Hieroglyphs
"The Word of God" - this is how the Egyptians spoke about hieroglyphs. In ancient times, it was believed that the hieroglyphs "speak, indicate and remain silent."
A triple meaning was put into them: the usual phonetic reading for writing, the ability to symbolically express a thought on papyrus or stone, and an esoteric meaning known only to the initiated priests and kept secret.
In the Egyptian system of the Middle Kingdom there were about seven hundred hieroglyphs, some of which had more than one meaning. Hieroglyphs were considered symbols of secret knowledge. When transferring knowledge to students, the priests of Egyptian temples did not use ordinary written signs, but drew symbols into which they put thought forms and thought images.
The ancient Egyptian religion was based on the belief in the ability of the "word" to have a magical effect in the afterlife. Special prayers and spells were carefully recorded, and then placed in tombs to facilitate the transition to another world. The murals of Egyptian tombs served not only as decoration, they performed magical functions. The Egyptians believed that by depicting an object or event, they "breathed life into them."
Like the paintings on the tombs, the Egyptian hieroglyphs lived their own magical life. By depicting a person's name with the help of a hieroglyph, it was possible to ensure him eternal life. To erase the name of the enemy meant to prevent him from being reborn after death. In the "Pyramid Texts" intended to protect the pharaoh during his journey to the afterlife, the hieroglyphs denoting the forces of evil were deliberately distorted or written incompletely.
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In the days of the Middle Kingdom, for rich and high-ranking people, spells were written on wooden sarcophagi. These are known as the "Sarcophagus Texts". In the era of the New Kingdom, these texts were modified, supplemented and compiled "The Book of the Dead". The papyrus scrolls that accompanied the deceased contained excerpts from the Book of the Dead and were illustrated with spells. The traditional plot was the weighing of the heart in the hall of justice before God Osiris.
The ancient Egyptians believed that every deceased had to appear before 42 judges and plead innocent or guilty of sins. The soul of the deceased was weighed on a scale balanced by the ostrich feather of the Goddess Maat, the daughter of the Sun God Ra. Libra was held by God Anubis, the verdict was pronounced by the husband of Maat - God Thoth. If a person lived his life "with Maat in his heart", was pure and sinless, he revived for a new happy life.
CHAMPOLION
For a long time, scholars have tried to read Egyptian hieroglyphs. Since the time of Herodotus, it was known that the Egyptians used three types of writing: hieroglyphic - signs, hieratic - cursive and demotic - "folk writing".
In the IV century AD, the last representative of the Egyptian priesthood of Gorapollo - Horus Apollo, compiled in the Coptic language a treatise on ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics "Hieroglyphics", dedicated to the interpretation of Egyptian hieroglyphs, which has come down to us in Greek translation.
Gorapollo argued that all Egyptian hieroglyphs are ideograms - semantic signs. In 1822, the French scientist Jean Francois Champollion, who deciphered the Egyptian hieroglyphs, proved the erroneousness of Gorapollo's views and established that in the ancient Egyptian writing, in addition to ideograms, there were phonetic signs.
The Rosetta Stone - a slab of black basalt found in 1799 near the town of Rosetta in the Nile Delta by a member of the French expedition Bouchard during the construction of Fort Saint-Julien - became the key to unraveling the Egyptian hieroglyphic and demotic writing. The Rosetta stone contains a decree dating back to 196 BC, the time of the reign of Ptolemy V Epiphanes, and written in three types of writing: hieroglyphs - sacred signs used by the priests, demotic writing - widespread cursive writing in that era and in Greek.
In the inscription carved on the stone, the Egyptian priests thanked the Pharaoh Ptolemy I Epiphanes for the benefits rendered to them to the temples. To glorify the king, the priests decided to erect his statues in all the sanctuaries of the country. In conclusion, they reported that in memory of this event, an inscription was carved on the memorial stone "in sacred, native and Hellenic letters."
The name Ptolemy V, written in the "cartouche", and also found in 1815 on the island of Philae, the second bilingual spelling of the names of Ptolemy and Cleopatra, allowed the French scientist Champollion to decipher the first ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and initiate the study of hieroglyphic writing.
Champollion discovered the Egyptian writing system, establishing that it was based on the sound principle. He deciphered most of the hieroglyphs, established the relationship between hieroglyphic, hieratic and demotic writing, read and translated the first Egyptian texts, compiled a dictionary and grammar of the ancient Egyptian language.
TOTA BOOK
The Egyptians called their writing "the letter of the word of God." According to them, the letter was under the special protection of God Thoth. He was a "scribe of the Gods" - an intermediary between Gods and people. According to Egyptian mythology, Thoth was revered as the God of wisdom, counting and writing, the patron of sciences, sacred books, the creator of the calendar.
According to the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, Thoth discovered numbers, geometry, astronomy and letters for the Egyptians. Legend has it that Thoth - Atlantis possessed a secret teaching, the legacy of the civilization of the lost Atlantis, he was the author of 36 thousand books on magic, astrology, alchemy and medicine, the most important of which is the famous "Emerald Tablet", on which the signs of the ancient Atlantean language are carved.
Legend has it that the "Emerald Tablet" was found in the 4th century BC by Alexander the Great in the tomb of Thoth, who was buried by the Egyptian priests in the Great Pyramid of Giza. According to legend, by this time the text of the Tablets had existed for many thousands of years.
Researchers believe that the "Emerald Tablet" - "The Book of Thoth" was written on 78 gold plates more than ten thousand years ago.
The golden tablets disappeared, the book was copied several times on papyri, copies of which were destroyed by the priests, and later by the Inquisition.
Only a few scattered pages remain of one of the copies, which are kept in the Library of Alexandria in Egypt.
Possessing the "Book of Thoth", priests and pharaohs acquired tremendous power. The book contained the secret of “power over the worlds, it gave power over the earth, ocean and celestial bodies. With its help it was possible to discover secret ways of communication, raise the dead and influence other people."
Tarot
French writer, historian and philosopher Jacques Bergier in his work "The Cursed Books" wrote that according to legend, in the 15th century, a secret society that possessed the "Book of Thoth" distributed its summary on public cards - the famous deck of cards for playing Tarot … French scientist, occultist, freemason Cours de Gebelin in his book "The Primitive World" says that he got access to the ancient Egyptian "Book of Thoth", which survived after the destruction of Alexandria.
At the end of the 18th century, Antoine Cour de Jebelin put forward a theory that the Tarot cards contain the universal knowledge and secrets of the priests of Ancient Egypt, and the word "tarot" means "the royal path". In the next century, the French occultist Eliphas Levi associated the Tarot with the Jewish Kabbalah, a complex system of mysticism and magic that originated in medieval Spain and became the basis of occultism.
Tarot has long been associated with secret mystical knowledge. At all times, people engaged in secret mystical and magical practices, from ancient priests and magi to medieval alchemists and modern mystics, studied this mysterious system of symbols.
The text of the Book of Thoth has survived to this day in the form of Tarot cards. It is believed that 78 Tarot cards originated from 78 gold tablets, pages of the "Book of Thoth", written by Thoth - Hermes. In the legends of the Hermetic (esoteric) orders, it is mentioned that 22 paintings of the Major Arcana of the Tarot were depicted on the walls of 22 rooms of the Egyptian temple, in which the students of magicians were initiated into the secret mysteries.
One of the most popular in the world is the "Tarot Tota", created by the English occultist Aleister Crowley in collaboration with the artist Frida Harris. Each card is an independent work of art, and all together they form a model of Crowley's magical universe, in which the Tree of Life and the letters of the Jewish Kabbalah, European astrology, alchemy, the Chinese I Ching, Greek and Egyptian mythology intertwined.
As the French occultist Eliphas Levi wrote: "All religions have retained the memory of one primary book, written in hieroglyphs by the sages of the first centuries of the world, the symbols of which, being subsequently simplified, served the Scripture as letters, the Word - categories, and occult philosophy - its mysterious signs."
Vladimir Shmakov in the book “The Sacred Book of Thoth. The great arcana of the Tarot "wrote:" Imprinted in symbols, the doctrine of truth has come down to us in the most ancient monument of human thought, the origin of which is lost in the fog of centuries. This monument is the Sacred Book of Thoth, the Great Arcana of the Tarot.
There is nothing new in the world, human civilization moves in a spiral, and from century to century people follow the same paths. The history known to us embraces only a tiny part of the true complete history, it has not preserved the memory of the former brilliant eras of life and activity of mankind both in the world of spirit and in the world of reason."
Author: Valentina Zhitanskaya