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Author Topic: Has anyone read "The Union of Isis and Thoth"?  (Read 1867 times)

Sefiru

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Has anyone read "The Union of Isis and Thoth"?
« on: December 16, 2015, 07:30:16 pm »
Full title: The Union of Isis And Thoth: Magic and Initiatory Practices of Ancient Egypt, by Normandy Ellis and Nicki Scully

I saw this book in my local indie bookstore today, but only had time to glance at the table of contents. A few of the chapter titles looked interesting, but I have never heard of this book or its authors.

Does anyone here know anything about this book? Is it credible at all? And is it worth paying retail price for it?
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Darkhawk

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Re: Has anyone read "The Union of Isis and Thoth"?
« Reply #1 on: December 17, 2015, 12:41:20 pm »
Quote from: Sefiru;183558
Does anyone here know anything about this book? Is it credible at all? And is it worth paying retail price for it?

 
It looks like, from Ellis's site, that the book is brand new.

Ellis is, from the work of hers I've read, more general neopagan than reconstructionist in outlook, but that makes her a) accessible and b) reasonably easy to adapt.  She does research.  I can't remember whether or not she does proper footnotes. ;P

 Okay, yes, endnotes, in quantity, including cites of The Golden Ass and Bleeker's Festivals of Renewal, which should give a sense of her range, heh.

I would expect it would be useful with caveats, possibly inspiring of useful tangents, and that the bibliography and endnotes would be a functional to-do list.  Also I expect I should add it to my list of things what are relevant to my interests, sigh.
as the water grinds the stone
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Sefiru

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Re: Has anyone read "The Union of Isis and Thoth"?
« Reply #2 on: December 17, 2015, 06:56:04 pm »
Quote from: Darkhawk;183582
It looks like, from Ellis's site, that the book is brand new.

Ellis is, from the work of hers I've read, more general neopagan than reconstructionist in outlook, but that makes her a) accessible and b) reasonably easy to adapt.  She does research.  I can't remember whether or not she does proper footnotes. ;P

 Okay, yes, endnotes, in quantity, including cites of The Golden Ass and Bleeker's Festivals of Renewal, which should give a sense of her range, heh.

I would expect it would be useful with caveats, possibly inspiring of useful tangents, and that the bibliography and endnotes would be a functional to-do list.  Also I expect I should add it to my list of things what are relevant to my interests, sigh.

 
Excellent! Especially since, now that my copy of Temple of the Cosmos arrived, I have pretty much all of the "core" recon books. Thus, my reading list is going to swing to more modern and/or broader material, I expect. Thanks for the info!
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Sefiru

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Re: Has anyone read "The Union of Isis and Thoth"?
« Reply #3 on: December 29, 2016, 07:33:44 pm »
Quote from: Sefiru;183558
Full title: The Union of Isis And Thoth: Magic and Initiatory Practices of Ancient Egypt, by Normandy Ellis and Nicki Scully

 
Now that I've actually read this book and had time to process it, I thought I'd return with a book report for those interested.

The book is primarily a series of guided meditations in which the reader constructs their own astral temple to Isis and Thoth. So the chapter about "Creating a Naos" is aboout visualising the building of a naos in your soul, not about how to build a physical shrine cabinet to house your physical deity images. There's a comment at one point that performing these rituals entirely mentally is preferable to acting them out (my response: ha ha no.).

The trappings are Kemetic but the underlying principles are very much New Age; I'm a bit too recon-leaning to get into that. They did cite Temple of the Cosmos at one point. Also, as a Set kid I didn't much appreciate their attitude toward the darker aspects of life, which is basically "repress! repress!" Oddly, in this book's version of the mythology, it's Anubis that's responsible for containing Set, rather than Horus, on rather flimsy mythological grounds (if you ask me).

There's a spot where they mention orgone energy and chi in the same sentence. That made me go "wait, what?"

Apparently, Wadjet is the Egyptian goddess of Kundalini energy. Because snakes?

Equating Thoth with Hermes is no surprise, that's been done since antiquity. What is surprising is equating the caduceus with the chakras of the body. And the snakes on the caduceus with Kundalini energy, again. I don't know enough about Kundalini to tell if this makes any sense or not.

Later on in the book, there's a version of the Opening of the Mouth ritual that is supposed to be done to a living person, as a means of achieving spiritual awareness. This strikes me as a Very Bad Idea.

I could probably go on. In short: turned out not to be useful to me; if you like guided meditations, you might get more out of it.
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