So Uri Geller buying his own "pyramid" in Scotland (OK the island of Lamb) has got some interest - it made the Beeb and the Scotsman, we are discussing it on the forum and Greg has posted a good round-up on over at the Daily Grail. The question is: How do things line-up? Literally. Well let's see.

The claims are from Jeff Nisbet's The Pyramids of Scotland:

On a wild hunch, I decided to bring Orion and Sirius down to Earth, laying the three belt stars exactly on top of the three islands in the Firth of Forth. Incredibly, Sirius lay on tiny Inchcolm island, farther west in the Forth, where Walter Bower had written his Scotichronichon. In Richard Hinckley Allen’s “Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning,” the author cites a Hindu astrological tradition which personifies Sirius as a hunter who shoots a three-jointed arrow which pierces Orion through the waist.

It’s interesting that Walter Bower’s surname derives from the craft of bowmaking? Could it be that Bower, finishing his book, let fly an arrow of forbidden knowledge towards a more enlightened future?

The importance of the Scotichronicon is explained earlier and where an Egypt-Scotland link comes in:

Completed in the 15th century by Walter Bower, Abbot of Inchcolm, the Scotichronichon begins with “The Legend of Scota and Gaythelos.”

The legend claims that Scota was daughter to the pharaoh who pursued the Children of Israel out of Egypt on their Exodus to the Promised Land. Gaythelos, an exiled prince of Greece, was Scota’s husband. Shortly thereafter, the couple is forced to lead an Exodus of their own out of Egypt—going first to Spain, then Ireland and, finally, to Scotland, which was named after Scota.

Sirius itself is significant in occult and UFO circles (with links going back, in modern times, to the A∴A∴) culminating in Robert Temple's Sirius Mystery, and other claims for contact with the Dog Star). There is even a Geller-Sirius link as his early mentor Andrija Puharich was involved with the channelling of The Nine, an group of aliens from Sirius. Also present was Arthur M. Young who passed the idea of Sirius on to Temple (it is a bigger story, that I will return to, and is covered best in Picknett and Prince's book The Stargate Conspiracy, but for a quick summary see this). Puharich and Geller would do research at the Stanford Research Institute (which had all sorts of CIA involvement a the time). I await the conspiracy theories on this one (although I suppose the above is an outline), we can only hope Uri is making some grand chess move to block the evil machinations to bring back The Nine!!

Anyway back to alignments, for starters here is the broader Google Map: The three island in the box on the right are the ones we are interested in (Fidra is on the left, Craigleith is the tiny speck in the middle and The Lamb is on the right), but also keep an eye out for the island in the box on the left as that is Inchcolm.

If we want to test this north of the border equivalent of the Orion Correlation Theory, we really need to overlay things, so first we'll zoom in on the three island that are said to make up the "belt":

What you can see is I've stacked the island, pyramids and stars with varying opacity (I'll work on making these animated gifs which might show the positioning better). I lined everything up on Craigleith (the small one in the middle, makes for an easy "point" to work with as there is more wiggle room with the larger islands) and then lined up the right-hand objects and looked to see how the fit was on the left. As you can see even exploiting the wiggle room to its maximum the stars are way off, although the pyramid is close. I also decided to do it the other way round and again exploited the wiggle room by aligning the pyramid and star on the left with the very tip of the lower island and again it is off on the right (with the pyramid and island being better fits than the star):

All this is fairly crude juggling of freely available images, but I don't find it very convincing and in fact you could get similar approximations with any three objects that are roughly in a line and approximately equidistant (I initially got the islands wrong and got something similar using Fidra, The Lamb and Bass Island (the similarly sized island further east which you can see to the right of the box on the first map). If one is to believe that someone was using precise engineering skills to map the heavens to the Earth then they were clearly having an off week when they did all that.

Now on to the broader picture with an overlay of a star map showing Orion (right) and Canis Majoris (left)?

That is pretty good (I had a little chuckle to myself when I got things to line up) but the process of doing this has has made me less impressed than I might be coming to this cold.  As the "belt" is small and close together (and the stars are big dots) I was able to jiggle the scale and angle around to get the fit. It is still interesting but it got me thinking that if I wanted try and find "Sirius" merely only having the belt islands (if it had been, for example, a treasure map) then it could easily have been anywhere within a space of a couple of hundred square miles. However, I reckon it'd be good enough for me to risk a few tens of thousands of pounds on buying an island (if I had such large chunks of change to throw around) as you not only get your own bragging rights from owning an islands but there is enough background material to make a pretty good story out of it for celebrity dinner parties so I say good on Uri Geller, even if I'm not 100% convinced by the actual evidence. However, I lay it all out for you above and you can come to your own decision on how wise his purchase was, and you can even grab some image and play along at home - you might even get better results than I did and/or you might see broader patterns (there are plenty of features on the ground to aim for).

For example, you can see parts of Lepus falling on the coast between Edinburgh and North Berwick (the rabbit below the feet of Orion being chased by Orion's hunting dog). A something that caught my eye was how Beta Canis Majoris (Murzim, The Herald) falls within Edinbugrh - our Edinbuggers here can make of that what they will. As luck would have it we have quite a concentration of them here, including the Big Yin of the Edinburgh Fortean Society (although I am reliably informed he prefers the title of Grand Poobah) so your mission, if you chose to accept it, is to accompany Uri Geller on his visit to the island and tell us all about it.

Of course, the problem comes in when you wonder how anyone has been able to shape/move the islands to fit the correlation and (without an awful lot of unsupported assumptions) you can't. Another big concern is that if someone had the means to do that, they not only dropped the ball on the alignments but the relative size is way off. The largest island corresponds to the smallest pyramid and the tiniest island is supposed to correlate to one of the largest - this is more troubling than the alignments. Personally, I'm formulating a theory that suggests the experts have  everything backwards. The ancient Scots saw the similarity between the islands and Orion, and rose to be a global power, eventually building the pyramids of Egypt to reflect this. I will leave those more knowledgeable in such matters to flesh this out.

Technical note: To avoid any claims of selecting my images to prove a point, one way or the other, I grabbed the maps from Google Earth, other images came from Wikipedia (like the stars from Orion's belt and the Giza pyramids) and the larger star map from here. I'll go and make those animated gifs and upload this later below the fold.