Spirits Of Ancient Egypt | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

‘Spirits Of Ancient Egypt’ is the eighth song on Wings’ Venus And Mars album. See more…

It was inspired by McCartney’s 1974 conversations with guitarist Chet Atkins in Nashville. Atkins gave McCartney a copy of Peter Tompkins’ 1971 book Secrets Of The Great Pyramid.

After dinner he suddenly turned to me and said, ‘Are you interested in Egyptian mythology?’ It was abrupt, a real non sequitur, but I’m not easily fazed, so I said, ‘Well, kind of,’ and he started talking about it.

He then gave me this book by Peter Tompkins, Secrets of the Great Pyramid, and it was fascinating. There were some great theories in it, including that the Egyptians knew much more than people thought they did, and that the measurements around the base of the pyramid are somehow connected to the circumference of the Earth. How did they know the circumference of the Earth? You couldn’t go around it with a tap measure, but they’d figured it out. So I devoured the book, and I treasured it all the more because it had Chet Atkins’s ex libris.