We all know the story that the very name “alchemy” is supposed to be derived from the land of Egypt: “Al-Khemit”. Egypt itself was a symbol of alchemy, the outcome of a transformative substance: the Egyptian soil, deposited by the Nile, allowing farmers to grow their crops and feed the nation. Now wonder that the Nile was considered to be at the origin of all life; for the ancient Egyptians, it was.
We also know how our modern chemistry is derived from medieval alchemical practices. It seems that what was held as science were those aspects of alchemy that were clearly and without any doubt repeatable and demonstrable.
What is less known, is that at the very heart of ancient Egypt, at the centre of their knowledge, was “the Book of Thoth”, one of the first, if not the first, “alchemical manuals”. This “body of knowledge”, for a book, such as the Corpus Hermeticum, was literally seen as a “body” of the god, whether Hermes or his Egyptian equivalent Thoth, consisted out of two parts. Part one was a manual containing magic for the heavens, the earth, etc. Part two was a manual to attain knowledge of immortality – and perhaps the latter may not have been radically different from the so-called Book of the Dead, which was all about attaining immortality. The Book was nothing more than a set of instructions, which is what magic is all about.
The heart of the cult of Thoth was Hermopolis. Hermopolis was located on the west bank of the Nile, about midway between Thebes and Memphis, across the Nile from Akhetaten, the new Egyptian capital founded by the rebel pharaoh Akhenaten. The Ancient Egyptian name of the city, Khmun, means the “8-town”, after the group of eight deities (Ogdoad) who represented the world before creation. The name Khmun, of course, is close to Khem; or should we read “alchemy” as al-Khmun?
Thoth’s cult, like all others, championed its own creation myth. On the Island of Flame, four elements had come into being at the same time. Together with the unnamed creator, they were the Great Five – the Fifth Element. The Pyramid Texts said that “the Waters spoke to Infinity, Nothingness, Nowhere, and Darkness” and creation began. The four became eight – male and female. Out of the union of the eight came the primeval egg and out of the egg came the light of the sun. Already, with its emphasis on the four elements (Earth, Water, Fire, Air) and its numerical sequence of multiplication, we are very close to the core of medieval alchemy.
In a Ptolemaic papyrus, we read how Thoth wrote the book with his own hand and in it was all the magic in the world. “If you read the first page, you will enchant the sky, the earth, the abyss, the mountain, and the sea: you will understand the language of birds in the air, and you will know what the creeping things in the earth are saying, and you will see the fishes from the darkest depths of the sea.”
Such promises are clearly linked to shamanic powers and as the Egyptian civilisation developed out of a native shamanic culture, we should not at all be surprised. “If you read the other page, even though you are dead and in the world of ghosts, you could come back to the earth in the form you once had. And besides this, you will see the sun shining in the sky with the full moon and the stars, and you will behold the great shapes of the gods.” Amen.
The Book of Thoth was said to contain all the knowledge of the universe. As a consequence, it was a very prized possession. The priests of Thoth must have been in a very privileged position, as no doubt many considered them to have access to precious knowledge.
It is therefore not surprising that in ancient Egypt, there were many stories of people going in search of the book, trying to unlock its power and its knowledge. Most often, the protagonists of these tales were princes – a setting very similar to the medieval Grail legends, in which the protagonist is Perceval, a cousin to the king. Indeed, one could argue that there are several parallels between the legends of Perceval and his quest for the Grail and the Egyptian princes’ quest for the Book of Thoth. (Read more ...)
We all know the story that the very name “alchemy” is supposed to be derived from the 