© 2012 Bruce Johnson – reprinted with permission from Shining Lotus Metaphysical Bookstore Newsletter August 2012
by Bruce Johnson
The Egyptian Thoth, also known as Hermes Trismegistus, is credited with authoring over 20,000 books before the year 3000 BC. His book subjects include those of science, medicine, law, music, religion, art, occultism, mathematics, astronomy, letters, history, and philosophy. The Hermetic Wisdom taught millennia ago by the ibis-headed god Thoth can shed light on many contemporary questions today.
The book Divine Pymander contains altered fragments from some of the Books of Thoth. Thoth teaches through the Pymander that divine thought is the basis of reality. Thoth is sometimes depicted with a seven-rayed solar disc on his head, indicating his divine intelligence and link with the Sun. Thoth-Hermes was traditionally related to the yellow ray and to Mercury, the scribe and messenger of the gods, who receives his wisdom from the Sun, the Solar Logos of our solar system.
Concerning religion, Thoth wrote of a unified one God that was infinite, invisible and incomprehensible to human minds, and not of a God who is a limited human-appearing being.
The immortality and goodness of the human soul and the progressive development of the entire universe through natural law were basic doctrines. Soul liberation was achieved through lifetimes of personal effort and merit and not through the washing away of a mythical Original Sin. Specific Books of Thoth outlined the processes of the spiritual creation and evolution of man and all the kingdoms of life on our planet Earth, as well as on other planets. Hermetic symbols can be effectively used as a key for an esoteric interpretation of the Bible in contrast to its more common “dead letter” interpretation.
The ancient Egyptians comprehended secrets of nature’s duality and of many subtle forms of energy not yet understood by orthodox science. Egyptian Mystery Schools, unlike most modern scientists, taught in the absolute existence of the akasa, sometimes called the ether, and its multi-fold expression on all planes of life.
The Laws of Nature taught by Thoth seem to contradict the Big Bang theory with its violent, sudden beginning to our universe. Hermetic doctrine teaches that nature moves in slow harmony in the evolutionary process, with no violent transitions or sudden changes, despite physical appearances. Hermetic doctrine reveals that our present universe to be only one in an infinite chain of universes, each the predecessor and cause of the latter. Each physical universe is created as a result of the out breathing of the Divine Breath, or the divine motion of the Causeless Cause, and with the inbreathing of the Divine Breath, will disappear into unfathomable Deity to sleep until the next out breathing. He further taught that no physical form can come into objective existence before its subjective manifestation was created. This shows that all physical forms have an underlying physically- invisible spiritual counterpart. Hermes taught that spiritual and physical evolution are one, integrated, and parallel each other in the well known occult axiom-“As above, so below”.
Bruce Johnson has over 30 years of study in the fields of Ancient Wisdom and occultism. He has taught classes on a wide range of topics, from Atlantis to mediums to Zoroaster. He is also a spiritualist minister, with a background in spiritual astrology. He lives in Colorado with his wife and their cat.
