Truemors
La Pyramide Inversée (The Inverted Pyramid) is a skylight constructed in an underground shopping mall in front of the Louvre Museum in France. It may be thought of as a smaller sibling of the more famous Louvre Pyramid proper, yet turned "upside down"--its upturned base is easily overlooked from outside. Designed by architects I.M. Pei, Cobb Freed and Partners, it was installed in 1993 as part of the "Grand Louvre" project, which renovated all underground area beneath the Cour Napoléon and Cour du Carrousel.
The pyramid marks the intersection of two main walkways and orients visitors towards the museum entrance. Tensioned against a 30-ton, 13.3-meter square steel caisson frame, the inverted pyramidal shape in laminated glass points downward towards the floor. The tip of the pyramid is suspended 1.4 meters (a little more than 4.5 feet) above floor level. Individual glass panes in the pyramid, 30 mm thick, are connected by stainless-steel crosses 381 mm in length. After dark, the structure is illuminated by a frieze of spotlights. Directly below the tip of the downwards-pointing glass pyramid, a small stone pyramid about one meter (three feet) high is stationed on the floor, as if mirroring the larger structure above. The tips of the two pyramids almost touch.
The inverted pyramid is perhaps most famous for its prominent role in Dan Brown's The Da vinci Code. The protagonist of his novel, Robert Langdon, reads esoteric symbolism into the two pyramids: The Inverted Pyramid is perceived as a Chalice, a feminine symbol, whereas the stone pyramid below is interpreted as a Blade, a masculine symbol--The whole structure expressing the union of genders. Langdon concludes that the tiny stone pyramid is actually only the apex of a larger pyramid, embedded in the floor as a secret chamber which encloses the Holy Grail--the sarcophagus with the remains of Mary Magdalene. In reality, the stone pyramid sits on top of the floor and designed to be removed during maintenance work.
Brown was not the first writer to offer esoteric interpretations of the Inverted Pyramid. In Raphaël Aurillac's work Le guide du Paris maçonnique the author declares that the Louvre used to be a Masonic temple. To Aurillac, the various glass pyramids constructed in recent decades include Masonic symbolism. Aurillac sees the downward-pointing pyramid as expressing the Rosicrucian motto V.I.T.R.I.O.L. (Visita Interiorem Terrae Rectificandoque / Invenies Occultum Lapidem, "Visit the interior of the earth and… you will find the secret stone"). Another writer on Masonic architecture, Dominique Setzepfandt, sees the two pyramids as suggesting "the compass and square that together form the Seal of Solomon" (quoted in Code Da Vinci: L'enquête by Marie-France Etchegoin and Frédéric Lenoir). According to I. M. Pei's biographer Carter Wiseman, he is interested almost solely in abstract geometrical form and no deeper symbolic meaning should be sought in the inverted pyramid.
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