Why would anyone be poking around the pyramids in hi-viz gear, pushing a wheelbarrow full of bricks across a barren landscape? It’s a big question – perhaps dangerously big. In Gareth McConnell’s vivid and mysterious photographs from the Giza Plateau, a lone workman seems to be searching for something. What is Chunky doing out there? Is he on a pilgrimage, or a quest? Paying homage to the ancients? Raiding tombs? I’ve got an idea, but it’s too weird for an opening paragraph. Allow me to start by setting the scene. When Pharaoh Khufu ordered the construction of the Great Pyramid, the first and biggest of the three pyramids at Giza, he secured his voyage into the afterlife, where he expected to become a god. The pyramids became one of the most recognisable symbols of human civilisation. In our collective imagination – a dimension where ideas can feel as solid as physical objects – the pyramids take up a lot of space. You don’t need to have visited Giza to know what they represent: life after death. So if someone was to bootleg Khufu’s design to build their own monument, thousands of years later, and if they were to call that monument The Peoples Pyramid, then the meaning of this would, I think, be self-evident.
Which is why, every year on the 23rd November, 400 people take part in a ceremony to add bricks to The Peoples Pyramid, the culmination of The Peoples Day of Death. The ceremony is led by an undertaker, a bricklayer, a cement mixer and the bearers of that year’s bricks. Each brick represents a dead person. Actually, it doesn’t just represent that person – it also contains bits of that person: 23 grams of their ashes. The process of being laid into the pyramid as a brick is known as MuMufication. The Pyramid will be finished when 34,592 bricks are laid, which is expected to be in the year 2323. (That’s long after the first bricklayers will have themselves been MuMufied, which raises a question that might have troubled Khufu: what happens to the MuMufied if the monument isn’t completed?) Like The Peoples Pyramid, The Peoples Day of Death samples an existing notion from ideaspace and applies it to 21st century Britain. In Mexico’s Day of the Dead tradition, families clean up the graves of their deceased and decorate altars with marigolds, sugar skulls, mezcal and snacks as offerings. Sometimes they’ll take a picnic to the cemetery, or write satirical obituaries for their still-alive friends. Mexicans aren’t in agreement on the roots of Dia de los Muertos: was it an indigenous Aztec ritual? A Catholic European import? Or a syncretic jumble of both cultures? What we do know is that there are Day of the Dead festivals across South America, and death rituals to be found in almost all cultures. There’s Tomb Sweeping Day in China, Obon in Japan, Thursday of the Dead in the Levant, and countless forms of ancestor veneration across Africa. Notably, what a lot of them have in common is a sense of humour. Dia de los Muertos isn’t a gloomy ritual but a lively, fairly inebriated one – and a group activity that brings death into the public sphere. Can it be replicated?
Claire Phillips-Callender, one of the undertakers for The Peoples Pyramid, got into the funeral business because she was frustrated with the culture around death in Britain – the solemn ceremonies, the careful euphemisms, the misplaced religiosity. Even worse, the utilitarian crapness of the modern crematorium. She thinks we need ‘more public mourning rituals. What we have is 20 minutes down the crem in a building that looks like the humanities block of a 1970s comprehensive school.’ This was basically my experience when my dad died a few years ago. Everyone at the funeral home was very nice, speaking in soft voices about which wood veneer I wanted for the coffin’s brief moment of fame before incineration. I chose an efficient-looking woman to lead the service and write a eulogy about my dad’s life. The result was well-meaning but uncanny, like a voice assistant saying all the right things with the wrong emphasis. I played as much music as I could from a Dropbox folder of light classical tunes, which my dad had rather morbidly put together ages before, but in the end it felt like ‘20 minutes down the crem,’ as Claire put it. ‘All the emotion is repressed, and then you get ushered out the other door and they put the last fucking song on repeat.’
Why are we so bad at death in Britain? Much of the blame can be placed on the anti-fun brigades that arrived with the Reformation in the 17th century. Protestant preachers pointed out that the Bible doesn’t provide instructions for burial, and Jesus’s life only gives us two rites to work with: baptism and the Eucharist. Everything else was therefore superstition. So along with banning Christmas and closing down theatres, the Puritans even managed to take the fun out of funerals. No eulogies, preaching or extravagant bell-ringing, and no praying for the souls of the dead – too Catholic. Not everyone followed these rules to the letter, but over time many of the emotional and communal aspects of burial faded away. Meanwhile, the religious hardliners of Northern Europe either took their self-flagellating morality to America or spread it around the world as the imperial ‘stiff upper lip’. By the time the church had lost its power and influence, centuries later, we were left without much of a script for navigating death.
The upside to the Puritans’ crackdown on overtly religious burials is that there are still very few rules around funerals. Undertakers don’t need any qualifications or a licence, and the dead don’t have to be buried in a cemetery. ‘You can bury them in a field if you have a landowner’s permission. There’s less legislation around burying a person than there is around burying a sheep,’ according to Claire. She has helped bereaved people to plan some very unusual ceremonies. One woman slept in her mother’s grave the night before the burial, then hiked to her house afterwards, sleeping in a bivvy bag on the way.
The work of radical undertakers like Claire reveals that there are as many ways to grieve as there are ways to arrange a funeral. There’s still an opening for a decent collective mourning ritual, though, which brings us back to The Peoples Day of Death. In its current form, the ritual seems to mimic the cycle of life, starting with the Skool of Death – workshops where The 400 share their invented kustoms, prepare costumes and foghorns, post messages to the dead and type out zines. You could compare the participants to a fandom, but without the parasitic relationship to corporate IP. Or maybe to a church congregation, but without the dogma – this is BYOB (bring your own beliefs). Claire doesn’t believe in the afterlife as such: ‘People live on after they’re dead through the people they’ve influenced. I think you completely and absolutely die when the last person says your name on this earth. Then you’re gone.’
After an afternoon of (un)learning in the Skool of Death, The 400 are ready to go out into the world, in a noisy procession through the streets of Liverpool. At dusk they begin the Krossing – the ferry to the other side, the mystical marrow of the day. Names of the dead are read out over the ferry’s tannoy. The people listen silently, then shout the names of their own dead into the black void of the Mersey. On the other side, they eventually reach The Peoples Pyramid. Still barely a metre in height, it’s already a solid block of collective memory. The people bring their bricks to be laid, with Claire reading the eulogies. Then everyone has a drink.
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Something else about these photographs has caught my eye. Chunky is in hi-viz, the 21st century uniform of the ordinary worker. But his employer is not an ordinary workplace. K2 Plant Hire was founded by Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty in 1995 with a view to solving the ongoing disarray at Stonehenge. Either somebody should fix them up or the whole thing should be scrapped as unworkable, they thought. Bulldoze the stones? It’s a perverted idea, and I worry for the sanity of anyone who’d entertain it. That said, every time my dad drove us past them on the A303 I’d brace myself for the inevitable, unbearable announcement: ‘It’ll be nice when it’s finished!’ Perhaps he would have been persuaded by K2’s masterplan. Anyway, with K2’s original mission in mind, Chunky’s activities on the plateau start to look a bit dodgy. Could he be assessing the site? Scoping the pyramids for demolition?
Logic is starting to disintegrate now, so we must go further into these dream-like images. The ancient Egyptians wrote on papyrus, and sometimes, to be economical, they’d erase their marks and reuse the scrolls. The traces left behind would turn the papyrus into a palimpsest: an object where the old is visible alongside the new. What happens if we look at these photographs as a palimpsest? Maybe we can identify a stain of the past lurking behind the bright colours: the day the K Foundation burned a million quid. I tried to avoid it, but it won’t go away. The burning, which took place on 23 August, 1994, brought about the end of Bill and Jimmy’s first chapter as collaborators. A year later they signed a contract agreeing to place a 23-year moratorium on the K Foundation’s activities, after which they hoped they’d have a better idea of why they did it. When that contract expired in 2017, it was followed by the announcement of The Peoples Pyramid.
One of the more explicable events at the first Peoples Day of Death, as I learned secondhand, was an inquest into the meaning of the burning of the million quid. Bill and Jimmy were still unable to satisfactorily explain it. Was anyone else any closer? Five speakers put forward their case, including Annebella Pollen, who compared the K Foundation to an interwar British youth movement called the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift. Pollen explained that the Kindred’s made-up rituals, homemade outfits, occult symbolism and nature worship were meant as a rejection of the industrialised society that had brought about the unthinkable destruction of the first world war. After her speech, the audience agreed that the burning of the million quid was part of the same ‘deep tradition of historical weirdness’.
It’s a workable theory. There’s certainly weirdness at The Peoples Day of Death. The entertainments are bizarre, the people eccentric. There’s a crackpot-wonderland feel to proceedings that fits into a familiarly British lineage of nonsense and carry-on, from Edward Lear and Monty Python to cheese rolling and bog snorkelling. There is satire, even blasphemy – but overall, no harm done. However, the burning of the million quid. With all due respect to the rich history of ‘weird’, that word doesn’t cut it. If someone told you they’d set fire to their house and life savings, you wouldn’t say, ‘That’s weird – haha, how weird!’ You’d say, ‘What the fuck, pal? Why?’ And you would rightly expect that person to have an answer. Maybe that’s the question that Chunky is out there in the dust trying to answer: why did they do it?
If anything is to be learned from the Skool of Drummond-Cauty, it’s that sense can emerge from nonsense at any moment. Even, or perhaps especially, when you have no idea what you’re doing or why you’re doing it. I’m looking at these photographs, thinking about papyrus and dead sheep and the crackle of burning paper. Could it be possible to commit an act so catastrophic, so extreme, that it tears open a void in reality – a void of absolute and total nothing, out of which can only come… something? An act so obscene that it brings about the next stage in the eternal cycle of destruction and creation, the inevitable handover from Shiva to Brahma? They didn’t know it at the time, but the K Foundation burned a million quid so that they could build The Peoples Pyramid.
This sounds like rubbish, and in a way it is. But once you’ve gone down the rabbit hole it’s hard to climb back out. The world begins to bend around your beliefs. Pick a sign to follow until the road runs out, and there you’ll find the White Room. Get too kulted and things begin to make too much sense. It’s 11:11 twice a day. You can get conspiratorial, paranoid. Find yourself riding a camel round the pyramids in full hi-viz. Writing essays of exactly 2,323 words. But if you can stay on that tightrope, poised ever-so-carefully between sense and nonsense, incredible things can occur. Here’s one now: in the time it took to write this, Jonny Banger was introduced to a whole branch of his family tree. He learned that one of his relatives had been the custodian of a Neolithic flint mine, originally in use at the time Stonehenge was raised. Jon also discovered a photo of his great-great uncle Stephen, in military uniform, riding a camel in front of the Great Pyramid – a nearly identical image to one that he’d posed for the week before, on the shoot for these photos. What does it all mean? Nothing if you don’t want it to. Everything if you do. A very long time ago, Bill Drummond decided on a personal motto: ‘Accept the contradictions.’ He was wise to do so. There’s no point thinking about why Claire mentioned burying a dead sheep, of all animals. Or whether Bill knows that his motto contains 23 letters. Or why my dad sometimes answered the phone with the words, ‘Stonehenge, duty druid speaking…’ Call off the search, I say. The Peoples Pyramid must be built. It’ll be nice when it’s finished.
Chal Ravens