Gerald Massey

The teaching

Taught from his own books, above all A Book of the Beginnings, The Natural Genesis and Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World.

Out of Africa and Egypt

Massey teaches that the beginnings of human language, myth and religion lie in Africa, and that Egypt, which he calls by its old name Kam, the black land, kept them in their fullest form. Every people that went out from the Nile valley carried part of that first learning away with it, and its traces, he holds, can be found in the words, rites and stories of Britain, India, Israel and the Americas alike. His three large works are one long attempt to follow them back to their source.

Typology: the sign before the god

His method he calls typology. The first people did not begin with ideas of gods; they began with natural facts, which they marked with signs, a type for each: the water that brings life, the mother who bears, the moon that waxes and wanes, the star that rises before the flood. Myth, in Massey's teaching, is the language of these types, and religion arose when later peoples took the types for persons and the signs for history. To read a myth rightly is to trace each figure back to the natural fact it first stood for.

Stars, moon and Sun

The types were read from the sky in a fixed order. First came the stars, in what he calls the stellar mythos: the Great Bear and the pole, the stars that never set, figured as the mother of time and of the seasons, and Sothis, whose rising announced the flood of the Nile. Then came the moon, with its changes, its dying and its rebirth each month. Last came the Sun, whose daily and yearly course became the drama of the god who dies and rises. The solar religions of the later world are, in his account, the top layer of a long building.

The two Horuses

At the heart of his reading stand two figures of Horus. The first is Horus the child, born of the mother, weak and mortal, the type of the seed and of the soul in the flesh, who suffers and is lost. The second is Horus the adult, the son of the father, who rises in power and spirit, the type of what survives. The one passes into the other through death and resurrection, and Massey reads that passage as the oldest picture of the soul's journey from the body into the life beyond.

Amenta, the land of the dead

His other great subject is the Egyptian book he calls the Ritual, the texts now known as the Book of the Dead. He reads it as the first account of the soul's journey through Amenta, the hidden land of the west: its judgement in the hall of the two truths, its heart weighed against the feather of Maat, its passage past the keepers of the gates, and its rising into the light. Every later teaching of judgement and of heaven, in his view, descends from this drama, and Spiritualism, which he held to be true, is its continuation in the present day.

The myth made history

From these strands he draws his claim about Christianity. The Gospel story, he argues, is the Egyptian drama of Horus and the Ritual of the soul turned into the life of a man by readers who had lost the key, and he derives the title Christ from an Egyptian word for the mummy, the one prepared and anointed for the life beyond. Against the faith that took the myth for history he sets a gnostic Christianity, which knew the Christ as a figure of the soul.

The plain facts answer him. Christos is the Greek for anointed, translating the Hebrew messiah, and owes nothing to Egyptian; and the Egyptian texts tell the birth of Horus otherwise, as the branch on the authors of astrotheology, among The sky in the scriptures, sets out.