While the image of two canines guarding the path is found in the earliest occult versions of the Moon, the identification of these figures with Anubis has its origins in the Philosophus Ritual of the Golden Dawn:Hierophant: …The Dogs are the jackals of the Egyptian ANUBIS, guarding the Gates of the East and of the West, shown by the two Towers between which lies the Path of all the heavenly bodies ever rising in the East and setting in the West.
Thus, in order to understand the significance of the dual form of Anubis as he pertains to the Moon in the Thoth deck, we must examine the god in the context of the Golden Dawn.
The concept of dual forms of Anubis was probably gleaned by Golden Dawn founders Mathers and Westcott from the research of Egyptologist E. A. Wallis Budge. Budge was the Keeper of the Egyptian Antiquities of the British Museum and the principal source of information on the subject of Egyptology in his time. In Gods of the Egyptians, Budge writes of...
…the two jackal gods Anpu, or Anubis, and Ap-uat, who are only two forms of one and the same god. Strictly speaking, Anpu is the ‘opener of the roads of the South, the power of the two lands,’ and Apuat is the ‘opener of the roads to the North, the power of heaven.’ The two jackal gods are often depicted on stelae, where they symbolize the two halves of the year, and the night and the day sky, and the periods of waxing and waning of the powers of nature in summer and winter.
Budge associates the dual forms with the North and South directions. As the guardians of the “Gates of the East and of the West,” that is, the path oriented on an East-West axis, we find them placed in their proper directional posts in the Trump.
Budge also presents the dual forms of Anubis as a pair of polarized opposites: earth and heaven, night and day, winter and summer. In essence, they are darkness and light, or as expressed in terms of the Tree of Life, severity and mercy ... Read More ...
