Into this mix of gods arrives Jesus Christ Superstar. From the grammar of the multitude comes the Word of the Father: Hebraic law handed down by Moses and the patriarchs to the Israelites in their flight from Egypt. “In the beginning was the Word,” yes: but Word that becomes flesh as the body and blood of Christ. Church fathers assemble into the anthology of the New Testament the testimonies of Christ’s followers, appending these to Hebrew scripture. From the Word of the Father comes the Word of the Son, old covenant replaced by the new.
When, in the fourth century AD, Rome’s emperors embrace the words of He they once crucified, the Text of the Judeo-Christian Greco-Roman synthesis begins its spread along its path of westward expansion, replacing the many with the one.
Reed, a proponent of multiculturalism, son of those whose ancestors were, more than a thousand years after the death of Christ, captured by Christians and brought to Turtle Island as slaves, replies by remembering Osiris, the Ancient Egyptian Lord of the Underworld and Judge of the Dead.
The Osiris myth is the most elaborate and influential story in Ancient Egyptian mythology. Osiris has two siblings, Isis and Set. Osiris marries his sister Isis. Moved by jealousy, Set kills Osiris and usurps his throne as king of Egypt. Osiris is dismembered, parts of his body strewn across the kingdom. Isis, grieving the loss of her beloved, restores Osiris’s body, reanimates his corpse, so that the couple can posthumously conceive their son Horus, who, imbued with the spirit of his father, eventually defeats Set and restores order to the kingdom.
Plutarch’s essay, “On Isis and Osiris,” is one of the few texts to preserve this myth amid the timelines and wisdom traditions of the West. As Earl Fontainelle notes in Episode 68 of the SHWEP, “No one could read ancient Egyptian from late antiquity until the development of modern Egyptology (the Rosetta Stone and that whole business). Thus, almost every scrap of Egyptian religion was totally lost until the nineteenth century. The material preserved by Plutarch is the sole major exception to this rule. In other words, Plutarch’s ‘On Isis and Osiris’ was, for most of Western history, all we knew about Egyptian religion.”
By the time of Derrida, the aperture onto the past had expanded well beyond Plutarch, thanks to tellings of these myths in works recovered by Egyptologists. In the footnotes to his account of Thoth in “Plato’s Pharmacy,” Derrida refers us to Adolf Erman’s Handbook of Egyptian Religion and André-Jean Festugiere’s four-volume study of the Corpus Hermeticum.
For this, too, is how Thoth persists in the wisdom traditions of the West. He lives by way of “hermeticism”: that strange corpus of literature associated with, attributed to, said to be written by “one of the great matinee idols of esoteric lore: Hermes Trismegistus” (TechGnosis, p. 9).
Frances A. Yates surveys much of this lore in her book The Art of Memory.
From hermeticism we get groups like the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. With the Golden Dawn, the focus shifts to Tarot.
Trance-Scripts 