|
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.
|
