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Rating: 
Summary: Must read for background to western esotericism
Review: Broken mirrors, 7 revolutions of bad luck, is all the wisdom of this world. "As above, SO below", nuance on the so is crucial to understanding, the difference involves levity & gravity. Here in Masseys book much is still presented in its leaden carapace as has fooled the world, but it is the best glimpse to be had of the secret evolution, rarely to be found in books. Then I recommend Budges "The Gods of Egypt", & "The Egyptian Heaven & Hell" as Piankoff's "The Tomb of Ramesses VI" is out of print. "The Hermetic Museum" ed. A.E. Waite & "Teachings of Padmasambhava" trans. Herbert Guenther are later flowers of all this, that is; if you really want to live the legend.
Rating:
Summary: Must read for background to western esotericism
Review: Broken mirrors, 7 revolutions of bad luck, is all the wisdom of this world. "As above, SO below", nuance on the so is crucial to understanding, the difference involves levity & gravity. Here in Masseys book much is still presented in its leaden carapace as has fooled the world, but it is the best glimpse to be had of the secret evolution, rarely to be found in books. Then I recommend Budges "The Gods of Egypt", & "The Egyptian Heaven & Hell" as Piankoff's "The Tomb of Ramesses VI" is out of print. "The Hermetic Museum" ed. A.E. Waite & "Teachings of Padmasambhava" trans. Herbert Guenther are later flowers of all this, that is; if you really want to live the legend.
Rating: 
Summary: A monumental work that helps explain religion and mythology
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Better and better with every return to the page
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Better and better with every return to the page
Review: 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.
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