What is a zootype in Gerald Massey’s books?

A zootype is Gerald Massey’s word for an animal used as a sign of a power of nature. In his last book, Ancient Egypt: The Light of the World (1907), he argues that before gods were pictured in human form, the powers they stood for were shown by living creatures: the lion for force, the ibis for the moon god, the beetle for transformation. His rule is that the animal is the sign, never the god: worship went to the power behind the sign.

Where the word comes from: The word joins zoo-, from the Greek for “animal”, with type in its old sense of a figure that stands for something else. Massey uses it for any creature, beast, bird, reptile or insect, as one word for them all.
How Gerald Massey used the idea: Massey wrote against the leading scholars of his day, such as Edward Tylor and Max Müller, who held that early people pictured the forces of nature in their own likeness. For him the animal came first, chosen for a power greater than human: the panting lion for Shu, god of the air’s breathing force; the ibis, which he calls a famous fisher of the Nile, for Thoth (his Taht), the moon god; the little ichneumon, or mongoose, that attacks snakes, for the young Horus fighting the serpent of darkness; the bee for the soul. He calls zootypes living pictures, older than painting or sculpture.
His rule: the sign, not the god: Massey insists that the animal itself was not what was worshipped. When the Egyptologist Renouf called the scarab “an object of worship”, Massey answered that the beetle was honoured as a sign of transformation, and that the worship went to the god it stood for. He followed zootypes far beyond Egypt, into totems and folk tales around the world, and held that Egypt’s explanation of them was the key everywhere.
Animal forms of the gods in Egypt: Egyptian gods really were shown as animals or with animal heads: Horus as a falcon, Anubis as a jackal, Thoth as an ibis or a baboon, Sekhmet as a lioness. One god could appear as an animal, a person, or a person with an animal’s head. Some living animals were honoured as images of a god: the Apis bull of Memphis, linked with Ptah, was buried with great ceremony at Saqqara, and Egyptologists describe such an animal as a manifestation of its god. In later times millions of mummified ibises, falcons and cats were offered at temples.
What scholars say now: The animal forms are real, and on one point many Egyptologists agree with Massey: Egyptians did not worship animals for their own sake, but saw in certain animals a form a god could take. Massey’s larger scheme is not accepted. The idea that every religion passed through the same stages, from animal signs and totems to gods in human form, belongs to nineteenth-century theories that anthropologists have since given up. In Egypt a god’s animal and human forms were used side by side, often in the same period, and one did not replace the other.
In Massey’s words: “If there was a God, and the Beetle was his symbol, obviously it was the divinity that was the object of worship, not the symbol: not the zootype.” (Gerald Massey, Ancient Egypt: The Light of the World (1907), Book I, p. 10)
In the app: Trainer › Symbol Trainer. In the app, the Symbol Trainer sets Massey’s reading of each animal sign, from the scarab and the jackal to the ibis and the bee, beside what it meant in Egypt, and Book I gives his full case.

Last updated October 28, 2026.

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