Gerald Massey, the profoundest and most discerning of Egyptologists, in his fine work, The Natural Genesis (Vol. II, p. 378 ff.) writes:
"The lost language of celestial allegory can now be restored, chiefly
through the resurrection of ancient Egypt; the scriptures can be read as they were originally written, according to the secret wisdom, and we now know how the history was first written as mythology."
He adds that the Revelation assigned to John the Divine is the Christian form of the Mithraic Revelation, that in the Parsee sacred books the original scriptures are always referred to as the "Revelation," and that the Bahman Yasht contains the same drama of mystery that is drawn out and magnified in the Bible Revelation. He asserts that the personages, scenes, circumstances and transactions are identical in both. Each revelation relates to the Kronian allegory and in both the prophecy is solely astronomical. He explains that Egypt is the mother of the world's primeval religion and that the myths of Egypt were the origin of the Mysteries of the world. The main theme of most of his voluminous work is that the Hebrew "miracles" are nothing but the original myths of Egypt, misread as history. In his Reply to Prof. A. H. Sayce he says:"I have amply demonstrated the fact that the myths were no mere products of ancient ignorance, but are the deposited results of a primitive knowledge; that they were founded upon natural phenomena and remain the register of the earliest scientific observation."
He hammers endlessly on the point that the whole grand structure of
luminous ancient doctrine crashed to ruin on the rocks of the early
Christian stupidity which converted into literal history a vast body of drama and allegory that "was never anything but frankly mythological."
And he has written thousands of pages to support his contention that
what purports to be "history" in Christian systematism was actually
pre-extant as Egyptian mythology. He cites as proof of his main thesis
the fact that the Biblical material is found to be nonsensical and
chimerical, in fact impossible, as history, but becomes lucidly
intelligible and possible as myth. The massed material of his great
volumes goes far to substantiate this claim.
He calls attention to the fact that the Jesus character both in the
Gospels and in the Gnostic Christian work, the Pistis Sophia, announces to the inner circle of his initiated disciples that he will speak with them freely "from the beginning of the truth unto the completion thereof . . . face to face without parable." Parable was the declared method of his speaking to "them that are without" the circle of the initiated. In the full release of light and knowledge to the trained disciples parable and myth could be discarded for direct revelation.
We need the directness of Massey's phrasing of the following passage,
the truth of which is of ominous import for civilization: "The human mind has long suffered an eclipse and been darkened and dwarfed in the shadow of ideas the real meaning of which has been lost to the moderns. Myths and allegories whose significance was once unfolded to initiates in the Mysteries, have been adopted in ignorance and reissued as real truths directly and divinely vouchsafed to mankind for the first and only time!
The early religions had their myths interpreted. We have ours misinterpreted. And a great deal of what has been imposed on us as God's own true and sole revelation to man is a mass of inverted myths. . . Much of our folk-lore and most of our popular beliefs are fossilized symbolism."
His great contention--with Max Muller--was that the Marchen and folk
tales are not reflections, but refractions, or distorted popularizations of the original mythos, and that, contrary to Muller's assertions, it was the mythos that passed into the folk tale and not the folk tale into the mythos. The myths were first and the Marchen were their product, through the inevitable deterioration which all esoteric truth sooner or later undergoes when floated among the unlettered masses. "Typology and mythology are twins from their birth and one in their fundamental rootage." (Nat. Gen. I, 313.)
In the same volume, preceding page, Massey has a long and enlightening
dissertation on the nature of the gods as just the "elementary powers of nature," and he reads the logical conclusions from the fact that they were represented symbolically by the animal types. Much other material is assembled to depict the wide variety of figures under which the gods and goddesses were exhibited. The hundreds of religious insignia, emblems, types and figures which Sir James Frazer presents but is powerless to interpret in his famous The Golden Bough, Massey clarifies with astute penetration into cryptic meanings. "Mythology" he says, "issne as a system of representation, one as a mold of thought, one as a mode of expression, and all its great primordial types are practically universal."
Testimony of another life-long research student in the field of archaic philosophy confirms Massey's conclusions. Godfrey Higgins, in his monumental work, The Anacalypsis, (p. 441) says that "one thing is clear--the mythos of the Hindus, the mythos of the Jews and the mythos of the Greeks are all at bottom the same; and what are called their early histories are not histories of man, but are contrivances under the appearance of histories to perpetuate doctrines . . . in a manner understood by those only who had a key to the enigma. Of this we shall see many additional proofs hereafter."
The Anacalypsis is some 830 pages of additional proofs. Page 446 of this work gives his final summation of his life of investigation:
"When all the curious circumstances have been considered, an
unprejudiced person will, I think, be obliged to admit that the ancient epic poems are oriental allegories, all allusive to the same mythos, and that many of these works which we have been accustomed to call histories are but allegorical representations of mythologies, of the secret doctrines of which I am in pursuit and which have been . . . concealed and perpetuated . . . for the initiated, under the veil of history."
He makes the unequivocal statement that "two clear and distinct meanings of the words will be found; one for the initiated and one for the people. This is of the first importance to be remembered." He quotes Niebuhr as showing that what we call early Roman history was "mere mythos," and explains that this will account for what on any other thesis is incredible, the "degree of superstition" evidenced by the Romans. He cites an Englishman, Lumsden, as saying that events
purporting to be Roman history are drawn from the heroical legends of
Greece and therefore must have been copied from them; that they were not copies of one another, but all drawn from a common source; and were in fact the remnants of a mythos almost lost but constantly renewed, discoverable everywhere in the East and West--"new Argonauts, new Trojan Wars," and the like. The works of early writers without exception were "deeply tainted with allegory," he declares elsewhere. "The mythos, not history, is the object of the writer."
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