Egypt

Four historical contexts and their sources

The section uses four chronological contexts: Egyptian-language sources; Greek and Roman interpretations; Renaissance and early modern esoteric Egypt; and modern occult and initiatory traditions. These are not degrees of authenticity. They identify who made a statement, what sources were available, and whether the work was funerary, philosophical, scholarly, religious or ritual. A Golden Dawn god-form and an Egyptian funerary text can both matter deeply while belonging to different histories.

1. c. 3100 BCE – IV CE

   Egyptian sources

   What Egyptians wrote, on walls, coffins and papyri

   The Pyramid Texts, the Coffin Texts, the Book of the Dead, temple inscriptions, medical and magical papyri. Egyptians wrote these to do things: to bring down a fever, to turn a scorpion aside, to carry a childbirth safely, to equip the dead for a journey with real hazards on it, to keep a god housed and fed and clothed. The record runs three thousand years and does not speak with one voice — a practice attested at Thebes under Ramesses II belongs to that place and that reign before it belongs to Egypt at large. Where this section can cite it, it does; where it cannot, it says so.

2. V BCE – IV CE

   The Greek and Roman reading of Egypt

   Egypt explained to a Greek-reading world, in Greek terms

   Herodotus, Plutarch, Diodorus, Iamblichus, the Hermetica and the magical papyri. These writers set out to make Egyptian religion intelligible to readers of Greek, and their chief tool was equivalence: Herodotus tells you that Osiris is Dionysos and leaves you to work with it. Several were also arguing that Greek philosophy had an Egyptian pedigree, which is a claim about Greece as much as about Egypt. They stood close to Egypt in time, were often well informed, and wrote Greek for Greeks — so this is Egyptian religion given in another language and another frame. It is also the channel through which most of what later Europe knew about Egypt arrived.

3. 1419 – 1822

   Renaissance and early modern Europe

   Europe reading Egypt for a wisdom older than its own

   From the rediscovery of the Hieroglyphica in 1419 to Champollion in 1822, European scholars read Egypt as the home of a wisdom older than Greek philosophy — a prisca theologia, a first theology held whole in antiquity and broken up since. On the authority of the Greek writers above they took hieroglyphs to be a philosophical picture-language rather than a script, and read them for meanings accordingly, which is both what their sources described and what they had come looking for. Ficino, Kircher, the Rosicrucian manifestos and Freemasonry's Egyptian degrees belong here. The body of work is substantial, often beautiful, and shaped European thought for four centuries.

4. 1875 onward

   The orders' Egypt

   Egyptian material built into a working ritual system

   The Theosophical Society, the Golden Dawn, Thelema and what followed. These orders were building ritual meant to be performed, and Egyptian material offered what such a system needs: a vocabulary carrying the weight of antiquity, and an iconography vivid enough to be assumed as a god-form and held in a hall. The Egypt they drew on is largely the one assembled above rather than the Egyptology of their own day, and the god-forms, grade names and attributions are nineteenth-century constructions in Egyptian vocabulary, made deliberately and in use ever since. Naming the context says which body of writing they came out of; the orders were frequently clearer about that than their readers have been.

The hinge is 1822

Jean-François Champollion demonstrated the phonetic character of hieroglyphic writing in 1822. Earlier European scholars had worked from Greek authorities who described hieroglyphs as symbolic images of priestly philosophy; decipherment made it possible to read Egyptian-language sources alongside that inherited account. The date therefore marks a change in the evidence available to European readers, while the older philosophical and esoteric tradition continued on its own terms.

Religion and magic in Egyptian sources

Egyptian magical practice is attested in enormous quantity, much of it protective and medical: spells against scorpions and snakebite, for childbirth and fever; rites that prepare the dead to meet the hazards of the next world; and temple service performed daily for the gods. Heka — the word usually translated magic — is a power used by gods and human beings and is also personified as a god. Egyptian sources place it within religious and cosmic order rather than drawing the modern boundary between magic and religion.

In many periods an Egyptian priest served in rotation, and a temple was an estate with fields and granaries as well as a sanctuary. Daily service opened the shrine and washed, clothed, fed and censed the god before closing it again. The lector priest carried and recited ritual books and became an important model for the Egyptian magician in later Greek writing. That reception begins with a recognisable Egyptian office and develops it for new literary, philosophical and ritual settings.

The signs

54 hieroglyphs, each found by its official Unicode name and drawn from the outline of an open-licence font. Hieroglyphic is writing, and the signs are given with the sounds they represent: twenty-four of them stand for a single consonant, which is the set that can spell a name the language had no word for.

• Vulture
• Reed
• Double reed
• Forearm
• Quail chick
• Foot

What the signs sound like, and a box that spells a name in them The Rosetta Stone, and the year 1822 All 54 signs in the reference

Scope of this section

Planetary correspondences associated with Egyptian deities are presented under their Greek or later source contexts rather than as pharaonic doctrine. Tarot's Egyptian reception begins with Court de Gébelin in the 1780s and is treated in the Tarot section as an important episode in the cards' esoteric history. Hieroglyphs here receive only the sounds and words recorded by the reference; symbolic readings such as the djed as stability remain attached to the traditions and sources that make them.

Historical contexts and sources Egypt and its esoteric reception