endymions_bower | February Twitter Archive

Here's the tweets for February. As you'll see, it's pretty much all Book of Thoth, all the time! Which is what my work has been recently, and will be until the article is all done. So, without further ado…

31 Jan

A significant term which remains enigmatic in the Book of Thoth is wn-imA. At B07, 1, we may have the opening rubric of the text: "The words which cause a youth to learn and a son of wn-imA to question." No translation has been proposed, but wn-imA seems to have been a priestly title and/or a title of the deified Imhotep. "Son of wn-imA" is used of the king at Edfu, notably in the presentation of a scribal palette. What is interesting to me, though, is that the translation which offers itself at first glance for wn-imA is "who was there": "Wn-im may mean, of course, 'He who was there' … but it is by no means clear that this is the force of the phrase" (31; the editors). There is a possible pun on the name at B07, 14: "… the prophets call out 'Istes, son of wn-imA' to him, every form in which he is [imw nb i-wn=f] is that which they say to him." ('Istes' here is the epithet of Thoth, more commonly 'Isdes' or 'Isden'.) As with most puns in Egyptian sacred texts (or, for that matter, in Plato's Cratylus), it is not a question here of etymology as we know it. But I believe that imw nb i-wn=f, "every form in which he is", is a clue to the register, so to speak, in which to hear wn-imA; I believe it strengthens the reading "[he] who was there". This phrase evokes Dasein, facticity, but also Greek to ti ên einai, "essence". A teacher of mine emphasized the past tense embedded in this ubiquitous Aristotelian phrase. To ti ên einai is literally "what it was for something to be". This is the term which becomes "essence" in the Latinate tradition (except to the extent that Neoplatonic usage of ousia, Aristotelian "substance", also gets translated as "essentia"). "Essence" is thus not, originally, something timeless, but simply something past, the retention of something's own past, its narrative. To be a "son of wn-imA", then, is to be a son of one who was there; located in space and time. In this respect, it is a kind of polar opposition to the status of kA-mut.f, "bull of his mother", self-begetter. Between the autochthonous (kA-mut.f) and the factical (sA wn-imA) extends the axis of the scribe.

1 Feb

"He speaks, namely, The-one-of-Heseret [Thoth], he says: Writing is a sea. Its reeds are a shore … Count waves/difficult passages. As for its body, it is a myriad. Do not be weak with regard to it until its lord permits that you swim in it and he makes a fair wind before you." (B02, 4/13-15). This passage from the Book of Thoth speaks I believe to the immanence of hermeneutics as taught by Thoth. Upon the sea of the text, we seek the shore, which is made of reeds, that is, writing instruments and paper, for to understand the text is inseparable from producing new text. We are urged to "count waves" on this sea, with a term that refers ambiguously at the same time to difficult textual passages. We don't look outside the text, rather we get our bearings from within it, reckoning from its very aporiae. The "body" of the text is "myriad", numberless; it has no absolute or transcendent valuation, only that established by our reckoning. Do not wait, we are told, for the divine agency to resolve the text's difficulties, for calm waters: meaning derives from turbulence.

13 Feb

The Book of Thoth is a scribal initiation manual, but 'writing' is not here merely one profession amongst others; instead, writing is presented as an intensification of the mode of being of semiosis, or sign-production, in general. This is what gives the Book of Thoth, in my view, its wide significance. (Though obviously the text has a special significance for those of us who are writers by vocation.) I read the Book of Thoth as presenting the essence of writing as the relation to three kinds of externality: 1) To the materiality of text, conceived usually as an oceanic flow or chaos and the liminal space of the marsh; 2) To writers who came before, and hence (in quintessentially Egyptian fashion) to mortality as locus of ideality; 3) To animality, in the form of a set of discrete animal personas that seem to be formative principles (akin to genres?). These three kinds of externality come together in the central concept of the Book of Thoth, the Chamber of Darkness.

14 Feb

Most of the references to the materiality of texts in the Book of Thoth pertain to water, or to the reeds which supply paper and pens. An exception are several passages which speak of charcoal, an ingredient in ink. References to charcoal, and to burning, add an elemental polarity to the prevailing 'wetness' of semiosis in the Book of Thoth. At V01, 3/5, it appears that "container of coal" is a synonym for the Chamber of Darkness: "[…Chamber of] Darkness … spend the night, spend the day in the container of coal. You are to find scribal equipment…" At B02, 3/6, we read "May he row in the river of coals." The editors suggest a reference here to the "Isle of Flame" or "Lake of Fire" known from the afterlife literature, but there is no precedent for a "river of coals" in this connection, and the context suggests ink again: the next line reads "Effective is the chapel of the bA.w [texts]. Effective is the one who takes possession for himself of the storeroom of the spirits." The 'spirits' (ixy.w) are the authors of the texts. B02, 5/4: "As for these storerooms, they are overflowing with coal: their meanings, a hand which works." This line belongs to a passage dense with symbols for writing: there is a reference to seed-corn in thick-walled storerooms, and to interpretive difficulty: "The second body" (one who receives a transmitted text) deals with "fields" that "cannot be reached". A gloss suggests "They are the Red and the Black which cannot be reached," seemingly referring to the two colors of ink scribes used. We find again the stress on the immanence of interpretation in the phrase "their meanings, a hand which works." The answer to the opacity of the "storerooms overflowing with coal" is to write one's way out: meaning=the working hand. "The-one-who-loves-knowledge, he says: 'Let one say to me the work of the fist, the hand which labors on the divine writings'," (B02, 5/12). The reference to a fist grasping a pen here evokes Atum's primordial act of masturbation; his fist personified as the Goddess Nebet-Hetepet. B02, 5/5 says of the "storerooms overflowing with coal" that the one who lays hold of them without having experienced "heat" (Xmm), "their roasting burns his fingers." Here the charcoal, symbol for the opacity of the text, evokes the "heat" of a process in the subject. Experience the "heat" upon one's own initiative, it seems, lest one be "burnt". The editor notes a homophony here between Xmm, "heat", and Smm, "harvest", another frequent metaphor in the text. This seems to pertain to another passage (B02, 2/12-16): "As for his beloved, he being in complete darkness (or 'the Chamber of Darkness'), the teaching will light for him a torch … the one who lives through eternity, they will burn him to his (very) bones. They will make a burning in his lips. They will set his limbs ablaze. She will make … to his heart before the chamber which has cooked his kky [a part of the body that comes in pairs; ears?] … the initiated ones/torches will draw near before him." Fascinating that in line B02, 2/16, one manuscript has bs.w "initiates", the other bs.w "torches". Here it seems that the fate the writer seeks is to be consumed in their writing, leaving behind only an inky trace. Their living speech (lips), their understanding (ears), live eternally as this "river" or "storeroom" of "coal".

24 Feb

Went to a lecture last night by John C. Darnell on ritual scenes in Protodynastic rock art. This got me thinking about royal "navigations". The point of the navigation, in which a ship is dragged across the land, it seems to me, is to symbolically inundate the land. This would naturally be interpreted in light of the essential irrigation of the arable land by the Nile's annual flood. I've been thinking, however, about how the watery expanse is transformed in texts like the Nun cosmogony into a semiotic continuum. The symbolic flood imposes a smooth space, a blank page, receptive to symbolic activity. In one of the navigation scenes he showed, the ritual operator wasn't royal; in the late period, when the role of the king had diminished, scribes may have increasingly seen themselves as being in charge of the creation of this smooth semiotic space. Hence the scribe in the Book of Thoth is preeminently a navigator (a rower, especially). It was also intriguing to see the popularity of the giraffe in the predynastic imagery. If this is an early symbol of royal power, then it is also a power never fully vested in the king alone, as we can see from the occurrence of the giraffe in the word sr, 'prophet'. Part of the flexibility of Egyptian society was its ability to devolve powers held by the king back into the populace later on. We see this in particular in the status of sacred animals, who can take the king's place, as the living sacred hawk did at Edfu. It has also been pointed out that deities such as Tutu (Tithoes) fill up some of the space vacated by the shrinking royal sphere. The scribe is perhaps another beneficiary of this devolution of royal power, albeit a special one, because to be a scribe is simply an intensification of the condition of being a subject of utterance.

28 Feb

Interesting addendum to the discussion on the Corpus Hermeticum with @t3dy and others: at the time, I pointed to devaluation of materiality in CH as a major discrepancy with traditional Egyptian theology. Recently, I came across two articles by B. H. Stricker, from Discussions in Egyptology vols. 23 & 28. Stricker wrote a massive tome, De Geboorte van Horus, which he draws upon in these articles (useful for those like me who don't read Dutch), where he interprets certain New Kingdom Netherworld texts like the Book of Caverns and the Book of the Earth as "embryological", that is, as concerning embodiment. This means that embodiment in these texts has a rather torturous quality; hence, Stricker claims, the 'ascetic' quality in much of the Corpus Hermeticum is not novel, but translates an esoteric doctrine. I'm not saying that Stricker is correct; his interpretation of these texts is best termed provocative, but it is a significant viewpoint.

Another interesting matter I've been pursuing while working on the Book of Thoth article is a series of puns around nb, "gold". This word is written with a glyph of a bead collar (Gardiner's S12 or S13). By using this sign, rather than others for n+b, scribes show semantic links. We see this in nbi, to melt metal, cast objects in metal, gild, but by extension, to model or fashion something generally. Hence the Ht-Nbw, 'House of Gold', is the sculptors' workshop. Further out, we have nbi.t, which is one of two words for divine flame, with nsr.t; Inconnu-Bocquillon distinguishes these as follows: nbi.t, which is the flame of Wadjet, the uraeus, with the defense of Re, that is, the order of the cosmos; nsr.t, the flame of Sekhmet, with the defense of Osiris and of Horus, i.e., of the mortal as such and of civilization. Finally, we have nbi, to swim, which is used sometimes instead of mHi to refer to Osiris as "immersed" (not "drowned", according to Vernus). This word is only rarely spelled with the "gold" sign, but that it can be is significant, I think, as I believe it alludes to the "immersion" of Osiris in a liquid medium as being "cast" into a form. In the Book of Thoth, I argue, we find this fluid medium transposed to the semiotic register. The bA, or "soul", is cast into the sea of words and trapped in the net of the text. In a sense, we could say that ancient Egypt skips transcendental philosophy and goes straight for a kind of semiotic materialism.

29 Feb

A text does not need to be polemical in order to possess "argument" in a sense philosophically meaningful. Narratives possess argument of a sort, as do texts in an implicit dialogue with one another. An example of the latter are the diverse cosmogonies of the Egyptians; each implicitly cites and comments upon the others. Lévi-Strauss is also correct that no myth is without syntactic relationships to others. These relationships are themselves a kind of argumentation, albeit results of structuralist analysis of myth are not always satisfactory.