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The shrine of Thoth. Thoth and his company of Eight. The House of the Net
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THE SHRINE OF THOTH
“The principal seat of the Thoth-cult was Khemennu, or Hermopolis, a city famous in Egyptian mythology as the place containing the “high ground on which Rā rested when he rose for the first time. ”
Dare I here speculate that in this we have the mountain of our “Secret Sermon on the Mountain, ”
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and that it was in the Thoth mystery-tradition of Hermopolis that the candidates for initiation were taught to ascend the mountain of their own inner natures, on the top of which the Spiritual Sun would rise and rest upon their heads “for the first time, ” as Isis says in our “Virgin of the World” treatise?
THOTH AND HIS COMPANY OF EIGHT
At Khemennu 1 Thoth was regarded as the head of a Company of Eight—four pairs of divinities or divine powers, each a syzygy of male and female powers, positive and negative, active and passive, the oldest example of the Gnostic Ogdoad.
This was long ago the view of Brugsch, and it is now strongly supported by Budge, on the evidence of the texts, as against the opinion of Maspero, who would make the Hermopolitan a copy of the Heliopolitan Paut, or Company, which included Osiris and Isis. Budge, however, squarely declares that “the four pairs of gods of Hermopolis belong to a far older conception of the theogony than that of the company of gods of Heliopolis. ”
If this judgment is well founded, we have here a most interesting parallel in the Osirian type of our Trismegistic literature, in which Osiris and Isis look to Hermes (Thoth) as their teacher, as being far older and wiser than themselves.
The great struggle between Light and Darkness, of the God of Light and the God of Darkness, goes back to the earliest Egyptian tradition, and the fights of Rā and Ā pep, Ḥ eru-Behuṭ et and Set, and Horus, son of Isis, and Set, are “in reality only different versions of one and the same story, though belonging
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to different periods. ” The Horus and Set version is apparently the most recent. The names of the Light God and Dark God thus change, but what does not change is the name of the Arbiter, the Mediator, “whose duty it was to prevent either God from gaining a decisive victory, and from destroying one another. ” This Balancer was Thoth, who had to keep the opposites in equilibrium.
THE HOUSE OF THE NET
The name of the Temple of Thoth at Khemennu, or the City of Eight, was Ḥ et Ȧ btit, or “House of the Net”—a very curious expression. From Ch. cliii. of the Ritual, however, we learn that there was a mysterious Net which, as Budge says, “was supposed to exist in the Under World and that the deceased regarded it with horror and detestation. Every part of it—its poles, and ropes, and weights, and small cords, and hooks—had names which he was obliged to learn if he wished to escape from it, and make use of it to catch food for himself, instead of being caught by ‘those who laid snares. ’”
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Interpreting this from the mystical standpoint of the doctrine of Rebirth, or the rising from the dead—that is to say, of the spiritual resurrection of those who had died to the darkness of their lower natures and had become alive to the light of the spiritual life, and this too while alive in the body and not after the death of this physical frame—I would venture to suggest that this Net was the symbol of a certain condition of the inner nature which shut in the man into the limitations of the conventional life of the world, and shut him off from the memory of his true self. The poles, ropes, weights, small cords, and hooks
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were symbols of the anatomy and physiology, so to say, of the invisible “body” or “carapace” or “egg” or “envelope” of the soul. The normal man was emeshed in this engine of Fate; the man who received the Mind inverted this Net, so to speak, transmuted and transformed it, so that he could catch food for himself. “Come ye after me and I will make you fishers of men. ” The food with which the “Christ” nourishes his “body” is supplied by men.
Thus in a prayer in this chapter of the Ritual we read: “Hail, thou ‘God who lookest behind thee, ’ 1 thou ‘God who hast gained the mastery over thine heart, ’ 2 I go a-fishing with the cordage [? net] of the ‘Uniter of the earth, ’ and of him that maketh a way through the earth. 3 Hail ye Fishers who have given birth to your own fathers, 4 who lay snares with your nets, and who go round about in the chambers of the waters, take ye not me in the net wherewith ye ensnare the helpless fiends, and rope me not in with the rope wherewith ye roped in the abominable fiends of earth, which had a frame which reached unto heaven, and weighted parts that rested upon earth. ” 5
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And in another chapter (cxxxiii. ) the little man says to the Great Man within him: “Lift thyself up, O thou Rā, who dwellest in this divine shrine; draw thou unto thyself the winds, inhale the North wind, and swallow thou the beqesu of thy net on the day wherein thou breathest Maā t. ”
“On the day wherein thou breathest Maā t” suggests the inbreathing or inspiration of Truth and Righteousness, the Holy Ghost, or Holy Breath or Life, the Spouse of the Ordering Mind or Logos. The winds are presumably the four great cosmic currents of the Divine Breath, the North wind being the “down-breath” of the Great Sphere.
The term beqesu has not yet been deciphered (can it mean knots? ); but the swallowing of the Net seems to suggest the transformation of it, inwardly digesting of it, in such a fashion that the lower is set free and becomes one with the higher.
And that this idea of a net is very ancient, especially in its macrocosmic significance, is evidenced by the parallel of the Assyrian and Babylonian versions of the great fight between the Sun-god Marduk and the Chaotic Mother Tiamat and her titanic and daimonic powers of disordered motion and instability—both Egyptian and Babylonian traditions probably being derived from some primitive common source.
“He (Marduk) set lightning in front of him, with burning fire he filled his body. He made a net to enclose the inward parts of Tiamat, the Four Winds he set so that nothing of her might escape; the South wind and the North wind, and the East wind and the West
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wind, he brought near to the net which his father Anu had given him. ” 1
Now in the Hymns of the popular Hermes-cult found in the Greek Magic Papyri, one of the most favourite forms of address to Hermes is “O thou of the four winds. ” Moreover, we may compare with the rope with which the Fishers “rope the abominable fiends of earth, ” the passage of Athenagoras to which we have already referred, and in which he tells us concerning the Mysteries that the mythos ran that Zeus, after dismembering his father, and taking the kingdom, pursued his mother Rhea who refused his nuptials. “But she having assumed a serpent form, he also assumed the same form, and having bound her with what is called the ‘Noose of Hercules’ (τ ῷ κ α λ ο υ μ έ ν ῳ Ἡ ρ α κ λ ε ι ω τ ι κ ῷ ἄ μ μ α τ ι ), was joined with her. And the symbol of this transformation is the Rod of Hermes. ”
Here again it is the symbolic Caduceus that represents the equilibrium between the opposed forces; it is the power of Thoth that binds and loosens; he holds the keys of heaven and hell, of life and death. It is further quite evident that Athenagoras is referring to a Hellenistic form of the Mysteries, in which the influence of Egypt is dominant. The “Noose of Hercules” is thus presumably the “Noose of Ptah. ” Now Ptah is the creator and generator, and his “Noose” or “Tie” is probably the Ankh-tie or symbol of life, the familiar crux ansata, of which the older form is a twisted rope, probably representing the binding together of male and female life in generation. Ptah is also the God of Fire, and we should not forget that it is Hephaistos in Greek myth who catches Aphrodite and Ares in a Net which he has cunningly contrived—at which the gods laughed in High Olympus.
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In the list of titles of the numerous works belonging to the cycle of Orphic literature, one is called The Veil (Π έ π λ ο ς ) and another The Net (Δ ί κ τ υ ο ν ). 1
In the Panathenæ a the famous Peplum, Veil, Web, or Robe of Athena, the Goddess of Wisdom, was borne aloft like the sail of a galley; but this was the symbol only of the Mysteries. Mystically it signified the Veil of the Universe, studded with stars, the many-coloured Veil of Nature, 2 the famous Veil or Robe of Isis, that no “mortal” or “dead man” has raised, for that Veil was the spiritual nature of the man himself, and to raise it he had to transcend the limits of individuality, break the bonds of death, and so become consciously immortal.
Eschenbach 3 is thus quite correct when, in another of its aspects, he refers this Veil to the famous Net of Vulcan. Moreover Aristotle, quoting the Orphic writings, speaks of the “living creature born in the webs of the Net”; 4 while Photius tells us that the book of Dionysius Æ geensis, entitled Netting, or Concerning Nets (Δ ι κ τ υ α κ ά ), treated of the generation of mortals. 5 And Plato himself likens the intertwining of the nerves, veins, and arteries to the “network of a basket” or a bird-cage. 6
All of which, I think, shows that Thoth’s Temple of the Net must have had some more profound significance in its name than that it was a building in which “the emblem of a net, or perhaps a net itself, was venerated, ” as Budge lamely surmises.
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