Gerald Massey's Lectures - Society in evolution - Awardspace

It really makes one ashamed of scholarship to think of two reputed great scholars backing
by taking shelter behind a pretender to knowledge like Mr. Coleman to discredit me and
condemn my work instead of handling the matter for themselves.
My publishers tell me they sent a copy of the "Natural Genesis" to Mr. Sayce over three
years ago. I have not heard that he attempted to expose my mass of ignorance and false
quotation, dispute my facts, refute my interpretation, or controvert my conclusions. True,
he is not an Egyptologist nor a master of mythology. But that is no excuse nor
justification for the conduct which I resent. It only serves as cause for all the severer
condemnation. Of course in writing a letter he might have claimed privacy for his
opinions, but cannot plead that privilege now the letter is made public.
The other writer, whom I hold to be Mr. Renouf (pro. tem.), is a professed Egyptologist, a
good grammarian, an expert in textual criticism. I am a devoted student of his writings in
common with those of other Egyptologists. But I never could think highly of his insight
or range of vision. To a mind like his, in a case like mine, the profoundest
acquaintanceship with the largest mass of facts--the widest and truest generalisation
based on the facts, or the subtlest interpretation of them, will only look like a departure
away from and a going beyond the facts as limited for him.
I have dived deeply, and he fails to see
The ocean hath its due profundity.
You may transcribe texts and decipher inscriptions, but with the light shut out all round
by non-application of the comparative method, and from lack of illumination within, you
cannot touch the Egyptian origins in mythology or language, time or space, or interpret
the mystery of Egypt to her own forgetful self.
Every day discoveries are proving how limited has been the outlook, how nonevolutionary
and untrue the interpretation of Egyptologists concerning the past of that
people; and the latest discoveries made have swept away many of the mental landmarks,
and effaced the limits of Egyptologists like Mr. Renouf, who have only just blazed the
veriest surface of the subject. But I claim that every fresh fact made known of late years
is in favour of my interpretation. In England they have been too long the victims of the
Hebrew and Indo-Germanic delusions respecting the beginnings.
Mr. Renouf has declared (Hibbert Lectures, p. 243) that "neither Hebrews nor Greeks
borrowed any of their ideas from Egypt" (see Herodotus, Plato, Plutarch, Diodorus
Siculus, and others). He thinks the "mythological symbolism" of Egypt arose from
"varieties of metaphorical language" which "reacted upon thought" and "obtained the
mastery" (Ib. p. 237). Following Max Müller he says, "Mythology, we know, is the
disease which springs up at a peculiar stage of human culture" (Ib. p. 251). Nonsense.
'Tis but a dream of the metaphysical theorist to suppose that mythology is a Disease of
language, or anything else except his own brain. Mythology was a primitive mode of
thinging the early thought; the beginnings of its sign-language being earlier than words. It
remains the repository of man's most ancient science; and, truly interpreted once more, it
is destined to be the death of all those false theologies to which it has unwittingly given
birth.
He has said (Ib. p. 177) it is perhaps hopeless to expect that the Egyptian legends alluded
to in the "Book of the Dead" will be recovered. My claim is to have recovered them, by
application of the comparative process to a world-wide range of mythology; and it will be
easier to denounce the audacity as lunatic than to disprove the right to make that claim. I
do not pretend and I do explain. He is one of those critics who suspect error in what they
do not understand--e.g. the Father-God Seb in one phase of character is the Earth. But
when Seb is called the Mother, Mr. Renouf suspects an error in the text. It is only the
mother who can bring forth. Hence we find the back of Seb opens to bring forth.
In his off-hand way of damning by denunciation an old friend of mine, Mr. McLennan
(whose name Mr. Renouf mis-spells twice over, once as McLellan in the text (p. 30), and