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which has become a shaft… the obelisk, as it is
commonly known, is a symbol sacred to the
Sun-god…[it followed that] the king was buried
under the very symbol of the Sun-god which
stood in the holy of holies in the Sun-temple at
Heliopolis.” This conclusion by an authority of
the caliber of Breasted was quickly embraced by
other authorities such as Sir I.E.S. Edwards who
also proposed that the occasional sight of an
immaterial triangle formed by the sun’s rays
striking downwards through low clouds at
sunset could have been the inspiration for the
Benben’s shape “and its architectural derivative,
the true Pyramid.”
According to Edwards “the temptation to
regard the true Pyramid as a material representation
of the sun’s rays and consequently as a
means whereby the dead king could ascend to
heaven seems irresistible.” Yet it is also true that
the Pyramid Texts give many other means for
the dead pharaoh to ascend to the sky: on a
ladder (“The king climbs to the sky on a
ladder”); on the wind (“the king is bound for
the sky on the wind” (pyr. 309); on a stormcloud/thunderbolt
(“The king is a flame before
the wind…there is brought to him a way of ascent
to the sky”); on a hailstorm (“the hailstorms
of the sky have taken me”); on a reedfloat:
(“the reed-floats of the sky are set in place
for me…I am ferried over to the eastern sky”);
by climbing a rope (“set the rope aright, cross
the Milky Way…”); on the thighs of Isis: (I ascend
[to the sky] upon the thighs of Isis”). So
the Pyramid Texts are full of such metaphors,
and thus the idea of the dead king climbing on
the sun’s rays is only another to describe poetically
the celestial ascent, and cannot be taken as
evidence for the shape of the Benben or the
pyramid. There is, however, in the Pyramid
Texts a passage which directly equates the actual
pyramid to the king and Osiris: “This king
is Osiris, this pyramid of the king is Osiris, this
construction of his is Osiris, betake yourself to
it, do not be far from it in its name of pyramid…”.
In the rebirth rituals of the Pyramid Texts
the dead king’s name is compounded with the
name of Osiris, showing that after his death the
king became “an Osiris.”
Could, therefore, the Benben Stone, and its
derivatives—the pyramid and the pyramidion—
be regarded as ‘star’ symbols? Though it is true
that the ‘Mansion of the Phoenix’ in which was
kept the Benben Stone was in the City of Iunu,
later called Heliopolis (City of the Sun) by the
Greeks, an association of the Benben with the
sun does not necessarily follow. Why, one must
wonder, was a pyramid or conical shaped stone
regarded as a manifestation of the sun when in
all ancient Egyptian art the sun is represented
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as a disk or circle? Egyptologists have argued
that the reason was because the Benben Stone
may also have been a symbol of the so-called
“Primeval Mound” in the Pyramid Texts on
which it is said that the first sunrise took place,
implying that the shape of the pyramid was inspired
by the idea of a sacred mound. Edwards
rejects this idea by pointing out that the Primeval
Mound was linked to the much older
Mastaba tomb structure of the first three dynasties,
which was not pyramid-shaped but rather
in the form of a rectangular slab. Clearly, another
more plausible explanation for the pyramidal
or conical shape of the Benben Stone
must be sought.
It is known that a sacred pillar was worshipped
at Heliopolis before the Benben. The
phallic symbolism of a pillar needs no explanation;
and its association to the “phallus” of
Atum is implied in the Pyramid Texts.
The Egyptologist Henry Frankfort made the
plausible suggestion that the Benben was
placed atop the sacred pillar, giving rise
to the idea of the obelisk with a Benbenet/pyramidion
at its top, and
that the pyramidion may thus
represent the “semen” or
“seed” being ejaculated from a
cosmic phallus associated to
Atum. There are several wellknown
depictions of the Earth-
God Geb (the son of Atum) laying
down with an exaggeratedly long
phallus pointing to the Sky-Goddess
Nut, the “mother of Osiris.”
In my opinion, then, the idea of a
pillar surging skywards and on top of
which was the Benben Stone, is highly
symbolic of a giant phallus offering its “starseed”
to the sky-goddess in order to gestate it
in her womb and cause the departed king to be
“reborn.” Bearing this in mind, it comes as no
surprise to discover that the word “Benben” is
often given the meaning: “to copulate” or
“seed a womb,” confirmed by the hieroglyphic
sign of an erect phallus shown ejaculating. Indeed,
there are several words in the ancient
Egyptian language that use the root word ‘Ben’
to describe sexual acts. Also in the famous
Turin Papyrus which depicts sexual scenes, one
image shows a naked woman inserting the tip
of a pyramidion into her vagina, making clear
that such objects were regarded as phalluses or
capable of seeding a womb.
As we have said, the names of several monumental
pyramids were given stellar names such
as ‘Djedefre is a sehed star’; ‘Nebka is a star’.
Also the ‘ba’ i.e. soul, of the dead king is
clearly to be regarded as a ‘star’ in the Pyramid
Texts, which indirectly also gives a stellar name
to many other pyramids such as ‘The soul (ba)
of Sahure gleams’ and ‘Neferirkare has become
a soul (ba)’. The compounding of the pharaoh’s
name with his pyramid implies, if not
proves, that the monument (or perhaps mostly
the pyramidion at the top) is to be regarded as
Tutankhamun
Heart Vase
with Benben
bird
the transfigured form of the king into a starsoul.
Still, why did the ancient Egyptians imagine
that the stars were shaped like a pyramid or a
cone?
In antiquity the sight of “shooting stars” or
“falling stars” is, of course, a meteorite. Meteorites
are debris from outer space, mostly from
broken up asteroids, which enter the gravitational
pull of Earth and fall to the ground—as
opposed to meteors which completely burn up
during atmospheric transit. Meteorites are either
iron (about 90% iron and 10-12% nickel) or
stone. For obvious reasons, the largest that survive
impact are the iron-meteorites. Most meteorites
are very small, but occasionally a large
one enters our atmosphere. If it is very large it
will retain most of its cosmic velocity, thus
compressing the air in front of it as it approaches
the ground, causing it, ultimately, to
explode with dramatic effect. But if the meteorite
is of medium size, somewhere between
10 and 60 tons, its cosmic velocity is
slowed by Earth’s atmosphere, causing
the meteorite eventually to fall free
and hit the ground almost intact.
Some of these medium
size meteorites retain their orientation
as they speed through
Earth’s atmosphere, which
causes only the front part to melt
and flow toward the rear. The result
is an iron object having the shape of
a rough pyramid or cone.
Bearing this in mind, I also discovered
that the ancient Egyptians believed
that iron actually came from heaven,
which is clearly an allusion to the meteoric
origin of iron before the Iron Age. In other
ancient cultures there were many sacred stones
such as the Benben which were believed to have
‘fallen from heaven.’ The Ephesians (see Acts
19: 35 of the Bible) worshipped such a stone in
the temple of Diana, “that symbol of her which
fell from heaven.” In Delphi a stone shaped like
a cone was believed to have come from the sky.
A conical iron-meteorite was also worshiped by
the Phrygian in the seventh century BC. There
was also the famous conical “black stone”
called Elagalabus that was worshipped in
Emessa. A modern example of such a “stone
from heaven” is the black stone of the the
Ka’aba in Mecca in Saudi Arabia which is a meteorite
that was recovered in antiquity. The
British Egyptologist Gerald Wainwright has
shown how iron in early Egypt was obtained
from iron-meteorites. The ancient Egyptian
word for iron was ‘bja’ which was called “material
of which heaven was made.” Significantly,
in the Pyramid Texts we are told that:
“The king’s bones are iron and the king’s
members are the imperishable stars…”
“I [the king] am pure, I take to myself my
iron bones…my imperishable limbs are in the
womb of Nut”
“…my bones are iron and my limbs are the
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