By Ademola Adegbamigbe
Professor Godini G. Darah of Department of English and Literary Studies, Delta State University, Abraka, has argued that Egyptian Mystery System gave birth to Judaism, Christianity, Western education, claiming that the biblical story of creation, exodus and others are mere mythical creations. He made the submission at the recent Faculty of Arts Distinguished Lecture, University of Lagos, in honour of the literary titan, Professor J. P. Clark.
Darah, relying on the works of Africa’s distinguished Egyptologist, Professor Cheikh Anta Diop of Senegal, Dr Louis Leakey, J. A. Rogers, George G. M. James and others proved that human species originated from Africa and that Hippocrates was not the father of Medicine.
On Judaism, Darah argued: “It is known that Moses produced the 10 Commandments that constitute the moral anchor of the religion of Judaism. It is logical to say that Moses derived his ideas about the 10 Commandments from the virtues and moral mandates he learned as an Initiate of the Egyptian Mystery System. The theology of Judaism was developed by the Hebrew people about 700 years after the return of their exiles from Egypt. Judaism benefited from the knowledge the Hebrew got from Egypt.”
He revealed the influence of Black Egyptian philosophy on Judaism and Christianity as attested to by Diop, especially in the relation to the concept of post-mortem trial and residence in paradise:
“The religion of Osiris is the first, in the history of humanity, to invent
the notions of paradise and hell. Two thousand years before Moses
and three thousand years before Christ, Osiris, the personification of
the Good, was already residing over the judgement of the dead in the
world beyond the grave, wearing on his head the Atew or Atef.”
Egyptian education, as Darah poited out, produced Moses. In his words: “He was an Initiate of the Egyptian Mystery System at the age of seven. Professor James, according to the lecturer, has a helpful account of this process: All the great religious leaders from Moses to Christ were Initiates of the Egyptian Mysteries. This is an inference from the nature of the Egyptian Mysteries and prevailing custom:
“(a) The Egyptian Mystery System was the one Holy catholic Religion
of the remotest antiquity.
(b) It was one and only Masonic Order of Antiquity, and as such,
(c) It built the Grand Lodge of Luxor in Egypt and encompassed the
ancient world with its branch lodges.
(d) It was the first University of history and it made knowledge a
secret, so that all who desired to become Priests and Teachers
had to obtain their training from the Mystery System, either
locally at the branch lodge or by travelling to Egypt.
We know that Moses became and Egyptian Priest, a Hierogrammat,
and that Christ after attending the lodge at Mount Camel (Palestine)
went to Egypt for Final Initiation, which took place in the Great
Pyramid of Cheops (Khuffu). Other religious leaders obtained their
preparation from lodges most convenient to them (Stolen Legacy,
p. 178).”
Darah proceeded to debunk the exodus story, saying that the geniuses in political engineering and administration included King Akhenaton who became Pharaoh at 17. The professor said: “He so abominated the material corruption of the Temple priests exhibited through the worship of multiple gods during his father’s reign that his first royal ordinance on coming to power was to decree the worship of one god (monotheism). When Akhenaton made this law about 1,350 B.C. the Jewish immigrants were resident in Egypt. Contrary to the folklore in the Bible, the Jewish exiles were not held in captivity. They voluntarily migrated to Egypt to enjoy the privileges of education and security of life afforded by the regimes of the Pharaohs. The land of the Jews was impoverished and famished and they lived on it as herdsmen and nomads. By that time civilization had flourished in Egypt for about 2,000 years. It was therefore the desire of the impoverished Jews to seek to be connected with Black Egypt and they sold slaves to merchants from there.
“As the biblical account shows, Joseph the dreamer was one of the first to be sold into slavery by his envious brothers. Joseph was beloved of his Egyptian masters and he received good education that earned him the prestigious position of Minister of Agriculture and Food Security, even advancing to the halcyon position almost equivalent to that of a deputy Pharaoh. Following Joseph’s good fortunes, more Jewish migrants went to Egypt. The Jewish immigrants stayed for 400 years in Egypt. They were not captives of war and they were not tortured or deliberately exploited as the Old Testament account misinforms us. In fact, by the time the Jewish communities settled in Egypt about 1600 B.C., the building of the pyramids and other gargantuan public structures had been completed. As Professor Diop has pointed out, about 12 Jewish immigrants first settled in Egypt; they lived and multiplied there for four centuries and by the time of their Exodus under the leadership of Moses, the population was 675,000. Note that the Egyptian government had capacity to enumerate all the foreigners who left the kingdom.
“As already pointed out, the Jewish immigrants were in Egypt when Pharaoh Akhenaton initiated the theology of monotheism. It would appear that the immigrants admired the idea of serving a single god and monotheism was one of the enduring ideas they took from the land of Egypt. The Jewish returnees also copied the Egyptian monarchical system of government; soon after they got back to Judah they asked God to give them a king like the Egyptian pharaoh. Saul was the first, followed by David and his son, Solomon. Like the scholar-pharaohs of Egypt, David and Solomon were famous for composing psalms and songs (poetry).
Darah went further to prove that Black African scientists and astronomers of the Nile Valley civilizations inaugurated the systematic study of the planets, stars, and other heavenly bodies in the universe or cosmos. These inquiries and the deductions made therefrom, according to him, formed the foundation of philosophical speculation and exegesis. These Africans of antiquity were, in his words, “able to determine the natural laws that govern the existence and movement of planetary bodies and animate life. For example, the ancient Egyptians knew that the star we know as the sun was at the epicentre of the universe. This is now referred to as the solar system of which the Earth is a member. This explains why the early cosmogonies religion in Egypt made the sun the central object of veneration and worship. The Sun-god was called Ra.”
Darah added: “Evolutionists estimate that the first human-like beings appeared about 4.5 million years ago. Anthropologists and geologists have confirmed that the first site where this miraculous transformation occurred was the Olduvai Gorge in Northern Tanzania in East Africa. The initial discoveries were made by the British scientist, L. S. B. Leakey in the 1930s; his wonderful work was continued by his wife, Mary, and son, Richard. Following the Olduvai excavations, further hominid finds were made in Kenya and the Oromo river valley in Ethiopia, also in Eastern Africa. The accounts of these breakthrough researches are well documented in Martin Meredith’s book, Born in Africa: The Quest for the Origins of Human Life (Simon & Schuster, 2011).
Darah argued that Medicine is another field in which Imhotep of Egypt excelled. Professor Innocent Onyewuenyi, as Darah pointed out, provides a good summary of some of the great heights of Egyptian medical science. In his The African Origin of Greek Philosophy: An Exercise in Afrocentrism (1993), Onyewuenyi comments that the “Mystery System Schools also produced medical doctors of repute. He quotes the views of the historian, Mary Motley thus: “The first physician of antiquity of any fame was the black Egyptian Imhotep, who lived about 2980 B.C. during the Third Dynasty…and he was so highly thought of in his day that he was worshipped a s kind of god centuries after his death. He cured physical and mental sickness. In later years people slept in the shrine at his temple, dreamed of him and went away cured” (p. 51).Onyewuenyi adds that:
Imhotep lived two thousand years before the Greek doctor Hippocrates who is called the father of medicine.
In her own reaction, Professor Ebun Clark quoted John 1:1-5: “1In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2He was with God in the beginning. 3Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. 4In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. 5The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcomea it.”
Read Professor Darah’s lecture here:
https://thenewsnigeria.com.ng/2017/04/the-humanities-and-the-redemption-of-africa/