Customer Reviews

Ancient Egypt: The Light of the World (2 Volumes) (Vols 1&2)

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I am currently rereading this near masterpiece of esoteric, and anthropoligical look at Egyptology and ancient Egyptian civilization- and its legacy. It gets better and better everytime.

Gerald Massey is much like Freud, a man whose herculean intellect combined with his revolutionary discoveries (and in Freud's case obvious character flaws) make people long after him debate his relevance in the intellectual world he himself created (kind of like debating the existence of Frank Lloyd Wright's art in the Guggenheim Museum). What stops this book from being a five star epic is simply his tendency to ramble, creating a labyrinthian world of insight and ideas that can confuse the reader. Yet his work is so meaningful, and so provocative, that it is has only been in the last few years, with the advent of Mega-book outlets like Amazon.com, that his books were available outside of the occult or Afrocentric bookstore.

Gerald Massey was not an "Afrocentric" as we have come to know the term today- which is now seen as pejorative. That is what makes him all the more important. In fact, one major reason that his work has been written off for most of this century, is that his logical deductions, gathered from the variety of disciplines that work so logically together, fly in the face of conventional scholarly wisdom without an obvious thing for him to gain from it in the form of reputation or finances. His work reifies the linguistic, astronomical/religious, architectural and Darwinian/evolutionary perspectives to such a degree that devout Christians and Greco/Roman cultural sepremacists should beware this book. It will shake the very foundations of your faith before giving you the space to reclaim it with a new point of view; particularly in his decoding of the origins of our comparitively modern religious beliefs and literary myths.

Like it or not, Gerald Massey was one of those authors that turn your mind upside down, like Alice's looking glass, to the point where you wonder what is the "real" ancient world, and its influence on the world after it- up to and including today. That alone makes him profoundly successful as an historian/Egyptological anthropologist, with something great to offer all of us.

You will be surprised at how meaningful his perspectives will become to you, over and over again.