This book was not the first to attribute quasi-magical powers to pyramids, but it has been one of the most influential. Since it was first published in 1973 it has been continuously in print. You can, if you have money to waste, purchase it from Amazon today.

One of the reasons for its success is, I suspect, the forcefulness with which Flanagan makes his claims. As he has it:-

Each sentence in this book is a complete thought within itself, and is therefore printed in a format known as Ventilated Prose.

(Italics in original). Match that for pomposity: the term “ventilated prose” was coined by R. Buckminster Fuller to describe his poetry, but as used by Flanagan it means a series of one-sentence paragraphs consisting of bare assertions with little in the way of argument or evidence to back them up, like this sequence which could equally well be printed as a single paragraph, with the added bonus that the book would be less of a waste of paper:-

Czech scientists have been hard at work investigating pyramid power and other forms of “shaped power”.

A Czech engineer, Robert Pavlita has come up with a number of interesting devices he calls “psychotronic generators”.

These devices resemble modern art sculpturings made of metal, wood, and paper.

At least one American scientist has visited Pavlita and examined his generators and could detect no fraud.

It is claimed that the various generators can create mechanical movement, purify water, and attract magnetic and non-magnetic particles, even under water!

The Czechs have been very hush-hush about the devices and have revealed nothing that can be evaluated properly.

(There used to be a very strange web site about Robert Pavlita, still accessible thanks to The Wayback Machine. I cannot resist the temptation to quote from it: “Let us go directly to balls”. Exactly.)

Somehow in Flanagan's mind the most startling claims, no matter how unsubstantiated, have to be believed. Pyramids, he says, preserve food from decay, sharpen razor blades, and make cats vegetarian. The food preservation idea is due to a Frenchman, Antoine Bovis, who observed that organic matter thousands of years old inside the Pyramids of Egypt had failed to decay. He jumped to the conclusion that this effect was due to the shape of the Pyramids rather than any other possible cause. Flanagan adds that:-

One person reports that maggots left meat if a pyramid was placed over the maggot infested meat.

He said that the maggots left and starved to death rather than go back to the meat.

If you have a bullshit meter to hand, you may well notice an abnormally high reading at this point. (The thought occurs that perhaps the maggots had been converted to vegetarianism, in which case surely they should have been provided with some carrots to munch on, rather than callously being allowed to die of hunger.)

Flanagan rounds off his book with an advocacy of the existence of the ether, which he strains to make a viable explanation for the so-called pyramid effect. However it should be noted that much of what he writes is lifted without credit, word for word, from another silly but more obscure work, “The Ether and its Vortices” by Carl Krafft (self-published, 1955). Such intellectual dishonesty is saddening but hardly unsurprising given what precedes it.

The best thing about this book is the picture of its author on the back of the jacket, showing his pyramid tent and his amazing pyramid trousers, very effective against foot-rot, no doubt.

More pyramidiocy: Great Pyramid Proof of God.