The Name of Thoth

The god depicted most often with an Ibis head was identified by several variant hieroglyphs. These symbols are transliterated individually into the form, ḏḥwtj which would be pronounced jay-hoo-oo-t-ee , or more commonly “Tehuti”. It is suggested that the symbols themselves come from the oldest word for ‘Ibis’. So, the name represented by those symbols simply means “He who is like an Ibis”.

The name ‘Thoth’ is from the Greek form of this same word – and ‘Thot’ or ‘Thout’ depending on the Greek letters used in the translation. The most common spelling, and that adopted by Crowley is:

Θωθ

This gives us T(hard)-O-Th(soft), so the ‘best’ pronunciation of this version would indeed be akin to ‘Toff’. Which is very difficult for those of us who spent many years without having to say it to anyone, and calling it inside our own heads, ‘Photh’.

So, ‘Toff’ or ‘Photh’ are fairly close to the Greek rendering of the Hieroglyphs. There is one rare mention of ancient Egyptian pronunciation that might also go back in time to offer a variation. In the Corpus Hermeticum , there is a single sentence which suggests that "the very quality of the speech and the (sound) of Egyptian words have in themselves the energy of the objects they speak of”. [140] We can hear this in ‘pasht’ for the purring of a cat. If we listen to the call of a Nile Ibis, we might imagine that the name had a two-syllable harder pronunciation as ‘Tuh-off’.

Or perhaps in future we might simply refer to the deck as the Crowley-Harris Tarot, the “Tahooti Tarot” or maybe avoid the issue altogether and settle on the Tarot of the Ibis .

It was not only Thoth that inspired the Tarot deck and was invoked into the cards, but many other deities. We will now overview the gods and goddesses we are about to meet in the Temple of the Thoth Tarot.