From a Utah church to a Denver museum: the man who found 75 pyramids in the US

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On a summer afternoon in 2017, Los Angeles-based artist Ian James found himself at the Pain Reliever Bar & Grill, the only functioning establishment in Nekoma, North Dakota.

Lingering until midnight, while trying not to look too much like a Californian in a town of less than 30 residents, James struck up a conversation with a local couple who explained how to gain access to the Stanley R Mickelsen Safeguard Complex. The former anti-ballistic missile military facility, constructed during the cold war and only operational for six months before being decommissioned, was his destination: specifically, its brutalist concrete radar tower resembling an Egyptian pyramid without an apex.

For the next two days, while James car-camped in a field to photograph the radar tower in different lighting conditions with his 4x5 camera, he became transfixed by the pyramid’s uncanny nature as a “purpose built ruin … unmoored from time”.

It was here, among the pyramid’s energetic resonances, that James realized the photographs of pyramid-shaped buildings he’d been capturing – from an office complex in Indianapolis to a Mormon church in Utah, a science museum in Denver, a Walmart in British Columbia, and numerous private residences – were a series that would lead to a book. A decade – and over 75 pyramids in nearly 20 states – later James has released Pyramids: Special Economic Vortex Zones of North America.

James’s desire to document US pyramids was born out of a new age music radio show he hosted on KCHUNG radio featuring independently produced cassettes ornamented with pyramid motifs that would have originally been found in crystal stores or massage parlors – before he sourced them from eBay.

During his travels on a veritable pilgrim’s trail to these sites, James hypothesized that the intersection between new age beliefs and pyramid-buildings across the US is reflective of what he terms “capitalist metaphysics” – the impulse to channel the pyramid’s ancient, eastern, energetic properties toward the manifestation of American values and, as he puts it, create a “space for the ‘religion’ of laissez fair capitalism in the US”.

The Bass Pro Shops pyramid in Memphis, which James photographed for multiple days but never entered – despite its promise of “an immersive retail adventure” complete with a hotel, indoor swamp, archery range, restaurant and overlook deck – is a prime example. Conceived in the 1950s as a series of three buildings named the Great America Pyramids, in a nod to the city’s Egyptian namesake, the lone structure was built in 1991 and has served many functions: including a concert venue inaugurated by the Grateful Dead and a stadium for the Memphis Grizzlies NBA team. It’s also garnered the name “tomb of doom” due to booming echos of fans’ cheers and the highly inauspicious removal of a crystal skull placed in its apex by the owner of the Hard Rock Cafe to channel mystic powers.

a pyramid-like structure by a body of water

Vacant for nearly a decade, the owner of Bass Pro Shops reluctantly struck a deal with the city in 2008 to renovate the site (using $100m of taxpayer money in exchange for 2% of the store’s gross sales or, at minimum, $1m paid to the city in rent each year), but only if he caught a catfish in the Mississippi River. The universe delivered him the fish, but questions remain as to whether the city has ever received their full 2%. The superstitious events and overly lenient governmental-fiscal policies that have allowed Bass Pro Shops to flourish are an apt embodiment of a “pyramid which has been emptied of meaning” and instead become, what James calls “the raw synthesis of the blood of American capitalism.”

Ironically, he notes, even when pyramid sites are dedicated solely to religious or spiritual practices “you can have these sacred structures in the US but they have to be generating income or tickets or financial sustainability.” The American spiritual experience is largely profit-driven.

In order to photograph the pyramid at the Church of Shambhala Vajradhara Maitreya Sangha, a Buddhist monastery in northern California, James underwent “soul therapy” treatments in 2019 – wherein he lay inside a large plastic pyramid wrapped with copper wire while a nun pointed brightly colored lights at different organs in his body.

Run by the Buddha Maitreya, who declares himself the second coming of Jesus Christ and the long-prophesied Medicine Buddha, the monastery is home to monks and nuns. They run Shambhala Healing Tools, which sells head pyramids, pendulums, meditation systems, welded dodecahedrons and vajras to visitors and devotees, sustaining their collective way of life – which is set to the perpetual soundtrack of the Buddha Maitreya’s music.

Private homeowners that James has visited also believe in the energetic power of their structures and similarly, he says, “aspire to ascend the ladder economically and spiritually”. James’s experiences with such individuals have varied widely. The home of a record producer in Paynes Creek, California, could only be photographed from outside their expansive property, as the owners were known to fire shots at anyone approaching.

Others, however, will occasionally invite James inside. A woman in Why, Arizona, wished to learn more about his project and have him experience the “strange type of magnetism” exuded by her house. Over strong coffee and banana bread, she told him of her cross-country travels with her husband in a school bus and their decision to permanently settle in the area after discovering the pyramid house for sale. It was a sign.

“I too feel a metaphysical connection to all of these places,” James said. “Seeing a pyramid rise over the horizon, how do you not respond to that?”