Back in November 1903, ‘The Great Beast’ – aka infamous occultist Aleister Crowley – reportedly spent a night in the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid of Giza while honeymooning in Egypt with his wife, where he perfomed a magickal ritual.
Fast forward to 2025, and an altogether different beast – YouTube megastar ‘MrBeast’ (aka Jimmy Donaldson) – and his friends took a personal tour inside the Great Pyramid at night, to the top of the ‘relieving chambers’ above the King’s Chamber. In fact, they spent 100 hours in all on the Giza Plateau, exploring each of the pyramids, the Great Sphinx, the ‘Tomb of Osiris’ and various other locations and documenting it all on video (see YouTube feature embedded below).
If you’re older than 30 and/or not perpetually online, you may not be familiar with MrBeast – but he is a huge star of the modern online world, and his reach is immense. His main YouTube channel has over 360 million subscribers, and this particular video in its first day of release has already been viewed more than 60 million times at the time of writing, dwarfing the viewership of even the biggest TV channels.
The video is sure to bring a new wave of interest in ancient Egypt and the Giza Plateau from younger generations – though if you’re a reader of this site, you’re probably very familiar with this topic and may not learn anything new from the 21-minute-long video.
Indeed, you may even find it hard to watch – there’s a lot of noob energy from the five young Americans, lots of very loud shouting at the camera and ‘whoah!’s, and a fair bit of overselling of how special their access was (I’m pretty sure more than 50 people have visited the relieving chambers in the last 5,000 years). And, to me at least, there is a fair bit of disrespect for both the site, and those who have studied it seriously, in the way they acted in some locations.
It says something when Zahi Hawass was probably only the sixth least likeable person on the screen behind five others (Zahi was pretty funny actually, and the 77-year-old left his much younger, unfit tourists behind when exploring the relieving chambers).
You can understand why the Egyptian government would have allowed this access, it’s a brilliant way of reaching a whole new, massive audience of possible tourists. But still it hurt me a little to think that some people have studied Egyptology their whole lives and haven’t got access to the places these guys – who obviously had little clue about anything there – got to go.
Also painful is the fact that their 100 hours on the Giza Plateau is smooshed into just a 21 minute video. I legitimately thought I was watching an introduction featuring the highlights to be seen later in the video, until I realised they were just rushing through location after location.
But before you watch the video, I will note that one of the “very few humans” (as the video puts it) to have been in the Tomb of Osiris is Daily Grail and Darklore writer Ray Grasse – who was involved in the very first explorations of that location. His essay and photos about his involvement in that expedition is available right here on the Grail and you should definitely check it out if you’re interested in the Giza Plateau – Uncovering the Lost Tomb of Osiris: Personal recollections on an archaeological mystery – and provides much more depth than MrBeast’s coverage.
In any case, here’s MrBeast’s visit to the Giza Plateau:
