Gerald Massey's Lectures

“We learn as we come to a knowledge of joy, that all sorrow and suffering are but the passing shadows of things mortal, and not the enduring or eternal reality.” — Gerald Massey, “The coming Religion” (ca. 1887)

"Remember all ye that existence is pure joy; that all the sorrows are but as shadows; they pass & are done; but there is that which remains." — Liber AL vel Legis, The Book of the Law (1904)

After letting the thing gather dust under a table for over a year, finally fished out my rebound first edition of A Book of the Beginnings and managed to scan all of 20 pages. Don't expect the re-set any time soon. In the meantime, though, I made another attempt to put Massey's lectures on Scribd and this time it worked.

Massey, Gerald: Gerald Massey's Lectures. London: privately printed, n.d. (ca. 1900); many reprints. The ten lectures previously privately published as inidivual pamphlets (late 1880s).

This collection comprises "The Historical Jesus and the Mythical Christ," "Paul the Gnostic Opponent of Peter," "The Logia of the Lord," "Gnostic and Historic Christianity," "The Hebrew and other Creations fundamentally explained," "The Devil of Darkness in the Light of Evolution," "Luniolatry Ancient and Modern," "Man in search of his Soul during 50,000 years, and how he found it," "The Seven Souls of Man and their Culmination in Christ" and "The Coming Religion."

These lectures were intended as popular exposition of Massey's theories on the Egyptian origin of Christianity (and just about everything else) as well as being frankly polemical in a number of places; these theories are outlined in greater detail with at least a semblance of argument and presentation of evidence in his three major works, the (to steal a phrase) "Typhonian trilogy" of A Book of the Beginnings (1881), The Natural Genesis (1883) and Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World (1907).

While there is much to fault in Massey's works, and many of his arguments have been undermined by subsequent findings in Egyptology, linguistics and paleoanthropology, these is nevertheless material of value; and his championing of an African origin for humanity at a time when the mainstream, even those not promoting crude Aryanism, were obsessing with central Asia, marked him as ahead of his time (and endeared him to the "black pride" and "Afro-centric" movements of the latter half of the 20th century c.e.).

Electronic editions of the latter two of these major works have been issued by Celephaïs Press:

The Natural Genesis: Or, a Second Part of a Book of the Beginnings, containing an attempt to recover and reconstitute the lost origines of the myths and mysteries, types and symbols, religion and language, with Egypt for the mouthpiece and Africa as the birthplace.
Vol. 1
Vol. 2
(I note that vol. 1 is far and away the most-read CP title on Scribd, although vol. 2 has logged less than half the number of hits . . . I suppose most readers give up before then)

Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World
Vol. 1
Vol. 2

The omission here of A Book of the Beginnings is unfortunate; it was planned as a CP release for some time, but shortly after acquiring a decent copy-text I went through a period of general minor depression and could never face even scanning the whole thing (about 1200 pages); in any case, a complete HTML version with revisions and corrections by a modern editor can be read at a site called Masseiana.org which also has much supporting material, e-texts of some of the more obscure works Massey references, etc. A Book of the Beginnings is on one level vital to the whole scheme of the trilogy, but without some understanding of the system of Typology developed in The Natural Genesis, much of it looks like nonsense; Ancient Egypt, on the other hand, is written in a comparatively easy style which may mislead casual readers into thinking they understand it.

NOTE 2018.02.05: Masseiana.org apparently went offline recently; looking at the archived copy on the Wayback Machine (archive.org), it appears the editor gave up on the project and stopped updating the site in 2015.