[The following is part of an extensive fiction, alluded to in a few of the Call of Cthulhu related posts under the "Blasphemous Tome of Forbidden Elder Lore Club" tag. The books by Gerald Massey referred to, however, are real; for those prepared to risk the SAN hit, copies can be found online at the web-publishing site Scribd; links can be found on the Celephaïs Press blog.]
Adrian Wallace on Gerald Massey.
[Adrian Wallace (1881-1944) was an English occultist who, after a few years in the Theosophical society and a year in Crowley's A.'.A.'. (he was acknowledged as having completed the task of a Probationer but resigned rather than take the oath of a Neophyte, not long after J.F.C. Fuller broke with AC), was appointed head of the British section of an organisation called the Stellar Temple (founded 1906 by a resigned former member of Theodor Reuss' collection of orders) and became its world Grand Master in 1919. The S.T. claimed to teach and transmit what it called the "Stellar Gnosis," apparently an esotericist interpretation of religious and Masonic symbolism in terms of astronomical mythology, derived in part from various nineteenth-century works of comparative religion and speculative prehistory, and partly on a series of "illuminations" the organisation's founder claimed to have had.]
"[...] there is possibly material of value in the writings of Godfrey Higgins, though I am not sure whether it is worth the time it would take to read Anacalypsis at even the most superficial level; the work demonstrates all the intellectual limitations of the period, and ninety years' worth of archaeological discoveries have made nonsense of much of it. Gerald Massey is another matter. His writings, while diffuse, contain definite intimations of the Stellar Gnosis. What is more remarkable is that it is quite clear that he got this through his own independent insights; the scorn he pours on modern esotericists, occultists and Theosophists makes it fairly clear he was not an initiate in the narrow and formal sense.
"The biggest stumbling block I found, especially with Ancient Egypt and some of the lectures, is what seemed to be the man's utter credulity on the subject of Spiritism which also seemed to be at odds with his apparent hostility toward most other forms of Occultism. It seemed fairly obvious that he had had some kind of experience in these fields, & had known various mediums personally, whereas he probably regarded the T.S. and others, as Crowley put it, as people who talked about Yoga but didn't actually do any. He would probably have been more sympathetic to the Scientific Illuminism of the A.'.A.'., at least for the time it would have taken him to find out that it was a vehicle for AC's agenda of inflicting another Revelation on the world and setting himself up as a Messiah."
[Letter to Frank Marlow, 1924]
"As regards 19th-century writing on History of Religion and allied subjects, the mainstream is 90% worthless for one set of reasons, including prudery, intellectual conservatism and a fear of upsetting the established churches; the fringe 99% worthless for another set of reasons, mostly a complete lack of critical faculties and incapacity for basic logical reasoning. Massey, while there is much to fault, is one of the few on the fringe whose works actually repay the time and effort of serious study; even were it to turn out that his central thesis about Egypt being the source of everything was complete nonsense he gives some fairly heavy pointers to various aspects of the 'Starry Wisdom' or Stellar Gnosis.
"You must understand that we do not approach the subject in the first place as historians. Having a historical background is useful, as we do not operate in a vacuum, but magically speaking it is in fact completely irrelevant whether the primal Stellar Cult actually, factually, historically existed or was simply a figment of Massey's imagination. The true Stellar Gnosis is experiential and the purpose of reading such as we recommend is merely preparatory; if this or that nation of antiquity also possessed it, so much the better for them! but it is no odds to us, now."
[Memorandum to Stellar Temple students, ca. 1925]
"Massey. His works are valuable, but diffuse & he does tend to ramble and repeat himself; hence I rarely quoted or cited specifically, although perhaps I should have given him more of a mention than I did--too late to change that now. Beside the three major works there is a volume of lectures or essays. (Also he wrote poetry. Then again, so did Crowley, but I never let that put me off him.) All are hard to get hold of now but some libraries will have them & copies occasionally come up for sale; I will lend you mine if I can find them. Read the lectures first to get an overview. They were intended as popular exposition and polemic, which is why he tends to assert rather than argue & present evidence. Then read Ancient Egypt--just sit down and read it cover to cover. You will probably think you understand it. It is possible--you have shown yourself to be a fairly bright student so far--that you actually will understand it. Keep the earlier ones on hand for when he refers back to them, but don’t go too far into them. Then read Natural Genesis in the same way. Then read Book of the Beginnings. Then go back and read Natural Genesis and Ancient Egypt again--carefully. Book of the Beginnings is vital to the whole scheme but unless you understand his system of Typology it just looks like nonsense. You also have to bear in mind that while he was fairly frank for the time, there are still places where you have to read between the lines.
"Aside from being somewhat credulous about Spiritism the man seems to have been more or less a materialist & Darwinist when he wrote all this & would probably have retched at our understanding of the Stellar Gnosis, but there is still useful stuff in there, just as magicians and 'Neo-Pagans' should read Frazer even though he takes it as read that Magic is a mass of error and delusion and regards the notion of any 'pagan revival' with horror (vide his introduction to Spirits of the Corn &c.). In Natural Genesis he repeatedly puts the boot into metaphysicians, modern esotericists and Theosophists, despite which H.P.B. quotes him favourably and ran a lot of his essays in Lucifer magazine, possibly on an ‘enemy’s enemy’ basis.[*] I’m not sure what he would have thought of AC’s ‘Scientific Illuminism.’
"Churchward [**] on the other hand can be safely ignored; what is of value in his books is not original and most of the rest is just drivel.
"Churchward [**] on the other hand can be safely ignored; what is of value in his books is not original and most of the rest is just drivel.
"If nothing else (and there is much else) Massey is significant in that he was practically the only writer of the period to put the phallic cultus in proper perspective at a time when the mainstream just ignored it or tried to pretend it didn’t exist, and idiots like Inman, Jennings and Forlong tried to reduce everything else to it, seeing a Lingam in every standing stone, every vaguely conical hill, &c., &c. I still cringe when I think about Forlong’s attempts to explain Stonehenge."
[Letter to Osric Arras, 1941.]
[*] A slight exaggeration; according to an index to Lucifer, Massey contributed (a) a short poem and a 4-page article to vol. i no. 2 (Oct. 1887), (b) a book review (well, rather an extended essay which took the book as text for a 10-page sermon) to vol. i no. 3 (Nov. 1887), (c) a brief book review (possibly; the piece is initialled "G.M." and the book under review was a volume of poetry rather than having any connection with Massey's later interests), a promotional blurb for a projected reprint of his book on Shakespeare's sonnets and a retort to some of Blavatksy's criticisms of his article from the October 1887 issue, in vol. i no. 5 (Jan. 1888), and (d) a short article on "Luniolatry," supplementary to his lecture on the same subject, in vol. i no 6 (Feb. 1888). A pseudonymous and highly favourable piece on "Gerald Massey in America" including a lengthy quote from one of Massey's privately printed lectures, appeared in the September 1888 issue. Additionally, Blavatsky added multiple dissenting remarks in footnotes and afterwords to Massey's articles. Wallace's involvement with the Theosophical Society was somewhat later (1902-1908) than the publication of the first volume of Lucifer so he was possibly not speaking from direct acquaintance.
[**] Albert Churchward (1852-1925), a writer on Masonic symbolism and speculative prehistory and a friend of Massey in the latter's later years. Under Massey's influence he wrote a book called Signs and Symbols of Primordial Man (London: Swann Sonnenscheien, 1910; second edition London: George Allen & New York: E.P. Dutton, 1913) which was favourably reviewed by J.F.C. Fuller in the Equinox ("in every sense a great book [...] forms an excellent seventh volume to Gerald Massey's monumental work.") His elder brother, James Churchward, wrote a number of books on the Lost Continent of Mu.
