Announcer> A production of the South Carolina Educational Television Network.

Dr.

Charles Finch> Yes.

So here you have the balancing, okay.

And on the left hand side, you see a Anubis with the symbol of life and his left hand leading the soul, who is Ani to the balancing.

And, the heart is on the left side.

The feather of truth is on the right side.

And it says that he is justified because they exactly counterbalance one another.

You see that kind of composite monster there.

If the soul is not justified, then that is the, that is the devouring monster.

And that is the punishment of the soul.

Listervelt Middleton> That is your hell.

Dr.

Charles Finch> Yeah, exactly.

Good evening and welcome to "For the People," and the fourth part of our conversation with Doctor Charles S. Finch on Gerald Massey's "Ancient Egypt, The Light of the World."

We begin this segment by asking Dr.

Finch to discuss the concept of the manger as a place of birth.

Dr.

Charles Finch> Remember what we said about the great year?

Remember what we had said about the zootypical figures dominating or personifying the spirit of the age, whether it be Taurus on the one hand, who is the bull or the cow or the calf, whether it be Aries as the ram, lamb or shepherd?

Well, the previous manifestations, if you will, of the divine child who is the Savior of the world, was in the earlier time periods or the earlier ages.

On the one hand it was Aries, the ram.

And so the divine child, who is a manifestation of the ram is going to be the lamb.

Before that it was Taurus, the bull and divine child of the bull is going to be the calf.

So what this is showing is that Jesus, if you will, and in some way is a continuation of these earlier manifestations of God as a divine Savior.

So what you find, and where they ordinarily, of course, you would expect a calf or a lamb to be born where?

In a manger, in a barn.

In fact, when you see in Nativity scenes, you see Jesus being born in the manger, which is, if you will, a continuation or a recreation, of the previous births of the zootypical Savior's as a lamb and the calf, and what do you see in that scene?

You see calves and lambs and other animals.

Well, particularly the lamb and the calf, actually, they're on the scene, as a way of establishing the connection of the divine Jesus to his previous manifestations.

Listervelt Middleton> Okay, now.

Clarify for me again.

Can you break that down just a little bit more?

Tell me, what are you saying now, in terms of the birthplace, the manger as a place of birth?

Dr.

Charles Finch> Okay, well, the manger is a place of birth because, if the previous zootypical saviors are the lamb and the calf, where is a typical place of birth?

It's in a barn in a manger.

Jesus is the latest representation of the Savior as a child.

So this, if you will, is a recreation or reconstruction of the birth of the zootypical saviors, but this time, manifested as Jesus.

Listervelt Middleton> Okay, now why the calf?

That's the question.

Dr.

Charles Finch> The calf, 'cause the calf comes from the earliest or the only manifestation of the Savior as the typical bull or bull calf, in the age of Taurus, some 44,000 years prior.

Listervelt Middleton> But, do you understand what I'm saying?

What is it about the calf that it becomes the zootypical, Dr.

Charles Finch> It is not, it didn't become.

It represents of the older zootypical Savior.

It is a type of Horus.

It is one of the earlier type of Horus of Osiris, 4000 years prior to the birth of Jesus.

Listervelt Middleton> What I'm saying, why the cow?

Why not the tree?

Dr.

Charles Finch> Because the calf, of course, represents the age of Taurus.

When the, when the, when the equinox, they represent the Savior who was born during the age of Taurus, which is the bull.

<Okay> So the calf is the Taurean bull as the Divine Savior.

Listervelt Middleton> Okay, I'm still not getting through.

What is this about the characteristic of the calf?

Dr.

Charles Finch> Or maybe we want to know the characteristic of the bull.

Listervelt Middleton> Of the bull, <Okay> that it was used, that it was used for that.

Dr.

Charles Finch> Okay.

Well I mean the bull is a symbol, I mean, this is a time now when you have the, origins or the bringing forth of, or the ascendancy of, God in masculine form.

And the bull is a symbol of the potency.

The bull is a symbol of fertility, the symbol of potency.

It's a symbol of masculine strength.

It is a symbol of, the God, of God in His strength, really.

And it is a symbol of the potency of God, of God as a source of all, as the masculine source of fertility, therefore the source of life.

Okay.

So that is, so that is, where the bull.

Listervelt Middleton> Okay.

Now, Massey says that the Egyptians had no need for miracle, but does this mean that they did not know how to manipulate the forces of nature?

Dr.

Charles Finch> Oh, you see, what he means by that is that Massey is saying what people ordinarily think of miracles really are in the domain of natural phenomena.

It is just that they are in the domain of hidden or unseen natural phenomena.

And certainly in the African world, you cannot possibly understand the African world or the African worldview, African religion, without an appreciation that Africans, live intimately with the unseen world and unseen forces and interact with those unseen forces and those unseen beings, and they live with them really as extensions of themselves.

And so, there are those among them in the African frame of reference or in the African, worldview, who know how to interact, even manipulate and control those unseen forces which are part and parcel of the life.

And certainly the ancient Egyptians were masters of being able to control those kind of forces.

Listervelt Middleton> What is a fetish and how was it used by the Egyptians?

Dr.

Charles Finch> Well, a fetish is kind of a derogatory word.

It sort of, brings on a connotation of something that is somehow kinky, if you will, or decadent.

But what it means, really is that, there are objects that, if you will, represented the thing or the symbol that was trying to be reinforced or trying to be expressed.

For example, a grove, a spring, a tree or a rock would become a symbol of a certain type, a certain type of principle.

The rock, for example, is a is a personification or a manifestation or symbolic of that which is permanent and everlasting.

So it is a type of eternity.

So it'll be, it'll in a sense it'll become if you will, the personification or the house of forces that personify that aspect.

The tree is an aspect of that which nurtures, that which grows, that which is fertile.

So it becomes a personification of the forces that the tree sort of embodies, and that those forces become manifest and reside in the tree.

The tree and the rock, as an example, are not worshiped.

It is the powers, or the essence that reside in those things.

Listervelt Middleton> Okay, let's go back to Genesis, and the, and the creation story, if you will.

What does ancient Egypt have to say about that?

Dr.

Charles Finch> Okay.

On the one hand, the Genesis story comes to us, at least in the Hebrew form directly from Chaldea.

That is, a Hebrew form of Genesis was taken really almost out of, really almost from Chaldea.

But you see, again, the types come from those that pre-exist Chaldea in Africa and in Egypt.

And we have already sort of alluded to the, creation story, or at least perhaps, this would be a time to allude to by again, looking at the types that you find in Genesis.

I think in order to answer that question, the first thing I like to do is refer to a couple of the slides that I have and then move on to some of the material that's on the chart, and that will help illustrate, or at least give some semblance of an illustration to answer that question.

<Okay> Now, what we have, on this slide is a, is a picture depicting, on the one hand, Seb at the bottom, who is the god of Earth or who is a personification of Earth, overshadowed, if you will, by Nut, the sky goddess, or the heavens being lifted up by their son, Shu, who is the air or the space between earth and heavens.

And this represents, if you want to look at it this way, is one of the separation of the two firmaments that you, meet with in Genesis.

Listervelt Middleton> Okay, go on to the next slide, now.

Dr.

Charles Finch> Yeah, going to the next slide.

Here you find again, this comes out of the book of the dead.

This is the attainment, if you will, of the garden.

And the tree is the tree of life.

The tree, which nourishes, gives both, food and water to the soul.

In this case, the, Ani and his wife.

And then, interestingly enough, the tree is personified by Nut or Hathor.

And this is the tree of life that, gives plenty and food and nourishment to the souls in the garden.

So essentially the, action or the elements in Genesis really, again, come from if you will, the activity that occurs in Amenta when you have attained the garden, attained the oasis after having navigated or negotiated the terrors of the underworld or Amenta.

It is the Paradise, if you will.

Listervelt Middleton> It is the spirit world.

Dr.

Charles Finch> The spirit world, the Paradise of the spirit, where the fields of peace.

And the, tree that you see is the field, the tree of peace and plenty, the tree of life, in fact.

Now, in order to look at this, in a different way, we might want to go to, examining the meanings and etymologies behind Old Testament names.

Now, in order to understand how we can do this, you have to realize that Hebrew is a language that does not become codified or established until about 300 years after the so-called exodus.

The people who left Egypt in the exodus, and although it didn't happen the way it was supposed to have happened in the Bible, there was an exodus of people who left Egypt and went into Palestine.

But those people, by definition, would've have been speaking Egyptian language.

If we just use the evidence of the Old Testament alone, you just use the evidence of Exodus, you know, without commenting really on the, veracity or the validity of that evidence as historical evidence, but let's just use it to kind of illustrate the point that we're talking about.

Seventy came in with Jacob under Joseph.

Six hundred thousand men, an uncounted number of children and women left 430 years later in the exodus.

You have to ask yourself, how do 70 give rise to 600,000?

Or are really more than 600,000?

There's only one way they could do it.

Particularly you're talking about a small group of illiterate, uncultured shepherds coming into a civilization that was the dominant civilization of his time.

They settle among the people there, and they take their spouses from the people among whom they settled.

And this happens generation after generation.

Within the first generation, the Canaanite language that they spoke when they came in, not Hebrew, Canaanite language, when they, when they spoke, when they came in, they lose it after generation.

Within another generation, if they are ethnically different from the people among whom they settle, they lose that, so that they are indistinguishable after 2 or 3 generations, from the people among whom they settle.

So that, whatever ethnic, characteristics they had when they came in to Egypt, when they left Egypt, they were Black people, Egyptians, in fact.

Africans and Egyptians.

The people spoke Egyptian.

They couldn't have been speaking anything else.

If they had learned men among them, they would have been reading and writing in Egyptian.

Culturally, they were Egyptian, and ethnically they were Egyptian.

The so-called Semitic languages, that are described by linguists, whether it be Hebrew, Arabic, Phoenician, Syriac, Aramaic, all belong to a broader group or a larger group called the Afro-Asiatic languages, which include Egyptian, which is African, not a Semitic language, Ethiopian or Amharic, Chadic, Cushitic and Hausa.

In fact, Joseph Greenberg says that if you look at the origin of these Afro-Asiatic group of languages, the origin is actually in the highlands of Ethiopia, so that the Semitic languages, like the Semitic people themselves, are actually descended from Africa.

So, therefore, it should not come as a surprise that we can in a way, explore meanings in Hebrew by using the prism of the Egyptian language.

And those etymologies that we come up with are going to reveal things that are otherwise hidden from us.

Now, let us go, as you say, to the Genesis.

Let's look at Adam.

Adam is the same as Atem or Atom in Egyptian.

Adam is the Father of Mankind, according to Genesis.

Atem is the Father of Mankind according to Egyptian mythology.

This part of his name, "At" actually means "Father," and "Tem" means, one of the meanings of "Tem" it has several, means "People," Father of Mankind.

Adam is the First Man in the image of God.

Atem is the First God in the image of Man.

Adam represents the Completion of Creation.

You know, after Adam, after God created Adam, He, rested on the seventh day.

The root of "Tem," of this word, "Tem," means "Completion."

Adam is a namer of all creatures, you know.

He's the one who gives names to all living things.

The root of this, "Dem," which is also a form of "Tem," means to name.

So we see all the attributes of Adam contained in this preexisting Egyptian god in the form of man named Atem.

Listervelt Middleton> Okay, but, Atem, now is he the physical man or spiritual man?

Dr.

Charles Finch> Spiritual man.

Listervelt Middleton> Okay, whereas, Dr.

Charles Finch> Spiritual man.

Listervelt Middleton> whereas with the Hebrew, Dr.

Charles Finch> Yes, but Adam actually, too.

See, this is the point that I want to make is that Adam really is Atem, and he, too, is the spiritual man, in Genesis, he is made into an actual man.

Listervelt Middleton> Okay.

Dr.

Charles Finch> Okay, but let's look at Eve, the wife of Adam.

In Hebrew, her name is Havvah.

I put a "C" there in parentheses because, "CH" in Hebrew gives us "Chavvah," kind of a guttural sound, but frequently is rendered like this.

Havvah, H-A-V-V-A-H.

This is the same or is related to the Egyptian Hefa.

Havvah, Hefa, both, Havvah means "Eve," Havvah, Hefa.

Eve was one that was beguiled by the serpent.

Hefa is the great mother serpent of the world.

She is the Great Mother, Cosmic Serpent that circles and incubates the cosmic egg from which all creation comes.

In the ancient Egyptian cosmo conception, they represented creation as issuing from an egg around which was surrounded by the Great Mother Cosmic Serpent.

This is Hefa, Havvah, Eve.

So Eve is in reality, a form is in reality, the human form of the Great Cosmic Serpent who coiled around the Egg of Creation.

Eve was the serpent of Genesis, and remember the slide, the tree, the tree of life.

The mother.

Eve is also the tree of, she's also the personification of the tree or the tree of life.

And remember, the serpent was in a tree.

Remember one thing we had said earlier that the tree is first and foremost a maternal image.

And in equatorial Africa, one of the sites, if you will, phenomena that would have impressed upon, pressed itself upon the sort of the imaginations of early man would have been the great python who lives in the tree, and who would have been the sacred serpent, or the great cosmic serpent of creation.

You find this figure of the great cosmic serpent, who is the mother of all in every single traditional African religion.

Listervelt Middleton> Now some people are going to say, serpent.

Why a serpent?

Dr.

Charles Finch> Because you see, the serpent is the great python.

The serpent lays eggs, the serpent coils around the eggs, an image of the mother.

The serpent sheds its skin, an image of renewal and recreation.

All these make the serpent actually one of the early zootypical, remember that word, zootypical images.

Listervelt Middleton> So that's the serpent in the Egyptian Dr.

Charles Finch> Yeah, and African Listervelt Middleton> and African mythology.

Now get back to the Hebrew.

What is the, what does the serpent in the, Bible represent?

Dr.

Charles Finch> Yeah, well, the serpent in the Bible is the same thing, but they have changed it.

Listervelt Middleton> So what does it mean in the Bible?

Dr.

Charles Finch> Eve, in a sense, has been abstracted.

The human Eve has been abstracted.

It has been, there's been a separation that's occurred, if you will.

You know, really a splitting off.

The Bible writers have split Eve off from Hefa and made her human and then turned the serpent into a figure of that which is, the source of evil and the source of the sin, the original so-called original sin, Listervelt Middleton> Which was not the case, Dr.

Charles Finch> which is not the case Listervelt Middleton> in the Egyptian rendering.

Dr.

Charles Finch> No.

Exactly.

Now, see, one other thing too, is with, in early Africa, most the the religion was originally matriarchal.

The society was matriarchal.

God was originally maternal and female.

Why?

Because there was a time early on when human beings did not know that there was a relationship between procreation and sex.

So therefore there was no understanding that the father created or contributed to creation or procreation.

So the only, the only person or the only figure from whom creation came or from new life came was the female.

So the female became the dominant type in the consciousness of early man.

All the female images became the earliest forms of the deity.

First society in first religion was matriarchal and female, and this, by the way, is preserved in the ancient Egyptian religion, even though, well, okay, one thing that happened is that there was a changeover when the relationship of man and procreation was discovered, slowly and gradually, symbols that were originally female became taken over by the masculine consciousness or the patriarchal consciousness.

Patriarchal deities came to the fore and rose up and finally became dominant.

But what happened is as the old patriarch, as new patriarchal religions personified by Atem and Ra became dominant, they, old matriarchal religions sort of fell into abeyance.

And not only do they fall into abeyance, or at least they their status declined somewhat, the old female types became images of evil and darkness.

And so, the serpent became, which was originally the Great Mother Serpent of the world, on the one hand became Eve in the female form, and became the serpent who was responsible for original sin, on the other hand.

Listervelt Middleton> Now to what extent did the patrilineal father, male, Did that system ever become prominent in Africa?

Dr.

Charles Finch> It became prominent or dominant Africa only really in recent times, only in the last 500 years with the, adoption of Christianity and Islam.

In traditional African religions, it, never became over dominant or predominant, not even in Egypt.

Even though the Pharaohs were all male, even though the the primary gods and deities were masculine, there was always in Egypt a kind of balancing or, kind of equilibrium between the masculine and feminine aspects of the deity, the maternal and paternal aspects of the deity.

And in certain African areas, the paternal religion or the paternal deities never really achieved any kind of dominance whatsoever that the maternal religion or the matriarch religion persisted all the way down until modern times, so that, in Egypt, anyway, there was a kind of balancing that occurred between, on the one hand, the masculine or paternal phase or aspect of deity and the maternal or matriarchal aspect of deity.

Listervelt Middleton> Okay.

Do you want to show us some other things?

Okay.

Let me get this.

[sound of paper folding] Dr.

Charles Finch> Okay.

Other thing I'm going to show here again is how certain biblical types and names can only be understood in terms of their original essence by reference to the Egyptian.

This is Cain, okay?

Cain in Hebrew is "Qayin."

Qayin in Hebrew is the same as "Qen," an Egyptian.

Now Cain is "He who struck down his brother in the first murder."

Qen is a word that actually means to beat or to strike down.

So we, the Egyptian, gives you the actual meaning of that name, Cain.

Noah.

In Hebrew, it is "Nuach," and in Egyptian this gives us "Nu-akh."

He is, one, the survivor of the flood.

In Egyptian, "Nu" is the great watery mass of heaven, or the flood of heaven and earth, the great water.

He is also, if you remember, from the story of Noah, the great gardener or cultivator or husbandman, that is one of his attributes.

"Akh" means field.

So "Nuach" Hebrew is the same as "Nu-akh" Egyptian, and it is the flood that irrigated and fertilize the fields, so that you have the double personification of Noah represented and described in this Egyptian form of his name, Nu-akh.

Now, what this meant was that, of course, the annual flood came down from the African highlands in Ethiopia, flooded over Egypt, and that was the first primordial flood.

But that was a life giving flood.

And the ark that you find floating over the flood is the ark, are the boats that the Egyptians moved around in during flood time.

As on earth, so in heaven.

They also talked about the flood of heavens.

The heavens were represented as a great watery mass, and the sun was represented as a boat crossing the heavens on its daily course.

So that was another aspect of the ark of Noah crossing over the flood of the heavens.

So, the idea of the flood is both heavenly as well as earthly.

The other interesting thing about... Listervelt Middleton> What about this flood that covered the whole earth?

Dr.

Charles Finch> Again, remember that there was no flood that covered the whole earth.

The only earth that was covered was the earth of Egypt, In earthly terms.

The only other flood is a celestial flood that, was in the heavens, and that the boat, the ark floated over.

So what happened was the flood, the annual flood of ancient Egypt in the biblical rendering was made a flood of the whole earth.

Listervelt Middleton> Okay, so the earlier, the antecedent for Noah in Egypt, in Egyptian writings is... Dr.

Charles Finch> Is "Nu."

Listervelt Middleton> All right.

Who was... Dr.

Charles Finch> Who was the personifications of the water and the flood.

He was in fact the waters, the flood, the life giving waters.

Another one of his name is Hapi, <Okay> or the Nile.

Because water was considered, you see, in the ancient Egyptian conception, the water was considered the source of all life.

And so, water played a very, very important part in their religion and in their mythological conceptions.

Listervelt Middleton> But you have people believing that at one time the whole earth was just... Dr.

Charles Finch> No.

No.

Again, they believe it because they believe the Bible, and because the Bible told them that the great, all the earth was flooded.

All the writers of the Bible were doing were taking something that happened, on the one hand, in Egypt annually as a result of flood, and also something that was described mythologically in the heavens and applying it to earth as it did in everything else.

<Okay> Now, the other thing about Noah is that he succumbs to drunkness.

Remember that.

He comes down off of Mount Ararat and cultivates the vine, produces wine, drinks it, and becomes drunk.

Well, "Nuch" is another Egyptian word.

Very similar, "Nuch" is really a form of "Nuach," and it means literally drunkenness.

Now you have to understand, fermented beverages because of their intoxicating properties were seen to, create in the person who drank them, almost, a state that was akin to the divine because of the transformation that occurred in the fermentation process.

This is an image or a symbol or a metaphor for a transformational process that made the one who drank it or imbibe it as the gods themselves, because of its intoxicating properties.

So therefore, early on, drinking the wine or fermented beverages was only allotted or allowed to the priest as a sacred rite.

So this is the way in which you have to understand the drunkenness of Noah.

Noah, in effect, was a priest who was drinking this as a sacred rite, as part of the religion, as part of the image of transmuting yourself and sort of relating yourself to the Godhead.

Obviously, later on, when it became in the common usage, drinking of wine became a vice, but it wasn't originally that.

So that's the way in which you have to understand, and of course, in Old Testament, the drunkenness of Noah is seen, of course, in a negative light or as a kind of a vice, as kind of a failing.

But you see, this is the whole point that I'm trying to make.

You've got, in the Old Testament recreations and reconstructions of material that is preexistent, that is typological and mythological and ritualistic, but has been turned in order to and changed, <made literal> made literal in the Bible.

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