Who was Gerald Massey?

Gerald Massey (1828 to 1907) was an English poet and a self-taught writer on ancient Egypt. Born into a poor family near Tring in Hertfordshire, he worked from childhood and educated himself. He first became known as a radical poet of the Chartist years, later lectured on spiritualism, and gave his last decades to three large works on Egypt and the beginnings of religion. The last, Ancient Egypt: The Light of the World, was published in 1907, the year he died.

A poor childhood: Massey was the son of a canal boatman, and the family was poor. As a child he worked in a silk mill and then at straw-plaiting, with little schooling, and he taught himself from whatever books he could find.
Poet of the Chartist years: The Chartists were a movement of working people who, in the 1830s and 1840s, demanded the vote for all men. Massey wrote poems for the cause, and his collection The Ballad of Babe Christabel made his name in the 1850s. He also wrote a long study of Shakespeare’s sonnets.
Spiritualism, then Egypt: Massey became a spiritualist, holding that the dead live on and can make contact with the living, and he lectured widely on it and on religion. He then turned to ancient Egypt, working from the translations of the Egyptologists of his day. His three large works on it, each in two volumes, are A Book of the Beginnings (1881), The Natural Genesis (1883) and Ancient Egypt: The Light of the World (1907).
What Massey argued: Massey argues that the world’s signs, myths and religions began in inner Africa and were carried from Egypt to the rest of the world, and that later peoples, losing their first meaning, read the old myths as history. In Book XII of his last work he argues that the story of Jesus grew from the Egyptian myth of Horus. He saw that book printed on his seventy-ninth birthday, and died later the same year.
What scholars say now: Massey read the Egyptian sources of his day closely, and his accounts of the myths are often recognisable. His largest claims are not accepted by Egyptologists or historians of religion: that the world’s myths came from one source in Egypt and Africa, that words in different languages are related because they sound alike, and that the Gospels were drawn from Egyptian myth. His belief that humankind began in Africa matches what scientists hold today, on evidence from fossils and genes that was not available in his time.
His books today: His books on Egypt are out of copyright and often reprinted, and his list of likenesses between Horus and Jesus is still widely quoted, in books and online.
In Massey’s words: “It is the present writer’s contention that the Wisdom of the Ancients was the Wisdom of Egypt” (Gerald Massey, Ancient Egypt: The Light of the World (1907), Book I, p. 10)
In the app: Ask › The Guide. In the app, the Guide answers “Who was Gerald Massey?” in a few lines of its own, and answers questions about his ideas with passages of his book, quoted and cited.

Last updated October 25, 2026.

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