From Buried Cities Recovered by Frank De Hass, 1882.

From Transparent & Colored Lacquers for Metal Goods by Egyptain Lacquer Manufacturing, 1896.

From Southern Illinois University's 1964 yearbook.

From School Boys of Long Ago by Beatrice Hurley & Ina Sartorius and illustrated by Henry Rood, 1935.

From Transparent & Colored Lacquers for Metal Goods by Egyptain Lacquer Manufacturing, 1896.

Finding Cleopatra's Needle in a Haystack?

Those towering monolithic needles called obelisks, associated with ancient Egypt, are commonly understood to be sundials, memorial tributes, phallic and uprightness symbols, solar monuments, pointers of fixed stars, and/or property line markers.  Yet must there be something more to those tapered pillars, something weirder to their origin and purpose?  

There is!  Here's a fragment of an obelisk song that can be heard nowhere else, and then we'll dive right in.

"Cleopatra's Needle in a Haystack"

It's just like Cleopatra's Needle in a haystack
Searching for a Stonehenge at the beach
It's a figure of speech

It's just like looking for Grand Canyons in the gutter
Searching for the Great Wall through windows
As they say in mottos

I'll roam the town to find pyramids
Look at each sphinx not batting a lid
Give the Colossus a takeover bid
For it's all axiomatic

I'm finding Cleopatra's Needle in a haystack
Stumblin' 'pon stone circles in the sand
This is well out of hand

The 16th-century astronomer and mathematician Rheticus, famous for convincing Copernicus that the Earth moves around the sun,* came to view the obelisk not only as an astronomical instrument but as a revelatory cult object — an icon said to have come into existence miraculously and not by human hands, known as an acheiropoieton.  Rheticus did not believe that human reason was capable in itself of getting to the bottom of the mysteries of the heavens.  Rather, there had to be a tool of higher origin and an effect that human inventions couldn't produce.  Only by the means of the obelisk, Rheticus concluded, can all the laws of the celestial state be precisely apprehended and described.  This idea of divine instruction in fact goes back to history's first mention of an obelisk, in Pliny the Elder's account of the original obelisk being set up according to a vision in a pharaoh's dream.

Consider this, from Egyptology Professor Jean Capart in 1920:

"Obelisks are not mere ornaments; they were considered as divinities 'of flesh and bone' who needed food offerings which the religious texts meticulously prescribed.  The erection of an obelisk constituted a cult ceremony of which representations may be found in the bas-reliefs of the temples."

A similar insight has been discovered via an age-old technique for decoding ancient Hebrew texts by arranging the letters in a grid and studying the grid as one would in a search-a-word puzzle for hidden messages.  In /The Bible Code 2/, Michael Drosnin shows how he decoded the phrase "mouth of obelisks" not once but twice within the Torah, the odds being a million to one and far beyond chance, according to Israeli mathematician Eliyahu Rips. The phrase "mouth of obelisks" suggested that obelisks are not merely stone pillars but somehow had the power to speak, perhaps like oracles.  Crossing "mouth of obelisks" in the grid is the phrase "an object of Heaven," which finds equivalency in the 1700-year-old biblical commentary called the Midrash: "What were these obelisks?" the text asks, then answers: "They were not what a human being had made, but the work of Heaven."  The suggestion is that obelisks came from beyond this planet, perhaps from another realm.  But the Midrash continues: "They had eyes as a window, were a kind of male and female."  Though the ancient text doesn't explicitly say that obelisks are alive, they can yet see and perhaps speak.  Might they represent a life form not of this world?  Drosnin documents his search for the particular obelisks encoded in the Torah, based upon additional location clues, and Eliyahu Rips was equally convinced of their reality—though he couldn't say if it were a physical or a metaphysical reality.  "If it's metaphysical," Rips told Drosnin, "it's more real, closer to the ultimate source of all reality.  But maybe what you were seeking can only be seen with spiritual tools, because it requires contact with another realm."

"I'm All Alone with a Needle of Stone"

I'm all alone with a needle of stone
Down in the Valley of Kings
Piercing space-time and attempting to rhyme
"Obelisk" with other things

boggle obelisks .JPG Stranger realms would indeed seem to require singular devices to unlock them.  One of the oracular Dice Methods developed by Jim Girouard involves using letter cubes from the game of Boggle to form a grid of random letters.  Words are formed by connecting any adjoining letters in any directions.  In the 6x6 grid we created with these cubes, our eye immediately caught on something in particular — the only cube sporting double letters here is "He," and above it is an S, so we see both a "he" and a "she," as if echoing the Midrash's observation that obelisks are a kind of male and female.  S connecting to He to M, A, L and E spells "shemale," further suggesting a hermaphroditic nature.  Other words that present themselves are: LORE, FEEL, SEE, SCAN, LOADS, ARIA, FOTO, ROLE,  TIARA, SOLE, and SHEET.   Letters that all touch but whose words are slightly scrambled, like SCNOR suggesting SCORN, are encouraged in Girouard's method.  Hence, we also see LEARN, ROAM, REAL, FRAME, SMART, FREE, SEED, LOST, FROM, ROSE, LONER, ROOT, ORAL, ALSO, and SCALER.  The words we find are then arranged into sentences or poetic phrases, and in this case we find that "a SMART LONER can SEE LOST LORE and LEARN FROM the SEED and ROOT the REAL ROLE of the ROSE and TIARA."  A crowned rose is of course the symbol of England's Tudor dynasty.  But the rose symbol traces to Roman times and presumably beyond as a symbol of the womb.  The crown traditionally symbolizes supreme power, victory over death, and the celestial heavens.  To expand or improve upon this reading, create your own letter grid and discover what further messages emerge from the obelisk.

Throughout history, lines traced on astronomical charts, holy letter grids, and even tabletop gaming maps all keep pointing to obelisks.  In the Dungeons and Dragons adventure "Rahasia," an obelisk speaks in a deep, hollow voice: "Answer me and I'll answer thee in truth."

"Are You From Heaven?"

They must have sent obelisks down
To light my weary way
To make my darkest hour bright as day
My life was just an empty dream
Till you came here below
Obelisk, I want to know

Are you from Heaven? My glad heart sings
Are you an angel? Where are your wings?
Whom were you sent for? Whom were you meant for?
I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you, For me alone
Your tower in sunshine, like old Khufu
You point at starlight, visibly true
Your godly splendor, your soul so tender
Are you from Heaven? Please tell me, do

*For an account of Rheticus' views on obelisks, see The Genesis of the Copernican World by Hans Blumenberg, 1987.

May you not dream of an obelisk tonight.  From The Gates of the Future Thrown Open by Carlotta de Barsy, 1899.

Today's Egyptian hunting dog flying toward an obelisk is from Southern Illinois University's 1971 yearbook.

From Ancient Times, A History of the Early World, Second Edition by James Henry Breasted, 1935.