Extemporaneous musings, occasionally poetic, about life in its richly varied dimensions, especially as relates to history, theology, law, literature, science, by one who is an attorney, ordained minister, historian, writer, and African American.
Monday, September 2, 2013
NATURAL GENESIS, EXCERPT
THE NATURAL GENESIS, by Gerald Massey, “Natural Genesis of Kamite Typology” introduction by Charles Finch (Black Classic Press, Baltimore, MD: 1883, 1998), p. 39
“The beetle in Egypt, during the Inundation, would have been washed out of life altogether but for its Arkite cunning in making ready for the waters by rolling up its little globe, with the seed inside, and burying it in the dry earth until the Inundation subsided. How they must have watched the clever little creature at work; no font of letter-type employed in radiating human thought could shed a clearer light of illustration on the idea of resurrection from the earth than this living likeness of the process of transformation into the winged world. How the primitive man observed the works and ways and on-goings of the intelligence thus manifested around him; how he copied what he could, and gradually found a line of his own in the scheme of development; how he honored these his early teachers and instructors, and made their forms the pictures of the primal thoughts which they had evoked in his mind, at length recorded in the system of hieroglyphic symbols and mythology; and the illustrative proofs are extant to this day.
“One of the workers that caught the attention of primitive men was the spider, as spinner. In Inner Africa the ten-legged spider called Ananse in Ashanti, serves as the type for the Creator of man. This can be interpreted. The spider, as the first weaver, made the suspended woof. Heaven is the blue woof, the weaver of which was therefore the spider, according to the typology. The always represent Ananse as talking through his nose. The nose is an organ of breath. The god Knef is called the breath of those who are in the firmament. Ananse, as spinner of the blue woof above, was a deity of breath, or the nose as a type of life.”