculture has no defined characteristics of its own, only that it’s not part of the mainstream (whatever that means; we established that there are often competing ideas in any discipline). Which means if some interest wanted to point the subculture in a particular direction (or a small part of the subculture), all it needs to do is declare that “the mainstream” does not approve of or accept it.
Vaccines. Election results. Pyramid placements. Take your pick.
I read Speculative Non-Fiction to try and glimpse the world people of this subculture inhabit. I want to know what they’re talking about; what they’re thinking about. I want to know them. I think that’s how you pull someone back in who has joined this anti-mainstream faction. We stop dismissing the people out-of-hand - they’re used to it. In fact, being dismissed by someone in the mainstream only further reinforces these narratives. We need to engage with them on their turf. Maybe you can walk them back from the harmful stuff to just the silly stuff.
We’re all just looking for a place to call home.