The Egyptian Myth

Egyptomania1 is the term coined around the turn of the 19th century to describe the ongoing fascination for, and in some cases worship of, all things Egyptian, or thought Egyptian, particularly by Europeans and their cultural inheritors. For centuries the depth of European devotion to the imagined or mythical Egypt, and especially to its mysterious writing system, was proportional to the depth of Europe's ignorance concerning the real, hieroglyphic Egypt. Long before the ancient world had degraded into the Dark Ages, Europeans (and ultimately Egyptians themselves) had lost any reliable understanding of the meaning and proper use of that most mysterious ancient Egyptian invention—the hieroglyphs. Left with almost no idea of what the hieroglyphs actually were, and how they were intended to be read, Europeans did what many people do in such cases when they deeply desire to know the meaning of precious but unknown signs—they invented meaning where they could not otherwise discern it.2 This process is certainly familiar to those who study Tarot, for indeed occult Tarot is a product of this very same Egyptianizing dynamic, or Egyptomania. In fact, for those who piously demand that occult Tarot has been stolen3 from those virtuous gamblers of the Renaissance (who of course would never have dared "cheat" anyone on the facts and figures), it has to be disconcerting to realize that the true antecedent tradition4 upon which occult or Egyptian Tarot is based, is over 2000 years old! Tarot is merely one of the tradition's more modern converts, it being a little more than two centuries now since the Frenchmen Antoine Court de Gébelin and M. le Comte de Mellet anointed Tarot as an ancient Egyptian artifact.

The Egyptian Revival (the polite term for the late 18th-century version of the mania) was in fact an outgrowth of Neoclassical reverence for ancient art and architecture, a historicist approach that was based on a premise that the ancients—at least the ones who built large and magnificent structures—were closer to some original divine creative impulse, to some Golden Age. The Greeks themselves believed that they had inherited their knowledge, or at least the foundations of it, from the ancient Egyptians. Thus to truly get to the roots of Western civilization (or the myth of it extolled as worthy by modern Europeans), one had to go a little Egypt crazy. At least, that was the thinking, or sometimes the acute lack of it, that guided Egyptomaniacs. Egyptomania has in our time come to mean any attempt to (anciently) Egyptianize a modern aesthetic expression. It is certainly not always a negative idea, not even with respect to Tarot, though it does suggest that any particular Egyptian mania probably has little if anything substantively to do with the historical ancient Egypt. Or, in cinematic terms—it's not a documentary—e.g., Stargate. However, at the same time each supposedly legitimate archaeological revelation concerning ancient Egypt fuels the continuing mania about it. Hollywood's Egyptomania, still quite active, was inspired by the famous (and in some ways infamous) discovery of King Tut's tomb in 1922. Mummymania had hit several times before, resulting in such things as fashionable mummy furnishings for one's home. This time it ended up in Karloff's The Mummy (1932), not the first mummy movie but certainly the best and most influential. In 1981 the notion of the archaeologist as hero (and rascal) was resurrected for that greatest of pop-fictional tomb raiders, Indiana Jones, who in the Lucaspiel production Raiders of the Lost Ark went in search of something Jewish, buried of course in Egypt, and has at the same time to put up with everyone's favorite 20th-century villains, Nazis. Beneath the admittedly thin surface of this pop-Egyptomania is a mythology familiar to those who know the Egyptian-Tarot myth—that somehow the most sacred of Jewish (or Hebrew) things either is matrixed in or lost in Egypt, and the map for getting this treasure is amazingly rendered on a pack of playing cards! If only Indy knew he could have just read Tarot! But the somewhat serious point of this trailer is what Mary Lefkowitz remarks (see my comments on her book) concerning the roots of Afrocentrism—it's a "long established pattern."

NOTES

1—Precisely when the term was first used is not clear, nor has its meaning and especially its moral flavor always been the same. Complaints concerning "Egyptian mania" are seen in the first decade of the 19th century, a response to the European fascination, which increased greatly following Napoleon's expedition to Egypt in 1798, for Egyptianizing all kinds of artwork. The term has been used over the last two centuries to describe the unhealthy or at least vigorous interest in, and especially allusion to, ancient Egypt and its artistic styles and motifs. As noted elsewhere in this article, this interest is not necessarily, nor even usually, motivated by any academic concerns about archaeology.

2—Modern examples of this desperate creativity abound, especially in Tarotic circles. Perhaps the best example of it concerns Aleister Crowley's bizarre "Stele of Revealing" invention, wherein he took an ordinary Egyptian artifact, coincidentally numbered item 666 in the Cairo Museum, and turned an inept translation of its hieroglyphs into Apocalyptic god names—this is particularly the case with the purely Egyptomaniacal "Hadit". Latter-day OTO management has sought to cover up this absurdity by inventing yet another myth wherein Egyptian hieroglyphs are again required NOT to function as intended (as ideograms and phonograms of the ancient Egyptian language), but instead are used as an allegorical ornament serving a purely modern religious agenda.

3—To see in this interesting development of a mere card game, ONLY a regrettable and unjustified theft of that game, which is how people such as Michael Dummett and Ronald Decker do see it, is to defame an interesting and entertaining palimpsest. It is just as easy and more accurate to see Tarot after its Egyptianization as a greater game than it could ever have been without this enhancement.

4—In The Wicked Pack of Cards, the authors write (page 47): "For those who originated and developed [the occult] interpretation…of the cards demonstrably owed nothing to any antecedent tradition that had come down from earlier times." As I point out in some detail in my book, Rhapsodies of the Bizarre, the authors of this absurd bit of posturing are quite incorrect, and indeed so obviously so one has to question whether or not the comment is intended as irony, or is simply a bold lie.

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How Tarot Became Egyptian

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In this, one of the best surveys of the main sources and dynamics of Egyptomania, Erik Iversen explains how and why people began, and continued making, the myth of Egypt (and its hieroglyphs) in their own images.

"In Platonic and post-Socratic philosophy the Egyptian myths were always considered in the way in which the Greeks had become accustomed to consider their own, which means that the relationship between myth and reality was considered as being of a symbolic and allegorical nature. But the establishment of this symbolic relationship was a fundamental misinterpretation of the very basis of Egyptian thought, and substituted the mythical truth of the Egyptians, with its indissoluble magical identification of myth and matter, by an utterly un-Egyptian interpretation created by Greek philosophy and poetry..."

"It is obvious that these works [inspired by the career of Cagliostro] were only indirectly and very remotely connected with the Egyptian traditions, but the stupendous fraud responsible for their appearance was based on a cunning understanding of the fact that a mystic belief in the occult science of ancient Egypt was still alive and strong enough to be used in dangerous efforts to dominate the imagination and the minds of men."

  

You think this Egyptomania stuff only afflicts Hollywoodens and Tarotiers? Wrong! The silly halls of academe (especially the mustier ones in classics departments) have been torn by a decade-long war between Afrocentrists and traditional defenders of the Western (Greek) tradition. When Mary Lefkowitz discovered that Afrocentrists were teaching good ole Egyptomaniacal Freemasonry (a "black" version of course) as if it were Egyptian history, she wrote this book. And you need to read it, because it has just as much to do with the present (lousy) condition of Tarot as it does with the absurd political correctlessness of American universities.

"How could I persuade these colleagues, and many others like them, that evidence does matter, that not every interpretation of the past is equally probable, and that I was not trying to teach about the history of the ancient world in order to preserve or transmit racist values?...In effect, Afrocentrists are demanding that ordinary historical methodology be discarded in favor of a system of their own choosing. This system allows them to ignore chronology and facts if they are inconvenient for their purposes....In asserting that important aspects of Greek civilization were derived from Egypt, modern Afrocentric writers are, however, following a long established pattern."

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Egyptian Tarot

Court de Gébelin and the Comte de Mellet declared Tarot not merely to be any ordinary ancient Egyptian artifact—but the most precious of all—THE Book of Thoth, the Silver Sun, who had written (and thus created) the Universe and everything in it. Thoth's book (actually a collection of books) contained not merely all the knowledge that could be known, but also knowledge that couldn't be, or at least that couldn't be acquired by humans without the help of the gods, such as the secrets of men's hearts and the destinies of nations. If this book was really illustrated on the pages of Tarot cards, it was no wonder that it could reveal secrets to fortune-tellers. And if mere fortune-tellers could wield the book to that effect, imagine what an initiate in the mysteries might be able to do. So, to call Tarot the Book of Thoth was to elevate it from a card game to a sacred book of divine Truth and Apocalyptic powers.

But why?

Why should anyone have ever gotten the idea in the first place that Tarot cards were the pages of the Book of Thoth? The answer is complex and multi-faceted and finally comes down to Tarot having been noticed by the right person in just the right cultural and intellectual milieu (that of the 18th-century French Enlightenment). All the pieces were in place by 1781 in France for Tarot to be Egyptianized; it was only a question of having someone able and willing to do it, and Antoine Court de Gébelin was that someone. He and his contributor Mellet were not merely inventing a new layer of symbolism for Tarot, the card game, but were interpreting Tarot symbolism in light of the centuries-old tradition of Egyptomania, a brand or application of historicism, the practice of looking back to the assumed purity and glory of the past in order to validate and express a present articulation of those virtues. Of course the resulting eclecticism is seldom pure, but it can be glorious, or at least monumentally sublime (in the sense of terror-inducing transcendence). It is not unreasonable to note a similarity between the aesthetic, and largely architectural, tradition of historicism, and the same approach in literature, especially in the sacred literature of the Bible. The very process that led to the writing of the Apocalypse, itself important in inspiring the original Tarot symbolism of the 15th century, was in fact historicist in nature. The wealth of Hebrew scriptures of the OT had been, for several centuries prior to the development of Christianity, in a sense resurrected and reinterpreted by Jews for service in a new, apocalyptic, movement. The NT book, Revelation (or the Apocalypse), was written as the Christian expression of this tradition. Apocalypticism was a primary spiritual motive fueling the European (and American) political rebellions of the 18th century, rebellions given intellectual, moral, and often organizational support in the very Masonic lodges wherein Egyptomania was also reigning supreme. So it is not so strange after all, that a pack of cards, originally designed, at least in part, to depict scenes from the Apocalypse, should so easily have been merged by the Freemason, Antoine Court de Gébelin, with the Egyptomaniacal mythology of Thoth-Hermes. Both Apocalypticism and Egyptomania were products of this same process of historicism, the very basis of the theory that led Antoine Court de Gébelin to examine Tarot, of looking back to the great works of ancient civilizations to find explanations and inspirations for modern concerns and creations.

You can read much more about how Tarot became Egyptianized, and also a new English translation of the actual texts in which this magick was performed, in my book, Rhapsodies of the Bizarre:

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