Ancient Egypt; The Light of the World

[jari]

www.masseiana.org/aebk0.htm

By Gerald Massey..

[nebsen]

I have Gerald Massey 2 vol set Ancient Egypt ; The Light Of the World . I've had this set for about 20 years & still have not read all 2 volumes . it is very rich with information that is hard to come by about ancient Egypt. Also it can be somewhat arcane & add to that, a19th century style of English, it can be challenging to get through ; but oh there is gold in them hills ! !

[jari]

Yeah, it def. gonna be a great Read. Massey put alot of work into it. Im going to start reading it over the weekend.

[Dawn2Earth]

Feb 16, 2012 17:34:50 GMT -5 nebsen said:

I have Gerald Massey 2 vol set Ancient Egypt ; The Light Of the World . I've had this set for about 20 years & still have not read all 2 volumes . it is very rich with information that is hard to come by about ancient Egypt. Also it can be somewhat arcane & add to that, a19th century style of English, it can be challenging to get through ; but oh there is gold in them hills ! !

I recall seeing the name of both author and book various times at E.S. Question though: it's "rich with information" / "gold in them hills" like what? Talking about what types of stuff exactly?

Revealing stuff about them, or revealing ways in which their influence was widespread?

[maiherpra]

Feb 16, 2012 17:34:50 GMT -5 nebsen said:

I have Gerald Massey 2 vol set Ancient Egypt ; The Light Of the World . I've had this set for about 20 years & still have not read all 2 volumes . it is very rich with information that is hard to come by about ancient Egypt. Also it can be somewhat arcane & add to that, a19th century style of English, it can be challenging to get through ; but oh there is gold in them hills ! !

Am reading the chapter labelled The Primitive African Paradise; and you are right---it is arcane in many ways for eg:


A German traveller lately claimed to have discovered a people in the forests of Borneo who show some vestige of the ancestral tail. He saw the tail on a child about six years old belonging to the Poenan tribe. There was the appendage, sure enough—not very long, but plainly visible, hairless, and about the thickness of a man's little finger[2]. Also the persistent [p.250] rumour that some remains of a semi-simian race are vet extant among the hidden secrets of the old dark land is not incredible to the evolutionist. According to Lady Lugard, there is a tribe in Nigeria who are reputed not to have lost their tails[3]. The African pygmies, however, have not publicly proclaimed the tail.

But remember he was writing at the end of the 19th century. these views although unfortunate was seen as the most modern and acceptable interpratation of the Darwinian Theory.

Howeverthe author makes up for it a 1000 times over, by making reference to parallels between inner Africa and Egypt which is really remarkable scholarship. More impressive and disciplined than much of the analysis of the modern commentators or researchers of the Nile Valley. He really puts the Zahi Hawasses to shame:

Again, in the mysteries of the Yao people the young girls are initiated by a female who is called 'the cook,' 'the cook of the mystery' (mtelesi wa unyago). This is the instructress who makes the mystery or is the 'cook' that prepares it, and who is mistress of the ceremony. She is the wise woman who initiates the girls, and anoints their bodies with an oil containing various magical ingredients. She clothes them in their earliest garment, the primitive loincloth, that was first assumed at puberty with proud pleasure, and afterwards looked upon askance as the sign of civilized woman's shame. Now this primitive personage has been divinized as the cook in the Kamite pantheon. In Egyptian, tait signifies to cook, and this is the name of a goddess Tait who is the cook in paradise and the preparer of the deceased in the greater mysteries of the Ritual, where she is the cook of the mystery more obviously than a cook as preparer of food. Deceased, in speaking of his investiture for the garden of Aarru, cries, 'Let my vesture be girt on me by Tait!' [p.255]—that is, by the goddess who is the divine cook by name, and who clothes the initiate in the garment or girdle that here takes the place of the loincloth in the more primitive mysteries of inner Africa[25].

I have always heard afrocentric or I should say honest African researchers making reference to to this Massey; I never imagined he was so brilliant. This is the first time am reading the guy. Absolutely sensational:

Here he is again trying to prove the myth of Egyptian Origins which the Zulus, even today resolutely believe in. It does not matter whether or not you agree on this particular point. But nonetheless you have to admire this desciplined and rigorous intellectual reasoning of an honest, original and brilliant researcher:

The African legends tell us that the Egyptians, Zulus, and others looked backward to a land of the papyrus reed as the primeval country of the human race, and that on this, as we shall see, the Egyptians founded their circumpolar paradise in the astronomical mythology. There is a widespread African tradition, especially preserved by the Kaffir tribes, that the primeval birthplace was a land of reeds. The Zulus told the missionary Callaway that men originally 'came out of a bed of reeds.' This birthplace in the reeds was called 'Uthlanga,' named from the reed. No one knew where it was, but all insisted that the natal reed-bed of the race was still extant[27]. It was a sign of lofty lineage for the native aristocracy to claim descent from ancient Uthlanga, the primeval land of birth. The Basutos identify Uthlanga the human birthplace with a cavern in the earth that was surrounded by a morass of reeds. They also cling so affectionately to the typical reed that when a child is born they suspend a reed above the hut to announce the birth of the babe, thus showing in the language of signs that the papyrus reed is still a type of the primitive birthplace in which Child-Horus was cradled on the flower of the papyrus plant or reed. The Zulu birthplace in the bed of reeds was repeated and continued in the nest of reeds and the morass that were mythically represented as the birthplace of the child, which was constellated as the uranograph of Horus springing from the reed. What indeed is the typical reed of Egypt, first in the upper, next in the lower land, but a symbol of the birthplace in the African bed of reeds? Lower Egypt, called Uat in the hieroglyphics, has the same name as the papyrus reed. Also Uati is a title of the Great Mother Isis who brought forth Child-Horus on her lap of the papyrus flower. Uat in Egyptian is the name of Lower Egypt; uat is the oasis, uat is the water, uat is wet, fresh, evergreen. Uat is the reed of Egypt, the papyrus reed, and a name of the most ancient mother in the Kamite mythology. [p.256] Seb, the father of food, is clothed with papyrus reeds. The Mount of Earth was imaged as a papyrus-plant in the water of space. Lastly, the Mount of Amenta in the Ritual rises from a bed of papyrus reeds.

Horapollo says of the Egyptians, 'To denote ancient descent they depict a roll of papyrus, and by this they signify primeval food.'[28] This is the same as with the Zulus. The papyrus reed, uat, was turned into a symbol of most ancient descent precisely because it had been the primeval food of the most ancient people, a totem of the most ancient mother of the race when called Uati in Egypt, and a type of the African paradise

www.masseiana.org/aebk5.htm#269

[nebsen]

Dwan2Earth,

I suggest you check out the link that Jari provided, & look at the contents. You will be able to click on pages to read sections of the book. In that way you can decide for your self.