Someone told me Thoth was a messenger god but I and everyone else are too dumb to understand what his message was.

  • Kissaki@feddit.de
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    8 months ago

    Thoth was more than a messenger of a single message. Quoting Wikipedia:

    He was the god of the Moon, wisdom, knowledge, writing, hieroglyphs, science, magic, art and judgment.

    Thoth played many vital and prominent roles in Egyptian mythology, such as maintaining the universe, and being one of the two deities (the other being Ma’at) who stood on either side of Ra’s solar barque. In the later history of ancient Egypt, Thoth became heavily associated with the arbitration of godly disputes,[6] the arts of magic, the system of writing, and the judgment of the dead.

    • Cossty@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Why is there so much overlap between gods? Anubis is god of death. Seker is god of death. Osiris is god of death, his sister and wife Isis is goddess of death. And these are the only ones I know of. Sure they were not only gods of death, but why have many gods who have “God of death” as a secondary ocupation?

      • Uruanna@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Mythology is not a monolith. We’re talking 3000+ years of cultural evolution across multiple cities that united and separated multiple times, each having their own local cult that rose to prominence or got supplanted by a different one.

        When some of them got together and overlapped, they might have taken different facets of “death”: Osiris is not strictly a god of death itself but a judge of your soul, and grants eternal life in death, while Anubis was a god of funerary rites and graves, so the physical aspect of handling dead bodies.

        When a city took prevalence over another, either because the pharaoh set up shop there or because a temple in that city became more famous and gained influence, that city’s major cult could overshadow other gods worshiped in other cities and take over their duties.

        Then there were bigger gods that got cults that split into different aspects, like how Hathor and Sekhmet come from the same goddess but Sekhmet specialized in bloody war and the sun burning in the desert (an aspect she took from her father, a more general sun god) while Hathor specialized in motherhood.

        Other aspects are passed around in the same way, starting with the role of sun, there are countless aspects of the sun that were embodied in different gods. Even the scarab is an aspect of the sun - because it emerges fully matured from the dungball of its parent the same way the sun comes out from the underworld in the morning, so there was a god for that. Death is a major aspect that remained a big constant in Egyptian religion, that’s why those two are seen the most often.

        If you look at which city becomes the center of Egypt’s rule as time goes on through the different kingdoms and intermediate periods, and check which major temple is in that city, you see which cult takes over more duties.

  • Paragone@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Different religions represent fundamental-truths in different forms/ways.

    Thoth was a hominid-shaped form for karma.

    Thoth had 2 demands of the lives that Thoth judged:

    • you used your human-life honestly/intensely, so you didn’t just waste it coasting-by
    • your heart be lighter than a feather, aka you earned/evolved honesty & integrity.

    AwakeSoulism/Buddhism did-away with the hominid/animal forms, representing the fundamental-forces/principles, but they kept the same fundamental-forces/principles.

    1. There is no point in coasting through human-life, because all the other kinds-of-lives a Soul/ChildOfGod/CellOfGod/Continuum/ParticleOfBrahmanFieldOfFundamentalAwareness … are lacking in the perfect intersection between
    • suffering inducing motivation, &
    • capacity/opportunity, making motivation have “fertile soil”

    Below human-category, lives don’t have our diversity-of-senses, our considered-reasoning ( Kahneman System-2, from “Thinking Fast & Slow” ), & above human-category, sentience isn’t so circumstance-constrained, or semi-helpless, as to warrant earning real-change.

    ( I accidentally earned previous-Soul-memories, of other kinds of lives, back in the 1990’s, and when I discovered what those strange memories were, that nuked ALL the Abrahamic religions from objective-validity, and forced me into years of worldview-evolution, to meet/earn/hold-to the data/evidence.

    Non-autistics just ignore the contradicting evidence, the way Scientism does, with its cartoon oversimplifications, but I’d rather be autistic me, than be any normal, any day or eon. )

    1. ignorance/Soul-ignorance/ignosis blocks one’s Soul/CellOfGod from ever escaping the experience-enforcing-learning “machine” that endless-stream-of-Universes is, so if one wants to be released from contained-in-the-churn-of-phenomena, one needs to earn making one’s mind only out of kinds-of-mind that ignosis, & death, cannot grip on.
    • Faithing ( surrendering-entirely-to-higher-power, relying-entirely-on-higher-power, being-gratitude-for-its-nonself-centered-giving-of-helping )
    • Wisdom-piercing-ignorance-of-NoSelfInherentExistence
    • Bodhichitta, immeasurable-compassion-for-all-continuums-and–sentiences-but-controlled-by-wisdom’s-seeing-through-narcissism-etc.

    Those 3 substances-of-mind are all “lighter than a feather”, and therefore grant release-from-Soul-containment, when they are pure/absolute enough.

    To simply “climb Jacob’s Ladder”, however, is a worthy accomplishment, itself!

    Therefore, dying with a heart lighter than it had been before one’s life, was earned improvement: evolution.


    This should give the concept underlying Thoth.

    Goddess Isis was simply their culture’s representation for LivingSpirit, at one time.

    Oh, this need be said: differentiate between the root-idea, vs the soap-opera-accretions that “society” asserts onto such ones…

    E.g. for Hinduism to simultaneously hold that Shiva is

    • absolute, beyond-Universe YOGA, capable of altering the fundamental structure of Universes so that evolution can happen ( holding evil in abeyance, lodged in Shiva’s throat, after “drinking” it ) AND
    • incompetent to perceive soap-opera machiavellianism, and so ambush-assaulted into “completely losing control” & massacring everybody in the region, before putting their lives back, when Shiva regained control…

    Logic prohibits those 2 from coinciding, but Hinduism’s been disallowing logic, on that point, for many many centuries.

    Learn to cut-out the accretions-of-guff from the original-principles, when they’re still findable.

    Another example of that same principle is:

    Genesis, in the Abrahamic bible,

    Women ate “the fruit of The Knowledge of Good & Evil”, WHICH MEANS MORALITY,

    & shared morality with men.

    Male-culture’s bullying, of course, deliberately altered the scripture in order to put jealousy in God’s mouth, to justify accusing women of “eternal sin” in earning morality.

    Altruism is generalized mothering.

    Wasp-researchers from Bristol & Exeter universities, in Panama, discovered this.

    AwakeSoulism/Buddhism declared it 25 consecutive centuries ago.

    The proper reading of that story in Genesis shows it was originally in the root scripture, but got “graffitti’d” out by the male religion-authorities, through the past 12-ish millenia ( since the FLOOD which ended the last ice-age, drowning all the coastal civilization, now findable only through SCUBA diving, offshore, at 50’ up-to 400’ deep ).

    Beware the contaminations, & especially beware when entire factions have their “identity” welded onto the deliberate-contamination, instead of the underlying Truth … there you get the “religious” ideological/prejudice genocides, that the last few millenia have been filled-with.