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NILE GENESIS:
AN INTRODUCTION TO
THE OPUS OF GERALD MASSEY.
© Charles S. Finch III, 2006.
Preface
In contemporary times, Gerald Massey is primarily remembered for his
poetry, literary criticism, and socialist politics all in the pursuit of
which he applied his boundless energy. But it is in his forays into
human ‘typological’ beginnings, framed in the evolutionary perspective of
Darwin and Wallace, and probed through the antiquarian medium of
Egyptology and comparative mythology that Massey’s true genius is
revealed. To this effort – this opus – Massey dedicated the last 36
years of his life, resulting in three Herculean two-volume works which, as
they find a slowly expanding readership, are permanently changing our
perception of ancient history, human origins, and the primal place of
Africa – Massey’s ‘Old Dark Land’ – in the evolution of human
consciousness from its beginning.
I. Introduction.
The land of Kemit, ‘the Black Land’ – later called Aigyptos
(‘Egypt’) by the Greeks – was, as Herodotus rightly observed, the gift of
the Nile.
In this essay, the terms Egypt and Kemit will
be used interchangeably. The term Kamite will be used
adjectively for Kemit.
From two separate inner African lakes – Lake Tana in
Ethiopia, source of the Blue Nile, and Lake Victoria in Uganda, source of
the White Nile – two riverine arteries converged at modern Khartoum to
form the mainstream Nile that brought mud and silt with annual regularity
to the northeast African country of Kemit bounded by the Mediterranean on
the north, the Red Sea on the east, and the Sahara Desert of the west.
This flood-born annual deposition of soil from inner Africa over thousands
of years created the green, fertile Delta region of Egypt and, as
importantly, annually renewed the entire country, making Egypt the richest
and most productive farming nation in antiquity. Without the Nile
flood, Egypt would not exist; not surprisingly, the Nile itself was
deified by the people who created the pharaonic civilization along its
northern banks.
But it was not only life-giving soil and water from inner
Africa that the Nile brought; it also brought the people, the culture, the
symbols, and the values from the inner reaches of the continent providing
the foundation, scaffolding, and superstructure of the civilization of the
pyramid-builders. Thus the Land of Kemit was born of and renewed
yearly by the Nile wellsprings in the womb of Africa so that it might live
and tell Africa’s story. The ancient writers understood and wrote of
this umbilical connection between inner Africa and Egypt but after the
beginning of the Christian era, the realization and appreciation of this
fundamental historical linkage faded, almost to be forgotten until the
appearance, between 1881 and 1907, of the monumental writings of the
incomparable auto-didact, Gerald Massey. In three massive two-volume
works, The Book of the Beginnings (1881), The Natural Genesis (1883),
and Ancient Egypt (1907), we witness a titanic attempt to extricate and
repossess the veritable story of this Nile Valley kingdom from the neglect
and obfuscation of the centuries. Massey, with nearly no formal
education, became by sheer effort a man of startling erudition and his
books provide an inexhaustible mine of information on the Nile genesis of
early civilization.
If there is a unifying theme in Massey’s six-volume opus it
is simply this: Africa was the primal source of the world’s people,
languages, myths, symbols, and religions and Egypt Africa’s mouthpiece.
In Massey’s view, Egypt brought African genius to its highest and finest
expression then proceeded to instruct the world in Africa’s wisdom.
This conviction might have been inspired by the assertions of the
important classical writers and mythographers of antiquity such as
Herodotus, Hecataeus, Diodorus, and Plutarch who reported the
commonly-accepted story that the Egyptian Osiris (also called ‘Dionysus’
by the Greeks) traveled throughout the world bringing the blessings of
civilization everywhere he went. However, Massey found independent
verification of this view from his exhaustive studies of the myths,
symbols, beliefs, and customs of many lands all over the world. In
his eyes, metaphorically speaking, Inner Africa was the Mother, the Nile
the Father, and Egypt the brilliant Son and Fulfiller.
II. Early Life.
Gerald Massey was born in extremely humble circumstances, the
first son of a destitute canal boatman, in the small town of Tring in the
English Midlands in 1828. He received a very scanty early education
in the ‘penny schools’ of the time but, by the time he was eight, was
working a 48-hour week, first in a silk factory then as a straw plaiter.
At 15, he moved away from his Midland province to London where he was able
to find employment as a draper’s errand boy and it was then that his truly
prodigious efforts to educate himself began. His position, though
demanding, gave him city-wide mobility and he spent every spare moment
buying what books he could or, more often because of his poverty, reading
omnivorously at the book stalls he frequented. In later life, Massey
recounted discouraging tales at having to stop reading a book to run
errands only to find it gone upon returning to the stall. Not
uncommonly, he would buy a book in lieu of a day’s meal.
From the beginning of his life in London from 1843 on, Massey
became immersed in two interlocking pursuits: poetry and radical politics.
Poetry was clearly an outlet for his artistic impulses and need for inner
expression while at the same time the appalling conditions of the working
poor in urban England, of which he was a part, fueled his radical fervor
for political and economic justice. He managed to get some of his
early poems published in small journals and he continued to publish poetry
until the end of his life. At the same time, he participated in the
emerging radical causes of the day, especially Chartism, with total élan,
helping to found and edit several radical periodicals. These
‘seditious’ activities got him fired from a succession of jobs but, no
stranger to economic privation, none of these setbacks dimmed his
commitment and enthusiasm one wit.
As he approached mid-life, Massey had honed his literary and
oratory skills to such an extent that he was able to make a moderately
remunerative living on the lecture circuit. He achieved a modest
reputation as a poet and had become a respected literary critic. He
was regarded as an authority on Shakespearean sonnets and the poetry of
Tennyson. Even today, he occupies a minor place in the history of
English poetry and literary criticism. He remained politically
radical all his life and it has been said, though it has been disputed,
that he served as the model for the main character in George Eliot’s novel
Felix Holt, the Radical. As if his interests weren’t protean enough,
Massey by 1870 had become a devoted spiritualist. In this pursuit,
he was undoubtedly influenced by his first wife, a mentally unbalanced
woman who was, nonetheless, a gifted medium and seer. He added
spiritualism to his repertoire of public lectures and kept a busy schedule
that took him as far afield as America and Australia. Though Massey
was a rigorous empiricist, an indefatigable scholar, and a believer in
natural science, none of these attitudes propelled him into the narrow
positivism that ruled most scientific thinking of the 19th
century. It was the mark of the man that he could embrace Darwinian
evolution, spiritualism, socialism, and anti-vivisectionism seemingly
without conflict.
III. "A Book of the Beginnings."
Massey’s A Book of the Beginnings, in two volumes, was
first published in 1881 and in its Preface, he wrote that the book
was the product of 10 years of unstinting research, conducted mostly in
the British Museum. In the course of his studies, Massey was
befriended by Samuel Birch, the leading contemporary British Egyptologist
and translator of a version of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, one
which was to figure prominently in Massey’s own work. Birch
evidently gave Massey invaluable assistance and guidance, a debt Massey
readily acknowledged through the remainder of his life. But in spite
of Birch’s patronage, the intellectual and social climate of the time was
ill-disposed toward the revelations in this astounding book. Some
relatively unbiased and prominent men in scholarly circles such as
Massey’s hero Alfred Russel Wallace, the eminent evolutionist, and
Richard Burton, the famous explorer, did read the two volumes of The Book
of Beginnings and pronounce favorably upon them but Wallace made the
telling remark that, ‘there might not be a score of people in England who
were prepared by their previous education to understand the book.’[1]
Apart from a handful of other relatively unbiased reviews in publications
such as Nature, The Guardian, and The Theosophist,
the general reaction was hostile and disbelieving. In an era when
the search for evidence of man’s origins was concentrated solely in Asia,
that Africa could have instead been the birthplace of mankind was
considered preposterous, despite the explicit suggestion of Darwin that
Africa was in fact the most logical place to look.
In Volume I of A Book of the Beginnings, Massey staked out
his position boldly and without equivocation. For him the starting
point of the human family
…has now to be
sought for in Africa, the birthplace of the black race, the land of the
oldest known human types, and of those which preceded and most nearly
approached the human…Aethiopia and Egypt produced the earliest
civilization in the world and it was indigenous (italics added).
So far as the records of language and mythology can offer us guidance,
there is nothing beyond Egypt and Aethiopia but Africa…[2]
Massey
categorically dismissed the assertions of the Aryanist German
Egyptologists Bunsen and Brugsch postulating an Asian origin for Egyptian
civilization. Massey asked, in refutation of the Asian theory, why
did the Egyptians themselves look southward to Africa as their birthplace
and refer to it as Ta-neter, ‘the land of the gods?’ Moreover,
numerous Egyptian customs were unmistakably African in character, from the
practice of tracing ancestry through the maternal line to the ceremonial
dying of bodies with red ochre. Massey even derived an Egyptian
etymology for the Roman word Africa from the Egyptian af-rui-ka
which literally means ‘to turn toward the opening of the Ka.’ The Ka is
the energetic double of every person and ‘opening of the Ka’ refers to a
womb or birthplace.[3] Africa would be, for the
Egyptians, ‘the birthplace.’ Parenthetically, it is worth noting that
another Egyptian name for the African lands south of Egypt was Ta-Kenset,
which means ‘placenta land.’ In any event, the issue for Massey was plain
and the common ethno-cultural identity of Egypt and the rest of Africa
provided the framework for his study into human beginnings.
In Massey’s view, no authority in philology, mythology,
comparative religion, or Egyptology could really understand his subject
unless he was prepared to investigate deeply the phenomenology of types,
i.e., ‘typology.’ He considered typology to be the foundation of all human
symbolism, myth, language, and religion. Despite Massey’s seminal
studies of typology, there was little serious investigation into this area
until the advent of Jungian school of psychoanalysis in the 1920s.
Massey, through typology, plumbed to depths that revealed to him a record
of human development otherwise completely hidden from view. Forty
years later, the Jungians were elaborating as psychic models of thought
and feeling the ‘archetypes of the collective unconscious’ about which
Jung wrote:
…there exists a
second [psychic] system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature
which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious
does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of
pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious
secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents.[4]
Massey’s ‘types’ originated in natural phenomena, the first teachers of
man, and became the means by which the human mental and psychic world was
pieced together. The Jungian archetypes were thus the inner
embodiments of the Masseyan phenomenal types.
The Primordial Type for Massey was that of the Great Mother
and all she came to represent. Massey represented the mental world
of primeval man as a concrete world whose profoundest mystery was the
production of new life. Everywhere in nature for early man it was
observed that production of new life was the prerogative of the female of
the species. According to Massey, early humans realized no
connection between sexual congress and reproduction, hence
there was no notion of fatherhood. The cessation of the female
menstruation, followed by the swelling and bulging of the female body,
culminating in the bursting forth of new life in toto presented
itself as an awesome, transcendent mystery. It made the female, in
her exclusive motherhood, the paradigm of the first conceptions and images
of deity. In the first advent, God was feminine, though not
necessarily in human guise because the surrounding fauna and flora
furnished early humans in Africa with examples of superhuman females such
as the obese hippopotamus, the long-lived tortoise, the terrifying
crocodile, the ferocious lioness, the grand, overspreading sycamore tree –
all of these figures embodied powers both non-human and super-human.
These concrete nature powers supplied the earliest divine images; only
much later was the deity made immanent in human form. Massey could
not but know it then, but anatomically modern man has been proven to have
appeared in Africa 300,000 years ago; the
antecedents of the ‘natural genesis’ he describes would have started to
unfold at least from that time forward.
With the natural genesis of the aboriginal goddess-figure,
the human mother would have served as her ‘avatar,’ and it was around her
that early society first coalesced. JJ Bachofen, one of the first to
postulate the primacy of the matriarchy, held that agriculture, the first
social laws, the earliest arts and crafts, indeed all those things which
first discreted humankind from its animal beginnings, evolved under the
system of the matriarch, with the mother supreme as procreator, nourisher,
and preserver.[5] This Primeval Mother was the
prototype of the ‘virgin mother,’ the mother whose children, in Massey’s
words, ‘were born but not begotten,’ since there was as yet, no
realization of the father’s role in procreation. It is but one
example among many of how the typology of African primordial man gave rise
to the symbolic and eschatological figures of later ‘revealed’ religion.
The strangest and most peculiar beliefs and customs are never merely
products of the imagination; they reflect a typological reality that
governed the world that the early humans made.
The Great Mother was the primal type and from her, as her
Children, emanated other related types or Powers. These natural
types were not worshiped out of fear and ignorance as is commonly asserted
but as a means of linking with and benefiting from the Powers inherent in
nature. In this conception, nature encompassed both the seen and
unseen planes; the physical and immaterial worlds. The golden hawk,
for example, became an emblem of Horus the sun because of its color and
ability to soar to such heights as to seem like the sun. The
hippopotamus – or ‘water cow’ – in her immensity embodied the natural
image of the pregnant female and therefore the Great Mother. The
creeping, death-dealing serpent could in one aspect represent death and
darkness but when figured with its tail in its mouth – the uroboros –
would be the symbol of eternity. Moreover, with its ability to
exchange old skin for new, the serpent embodied the power of renewal and
resurrection. The leopard and other cats, with their nocturnal
habits and preternatural sight, would symbolize the nighttime sun passing
beneath the earth in the netherworld from west to east in the hours of the
night. The tree with its branches and fruit was both protector and
nourisher. Thus, the powers of nature, whether of the animal, plant,
or elemental planes, were not ‘worshiped’ in and of themselves but served
as images from which to fashion psycho-mental concepts that made the world
comprehensible. Though the dynastic Egyptians (4,300 – 30 BC) had
advanced far beyond the primeval and concrete mental stage of the first
imagers in Africa, they never dispensed with the types. This truth
is shown clearly by the Egyptian hieroglyphic writing (medu neteru) whose
numerous ideograms are drawn largely from natural typology.
Moreover, the richness and plasticity of these natural types were such
that they could embody increasingly complex and abstract ideas and
symbols. The golden hawk, for example, though one of the early
images of the sun, would in time also come to represent the human soul.
The first volume of A Book of the Beginnings was devoted
primarily to tracing the origins of the culture, language, and religion of
the British Celts to Kam(t), i.e., Egypt, and Africa. Today, Massey
would be labeled, somewhat derisively, as a ‘hyper-diffusionist,’ because
of his assertion that the world’s cultures were Kamite in origin.
With respect to the aboriginal Britons, the Celts, he carefully dissected
their language, religion, and customs to detail their Kamite origins.
Along these lines, Massey was echoing the work of the British
investigators Godfrey Higgins, author of Anacalypsis, and Duncan McRitchie,
author of Ancient and Moderns Britons, who also wrote
extensively about the pre-historic Black presence in the British Isles.
Massey reproduced an extensive comparative glossary showing the common
identity of hundreds of Egyptian and Celtic-British words. His
derivation of the English word ‘mother’ is instructive:
Our word Mother is
not derived from the Sanskrit Ma, to fashion, but from the Egyptian name
of the mother as Mut. Mut means mother, the Emaner, the mouth…Mut
the chamber, place, womb…AR (e.g.) is the child, or the likeness, the type
of a fulfilled period, the thing made. Thus MUT-AR is the place, the
gestator, the founder and emaner of the child.[6]
Massey applied
the same method to thousands of words in languages from Hebrew to Maori.
In the second volume, Massey conducted a searching
examination of the Hebrew legends of the Old Testament and in revealing
their Afro-Egyptian or Kamite origins, inaugurated a seismic shift in
Hebraic and Old Testament studies. Of especial importance is the
remarkable chapter The Egyptian Origin of the Jews Traced from the
Monuments. His research convinced him that the Five Books of Moses
represented Egyptian astronomical allegories that had been literalized,
historicized, and humanized. [7] The Book of
Exodus especially seemed to abound with Kamite astronomical types that
were reconfigured to form Hebrew ‘history.’ As Massey writes:
The Hebrew Books
of the Genesis, Exodus, Numbers Joshua, and Judges are invaluable as a
virgin mine of mythology; they are of utmost importance as an aid in
recovering the primeval types of Egyptian thought…For the Hebrews, who
collected and preserved so much, have explained nothing. There is
evidence enough to prove the types are Egyptian and the people brought
them out of Egypt must have been more or less Egyptian in race, and of a
religion that was Egyptian of the earliest and oldest kind.
Undoubtedly there is some very slight historic nucleus in the Hebrew
narrative, but it has been so mixed with myth that it is far easier to
recover the celestial allegory with the aids of its correlatives than it
is to restore the human history.[8]
Massey proceeded to show the connection between the Egyptian astro-mythical
types and all the important Old Testament patriarchs. However, there
really was an exodus from Egypt; in fact, there were at least two
(possibly three) alluded to in historical testimony, but, according to
Massey, none of them had anything to do with a foreign race of
shepherds enslaved for more than 400 years in Egypt then led out of it by
a messianic prophet. The latter years of Egypt’s 18th dynasty (14th
century BC) witnessed unprecedented religious ferment as indicated by the
so-called ‘Amarna Heresy,’ launched by Amenhotep IV, better known as
Akhenaton. This period of religious upheaval saw the patriarchal
status quo represented by Amon-Ra shaken to its foundation by the upsurge
of the Sethian solar deity Aton – the sole and exclusive god – championed
first by Queen Tiye, wife of Amenhotep III, then more vigorously by her
son Akhenaton. Though solar, by virtue of his Sethian character,
Aton represented the ancient Mother-and-Son religious system dating back
to pre-dynastic times. In the end, the Atonian religion was
overthrown and Amon-Ra restored, leading in the ensuing 120 years to one,
possibly two, exodes out of Egypt by religious dissenters who had retained
their allegiance to Mother-worship.
Egyptians, though conscientious recorders of their own
history, never mentioned a group or nation that could be remotely
identified with the Hebrews of the Exodus. [9]
Even the lone historical reference to Israel in Egyptian annals does not
presuppose the veracity of the events narrated in the Book of Exodus.
Massey connects Moses to the Egyptian lion-god Ma-Shu, though
another possible etymology is derivable from Mu (‘pool’) Sha
(‘reeds’) for Mu-Sha, ‘pool of reeds,’ the place where the infant
Moses was found. The name Moses is not Hebrew in origin and
pharaoh’s daughter is made to say that she gives the foundling infant this
name because ‘I drew him from the water.’[10] The
Egyptian word sah means ‘to draw from,’ so that Mu-Sah, an
additional etymology, would mean ‘to draw from the (pool of) water’.
The only identifiable historical figure in Massey’s view that can be
linked to the Biblical Moses is Osarsiph, an Egyptian priest of Ra
mentioned by the Jewish apologist Josephus in his polemic against the
Egyptian historian Apion entitled Against Apion. Osarsiph,
according to this report (which Josephus recounts but vehemently
repudiates), became a dissenter from the established priestly religion and
organized a large group of disaffected people in Egypt, inciting them to
rebellion then subsequently leading them out of Egypt into Canaan.
Apion claimed (after Josephus) that Osarsiph the Egyptian subsequently
changed his name to Moses. Sigmund Freud in Moses and Monotheism,
though himself Jewish and having read Josephus’ Against Apion, clearly
takes the side of Apion by asserting that Moses must have been an Egyptian
priest who took the part of the downtrodden in Egypt, led them into Sinai,
taught them the worship of one god, and gave them their laws. The
date of the Exodus remains a contentious issue though the weight of
opinion favors the reign of Mereneptah (1230 – 1215 BC) as the time period
for this seminal event. If so, Osarsiph would have lived 100 years
after Akhenaton, the king who instituted the brief period of pharaonic
monotheism in Egypt under the aegis of Aton. That being said, Massey
forcefully set forth the argument that the Hebrews, originally the
worshippers of the divine Mother and Son who later renounced them for the
all-exclusive Father, brought their religion and language out of Africa,
their original home.
IV. "The Natural Genesis."
In The Natural Genesis, Massey showed how the early evolution of human
consciousness derived from the development of types. Along the lines
of descent from an early ape-like ancestor, man’s first semi-articulate utterings were patterned closely after that of the baboon, the ‘clicking
cynocephalic ape’ met with in the Egyptian ideographs as the ‘announcer
and adorer’ of the sun, associated with Djehuti or Thoth. The sole
remnants of this primordial speech can be found in the click languages of
the present day Khoisan peoples of Southern Africa and their Bantu
neighbors who have incorporated these clicks into their own speech.
Such primordial speech would have been onomatopoeic, that is similar in
sound to the thing represented, and later speech would to a large extent
be abraded and worn down from the original onomatopoeia. For
example, the Egyptian goddess Tefnut, who is said to have arisen from the
spittle of her father Atum, contains the word tef in her name which is the
Egyptian word for ‘spit’ and imitates the sound of spitting. Her
consort-twin is Shu, who arose from the sneeze of his father Atum and
whose name imitates the sound of a sneeze. The word for ‘cat’ in
Egyptian was miau, which is the ‘meow’ sound that the cat makes.
Massey painstakingly explored the important primeval types
that passed in various forms into every religion. The tree and
serpent were two such types that formed a dyad that constantly reappeared
in the mythic symbolism of different lands and which were incomparably
older than the form in which they are encountered in Genesis. The
conjunction of these two types must have arisen from the association of
the tree and arboreal python found throughout Africa. At the
astronomical stage of mytho-genesis, the tree was figured as a type of the
pole and the serpent a type of the string of seven circumpolar stars that
encircle or ‘coil’ around the pole.[11] The
caduceus of Hermes and the Hindu Kundalini serpent coiled around the
spinal column are two later applications of this typological dyad.
In the Masseyan schema in addition to tree and python, there were many
other feminine and maternal types: the mount or rock, the cave, the dove,
the well, the ark, and the cow are but a few examples. Compare this
Masseyan typology to Jung’s Mother Archetype:
The archetype is
often associated with things and places standing for fertility and
fruitfulness: the cornucopia, a ploughed field, a garden. It can be
attached to a rock, a cave, a tree…, a deep well…or to vessel-shaped
flowers like the rose or the lotus.[12]
Jung goes on to
say that in its negative or dark aspect, the archetype was represented by
any devouring animal such as a dragon, large fish, or serpent. Had
Jung copied these examples directly from The Natural Genesis, he could
hardly have echoed Massey more closely.
In his elaboration of the typological system, Massey’s
chapter in the second volume, Typology of Time, is particularly
important because the determination and recording of cycles and their
periodicity became ever more significant to Kamite mentality as settled
communities were formed that depended on seasonal agriculture for
sustenance. The earliest modes of time-reckoning were to be found in
nature, and the female because of her more or less regular monthly
periodicity, became an early type of time-keeper.
…coming of age
applies to both sexes, but, as may be seen by the Kaffir festival of
female puberty, it was the woman-nature that made the primaeval
revelation, and was the first teller of time; the demonstrator of
periodicity in its most attractive and most mystical aspect.[13]
At a later
stage, the heavenly bodies with their regular and cyclic movements became
the chief tellers of time but nature was man’s first teacher before the
heavens were mapped. One of Jung’s foremost disciples, Erich
Neumann, in his extraordinary study of the Great Mother archetype, seemed
to confirm further the validity of Massey’s typological approach:
Since she governs growth, the Great Mother is the goddess
of time. From menstruation, with its supposed relation to the moon, pregnancy, and beyond, the woman
is regulated by and dependent on time; so it is she who
determines time…[14]
V. "Ancient Egypt: the Light of the World."
The culmination of Massey’s long labor of 36 years was Ancient Egypt,
published in the year of his death, 1907. [15]
Summing up his feelings about this monumental coda to his opus, Massey
wrote:
Comparatively
speaking, "A Book of Beginnings" was written in the dark, "The Natural
Genesis" was written in the twilight, whereas "Ancient Egypt" has been
written in the light of day.[16]
In Ancient Egypt, Massey appears to have obtained a full grasp of the
multi-dimensional subject upon which he had devoted the last
three-and-a-half decades of his life. In these two volumes, the
reader sees unfolding a tripartite evolutionary scheme of Kamite religion:
typology, mythology, and eschatology. Massey had reached the summit
of the mountain he had climbed relentlessly all his adult life.
In Ancient Egypt, Massey delved into an area untouched in
his previous writings: totemism. He outlines the manner in which
evolutionary natural genesis led man from primordial sign-language to
totemism and thence to spiritism. The totemic phase, overshadowed by
the Great Mother, was a harbinger of the elements that came to form what
is now understood as religion. It was the time when humans were
discreted out of the ‘primal, promiscuous horde’ into matriarchal lineages
demarcated by the natural totemic types, whether plant or animal.
The totem imparted:
-
Lineage
identification by relation to a common maternal ancestor.
-
A mode of
inter-lineage food distribution.
-
A means to
promote exogamy (out-marriage), thereby imposing the first taboos
against indiscriminate sexual congress.
It was the time, according to Massey, when the post-menopausal mother, her
life’s purpose fulfilled, voluntarily gave herself up to her children to
be eaten as a sacramental meal to:
-
Preserve her
from the ravages of old age.
-
Keep her
blood within the totem group.
It was the blood of the mother that determined descent and the blood was
(and is) the most potent representation of life. Here then is the
original eucharist, i.e., the consumption of the body and blood of the
savior to infuse the communicant with new life and potency. As
Massey attested, the first savior was the Mother – the earth that
germinated life, the tree whose fruit sustained life, the water that
renewed life, then finally the sacrificial blood necessary to
ontologically uphold the community. In these aspects and more, she
was man’s savior.
In the chapter entitled Elemental and Ancestral Spirits,
Massey embarked on a discussion of the Afro-Kamite interconnection with
the spirit world. Massey, the spiritualist,
perceived no incongruity in this spirit connection:
The colossal
conceit of obtuse modern ignorance notwithstanding, the ghost and the
faculty for seeing the ghost are realities in the domain of natural fact.
The seers may be comparatively rare, although the clairvoyant and seer of
spirits is by no means so scarce as either the great painter or great
poet. The abnormal faculties are human, and they can be increased by
cultivation.[17]
Massey, though
something of a clairvoyant himself, never claimed to be a mystic, per
se. He was a dedicated empiricist, believed in rational science,
and refused to countenance ‘miraculous’ happenings that contravened the
laws of nature. Still, he considered that the ‘mesmeric’ forces of
spiritualism were well within the domain of nature and strongly affirmed
the ability of the ancient sages of Egypt and Africa to command such
forces. Indeed, the late Senegalese polymath Cheikh Anta Diop showed
that with the empirical confirmation of the famous Einsteinian ‘EPR
Phenomenon,’ now referred to as ‘quantum entanglement’ or ‘non-locality,’
Psi phenomena might rightly be considered a branch of physics! [18]
In the Prefatory to Ancient Egypt, Massey wrote that
his earlier books ‘were met in England with the truly orthodox conspiracy
of silence.’ Considering that his writings completely overturned the
‘received’ theories on the birth of civilization as well as the very
foundations of orthodox Christianity, it isn’t any wonder. In Ancient Egypt, Massey showed that the highest and last phase of the
Egyptian science of the soul – a science slowly fashioned over many
millennia from its inner African beginnings – was the eschatological one.
The drama of Osiris with its interwoven themes of life, death, and
resurrection was the most perfect expression of this final psycho-mental
phase in Egypt, eventually giving rise to the late Mediterranean cults
like those of Tammuz, Adonis, and Dionysus. Even though the Osirian
drama represented Egyptian soul science in its most spiritualized form, it
preserved intact the earlier typology and astro-mythology. According
to Massey, the Egyptian priests (with their Ethiopian predecessors) had
maintained an unbroken continuity of star-gazing for more than 10,000
years. Moreover, as indicated earlier, the types (and archetypes)
had been reconstituted in the heavens. To the ancient Kamites, the
celestial and terrestrial worlds mirrored one another. The important
stars and star-groupings were given names, histories, and symbols
reflecting directly the natural types. Thus the planisphere (and the
Zodiac) gives us the constellations of the scarab beetle (our crab), lion,
ram, bull, and fishes, etc. Massey informs us that astronomical
mythology passed through three stages – stellar, lunar, then solar.
The developed Osirian drama was solar in character but incorporated all of
the mythos of the earlier stellar and lunar phases. Osiris was thus
the night-time sun passing through the nether-world of Amenta as a result
of his murder by Set, the principle of darkness, who was later figured as
the Hebrew Satan. At dawn, Osiris is resurrected as his son Horus
who fights and defeats the devouring dragon of darkness for light to
triumph another day. In the eschatological stage of typological
evolution, Osiris comes to personify the soul of the deceased who, after
conquering the forces of evil and corruption that lie in wait in Amenta,
is resurrected as the glorified, i.e., spiritual, sun of which Horus is
the symbol. As Massey saw it, everything in the Afro-Kamite world
was of a piece, expressing the complete interpenetration of typology,
mythology, and eschatology.
Massey capped his signature work with an elaborate and
detailed investigation into the Kamite origins of Christianity. He
was able to trace all the important Christic themes to Kamite typology and
astro-mythology. He asserted that the Gospels, like the Old
Testament, are revealed as just the humanized and historicized
astronomical mythology Egypt, instituted by the early Christian patriarchs
and redactors, and formalized at the Council of Nicea. [19]
As an example, the word Christ itself, meaning ‘anointed’, is a
late Greek word that only appears about 290 BC in Alexandria (Egypt), [20]
clearly derived from the Egyptian keres(t), a name for the anointed
and resurrected Osirified mummy. Astronomical antecedents of
Christianity's are shown in the canonical birthday of Christ, originally
celebrated on January 6 – as it still is in the Greek Orthodox Church –
but pushed back to December 25 in the Roman Church to coincide with and
co-opt the
understand Massey's writings of the sun-god Horus (and all the solar deities of
antiquity). Two thousand years ago, as the sun dawned on December
25th, the constellation Virgo could be seen on the eastern horizon.
The Sun – and the Son – were born ‘of a Virgin.’
It is also of note that the Christian crucified figure was
always depicted as a lamb until the 7th century. Here, the Savior,
the Lamb, harkens back to the Age of Aries, the Ram, the Zodiacal ruler
from 2,277 BC to 119 BC, when the sun rose at the spring equinox with the
constellation Aries sitting on the eastern horizon. Though Jesus
Christ incarnated as the avatar of the Age of Pisces, the Two Fishes, that
began 119 BC, the imagery of the previous Aries Ram Age maintained itself
in the reference to the Christ as ‘the Lamb of God.’ Christ as a crucified
man was a relatively late figure in Christian iconography. In
the Appendix to Ancient Egypt, Massey listed more than 200 direct
parallels between the Jesus legend and the cycle of Osiris/Horus.
The earthly Jesus is congruent to Horus; Jesus the Christ corresponds to
Osiris, the resurrected god.
There were a number of Christian and quasi-Christian cults
struggling for survival in the early centuries AD. In Massey’s view,
the Gnostics especially represented a type of Christianity in which the
Egyptian originals were consciously preserved and did not center around
the false human history of a mythical savior. The Gnostic Christ was
a type of the Deified Man that lies dormant in every human soul and the
attainment to which was the aim of Egyptian soul science whose guide map
was the Book of the Dead, more properly called the Book of the Coming
Forth by Day. Outside the Gospels, there is no authentic reference
to the man Jesus and his supposed history as portrayed by the Gospels by
any contemporary commentator until the 2nd century. The Theosophical
scholar GRS Mead, a learned authority in the field of Christian origins,
wrote:
It has always been
an unfailing source of astonishment to the historical investigator of
Christian beginnings, that there is not one single word from the pen of
any Pagan writer of the first century of our era, which can in any fashion
be referred to the marvelous story recounted by the Gospel writers.
The very existence of Jesus seems to be unknown [21]
(Italics added).
According to
Mead, and in this Massey concurs, a man named Yahushua (Joshua) Ben
Pandera (Jesus is Greek for Yahushua) did live more than
century before the Gospel Jesus was supposed to have been born. [22]
Yahushua was an Essene sage who was raised among the Therapeuts
(‘healers’) of Egypt where he became a master of healing and
‘wonderworking.’ Sometime around 73 BC, he traveled through Palestine,
healing, teaching, and performing myriad ‘wonders.’ Because of his
‘magical’ practices, he was arrested, tried, and hanged by Jewish
magistrates in the city of Lydda on the eve of Passover in 70 BC. If
there was a historical Jesus, Yahushua Ben Pandera was him.
Beginning late in the 2nd century BC, there arose a heightened and
widespread anticipation of the appearance of a ‘world savior,’ and it
seems that the life and work of Yahushua the Essene provided the germ
around which the vast soteriology (‘savior mythology’) of the ancient
world, specifically that of Egypt, coalesced. The system of the
Essenes – called Therapeuts in Egypt – prefigured Christianity that
evolved directly from it.
The worship of Isis and Serapis – a form of Osiris – was
lifted bodily out of Egypt and transplanted to Rome where, for nearly four
centuries the cult, particularly that of Isis, rivaled those of Jupiter
and Mithra. Isis was especially popular in her aspect of Mother with
Child, i.e., Isis with the Infant Horus, and both she and Horus were
consistently depicted with black coloring and Ethiopic features.
Surviving Roman frescoes in Pompeii represent her priests as Ethiopian and
Roman legions carried her image and worship to the farthest reaches of
barbarian Europe. When late in the 5th century Christianity began to
penetrate these regions, wherever the missionaries found the image complex
of Isis holding the Child Horus, they turned it into the Black Madonna and
Child. More than 1500 years after Christianization, these sacred
sites of the Black Madonna and Child remain the holiest shrines of
Catholic Europe.
VI. Assessment.
One implication of Massey’s work is that man’s path to
self-reconciliation lies in making peace with the Cosmic Mother, the
object of his abuse and repression over a period of 2,000 years, thereby
effecting a harmonious re-alignment between the Mother and Father
consciousness. In the Osirian legend, when Horus, personifying the
light and sun, was about to achieve complete victory over Set, the
darkness and night, Thoth, the Universal Mind and Balancer, stepped in,
put a halt to the battle, and restored Set to his proper place. The
cosmos was created in a balanced equilibrium; the subtle and complex
interplay between the light and dark gives meaning and form to the
universe. In the Deified Man – who is Osirian in one mode, Christic
in another – the opposites unite and are transcended. Massey’s opus
points us in the direction of that essential realization.
A word should be said about Massey’s legacy. When
reading David Shaw’s Gerald Massey, the
sole book-length biography of Massey in existence, it becomes evident that
there is a multi-vectored latter day appreciation of Massey’s legacy.
Massey seemed to be a man of many lives; certainly his interests were wide
and multifarious. He was self-taught and self-made; a radical
activist, editor, lecturer, poet, literary critic, evolutionist,
spiritualist, Egyptologist, antiquarian, and mythographer. Any one
of these pursuits would have served as a sufficient vocation for an
ordinary man. But four centuries earlier, Massey’s eclectic
interests might have won for him the sobriquet “Renaissance Man.”
The wide scope of Massey’s interests and writings has meant that there are
different “constituencies” to which he appeals. In academic circles
in Britain and America, there is burgeoning interest in his literary
output and, to a lesser extent, the radical, socially-conscious career of
Massey’s early adulthood. In Britain, his reputation as an
established member in the rank of the minor 19th century English poets
wins sustained interest. This literary reputation – considered along
with his radical political views, advocacy of women’s emancipation, and
opposition to dissection of live animals – reveals Massey as one of 19th
century England’s most interesting public characters, even if he labored
in relative obscurity all of his life.
In America, there can be detected a definable interest in
Massey’s literary output in academic circles. However, Massey has
gained a discernible public readership in the U.S. based entirely on
his Egyptian trilogy, the subject of this essay. There are
significant numbers of black Americans who are attracted to Massey’s
writings on Egypt, impressed by his erudition and the manner in which his
books open up a whole new vista of historical investigation. This
“sub-set” of readers knows little about the rest of his literary output.
Still, it must be pointed out that others outside this African-American
“sub-set”, e.g., the antiquarian writers Albert Churchward and Alfred Boyd
Kuhn, have also been decisively impacted by Massey’s Egyptian trilogy.
These two men, in fact, seem to have been Masseyan disciples.
Churchward, along lines of inquiry first introduced by Massey, was
completely absorbed in unraveling the riddle of human beginnings from
early Africa through a study of the primordial Pygmy (Ba Twa)
peoples who first colonized the earth. Kuhn adopted the Masseyan
approach in his attempt to unravel and understand the enigma of Christian
beginnings.
Among American Blacks, Massey’s Egyptian books were first
brought to light by the historical writers J. A. Rogers and John G.
Jackson in the 1930s and ‘40s. The present writer, after seeing the
citations of Massey in the books of Rogers (World’s Great Men of Color)
and Jackson (Introduction to African Civilization), found Massey’s books
in Weiser’s Bookstore, a well-known spiritualist bookstore in New York’s
East Village, in 1971 and spent the next 10 years laboring through all six
volumes. Massey’s books are almost impossibly dense and it was not
possible to read them straight through. There was too much
information packed in every written line and, taken together, the six
volumes ran for more than 3,000 pages.
From 1970 to 1990, an African-centered or ‘Afrocentric’
historiography emerged in the U.S. that challenged the received and
accepted notions of ancient African history, especially with regard to the
place of ancient Kemit (Egypt) in that history. This ‘new wave’ of
black historical writers accepted as fundamental tenets the following
premises:
-
Any history
that concerns Africa or people of African descent must place Africa at
the center of that history;
-
Egypt was
the founding civilization of Africa and the re-discovery of the values
of ancient Egyptian civilization will play the same role for the African
world as the re-discovery of the values of Greco-Roman civilization did
for the Renaissance in Europe.
The first
premise was first articulated by the African-American professor Molefi
Asante and the second by the Senegalese polymath Cheikh Anta Diop.
In effect, African-centered writers had begun to reclaim ancient Egypt for
Africa, from where there had been a prolonged and systematic scholarly
attempt to detach it. Gerald Massey became (and still is) one of the
most important and essential resources in the African-centered scholarly
re-examination that ensued. The present writer freely acknowledges
that Gerald Massey and Cheikh Anta Diop are, to this day, his most seminal
and formative scholarly and intellectual influences. The author’s
book Echoes of the Old Dark Land: Themes from the African Eden (1991)
was dedicated to these two men.
The present author began reading Massey’s works in 1971 and,
after 1981, wrote several review articles on the Masseyan opus.
However, it has only been relatively recently, that he has felt confident
enough to actually critique Massey. It could be said that it took 30
years to understand and grasp – if only in a gestalt fashion – the
details and multi-leveled vectors of Massey’s thought. For one
thing, after poring over Massey’s writings repeatedly, it became clear
that what was needed most was a competent editor. Massey seemed to
have just poured everything that was in his head onto the endless pages of
text so that a fair amount of redundancy crept into the books. But
who could have edited these books? Recalling the words of Alfred
Russel Wallace, there were probably not a score of persons in all England
who were prepared by their background and upbringing to understand Massey
writings. Secondly, Massey’s facts were not always accurate.
For example, in his exhaustive discussion of the (precessional) Great
Year, Massey writes that the Age of Pisces began 255 BC. That date
is 136 years too early. Until the recent book by the astrophysicist
Thomas Brophy, The Origin Map, there was reason to believe that the
Piscean Age would have begun around 68 BC. However, Brophy
demonstrates by using data concerning the timing of the most recent
northern culmination of the Galactic Center that the launch date for this
cycle of the precessional Great Year would have taken place in 10,909 BC
in the sign of Leo, meaning that the Piscean Age would have begun five
Ages later in 119 BC. Here and there throughout these tomes, there
are facts and interpretations of evidence that are dubious or debatable.
But then there has never been a writer whose works are free of flaws or
errors. Errors of detail and the need for at least some editorial
house cleaning in no way vitiate or diminish the Masseyan opus.
Massey was not merely a man of protean talents; in the
opinion of the writer, he achieved a certain greatness with the three
books to which he devoted the last decades of his life. He had the
ability, rare in the 19th century, to look at a thing without the blinders
of a priori prejudice to unflinchingly arrive at and proclaim a
truth unpalatable to the common run of people who surrounded him. He
possessed a wide-ranging and penetrating mind, never limited by artificial
distinctions or boundaries. Though he could be prickly in the
defense of his ideas and ideals, he projected a sensitive humanity in all
he undertook. He was overshadowed in public prominence, recognition,
and fame by other ancient historians and antiquarians, but there was no
one else like him in the England of his time. In the coming
generations, it is likely that his legacy will be rescued from the
obscurity that has shadowed it since his death. He was not the first
– nor will he be the last – man to be more fully appreciated by posterity
than by his contemporaries.
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