Adams, Walter M.: The house of the hidden places: a clue to the creed of early Egypt from Egyptian sources (London, 1895)

I.] The Star of Grand Orient.

star Sothis, or Sirius.* For the Grand Orient,
or position of that star when its rising forms
the immediate harbinger of dawn on mid-
summer morning, was, as is well known, the
great starting-point for the age-long cycles
of the Egyptian reckoning. And whereas the
figure usually employed to denote the Pyramid
embraces both the edifice and the rocky plat-
form, on which it is built -A-, , the form used
in the hieroglyph of Sothis consists of the
masonic portion alone /j^ , that is to say, the
structure which represented to the Egyptian
mind the Eternal Light, apart from its earthly
support ; while a Papyrus dating from the
time of Khufu, the founder of the building,

* When a star rises, not simultaneously with the sun (in
which case the star would be invisible), but just so long
before dawn as to appear for a few moments on the
horizon before it is swallowed up in the growing light, it
Js said to rise " heliacally," and " the heliacal rising of
Sothis" on the day of the summer solstice, or mid-
summer—an event which occurs every 1461 years (viz.
four times 305^)—was the epoch of the Egyptian secular
cycle.