On March 20, 1957, whilst training psychoanalysts in Paris in his seminar, Jacques Lacan noted (as he tried to describe what drives the Unconscious mechanisms of the Unconscious): as soon as there is a “graphia there is an orthographia”…that is, as soon as there are symbols in some kind of system, the system itself suggests corrections or possible readings or revisions in terms of how the symbolic system works. This is, of course, the kind of structuralist, synchronic short-hand that describes how meanings in general emerge from configurations of simpler elements – how stories, terms, images, rituals, and motifs can be combined into dreams, myths, explanations of the cosmos or neurotic symptoms or jokes or hieroglyphics or pyramid complexes or office space. Comedy, working remotely or several cups of coffee may spare one some of this meaningful structuralist orthography, one hopes.
Anyway, a quick glance at the chronology of hieroglyphics and Pyramid Texts suggests that the arrival of a complete orthography can take quite a lot of time and even the piling up of millions of tons of rock, though, sooner or later, the structuralist version of meaning can happen more or less once enough blood, sweat and tears are accumulated, shuffled into the past and buried. And so, as Unis assembled his pyramid and its temples and causeways, we can see how an Old Kingdom “structuralist” (or actually more than a little “post-structuralist” since the Pyramid of Unis was carefully and explicitly situated to counter the earlier obsessions of the Old Kingdom) rendering of how the cosmos was supposed to operate was constructed as something that was more devoted to legibility, yet more elaborate, more distributed over space, and more completely filled out in some nearly narrative form that seems to even have some segments that we can understand to some degree.
You could also say that the structuralist short-hand version of meaning is already at hand before the orthography is complete: the spells contained in the texts in the Pyramid of Unis were based on scripts and oral performances and even the pots gathered under the Step Pyramid long before the Pyramid of Unis already had written cursive demotic ink notations on them. But this all becomes more legible in the Pyramid of Unis – its links to the Step Pyramid, its place next to the Step Pyramid, its texts, its temples, its causeway, its avoidance of the gigantism of the 4th Dynasty.
So maybe there is a lesson in how the Pyramid texts emerge at the end of the dynasty (the 5th) that comes after the last gigantic pyramids of the 4th Dynasty were built. The texts emerge as part of a reversion to an earlier construction of the sacred – next to the Step Pyramid and distanced from the gigantic pyramids. The Pyramid Complex of Unis is not a small structure – the causeway down to the Nile is the second largest ever built as part of a pyramid complex, for example. But it is set out differently in space and it incorporates narrative scenes in the imagery of the causeway and in the texts. It might be supposed to have functioned as a model and an invocation of the sacred realm rather than the sacred realm itself – unlike the Step Pyramid or the gigantic pyramids of the previous dynasties. The pyramid complex devoted to the soul of Unis doesn’t accumulate sacred power by piling things up (as with the blocks of the gigantic pyramids or all the earlier objects in the tunnels under the Step Pyramid). Instead, its components (spells, chambers, temples, causeways) point elsewhere with descriptions of the linkages built into the entities that do the pointing. That is, the pointing (to the place of rising, the metal doors in the sky, the sky boats, the gods that empower these things) modulates the linkage. So, yes, the soul of Unis travels to all these cosmic places, but with his own specific powers over them, all built into the spells and the pyramid complex and the other offerings and linkages that it contains.
So Unis constructed an Old Kingdom version of a slightly post-structuralist re-reading of the giant pyramids enabling his new set of meanings to work in a different space. His pyramid is a massive marker at a particular point but very involved with pointing elsewhere, indicating linkages from itself over and over to cosmic forces, rearticulating and re-performing the whole schemes of magical power. So, just as the Old Kingdom begins to wind down, the texts explode in the pyramids – more and more spells after Unis at the end of the 5th Dynasty in all in the 6th dynasty pyramids. Even the Kingdom’s bureaucracy is more ramified locally and not exclusively centered on the royal court.
Taking the Pyramid Texts as a kind of fable about how symbolic systems work – for example, that they are only structuralist orthographies retrospectively, ie by reading the past and placing it elsewhere – we can see the possibility that the very early structuralist concerns with avoiding transcendence that Levi-Strauss and Lacan presented in the early 1950s were helpful but exaggerated. Sure, a symbolic system is going to evoke the presence of some transcendental operations in its realm, but this incipient pointing elsewhere (this deliberate, even dramatized, slippage from an earlier, other realm of emergence) of a symbolic system is (so to speak “psychanalytically”) its own cure. Even Unis the god-king, who you would think would be completely entrapped in the earlier symbolic world, can re-read the transcendental operations of the pyramids and relocate himself and the mechanisms of his cosmic power in his own terms – as it happens in his case, through several dynasties and the explosion of texts inside the pyramids and the collapse of the Old Kingdom – but still without being enclosed and defined by the apparently transcendental operations of the symbolic systems at work. Anyway, that’s the fable of structuralist meaning here for now.
Jacques Lacan Seminar IV: The Object Relation, translated by A. R. Price, Polity Press, 2020 (orthographies from 1956)
Jacques Lacan Seminar II, translated by Sylvana Tomaselli, Norton, 1988 (worries about originating some transcendence via structuralism in 1954)
See earlier posts for sources on the Old Kingdom and more to come on the Pyramid Texts.