Thoth

Thoth, Djehuty in Egyptian, is the god of writing, of reckoning, of magic and of the moon, and his cult is documented from the Old Kingdom onward. His city is Khemenu, which the Greeks called Hermopolis because they identified him with their own Hermes. The texts do not agree about his origin, and the disagreement is itself a fact: some have him born of himself at the very beginning, others call him the heart and tongue of Ra, that is the creator's thought and the word that carries it out, and a minority tradition, a violent one, has him come out of Set's forehead. He is shown in two ways, and both are ancient: as a man with the head of an ibis, the curve-billed bird that walks the banks of the Nile, and as a seated baboon with the moon disc on its head. The lunar part is not decoration. Thoth is the one who measures, and the moon is the only clock the sky shows to the naked eye.

His job is to keep the count. He measures time and orders the calendar, and according to Plutarch he won at draughts against the moon the five days the year was short of, so that Nut could bear her five children: this is the Egyptian explanation of the five epagomenal days left over at the end of the calendar. He invented writing, and for that reason scribes poured out the first drop of ink to him before starting work. In the judgment of the dead, the most copied scene of the Book of the Dead, the division of roles is exact: Anubis works the scales, the dead man's heart is weighed against Maat's feather, and Thoth stands beside them with his palette, writing down the result. He does not judge: he records, and that is why his word is not disputed. When the gods quarrel, he arbitrates. In the long lawsuit between Horus and Set it is he who reads, proposes and moderates, and it is he who heals the eye Set tore from Horus: the restored eye, the wedjat, carries his signature.

The Greeks who came to Egypt saw Hermes in Thoth, and out of that equation, by Roman times, a new figure emerged: Hermes Trismegistus, the thrice-great, supposed author of a body of treatises on the soul, the cosmos and creation. It is worth giving them a date, because the confusion is constant and not innocent: the Hermetic texts were written in Greek in the second and third centuries of our era, and they are not ancient Egyptian literature however much they present themselves as the wisdom of Thoth. The god who lent them his name had by then been receiving cult for more than two thousand years. Apart from that, Egyptian tradition did credit him with books of his own: forty-two scrolls containing everything a man needs to know, and a Book of Thoth holding the spells that govern creation, whose theft and consequences are told in a late demotic tale in which a prince takes it from a tomb and pays dearly for it. He is the god posterity has never stopped rewriting, and that insistence is also his way of lasting.