Any occult significance to the Transamerica Pyramid?
One of the searches that led… someone… to the sample of Bad Magic was “Occult Transamerica Pyramid.”
To the best of my knowledge, there is no occult significance to the structure. It’s a front—so big and obviously weirdly shaped, it serves to distract people from the real locations of occult significance in San Francisco. Obviously, I can’t go into great detail about these—I’d hate for anyone to have their eyeballs burned out of their skull as the result of walking into something they read about here—but there are two that are fairly safe.
As you may know, it’s illegal to operate a cemetery in San Francisco. The usual explanation is there just plain isn’t room—SF is bound on three sides by water, and had to resort to landfilling to reach even its present size. The City’s dead were moved en masse to Colma after 1900. (Did they get everybody? We don’t know—most of the records went up in flames after the 1906 earthquake. [And if you believe THAT one, I have some swamp land in Florida you might be interested in.]) Oddly enough, BART—one of the local light rail systems—has a stop in Colma. Almost nobody lives in Colma—the last reported population figure was 1911 people. And one point five million graves. Makes you wonder just who or what gets on and off the trains there, eh?
There are, however, two graveyards left within the City proper. First, the 28 acre San Francisco National Cemetery, AKA the War Memorial Cemetery. Dating back to 1884, it holds veterans of the various regional forts and camps.
The oldest is the Mission Dolores Church Cemetery—established 1776. (And a relative newcomer at that—recall that the Spanish had missions and colonies all through the New World when the first English were still puking their guts out just off Plymouth Rock.) Most of the graves were moved to Colma, but not all. In particular, there still remains a mass grave of various Native Americans—don’t worry, the locals, like the French, waited for a while and then packed bones into a smaller space—and the grave of Will Leidesdorff, the first recorded African-American San Franciscan. Yes, the site’s open to the public; it’s at 16th and Dolores. Just be respectful—for your own sake. Presumably, even dumb people should know better than to fool around at the gravesite of Native Americans and Catholic priests, but just in case: we’re not talking about picking up a poltergeist that writes amusing messages in the mirror while you take a shower. We’re talking about full-blown mind-cracking save-the-last-bullet-for-yourself stuff, here.
But the Transamerica Pyramid… no, nothing occult about it. Nope, nope, nope. Particularly not the 13th floor—nothing there at all.