This is something Mrs. Eddy refers to in Science and Health, only once (on page 226). She doesn’t go on to elaborate about it; the crux of her sentence is her desire to save people:
“The lame, the deaf, the dumb, the blind, the sick, the sensual, the sinner, I wished to save from the slavery of their own beliefs and from the educational systems of the Pharaohs, who to-day, as of yore, hold the children of Israel in bondage.”
People in my part of the world (and of the internet) would be quick to jump on what the sentence implies, that there are modern Pharaohs holding us in bondage. The illuminati, the 1%, the Oligarchy. I think it’s interesting that Mrs. Eddy doesn’t dwell there, doesn’t call out the Pharaohs or call for a rally to overthrow them. I don’t find it surprising; to call them out would be using the tools they would use, and falling into the same bondage. Mrs. Eddy makes clear that all evil is a lie, and the need is to drop it — to refuse to engage with it on its terms or any terms, since divine Truth obliterates any lie, and is the only place for us to dwell.
But she also points out the need to understand how evil works in order to avoid getting taken in by the lie. And as I started to understand the unconditional nature of good, I also started to see its opposite, and how it seems to be held in place throughout our educational systems and all of our society. Its shape is a pyramid, so it is aptly named the educational systems of the Pharaohs.
The pyramid shape has one or a few people at the top and many at the bottom. It illustrates the concept of relative good, graded good. And its function is to hide the power of good from us, and its accessibility. I remember a ditty from childhood:
Good, better, best
never let it rest
till your good is better
and your better best.
It’s interesting that the word good, in the romance and germanic languages, doesn’t have a comparative or superlative form. The comparative and superlative words are taken from a completely different root. I think that’s telling. Good, as a word for the unmistakeable God quality, is not qualified. But we lose sight of that when we make good relative, arrange it on a pyramid. Instead of being the key essence of what we desire in life, the engine of all our growth and movement, good becomes something in between “excellent” and “poor.” What does in mean, in that context, to say “God is good”?
That’s it. That’s the whole educational system of the Pharaohs in one little lie about how life is put together. It is a way of hiding good in plain sight. And it’s so pervasive that we can go for years, and many iterations of growth and progress, without breaking free of it.
In school and in society, we are taught that there are only a few people who are really excellent at any given thing, and everyone else is either trying to get there or has given up on it because they can’t be the best. Similarly, we are taught (a little under the surface) that some people are more worthy than others, more deserving of good things in their lives. It is intimated that those at the top of the pyramid are most deserving, and those at the bottom not deserving at all.
So the game of life, we are taught, is to work our way up the pyramid, and to try not to fall down. A great deal of our time as mortals is spent making open or clandestine assessments of where we stand in relation to others.
Yet it’s not a secret that friendships thrive in a field of equals, that we can most successfully be friends with people when we consider ourselves equal to them and they to us. In a good friendship, the corrosive comparison to each other can be put aside, so we can rejoice in each other’s good. But along the pyramid on which we’re arranged (according to the Pharaohs’ system) it’s hard to carve out little pools of equality to share friendships in, and it’s easy for some event or misunderstanding to tip the pool into inequality, spilling the friendship out.
Poem: Deliverance Prayer:
From my part of the internet: The pyramid and the pool:
