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

by Gerald Massey (Author)
Key Phrases: pyramid texts, natural genesis, communal connubium, Great Mother, Book of the Dead, Pistis Sophia (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
A work of reclamation and restitution in twelve books. Vol. I; Sign-language and mythology as primitive modes of representation; Totemism, tattoo and fetishism as forms of sign-language; Elemental and ancestral spirits, or the gods and the glorified; Egyptian Book of the Dead and the mysteries of Amenta; The sign-language of astronomical mythology, The Primitive African paradise, Egyptian wisdom, The Drowning of the dragon; The sign-language of astronomical mythology Part II, Horus of the double horizon, The making of Amenta, The Irish Amenta, The mount of glory; Egyptian wisdom and the Hebrew genesis; The Egyptian wisdom in other Jewish writings. Vol. II; The ark, the deluge, and the world s great year; The exodus from Egypt and the desert of Amenta, The seed of Ysiraal, The title of Pharaoh; Egyptian wisdom in the revelation of John the Divine; The Jesus-Legend traced in Egypt for ten thousand years, Child-Horus, The Jesus-Legend in Rome, The Egypto-Gnostic Jesus, Double Horus, or Jesus and the Christ, The mysteries and miracles, Jesus in the Mount, Sut and Horus as historic characters in the Canonical Gospels, The group in Bethany, The founders of the Kingdom, The Last Supper: the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, The resurrection from Amenta, The sayings of Jesus. Gerald Massey was a celebrated poet and served as the model for George Eliot s famous novel, Felix Holt the Radical.

From the Publisher
Kessinger Publishing reprints over 1,500 similar titles all available through Amazon.com.

Product Details

• Paperback: 954 pages
• Publisher: Kessinger Publishing (June 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1564591506
• ISBN-13: 978-1564591500
• Product Dimensions: 10.9 x 7.6 x 2.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #3,024,946 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

34 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A monumental work that helps explain religion and mythology, October 5, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Ancient Egypt: The Light of the World : A Work of Reclamation and Restitution in Twelve Books (Ancient Egypt the Light of the World) (Hardcover)

Gerald Massey (1829-1907)had humble origins: his father was aboatman on the canals of England.Gerald had to work long hours in afactory for a pittance before he was ten years old.But he had a strong urge to learn and through self education he became a well known poet.( To me much of his poetry is stilted, but now and then certain phrases reveal inspiring poetic imagination.)He became interested in ancient Egypt and learnt hieroglyphics.His magnum opus is this work, a pioneering study of the mythology of ancient Egypt, truly the light of the world.Massey shows how this mythology is related to natural and celestial phenomena.He is very convincing when he explains how the Christian mythos is based on that of ancient Egypt.The original Christ was Horus, and he gives 180 parallels between the lives of Horus and Christ.An open minded reading of this book will leave little doubt that the Christian Christ was based on Horus.He throws much light on THE EGYPTIAN BOOK OF THE DEAD ( better called THE BOOK OF COMING FORTH BY DAY).He calls it THE RITUAL. As enlightening as he is,I find that Massey omits to consider the inner aspects of religion.He fails to see that the Egyptian mythos is primarily concerned with the spiritual development of man, and it uses outward Nature to symbolise inner spiritual evolution.This is explained by Alvin Kuhn in THE LOST LIGHT, who is indebted to Massey, but takes his ideas further into the spiritual and soul aspects.All in all, ANCIENT EGYPT, THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD is a unique and fascinating book.Most books written about ancient Egypt are way off beam, but this book puts you on the right track.It is a must read in order to start to understand the ancient Egyptian mythos.

33 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Better and better with every return to the page, June 5, 2000

By	Earl Hazell (New York) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

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.

16 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A courageous work of scholarship that is still unsettling, September 28, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Ancient Egypt: The Light of the World (Hardcover)

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.

He may be considered, along with the superhuman Godfrey Higgins (ANACALYPSIS), as the gatekeeper of alternative scholarly vision. It is a deeply transformative work.

You will be glad you own this book; especially if you have children.