Egyptian Beginnings: Thoth, Osiris, Isis
Presented on: Tuesday, January 7, 1986
Presented by: Roger Weir
Hermetic Tradition: From Egypt to America, From Osiris to Benjamin Franklin
Presentation 1 of 52
Egyptian Beginnings: Thoth, Osiris, Isis
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, January 7, 1986
Transcript:
The date is January 7th 1986. This is the beginning of a new year and lecture series by Roger Weir at The Whirling Rainbow.
Morning is always a precarious thing. and it seems in our experience which confirms that of antiquity that the closer we come to something meaningful the more obfuscations arise. I hope that we'll be able to will complete this series. Which I'm setting my stamina to do over the entire course of the year. I've not typed up any pre-planned sequence because this is actually a discovery mode in many instances. But the general title would be the Hermetic tradition. I have tried to trace it from its Egyptian beginnings up to the figure and character of Benjamin Franklin. Who represents I think a great watershed. In that the esoteric traditions became public. Benjamin Franklin and Ghandi both were convinced that the esoteric should become so public that the invisibility is there not through esotericism. But because it was so familiar everyone thought this couldn't be it because it seems like our own home. Our own tradition. But that eventually the health of the human being would discover that healthful human living is in fact the esoteric doctrine. The Rosicrucian model was the life lived is the doctrine received. Menta de dabor (sp?)
So this will be called the Hermetic tradition from Egypt to America, from Osiris to Benjamin Franklin. And in this tradition and I have never seen it presented complete in this form. Two years ago we presented the Renaissance Hermetic tradition that began with Ficino and went as far as Leibniz. The European mastermind who in his life and learning seemed to bring all of the esoteric traditions together. The difficulty for most people after that was at the universal language that he made in order to express the **inaudible 2 words** was differential and integral calculus. And without having those capacities we are somewhat truncated and understanding what Leibniz was finally able to say. So this tradition has to my knowledge never been presented whole from its inception about 5,000 years ago. Up till it's identifiable as coming into this country into human form that we could come into contact with.
I want to begin with two admonitions to negative spirits. One of them is from the Hermetic writings. And this was called the Smoleg Dean Tablet(??). This was the essence and the quintessence of the Hermetic writing. "I speak not fictitious things but that which is certain and most true. What is below is like that which is above. And what is above is like that which is below. to accomplish the miracle of one thing." And this statement this far gives us what we would recognize in mathematical terminology as a ratio. The ratio is that what is above is as below and that is a numerator expression. And the denominator expression is just the same. Only given in more reverse so that what is below is as above. These two statements placed together in juxtaposition are a numerator denominator. And the juxtaposition implies that there is a ratio between the two. The ratio in this case is an expression of unity. Unity. Not of one. Not of singularity but of unity.
We will see quite later in the year that Ficino in the Florentine Renaissance will use the Latin term unitas to express this. And it means an undifferentiatness. That is it's not one as separate from a context or separate from a numerical series. But is in fact the unity as zero or infinity might be a unity. That can only be expressed in a ratio and not in a single form ever. There is no capacity for expression in a singularity. Which means then that to identify this peculiarity we cannot use the normal objective language. It will not work. That to identify on the basis of differentiation will always lead us astray. In fact lead us astray not in the doctrinaire sense but in a structural sense. We cannot use identity sensing or differentiating capacity to understand.
What gives us the key then here in the Hermetic tablet is that we have to use reason. We have to use rationality in its most comprehensive form. And the rationality lies in discovering that the relationality between elements is just as important as any of the any of the elements. If one has a deck of cards the usefulness of that deck of cards depends upon the dealer. and a very good dealer can make a deck of cards sing. It's the relationality behind the matrix of objectivity that deals us the pattern which is meaningful. And if we're going to be in that game we have to understand that the dealer is paramount. And just mastering the deck is for starters. When we recognize that we ourselves must become the dealer then we begin to be Hermetic. And that's what this tradition is all about.
The tablet goes on to state, "And as all things were produced by the one word of one being so all things were produced from this one thing. By adaptation. its father is the son. It's mother the moon. Wind carries it in it's belly. It's nurse is the earth. He is the father of all perfection throughout the world. The power is vigorous. And it has changed into earth acting prudently and with judgment. Separate from the earth. From the fire. The subtle from the gross. Ascend with the greatest sagacity from the earth to heaven. and then again descend to the earth and unite together the powers of things above and below. That she will obtain the gray(?) of the whole world. And darkness will fly away from you. This has more fortitude than fortitude itself because it conquers every subtle thing and can penetrate every solid."
This tablet is inscribed. And in fact in the Greek inscription of it and some of the early Phoenician characters that are sometimes been used to inscribe it. And the experience of some individuals that I have run into here in Los Angeles. elderly individuals. Mr. Hall is one of them. He was told and others have been told that old American Indians have said that they used to be able to have ancestors who could read script like that. And so there are mysteries in this world.
The second document that I'd like to present is from Plato's Seventh Letter. And Plato's Seventh Letter is one of the great Hermetic documents. And in it Plato is giving us a, an admonishment about the nature of what can be said and what can be understood. and disclosing as publicly as can be the conscientious nature of a speaker of wisdom who knows more than he can say. But understanding that is content with what he can say. Recognizing that the hearer also understands more than he can hear. And so the liason, Hermetically, is not through what is said so much but through the intuitive rationality that the pattern of what is being said amounts to a unity. And that the eventual accumulative penetration of the vision is what is to be had. And so not what is said tonight. And not what is said in a month of lectures. But hopefully the accumulated penetration over many months, and hopefully some of you will stay for the entire year, will build. And the sensitivity the sensibility that the pattern is a unity. That all that has been said. All that is being said. Yields a common matrix of understanding. And hopefully somehow we as the dealer will become some element in that. Depending on our penetration.
Plato says, writes. In a letter not in a dialogue. In a letter. "To sum it all up in one word natural intelligence and a good memory are equally powerless to aid the man who has not an inborn affinity with the subject." Natural intelligence and a good memory are not enough. You have to have an inborn affinity. Nobody in this room is lacking the affinity you wouldn't be here. There's no commotion. There are no neon lights. There are no degrees. There's nothing here except what is happening. So the affinity is there.
Plato writes, "Without such endowments there is of course not the slightest possibility. Hence all who have no natural aptitude for an affinity with justice and all the other noble ideals. They're thrown in the study of those in the study of other matters. They may be both intelligent and attentive. All those too who have affinity but are stupid if only attentive such whenever any of them attained to an understanding of the most complete truth in regard to moral concepts." And here Plato is being what we call today a colloquial(?) character. But there's an element of consciousness that is commensurate with character. That character is a shape. The dealer as a person is a shape. And without character consciousness has no shape. And so does the moral character which becomes finally paramount in recognizing unity. Otherwise the recognition is of a blur.
Plato writes, "The study of virtual and vice must be accompanied by an inquiry into what is false and true of existence in general. And must be carried on by constant practice through a long period. As I said in the beginning hardly any practicing detailed comparisons of names or definitions, visual and other sense perceptions after scrutinizing them and benevolent disputation by the use of question and answer without jealousy. At last in a flash of understanding. In a flash of understanding something blazes up in the mind as it exerts all its powers to the limit of human capacity is flooded with light." What Plato is graphically saying here is that the mind is not flooded with an image nor a symbol but light. That without the shape of character the light would not occur to oneself. But there would be an indifferentness to the occurrence and would pass one by. One might have a sense of deja vu that something happened or something didn't quite happen. Or that somehow some familiar moment came and what was that? But there would be no way for memory or intelligence to understand, to retain. Either through analysis or through any kind of recall. It's only the shape of character finally.
So that the Hermetic documents, when they get to them, by the time of the 1st century B.C. in Alexandria, the Hermetic documents will all be in the form of dialogues. Because it was the dialogue form that developed in the dramatic context of the dialogue they personae. The mask. The dramatic presentation of self. Yes it's true that that is our full capacity but that is our listening capacity. That is our acting capacity. And only by accepting that role of that character in a dialogue, in a drama of some sort can we set ourselves up for that flash of lightning of understanding the whole.
Plato then concludes The Seventh Letter with this admonition, which is for me and not for you. "For this reason no serious man will ever think of writing about serious realities for the general public. So as to make them a prey to envy and perplexity. In a word is an inevitable conclusion from this that when anyone sees anywhere the written work of anyone. Whether that of a lawgiver and his laws or whatever it may be in some other form the subject treated cannot have been his most serious concern." That is if he is himself a serious man his most serious interests have their abode somewhere in the noblest region of the field of his total activity and must remain there. If however he really was seriously concerned with these matters and did put them into writing, thinking that he had said the most serious things then surely the gods and the mortals that inherited blasted rets from such effrontery. So with this admonition to myself with a little bit of trepidation I'll try to take us to the Hermetic tradition.
Next week we're going to concentrate on the Pyramid Texts. And the Pyramid Texts of the true beginning of it, some 3,000 B.C. The Pyramid Texts literally are inscriptions on the tombs. The walls of the tombs. The pyramid of Unas is one of the most conspicuous. And we'll see that.
But we can't really begin there. We can't begin at the beginning because this is rather an epic story. And the classical form of presenting an epic straight is to start in the middle. And thereby the beginning is a fulcrum or focus as it were. So that by beginning in the middle and then going back to the beginning we carry with us a sense of context that what is being developed is in fact technically parenthetical. An aside. A flashback. So that the development of the tradition, the development of the epic, instead of coming from the beginning coming from the middle creates the sense that we are not really at the beginning but we're looking back from a standpoint where balance can be had. And so we begin at a balancing point. Because we are after developing first of all a sense of Hermetic character. And hopefully in the first month we'll be able to have enough indication of this most arcane quality of the Hermetic character that one is open-ended in the sense that entrances and exits are the definitional walls with which one works. That obfuscation occurs when any of those entrances and exits are closed. And by keeping them all open, all the time, we allow for an ambience of free circulation.
So the beginning of this epic of the Hermetic tradition the exact center of it is around 100 A.D. That's about the very center of it. And the figure that I've chosen is Plutarch. Plutarch who is a master of the mystery schools, the arcane schools of his time. Who lived in Greece. Was quite capable of writing some of the most erudite Greek. We have about 27 books of Plutarch left over from the classical world. So you can understand from that that he was always revered. Generally we think of Plutarch in terms of his Parallel Lives. And of course if you think of it now Hermetically, Parallel Lives that was presenting contrasting comparing character in order to reveal not those characters so much but by reflection one's own character.
And by reading through the Parallel Lives of Plutarch one got the sense then of who one was as a reader. One became not the dealer of the deck so much but the leader of all the Parallel Lives. And each life was either a Greek or a Roman. Never two Greeks compared. Never two Romans. But always a Greek and a Roman. So that two cultures, the Greek culture and the Roman culture, were brought into juxtaposition. So that the reader stood in the middle as a relational. neither trapped in the Greek nor in the Roman. And this was a Hermetic trick, a technique, in order to enable one to transcend the cultural context within one...which within which one was raised. Or one believed oneself to be real, quote real.
Aside from the Parallel Lives about sixteen volumes of miscellaneous essays survived. And one of those is the most arcane of all the classical essays that come down to us. And it's in volume 5 of Plutarch's Moralia in the low classical library series, published by Harvard. And the work is called On Isis and Osiris. And so it's to this that we begin. Because Hermes was originally the Egyptian Thoth and Thoth becomes identifiable first in the Osirian myth. And only by looking at the myth of Osiris are we able then to gain some kind of a traction in understanding who was Thoth. If we go to dictionaries in mythology. If we go to religious books on Egyptology we are given definitional but not relational not rational, ratio presentations. And so to Plutarch we go to get the Hermetic rational presentation.
Thoth occurs in the Osiris Isis myth. And this myth is the only surviving intact myth of ancient Egypt. We do not have the mythic cycle or Ra complete. We do not have the mythic cycles of Eman or any of the other gods of ancient Egypt. But we do have Osiris and Isis complete. largely thanks to Plutarch. Not that Plutarch is so uncannily accurate. In fact he has a great deal of errors in him. the errors are largely in language. He was trying to derive Greek names from Egyptian hieroglyphs and they just don't mix. It just isn't so. But it was a limitation which was only transcended in the 20th century by our scholarship and our capacity.
Osiris, his myth occurs in Egypt. But always Egypt is referred to in the Hermetic sense as Khem. The land of Khem. Or in Greek it was Khemya. From which the term chemistry comes from. Which the term alchemy comes from. Khem means black soil. Black Earth. Khem means that an Egyptian phonetic pronouncing. And in Greek the Greek word Kemya comes from that. But it's curious because in the greek Kemya is a physiological designation. It's a designation for the pupil of the eye. The black of the eye is the kemya. So that in the Greek understanding the land of Khem, the black soil, the fertile black soil, is esoterically the pupil of the eye. For it's there that growth can occur.
And it is the community of the pupils of the eyes of teachers and students meeting in that secret darkness we are lightning recognition flashes between them that constitutes the Hermetic tradition. It is always in that direct lineage. It is never reading and understanding something written. It is never looking at something and thinking by oneself to an epiphany. It has always in the personal contact that something is given and something is received. What is given and what is received must be in that ratio. It must have that kind of ultimate unitas to it. This ensures that the tradition is whole. That the tradition is pure. That the learning is without degradation. I think that's the word to use. In our time of course almost all learning is degredated to the point of being jibberish. One can know almost anything in detail but the context of detail is lost as soon as you go two or three sets of collection above the single detail. That is you can granulate understanding in our time but to build it only aggregates have been used so far. And of course you can't construct reality out of an aggregate. The larger the form of the aggregate the stronger the glue has to be. And the glue is always of delusional quality.
One is reminded of the photograph of the earth from the moon. At the whole earth catalogue in the late sixties pull on the back page. And the caption was we can't put it together, it is together. Meaning that the earth is in fact here. The unity of reality is in fact occurring. We don't make it happen.
In Isis and Osiris Plutarch then writes, "I think that a source of happiness is in the eternal life. Which is the lot of the gods. and that God in this event, which has come to pass, understands this because it does not escape his presence. But what is eternal about happiness is that the eternality is an occurrence in the presence of the divine. Thus happiness is real. In any other mode is fictitious."
Plutarch then writes, "But if his knowledge and meditation on the nature of existence should be taken away then to my mind his immortality is not living but a mere lapse of time." So that the eternality of the unity, of the unitas, if taken away by an untrained mind, kibitzing. What happens then is that one falls into time. And it is this journey of time that throws one into needing to rely upon memory and conniving and a kind of materialistic aspiration in order to survive and make things happen.
Plutarch writes, "Therefore the effort to arrive at the truth and especially the truth about God is a longing for the divine. For the search for truth requires throughout study and investigation. The consideration of sacred subjects and as a workman than any form of holy living or temple service." He's saying that holy living and temple service and all of these ecumimont(sp?) of activity and time are useless essentially. The only use that they will have in Hermetic tradition is to help tutor ourselves to develop a character, a sense of character, which can progressively mature and transcend the need for these prompts.
Plutarch then says in his writing that in the Isis and Osiris Mythos there is a character called Typhon or Set in Egyptian, who is hindrance. And Set or Typhon stops. Stops in terms of time. Stops events from continuing to occur. As everything begins to go along Set sabotages them. Typhon makes it happen so that tangents occur instead of the flow. That temporality has this kind of capacity to make figurations instead of unity. So that one gets increasingly a tangle and a jangle. And the time bond sensitivity then tries to weave back these threads into some kind of an occurrence, some kind of unity. And this is a fool's paradise because one can do this infinitely. And their nature is to come back together for a little while and then go back out. Whereas the Hermetic tradition will always stress that all that must be seen mythologically as an obfuscation not the ossification needs not to be a paid attention to. but that as well as leading it off into tangents. That what we are after cannot be put together by intelligence and memory piece by piece but must be grasped in its wholeness. And the preparation for openness to wholeness is the tone. That's what to find. That's what to have. Hence the contact with personal teachers. A personal teacher. Not the guru. Not the master. It's nothing like that at all. But it is that personnage for whom the conversation is not the point. for whom the accruing penetration of the pattern of all the conversations we might have is the only focus, instead of a point of focus.
So Plutarch then tells us that in ancient times that the Kings were often appointed from the military class. But when the Kings became king they joined the priesthood. So the king was always a priest also. And that eventually this royalty became apparent. And he writes, "He who is appointed from the military class was at once made one of the priests and a participant in their philosophy. Which for the most part is veiled in myths and words contained in reflections and elevations of the truth as they themselves intimated beyond question by appropriately placing sphinxes before their shrines to indicate that the religious teaching has in it an enigmatic form of wisdom." What the the symbol for the Egyptians was always an enigma.
So that the presentation of Gods who a part human and part animal is not a primitive but an enigmatical way of expressing. Instead of primitive its primordial. And it's primordiality is exactly in the understanding that they're presenting a ratio. The Anubis is dog headed over man, is a ratio. And that the image has its efficaciousness in terms of the unitas. Not in terms of what the mind can identify or in terms of what comparison and contrast could manufacture and analog memory. But to work in these more pedestrian modes of thought wield nothing but speculation. And in fact are the kind of fibulations that fragment ones understanding.
So that in a Hermetic tradition Plutarch is going to prepare us now to see that Hermes is a very peculiar figure. Hermes, very peculiar figure. "They say," he writes, "that the Sun, Helios when he became aware of Rhea intercourse with Kronos." Rhea this is not a hot TV story. Rhea. Rhea is a very interesting Goddess. She is probably close to the early Greek form was Ge. G-e. Ge meaning Earth. Rhea. you can look up Rhea in I have here a handbook of Greek mythology by H.J. Rose. It's just an example. And he writes in here that, "Kronos' consort and sister Rhea is a grandiose but somewhat vague figure. Not very often worshipped under that particular name." She's often called Cybele or k...or Gaia so forth. That excerpt's in here. that she is a usually a blend of very old and widely worshipped power the mother. Who if she has not herself the earth at least she has very close relations with earth goddesses. Rhea. Rhea. Rhea.
Kronos is time. Temporality. The time element. And the earthen as a Hermetic feminine in the unity of reality. When seen in temporality that juxtaposition produces something else. That juxtaposition then, when the Sun is aware of this invokes a curse upon her that she should not give birth to a child in any month or in a year. No month and no year.
Plutarch then says, "But Hermes being enamored of the Goddess consorted with her." That is the Hermetic feature of seeing the unity, seeing the the ratio in terms of its reality. Sees Rhea and Kronos not in its obfuscating form which is barren but in its creative form. And he then playing at draughts with the moon, gambling. Gambling at the moon. He won from her the seventieth part of each of her periods of illumination. The seventieth part of the moon's illunination. And from all the winnings he composed five days and intercalated them as an addition to the 360 days. That if you take earth and time or temporality and you work with a geometric construct based upon the minds intelligence and upon memory and retention one can come up with a 360 day year.
Please turn your...
but the 365 day a year is an inundation which is moved by intelligence understanding that the natural order is not enough. That the real order is somewhat different from the natural order. That the natural order is ok. It's close. It's a proximation is close enough for man in his normal temporal state. In his temporalizing condition. He doesn't know any better. But in his Hermetic condition he must not have the natural but the real. And the real year is 365 days.
These five days which are made out of time. They do not belong in time. They are an eternal intercalculation into time. And it is during these five days that the Gods are born. And the first day Osiris is born. So that these Gods Osiris and Isis and Set and Nephthys and Horus are not products of nature. there are not products of the mind. They are not of the earth. They're not of time. They are lightning occurrences from eternity which are intercalated into man's realm through Hermes, Thot, understanding of the real. In fact the only way that they can occur at all is that there is someone who livingly knows and presents this tradition. Without there being someone who is livingly allowing for this occurrence these Gods do not occur. That the Hermetic tradition is essential to the real that does not occur in nature, un-tutored.
So that we will see again and again in the Hermetic tradition that one has to follow nature so far and then one has to stop following nature. one has to have a **inaudible word** and turn around within and follow consciousness follow the mind back through the labyrinth of nature. And revise the natural order just enough to change it to the real. And that this is the minds function. And without this reality does not occur only nature occurs. And nature is just time happening. Just earth there in time happening. And that this is essentially unreal. It is barren. But because there are people and trees and events but that nothing real is happening. It's all just shadows. Fools play. Like fool's gold. There's no real gold. The only gold will be when there's an alchemist of the real able to precipitate out the conditions of the real and intercalate then in with time on the earth. Then the gods are real. Then all of life is sacred. Then nature is transformed. This is the Hermetic tradition. It's a far cry from the usual pedestrian presentation of it.
So that Plutarch then gives us these intercalated days. And he says, "Osiris was born on the 1st of these days. And he when, he issued forth his voice or a voice which characterizes his occurrence sounds this phrase, 'the Lord of all advances to the light'." The Lord of all, of the all advances to the light. The Egyptian Book of the Dead's true title, The Book of Coming into the Light. Of coming forth. The Book of Coming Forth into the Light of Day.
The individual human being is saved from natural death because he is transposed from the natural to the real. And reoccurs as an eternal being. As Osiris did. But this is only possible through the instruction at Hermes/Thot. Without that instruction it's not going to happen. That there is no way in the gambling with time and earth that one could ever come up with the right throw of the dice. The right formula. The right mental speculation that would do it. There is no chance at all. That that realm is the realm of permutation. Endless permutation. The tibetan mandalas usually put this on the on the edge of the wheel of life.
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...mandalas usually put this on the edge of the wheel of life. The is the ghos...the unreghost wheel, the preta(?). And they're constantly, constantly wandering hungry and there's no amount of feeding that's ever going to satisfy them. Ever. It's an endless permutation of going around and around. Endlessly. Only by pentrating into the center is there a deliverence, a salvation, a transformation from the permutational cycle to that indellable flash of lightening. The real is disclosed. And that the psycho pump that lead us there is ourselves. At long last become really rational.
So this is the core of the Hermetic tradition. As would be able to be discerned from a Hermetic reading of Plutrach. Of course if you're just a classical scholar you can't read anything at all like this.
So he writes that the Egyptians had a tradition. That Hermes had very thin arms and large elbows. They also gave to Osiris the title of General. And the title of Pilot to Canopus, the star Canopus. From whom they say that the star derives its name. And then using this star, Canopus....And remember some of you from the Alexandria series that the Eastern gate of Alexandria was the Canopic Gate. It was named for that. Using that guiding star Osiris then sets out by a ship. By a boat. And he takes this message of transformation around the world. And by taking this message of transformation around the world he civilizes all known peoples. And in the civilized mode they are shown how to plant. They are shown how to deal with time in a masterful way. So that man may master the seasons and master time so that he may the intuition that he is not a slave to time. That he is able to transcend the limitations of time and also transcend the limitations of the Earth. But folded into the agricultural revolution Osiris brings is the transformation of the real as the kernal interspersed among the natural. And that only by collecting all of the natural together in a unitary pattern can one then have a chance to see the eternal real. Which has been hidden in the folds, as it were, like the esoteric kernal of truthfulness. And for this one needs Thoth. Osiris presents the broad matrix that permits the real to be approached but it is Thoth Hermes, that delivers the master stroke. The lightening flash. The essential quentesinal transformation that makes it happen.
He writes then...but I have to skip over because our, our time is running out. I'll skip all the way over towards the end of it. "It is poss...impossible to conceive of these things as being Gods in themselves for God is not senseless or inanimate. Not subject to human control. As a result of this we have come to regard as Gods those who make use of these things and present them to us and provide us with things everlasting and constant. Nor do we think of the Gods as different Gods among different peoples. Or as barbian Gods and Greek Gods. Or Southern and Northern Gods. But just as the sun and the moon and the heavens and the Earth and the sea are common to all but are called by different names by different peoples, so for that one rationality which keeps all things in order. And the one providence which watches over them. Men make use of symbols but must penetrate through the symbols to the real."
In ancient Egypt when the sun and the moon were equidistant above the horizon in the equinoxical positions that was the horizon. The basic horizon which all computation could be commenced or could be ended. And that balance allowed for either the commencing or the ending of a pattern of natural comprehension. But only through the esoteric mysteries of tradition could the real be flashed in among that pattern of unity. And it was for this reason then that personal contact was the source of truth.
And I'm skipping over everything else that was in here because of our time. And come down to this. At the end of Isis and Osiris Plutarch is talking about sacred ceremonies and he says that usually the incense used in sacred ceremonies was kyphi. And kyphi is a compound composed of sixteen ingredients. Honey, wine, raisins, cyprus resin, myrhh, aspalathos , bittamin, rushsal etc. Juniper. All of this mixed together with cardamom and calamus(?). And so kyphi was used generally. But there was a kind of a myrhh called ball and this was different. And this is the sacred substance the the phoenix bird symbol would harvest. And it would be a resin that would come out only at certain times when the heighth of the sun was at its epitome and drawing out this sap, this resin from the living tree. This could not be mixed with anything. And it's this incense which is the Hermetic incense. Different from the compounded incense.
The diluted temporizing mind of speculative human beings always looked to the metaphysical construction of the kyphi for some indication of the esoteric nature of the world. It was never there. It was in the undifferentiated, untempered with myhrr that was brought out by the phoenix bird. This of course allowed for its rebirth from its own ashes. This was the Osirian myth. Recollecting together of the fragmented body of Osiris. Which is always going to be fragmented because the destructive obfuscation of Set Typhon is equally as powerful as the body of life which Osiris presents. But the tenasity of Isis to go around and collect the parts of Osiris again is equally tenacious. With the body of Osiris and the tearing apart of it by Set and the recollecting of it by Isis. And this triad only finds stability in the real. Only reoccurs, again and again throughout eternity because of Hermes Thoth. He is the one who understands how this is put together. And his instruction cannot be giving to an Osiris. It cannon be given to Set. It cannot be given to Isis. So his instruction is always given in an oblique way to the fifth god Horace. And it is Thoth Hermes who always instructs the divine sun of how to do it. Because it is the divine sun that does it. It brings the scattered remnants of divinity back together.
Well you can see that a lot of the early Christianity will derive quite a bit from the Egyptian 3,000 year old tradition. The Hermetic tradition.
Next week we'll go to the origins. We'll go to the pyramid texts and show you how, even 3,000 years ago Thoth was already clearly delineated. He is not a borrowed imaged from anything else in the world. He is indiginous to Egypt. To the African mentality. And we'll take a good close look at that next week.
Thanks for bearing with this voice of mine tonight.
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