Great Pyramids of Giza

Thinking Through Alfred Gell (1945-1997)’s Theory of Art and Agency

The Great Pyramid, reinterpreted as an electromagnetic power generator, is no longer a sepulchral relic, but an operative agent in the Gellian sense—a dynamic index of intelligent design that acts in the world. Gell’s theory locates the aesthetic power of art not in symbolic meaning, but in its efficacy to enchant and to mediate between agents across time and space. The pyramid’s vast geometry, piezoelectric granite core, limestone casing (now stripped), and Faraday-like structure become parts of an extended distributed system of agency.

In this new light, the pyramid is a performative artifact: not an object of passive admiration, but a living apparatus for manipulating energy—electrical, spiritual, cosmic. Through Gell's theory, it becomes a techno-magical prosthesis—a causal index that links the invisible flow of electromagnetic resonance with the social and metaphysical organization of civilization.

What enchants here is not beauty in the classical sense, but technological impossibility: the enchantment of an intelligence that encoded crystalline silica structures with geometric precision to interact with planetary resonance. As in Gell’s theory, this creates a rupture in normative causal reasoning: “How could they do this?” This rupture is the source of the enchantment of technology—a perception of intelligence that transcends ordinary social expectations.

If, as Gaia’s study suggests, the pyramid was never a tomb but a resonant structure for vibrational energy, it becomes a meta-agent—one whose actions occur at the planetary scale. It mediates forces, binds the Earth’s telluric currents with celestial alignments (Orion, Sirius), and broadcasts power as both frequency and memory. The enchantment lies in its ontological ambiguity: it is both monument and machine, both architecture and technology, both artifact and agent.

In Gell’s language, the Great Pyramid is an index of trans-temporal intention, possibly of extraterrestrial or non-human origin. Its form is the visible trace of an invisible operating intelligence, one that constructs not meaning but affective force—the energy of awe, the force of mystery, and the binding of consciousness to the planetary body.