  These “independent” constructions are meaningful in themselves: their meaning lies, for example, in their shape or in the number of their parts. By contrast, the Egyptian pyramids contain a “meaning” that is separate from the construction itself. That “meaning,” of course, is the body of the dead pharaoh. Since they house within themselves something other than themselves, pyramids, in Hegel’s view, are, as it were, on the way to being properly architectural. They fall short of proper classical architecture, however, because what they shelter within themselves is death, not the embodiment of the living god: they are, as Hegel puts it, “crystals that shelter within them a departed spirit” (VPK, 218). Furthermore, the “meaning” that they contain is completely hidden within them, invisible to all. Pyramids thus remain works of symbolic art that point to a hidden meaning buried within them. Indeed, as was noted above, Hegel claims that the pyramid is the image or symbol of symbolic art itself (Aesthetics, 1: 356).