Searching for the Lost Book of Spells ｜ Myth Hunters - Episode 8

Legend has it there's a 5,000 year old book of magic. It was handed down by an Egyptian god and contains spells that can predict the future. It's called the Book of Thoth. And what it says is deeply mysterious. Some say it contains ancient rituals used by secret organisations. Each person who is admitted to the order must die symbolically and be reborn. Others say it offers readers the power to divine the future through tarot cards. The original book of the tarot was really engraved on gold tablets and it was the Book of Thoth. For yet others, the book offers its followers a world of free love and drugs central to the rock and roll culture of the 1960s. Some of the most famous people in the world, like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, are deeply interested in this sort of thing. But what is the truth about the Book of Thoth? What does it really say? Does it even exist? Now scholars in Egypt are finding the answer. This is the story of the quest to find the truth about what some claim is the most important book ever written. Central London. Among the hustle and bustle are bookshops specialising in the occult and esoteric. They sell everything from books on ancient wisdom to magic charms. But one of the most common images is that of an ancient Egyptian god. He's called Thoth, a strange figure with the body of a human and the head of an animal. And on the shelves are copies of his book, the so-called Book of Thoth. 5,000 years after the Books of Thoth were originally composed, they are still beguiling modern people. I get asked to talk at conferences where the imagery above the stage, on the name cards, is a figure of Thoth. So who was Thoth? And why does a text from an age dating back to the pyramids exercise such a pull even today? The answer lies in a tangled tale that started over 2,000 miles away in North Africa. The Nile Valley. For years, at sites across Egypt, archaeologists have been uncovering what is probably the greatest civilisation of the ancient world. Martin Raven has been digging at a 4,000-year-old burial ground. We have uncovered this vast necropolis full of tombs with beautiful paintings, wall reliefs, inscriptions. Digs like this have revealed that ancient Egypt had a sophisticated culture, a complex belief system and a pantheon of gods. One of the most important was Thoth. He appears as a human body with the head of an ibis or as the figure of a baboon. Ancient Egyptian gods were invisible, but if they wanted to manifest themselves to our poor eyes, they needed a bodily form. Many gods had a sacred animal that was thought to be connected with them. The baboon, a monkey, looks very wise sometimes, very human-like. It must have deep thoughts. So he was connected with the god Thoth. The other sacred animal is the ibis. He's very quiet. He walks through the marshes, through the mud, but he looks as if he also has very deep thoughts. To the ancient Egyptians, Thoth was a god with exceptional powers. Thoth was the secretary of the gods. He noted down what they decided. So he became the god of wisdom, sometimes also the god of healing, and the god of magic. According to legend, Thoth handed down this magic to mortals in a book. It was said to grant its readers amazing powers. Ancient Egyptian literature has it that the Book of Thoth contains esoteric or magic wisdom, secret wisdom, that would allow an individual to communicate with the gods, talk to animals, to access the afterlife, these kinds of things. There's a wonderful story about a very important magician who found out where this Book of Thoth is kept, and he appropriates it. And he suddenly understands the language of other animals, and also he sees all the stars moving in the sky. He finally understands the mechanism that is behind the whole universe. Such was the reputation of the Book of Thoth. Its fame would spread across the ancient world. In the 3rd century BC, the warrior king Alexander the Great invaded Egypt. The Greek occupiers were amazed by what they found. They were overawed by this ancient civilization with wonderful buildings, the pyramids, statuary, all of the fabulous stuff that we see today, but then it was in its full glory. They were so impressed they adopted much of the Egyptian belief system, including some of their gods. One of them was Thoth. The Greeks already had a figure of Hermes, who they believed to be the god who was the patron of what we would call science. He was the inventor of writing. So they came across the figure of Thoth, who the Egyptians believed was also the inventor of all the mathematics, the geometry, which had enabled them to build the pyramids. So the Greeks associated their figure of Hermes with the figure of Thoth from ancient Egypt. The Greeks declared that Thoth and Hermes were the same god. It's said they also adopted Thoth's book and created a new version, the Corpus Hermeticum. But as they did so, Greek influences crept in. The original Egyptian text and the new Greek text became confused. And so as Greek culture swallowed Egyptian, Thoth's original text simply disappeared. One legend relates that a last copy of the original book was buried alongside the inquisitive Egyptian magician who'd read it and discovered the secrets of the stars. But whatever the truth, the original Egyptian book of Thoth was lost, replaced by a new Greek version. The original text would not be rediscovered for thousands of years. The Greeks were followed by the Romans. The wisdom of the Corpus Hermeticum was absorbed into early Roman culture. But then came a momentous change. Christianity spread across Europe. References to pagan gods like Thoth and Hermes were banned. The Greek version of the book of Thoth was suppressed. With the rise of Christianity, and especially with Christianity being adopted by the Roman Empire as the official religion, this older pagan philosophy gets wiped out. Those who advocated pagan ideas were burnt at the stake or broken on the wheel. The general kind of ravages of intolerance and conquest led to the loss of the Corpus Hermeticum. First, the original Egyptian book of Thoth had vanished. Now the Greek version, the Corpus Hermeticum, disappeared from sight too. Whatever had been written in the book of Thoth seemed to have been lost forever. But then there was another revolution in Western thinking. In the 1300s, the Renaissance arrived in Italy. It was a time of intellectual ferment and questioning. New ideas were born, and old ones rediscovered. They included the wisdom of Classical Greece and Egypt. The very word Renaissance means rebirth, and its first use of it that we find in the 1400s is somebody who says, I seem to see in this new learning the rebirth of the ancient culture. With it came a renewed interest in pre-Christian ideas. If you think of Botticelli's paintings, for example, of Venus and Mars, or the birth of Venus, these are pagan gods and goddesses which are being painted for the first time in Europe for a thousand years. This new interest in the wisdom of the past included the rediscovery of the Greek version of the book of Thoth, the Corpus Hermeticum. To the Christian culture of the time, it was an explosive find. The Catholic Church had been ruling Europe for over a thousand years. There was a growing sense it was overbearing and overpowerful. The institutions had become terribly corrupt. The office of the Pope had been thoroughly discredited. Indulgences were being bought and sold. The Church had fallen into a very low respect by even the common people. There was a groundswell of opposition. People began to look back to Classical Egypt and Greece for alternative religious inspiration. Somebody brought to Florence the Books of Hermes. The Corpus Hermeticum and the Court of the Medici, still reeling from the discovery of Plato and the pre-Socratic philosophers, suddenly found themselves with these Books of Hermes, the Books of Thoth, for the first time. The Greek version of the Book of Thoth was translated into Latin and published in Italy. It becomes one of the most influential books of the time. It goes into several printings over the next century and a half. It may not have been the original Egyptian text, but it spread through the Renaissance world on a wave of optimism. What made the message of this Greek version of the Book of Thoth so exciting was its vision of man's place in the world. For those seeking to challenge the orthodoxy of the Church, it came as a revelation. It was a completely different view of mankind, not as a fallen creature who, after being booted out of the Garden of Eden, wandered lost. The discovery of the Books of Thoth was saying, no, man has an exalted position within creation. The message of the Book of Thoth seemed to be saying that man was more than a servant to the gods. Not only did he have the same powers as the gods, it was his duty to use those powers to create a better world, a more beautiful world. Thoth seemed to offer a new vision of the importance of man's place on Earth. In the Books of Thoth, it says that man is halfway between the angels and the animals and has a very special role. He is a co-creator with God and he must create objects of beauty just as God has created objects of beauty. There's this whole idea of optimism about man, about the powers of the mind, the imagination, the ability to understand the world. To many people, the Book of Thoth seemed to offer an intensely attractive vision of mankind. What made this message even more powerful was its age. It seemed to come from a purer time, before the Church had been corrupted. If you were a Renaissance man, the idea was formed in your mind that if we could somehow restore this ancient wisdom to its proper place, we could once again live in a pristine world. So what was old was really good. And dating apparently from ancient Egypt, Thoth's knowledge was as old as any in the world. If you think of it as this kind of cascade, this sort of mountain or lake at the top full of this clear crystal water, and then through the ages it comes down. It's still the same water, but it gradually gets a bit muddy. And what the philosophers of the Renaissance believed when they had the Corpus of Medicum in their hands is they were going to the source. They were going to, you know, sort of the pure waters of the ancient knowledge. Yet the irony was that this whole alternative philosophy was based on the Greek version of the Book of Thoth. Nobody could be certain how much it had to do with the original Egyptian text. Yet in the name of Egyptian wisdom, it would now lead in some very curious directions. In the early 1700s, the first Grand Masonic Lodge was established in London. It would grow into the most powerful and successful secret society of all time, an organization of politicians and presidents, business and civic leaders. But in the early 1700s, it was composed of a small group of men looking for a better world. It was a time of war and intolerance. There was fighting between England and Scotland, Catholic and Protestant. The period when Freemasonry was developing was a period of great immorality. Politics and religion, huge amounts of corruption. They were trying to find a way to bring people together to forget those differences. The early Masons cast around for inspiration. They found it in the Renaissance rediscovery of the ancient world. We may not be able to trace the historical linkages directly, but we can say that the rituals and the foundation purpose of Freemasonry stretches right back into ancient Egypt. Like Renaissance man before him, the early Masons were beguiled by Thoth's can-do vision of mankind. The classical world in Egypt was seen as the start of real civilisation, where things like science, like mathematics, mathematics being the foundation of building, the Masons then saw that as the foundation of the arts that they grew out of. So there's a huge reverence for anything from classical times and from ancient Egypt. To mark this reverence, the Masons adopted Egyptian images. You suddenly get the importation of sphinxes, pyramids, anything to do with Egypt. We're sitting in Freemason's Hall in London, and lodger room number 10 there is a superb example of a restrained Egyptian architecture. They got copies of the Egyptian Book of the Dead and the walls of their temples are decorated with those, with Egyptian pillars, with lotus work. Most significantly, the Masons focused on one particular part of the Corpus Hermeticum. It was a ritual every Mason would have to go through. It came, they believed, straight from ancient Egypt. It was the ritual of rebirth. Each person who is admitted to the order must die symbolically and be reborn as a new person. And this idea of rebirth, it's central to the Books of Thoth, to the Corpus Hermeticum. And Thoth appears again in all his majesty, just as he had for the ancient Egyptians, as the figure who would grant all knowledge to the initiate and also guarantee them personal immortality. A new era claimed to have rediscovered the ways of ancient Egypt, even though the text they'd based it on was Greek. But nobody could say what was in the original Book of Thoth. As a result, there would soon be several other versions of it. Paris, the late 1700s. As Freemasonry was spreading through Europe, something new was stirring in France. Antoine Cordejabalon was a French-Swiss writer and thinker. Cordejabalon, he was an occultist, he was a Mason. In fact, he belonged to the same Masonic lodge in Paris that Voltaire belonged to, and he was friends with the King of France. So he was really connected. Cordejabalon had two overriding interests. One was ancient Egypt. The other was card games. Cards were a popular pastime. Many were illustrated with mythical or popular figures and events. They were used to play a game called tarot, the 18th-century equivalent of rummy or bridge. In the mid-1700s, Cordejabalon put his two interests together. Thumbing through a deck of tarot cards, he came to a startling conclusion. So he starts looking through the deck and goes, wow, this is based on Hermetic philosophy. And then he starts looking through the cards and he starts realising that they all seem to be about the most important book in the world, the Book of Knowledge, the Book of Thoth, that was just disguised as a common deck of cards. Cordejabalon's theory that the cards were the original Book of Thoth was not as strange as it appears. He knew that the Egyptians would have used hieroglyphics to write the Book of Thoth. Hieroglyphics are pictures, so are tarot cards. It therefore made sense to him that the original Egyptian wisdom of the Book of Thoth could have once been represented by pictures on cards. It just needed somebody with the insight of Cordejabalon to discover it. So here we had this set of cards that were in pictures, but this could actually be this hieroglyphic book. So this could be the Book of Thoth. In 1733, Cordejabalon announced his conclusions in a new book. It made the entirely novel claim that the Book of Thoth, lost for 5,000 years, was actually a pack of cards. He even claimed the word tarot derived from ancient Egypt. He said that the word tarot he felt was an Egyptian word which proved that the tarot was Egyptian. And he said that it was the Egyptian word tar-rah, which meant the royal road, being the royal road to knowledge, suggesting that it was the Book of Thoth. It didn't seem to matter at the time that nobody could read Egyptian hieroglyphics. Cordejabalon believed he'd stumbled on a profound truth and discovered the original Egyptian Book of Thoth. His book would generate widespread interest. One man captivated by it was an itinerant salesman, teacher, and spiritualist called Jean-Baptiste Alliette. For years he'd been dabbling in the occult. He now took Cordejabalon's idea and turned it into his own. He published a subtly different set of tarot cards. He called them the Attella Tarot. Alliette basically called himself Attella for magical reasons and all it was was his last name spelled backwards. The cards had what Alliette claimed was an authentic Egyptian feel. You see in this first card here, which represents a male querent, that he actually looks like an Egyptian man. A querent is a person seeking knowledge in a tarot reading. But Alliette didn't stop there. OK, now if we compare the fool in this Attella to the French fool, you see the French fool is being attacked by a dog because he's a stranger. Now to make it sound more Egyptian, Attella thought that the creature attacking him should be a leopard, thinking that leopards came from Egypt. So you see our fool is being bitten on the leg by a leopard instead of a dog. These cards, according to Alliette, represented the true wisdom of Thoth. Moreover, they could do something truly magical. They could divine the future. In 1788, Alliette formed a Society for the Interpretation of the Book of Thoth. It was a society dedicated to the reading of his tarot cards. Nearly 2,000 years after it had vanished, it was now claimed the original Egyptian version of the Book of Thoth had reappeared, thanks to the work of two Frenchmen. The legend of the Book of Thoth had taken another twist. But there would soon be yet another version of the book. In 1904, a strange and idiosyncratic Englishman travelled to Egypt. He was called Alistair Crowley, a leading member of an occult society called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Crowley, he thought he was an artist, a painter, a poet, a great magician. He was going to be something great. He just knew he had greatness in him. He even saw it in his name. Some people pronounce his name Crowley and some Crowley. In his own writings, he said it's pronounced Crowley, it rhymes with holy. One day in Cairo, he claimed he was told the ancient Egyptian gods had a message for him. Over the course of three days, he said he received a series of revelations. He sat in his study at his desk with his writing materials, and this being came in that was sort of like transparent, and came and stood behind him over his shoulder, over his left shoulder, and dictated to him what to write, and he just wrote it down. Crowley had no doubt who was speaking to him. Basically, this is a message coming from Thoth. Crowley called the text he'd received the Book of Law. If he was telling the truth, this was surely the most authentic version of the Book of Thoth ever. It had come from the god himself. Crowley described it as a gospel for a new age. His version of the Book of Thoth consisted of a series of tenets. So, line three says, every man and every woman is a star. And so now, he's saying that we're all like stars, you see. We don't need one central being to give us direction, that we each can find our own direction. To this end, Crowley argued the most important tenet of his new Book of Thoth was, do as thou will, shall be the whole law. Thoth, in the shape of the Book of Law, became the basis of a new freewheeling religion. Crowley called it Thelema. It was a religion in which almost anything went. Thelema means will, which, of course, everybody talks about when they talk about Crowley. It doesn't just mean will, it means desire, including sexual desire. Crowley's new version of the Book of Thoth put sexual magic at its centre. And the sexual act became a sacrament. They practised free love. They took drugs. They had visions. They were promiscuous. They had lots of children. He wasn't trying to con anybody. He really felt that he was somebody important. Finally, towards the end of his life, Crowley pulled his thoughts together. But it wasn't in a book. It took the form of another set of tarot cards. Crowley felt that the tarot cards were this whole message of everything he was trying to get across, this whole philosophy of Thelema. He published them as yet another version of the Book of Thoth. Thoth's book, originally written on papyri, had gone through another metamorphosis. Now it seemed a justification for, among other things, some very strange sexual practices. Crowley died in 1947. But his legacy would be carried on by a new generation. 1960s Britain. Crowley's version of Thoth was adopted by the rock and roll counterculture. His face even appeared on the cover of the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper album. A decade later, one man fascinated by it was Gary Latchman, bass player with the 1970s new wave band Blondie. Some of the most famous people in the world, like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, are deeply interested in this sort of thing. They start getting into meditation, they start checking out their tarot, they start, you know, being interested in their aura, and a variety of different occult sorts of things. Latchman believes much of the counterculture of the rock and roll period can be traced back to the Book of Thoth. People were talking about the Age of Aquarius, which is an ancient Egyptian tradition, this tradition of Thoth. This was something that was absolutely central to the 60s popular culture. But in a further twist, the New Age explorers were happy to take ideas from several different versions of the Book of Thoth. From Crowley's version of Thoth, they took drugs and free love. From the Greek version, the Corpus Hermeticum, they took the idea of a purer, more spiritual age. I believe the enduring attraction of the figure of the god Thoth, the philosophy associated with him, the ideas, is that it is this intuitive sense we have that life is deeper and more complex and stranger than what the official accounts tell us, whether that be science or the Church. There are some very inspiring passages in the Corpus Hermeticum. Grow to a measurable size. Be free from every body. Transcend all time. Suppose nothing to be impossible for yourself. Consider yourself immortal and able to understand everything. Now, what strikes me as wonderful about that passage and many others in the Corpus Hermeticum is that it's showing us the potential of our own consciousness, it's showing us the potential of our own minds and spirits. The meaning of what had once been the Egyptian Book of Thoth was now utterly confused. There were now four possible versions of Thoth's book and its magic. The ancient Greek version, the Corpus Hermeticum, translated into Latin and taken up by the Renaissance. Aliette's 18th century version, a pack of tarot cards, claiming to authentically represent the Egyptian hieroglyphic text. Rowley's sexually licentious version, a deck of tarot cards coming at the said in a message from Thoth. And a 1960s version which mixed several of the earlier versions and came up with something different yet again. Four versions, all wildly different, all claiming to represent the authentic Egyptian Book of Thoth. But how could one book cover such widely differing interpretations? Do any of them, in fact, represent the original? Recent discoveries mean that today, for the first time, it may be possible to uncover the real truth about the Book of Thoth. For over a hundred years, archaeological digs have been uncovering the mysteries of Egyptian civilization. Among them are thousands of texts, written on pieces of papyri. If there is a real Book of Thoth, this would be the place to find it. But the papyri haven't given up their secrets easily. They're written in two different Egyptian scripts. Some in hieroglyphics, some in a variation known as timati. For centuries, no one could read either script. They were only finally cracked in the mid-1800s, with the help of one of the most extraordinary objects ever found. It's called the Rosetta Stone. It had the same decree written in three different scripts. Hieroglyphics, Timati, and Ancient Greek. Before the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, people didn't know how to approach hieroglyphs. Essentially, they were just little pictures. And so people would try and describe what they see, treat them as symbols. In other words, the bird is in the house with the man, etc, etc. This didn't really bear much relevance to what the Egyptians were actually trying to say. The Rosetta Stone changed all of that. The Greek section could be translated. The hieroglyphic and the demotic sections said the same thing. So scholars could work back from the Greek and work out what the hieroglyphs were saying. That cracked the code entirely. Thanks to the Rosetta Stone, scholars are now able, little by little, to work their way through thousands of fragments of papyri. It's produced some intriguing results. As the fragments have been assembled and translated, Egyptologists have found explicit references to a book of Thoth. There are also references to magic. But it's not magic as we usually understand it. People thought that it is a miracle that the moon doesn't fall down to the earth or even the sun. That there's a change of day and night. So the magic of the Book of Thoth doesn't help you read the future. It's simply a way of understanding the world. Magic is a way that we can make sense of the unseen world. So things like the seasons rolling, day turning to night and back to day again, illnesses as well, all of these things that you can't really pinpoint a cause for. You could be alive one day and dead the other. And that explains that people were really looking for help in every area they could get it. And that's why magic was so incredibly important to them. There are also references in the papyri to spells. But again, these are not spells as we normally understand them. They are not magic. A spell catalogued by Egyptologists as Spell 15 reads, May he grant that I see the sun disk and behold the moon unceasing every day. Spell 31 deals with a common menace. Get back. Retreat. Get back, you crocodile. Do not come against me, for I live by my magic. So these are not spells designed to perform extraordinary deeds. They're more like prayers. The word spell doesn't really help the issue because this is very much our terminology being imposed over the ancient Egyptian literature itself. So does this mean all the later interpretations of the Book of Thoth, that see magic, supernatural powers in it, are simply misguided? Gradually it's becoming clearer what the Book of Thoth is and what it isn't. There are references to man being half-way to a god, as the Renaissance believed. And there are references to the masonic ritual of death and rebirth. These clues suggest the Greek corpus emeticum did contain some of the original Egyptian thinking. But there are no references in any of the papyri to tarot or images of the tarot cards. There are no references to Crowley's notion of free will or his promotion of sexual promiscuity. And there is nothing about the rituals of New Age mysticism. All these are complete fabrications. But there is something else in the papyri that's much more significant. Today, scholars question whether the Book of Thoth ever existed as a physical object. Despite the mentions that we have, we're not convinced there's actually a Book of Thoth that we can one day find. Essentially, the references to a Book of Thoth or the Book of Thoth seem to be metaphors for the collection in its entirety of ancient Egyptian religious literature. There are various compilations of magical knowledge written down in different periods. And to those believers of that period, that was the real Book of Thoth. But when we put them all together, they are all so different that there was not one central tradition. The Book of Thoth never existed. So does that mean the legend of Thoth and his magic book will disappear? It seems unlikely. In 2002, a BBC poll named Crowley the 73rd most influential Briton ever. And a new generation is adding to the legends of ancient Egypt. New films and video games draw on ancient Egypt. And even if there is no Book of Thoth, that won't stop a new generation believing in it. The 5,000-year-old legend of Thoth and his magic is still a force to be conjured with. There are secret societies, even today, who still hold Thoth to be the archetypal mystagogue. The person, the god, who will lead you into the arcane mysteries of consciousness. It's very, very strange that Thoth seems to have something to say to every century. He became a central figure for people who believe there is more in this world than can be explained by science.