Lost knowledge: the Book of Toth
Leaving the main road of Malawi, a small town in Upper Egypt, eight and a half kilometers away you come across the village of El- Ashmunein, the ancient sacred center of Khmunu, the capital of the 15th Egyptian nome, the Hermopolis of the Greeks. We are already in the desert and the sand envelops the few remains of the surviving monuments like a thick blanket dominated by the rocky buttresses of the Gebel. Once the water channeled from the nearby Nile kept aridity at bay and groves of tamarisk and palm trees shaded this important center dedicated to the moon-god Toth, the Healer, the Scribe of the Gods, the inventor of writing and mathematics and of the calendar, the Wisest among the Egyptian creator deities.
Toth had a reputation as a healer as he had cured the gods Horus and Seth after their fight in which they had literally torn each other to pieces. The Pyramid Texts say that the dispute took place in Hermopolis, where Egypt was divided between the two divinities under the judgment of Toth. For this reason the city became an important cultural and religious center of the moon-god with the face of an ibis or monkey, also depicted in one of the four couples of the Ogdoad. The name of the city Khmunu meant, the city of the Eight, the place where the sun had risen for the first time and where creation had begun.
As scribe of the gods Toth wrote the name of each new pharaoh on the leaves of a sacred tree that grew inside circular brick tubs on the "tamarisk plain." Fifteen meter thick walls delimited the temple inside which there were two large statues of the god Toth in the form of a baboon, an animal whose human expression recalls the primordial state of man at the dawn of his evolution, before in other words that a divine spark transformed him.
Toth was considered so important that Pharaoh Amenhotep III had his royal cartouche engraved on these statues as if to emphasize that the god rightfully belonged to him, conferring on the sovereign the same divine attributes of infinite wisdom and knowledge.
Strangely, more than the other gods, Toth was cajoled and elected protector of suffering humanity, continuing to exercise a subtle influence even when the importance of the other Egyptian deities were eclipsed by Hellenism and then by Christianity.
In the Coptic era the figure of Toth was transformed into a fearsome magician, and finally into the "Hermes Trimegistus" of the Alexandrian esoteric tradition.
The house of life
In El-Ashmunein of the temple of Toth nothing remains today. Its stones were used to make lime and the monuments demolished and dispersed. So a few windswept and sun-baked ruins remain. However, somewhere under the sand the secret room that once contained the sanctuary's famous library could be hidden.
Egyptian tradition claimed that the ibis-faced god, inventor of hieroglyphics, had compiled a book containing the basis of all knowledge: the mythical and powerful "Book of Toth". It is clear that this book needed to be jealously guarded.
The Toth papyrus, like all important Egyptian papyri, was preserved in the secret library of the temple of Hermopolis, or in the "House of Life" (in Egyptian "Per-ankh").
Every temple, from Karnak to Luxor to Abydo, possessed a similar library of sacred books. In the Temple of Edfu, in Upper Egypt, built between 237 and 57 BC in honor of the god Horus, you can still visit one of these "Halls of Books". In a library niche, the hieroglyphics indicating the names of 37 sacred books now lost are still visible. They were works that served to repel the forces of evil, demons, reptiles and lions, and this can be understood from the same titles, such as "Conduction of the Temple", the "Book of the Evil Eye" and that of the "Periodic Return of the Sun" . There was also a kind of geographical atlas to know every place on Earth. In short, all of Toth's knowledge was distilled in that document which in 200 AD the emperor Septimius Severus ordered to be enclosed in the tomb of Alexander the Great. It was a strange decision that could be explained by the ability of this papyrus to cause trouble: something for which there is abundant documentation.
The "Westcar Papyrus", a manuscript written between the 16th or 17th dynasty, found by Miss Westcar, the Englishman who brought it from Egypt, tells of the search conducted by Cheops to find "something" that belonged to the temple of Toth and its double aspect which, as stated in an enigmatic formula of the Westcar papyrus (733), defines it as a "nocturnal serpent that attacks the night".
Toth, in fact, was the son of Aner, a name which in Egyptian means stone, and as such defined as an "evil" entity, "coming from divinity" who fell to Earth. What meaning do these words hide?
Why, at a certain point in Egyptian history, is Toth mentioned as having the secrets of the "Emerald Tablet"? Was the mysterious book engraved on stone?
Certainly the danger of the Book of Toth was known in antiquity, so much so that in a papyrus translated in Paris in 1868, it tells of a court conspiracy that ended with the destruction of the very Book that had served to inspire it.
With the help of his magical formulas, some courtiers conspired against the pharaoh who, having miraculously escaped the danger, gave the order to execute the rebels and to burn every copy of that abhorrent text to prevent others from attempting to use its magic.
Metternich's stele recalls how Toth himself destroyed his papyrus, considering it dangerous.
The story of Setne
Another quotation from the Book of Thoth is reported in a papyrus found in 1864 in Deir el Medina, Egypt, during an archaeological excavation. In the tomb of a Coptic monk there were manuscripts from the Egyptian era preserved in a wooden coffin.
Probably the dead man's brothers, considering those papyri dangerous for the faith, had buried them with their owner, the only one capable of reading their contents.
The papyrus, preserved today in the Cairo Museum, tells the story of another papyrus which tells the story of Setne, son of Pharaoh Ramesses II, collector of ancient texts, who, to gain possession of the Book of Thoth, stole it from a tomb in Memphis bringing upon itself a terrible curse.
"Setne - said the manuscript - found a stone which he immediately raised, and which hid the entrance to the tomb. The tomb shone with the light that came out of the book and there stood the magician Naneferptah with his wife Ihuret and his son, because their Double was with him thanks to the power of the book of Toth. (...) The book of which I speak to you is in the midst of the waters of Coptic, inside an iron casket; the iron casket is inside a copper casket and the casket of copper is inside a wooden casket (...) But all around the caskets for twelve thousand cubits there are serpents, scorpions and reptiles of every kind, including a serpent of eternity coiled around the caskets."
Setne took that book in his hand and read a spell in it to
"...enchant the Sky, the Earth, the Underworld, the mountains and the seas, and I knew everything that the birds of the sky and the fish of the sea and the beasts of the seas said. mountains".
Unfortunately, a terrible curse struck the entire family of the unwary sorcerer. An attempt was made to remedy this by putting the book back in the tomb but Setne, thirteen of his brothers and many other relatives died killed by the spirits. Merenptah survived and inherited the kingdom.
The research continues
The cult of Toth spread throughout the Mediterranean, especially in nearby Phoenician Carthage. Here, in the temple on the hill of Byrsa, where the Bardo Museum is today, a temple was built to the lunar god Eshmoun, equivalent of Toth, in turn protector of culture and intellect.
The temple stood not far from the port, built, according to some, reflecting the proportions of the mythical Atlantis, protected, like the Egyptian temple of Hermopolis, by a more internal wall than that which surrounded Carthage. Here too, in the secret crypts of the temple, thousands of sacred scrolls written by the same hand of Thoth who had taught men to "...calculate time, years and the secrets of magic" were deposited.
The founders of Carthage made copies of the papyri of Thoth, later to become Hermes Trimegistus, the "thrice great", as over time his cult spread to the most important cities of the Mediterranean.
The library of Eshmoun in Carthage was comparable to that of Alexandria, Pergamum, Syracuse, Athens, cities which with their maritime trade spread the cult and culture of this divinity throughout the ancient world.
The hope of finding the Book of Thoth, or one of its copies, still travels in time. Promising teachings, initiations, apocalypses, like all mysterious books it continues to influence men at all times.
The importance of this text must have been truly great, so much so that the Berbers demanded from Rome the Punic Books, already contained in the temple of Baal Ammon in Carthage (including the Book of Toth), in exchange for help in defeating the African power.
Then there are those who wonder why Cleopatra insistently requested some mysterious papyri from Pergamum to replace those lost in the fire of the Library of Alexandria.
Finally, we are still racking our brains to understand what the book of Juba II was, ruler of Mauritania as well as geographer and naturalist cited several times by Pliny the Elder, in which occult revelations were written taken from that mysterious and very ancient text containing the knowledge maps of the ancient world, including the location of Atlantis.
