The natural genesis, or, 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 / by Gerald Massey.

  • Massey, Gerald, 1828-1907.
Date:
1883
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The natural genesis, or, 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 / by Gerald Massey. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    preceded a knowledge of the individualized fatherhood. Also, such phrases as “ Serpent-worship, “ Tree-worshipP “ Water-worship',' and “ Phallic-zvorship have but little meaning from the present standpoint. Nowhere did the Cultus originate in religion, but in a system of typology, a primitive mode of expression, a means of representation. The natural need of making signs by gesture- language led to the gradual adoption of certain things that were used as typical figures, a medium for the exchange of meanings, the earliest current coinage ever stamped and issued from the mint of mind. Such types were adopted for use, and became sacred in the course of time, the fetishtic or religious being their final phase. The present writer has sought for the natural genesis of the primitive mode of expression which created the types that were continued in the typology that is held to be fetishtic in Africa but religious in Europe. The oldest types, like the Serpent, Tree, or Water, were feminine at first, not because the female was then worshipped, but because the motherhood was known before paternity could be identified. The serpent sloughed periodically, so did the female. The tree was the producer of the fruit, as was the female. Water was the female fount of source. The ancestral spirit that preceded the individual ancestor, which was represented as creating or continuing by transformation of itself, might come to be typified by the serpent that sloughed and renewed, because a type once founded could be variously applied, but the serpent was a feminine ideograph from the beginning, and only the natural geiiesis of the type will enable us to interpret the later typology. Much of my matter has been fetched from far, and may be pro- portionately long in obtaining recognition. Being so remote from ordinary acquaintanceship, it could not be made familiar at first sight by any amount of literary skill. The appeal has to be continu- ally made to a lapsed and almost lost sense of the natural genesis of ideas, customs, and superstitions. Nothing short of the remotest beginnings could sufficiently instruct us concerning the origin of religious rites, dogmas, and doctrines, that still dominate the minds of men without being understood, and years of intense brooding had to be spent in living back to enter the conditions and apprehend the primary phases of the nascent mind of man, so as to trace the first laying hold of things by the earliest human thought of which the cave-dwellers of the human mind have left us any record ; and the writer believes that no such sustained, or at least