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.
Thursday, October 11, 2018
ANCIENT EGYPT LIGHT OF THE WORLD, EXCERPT
Reading "Egyptian Wisdom and Hebrew Genesis," in ANCIENT EGYPT LIGHT OF THE WORLD, vol. 1, I can now more fully understand why the Bible has such power and prescience: its foundation is sound.
Gerald Massey writes in his 1907 classic:
"The Egyptian system of uranographic [mapping of fixed stars] representation has been outlined and many of its details have been identified in the chapters on the astronomical mythology. It has now to be shown that the so-called 'legends of creation' chiefly known as Semitic are the detritus of the Egyptian wisdom. These legends did not wait for their beginning until the Mosaic Pentateuch had been carried around the wide circumference of his world either by the scattered Jewish people or the Christian missionaries. As we have seen , the Semitic theologians did not know enough of the ancient sign-language to distinguish the evil serpent from the good , the great Earth-mother from the chimerical dragon of the deep, or the beneficent spirits of elemental nature from the Sebau, the Sami or fiendish forces of external phenomena. The Semitic versions of the legends , Babylonian, Assyrian , or Hebrew, mainly reproduce the debris of the astronomical mythology, which has so often been reduced to the status of the nursery tale. It is their fatal defect that they are not the original documents, and have no firsthand authority . In these the primitive wisdom of Egypt has been perverted, and the mythical beginnings, which had their own meanings, have been transmogrified into what is herein termed a cosmological creation.... In the Babylonian legends of creation the seven associate gods , who are the creators in the Egyptian mythos, have been converted into seven evil spirits of a later theology. And on one of the tablets...it is said of the seven evil spirits, 'The woman from the loins of the man they bring forth.' Thus, the creation of the woman is made to be the work of seven evil spirits, who, as the Kamite wisdom witnesses, 'did not originate' as wicked spirits or as powers of evil... Egypt's knowledge of beginnings was laboriously derived by the long, unceasing verification of scientific naturalists . Their ancient wisdom did not fall from heaven ready made nor had it any claim to a miraculous birth. It was dug for and quarried out of the rock of reality. It was smelted, shaped, stamped, and warranted for current coin as perpetual symbol of the truth, however primitive. It was and is today and forever , a coinage genuinely golden , though the figures on it may be sometimes difficult to decipher. The ancient wisdom of the Hebrew books has been converted into a spurious specie and passed off to the ignorant and unsuspecting as a brand new issue from the mint of God. According to Egyptian thought, 'creation ' was mainly limited to the bringing forth of life--the life of water , fish and fowl, animal, reptile and other forms from the meskhen or creatory of earth , when this is represented by the womb of Apt the pregnant water cow. This idea of birth from the womb is portrayed in Apt the first Great Mother... Next the idea of birth from the womb is repeated in the making of Amenta with the Tuat as the creatory or the place of rebirth for the manes. And thirdly in the astronomical mythology of the meskhen, womb, or place of birth, was constellated in the 'thigh' as the sign of rebirth in the celestial rebirthplace. We now have to formulate the Egyptian origins of the creation legends that have come to us in Semitic guise or disguise."
P.287