Thoth (Egyptian Djehuty, Coptic Thout, spelled Tehuti by Billy Carson) was the ancient Egyptian god of writing, wisdom, the moon, measurement and magic, shown as an ibis-headed man or as a baboon. He was scribe and record-keeper of the gods, and in the Greek period he was identified with Hermes, which is how he became Hermes Trismegistus, the "thrice-great" sage credited with the Hermetica and the Emerald Tablet.
Thoth matters because almost every Western tradition of hidden knowledge passes through him. Egyptian priests, Greek philosophers, Arabic alchemists, Renaissance magicians and modern esoteric writers all claimed his authority, and each reshaped him. Knowing who Thoth was in Egypt, and how he turned into Hermes Trismegistus, is the only way to read the [Emerald Tablets](/topics/emerald-tablets) with clear eyes.
What did the ancient Egyptians believe Thoth was?
To the Egyptians, Thoth was the god who invented writing and kept the accounts of the universe. His title "lord of divine words" refers to medu netjer, the Egyptian name for hieroglyphs, and scribes treated him as their patron. As a moon god he governed the months, and so became the god of calendars, measurement, arithmetic and time.
His two animals tell the story. The ibis, with its curved beak, was linked to the crescent moon and the reed pen. The baboon, which chatters at dawn, was read as a creature greeting the rising sun. Thoth is often paired with Seshat, goddess of writing, who records the reigns of kings on the leaves of the sacred persea tree, and with Ma'at, the personification of truth and balance.
Thoth appears in the Pyramid Texts, the Coffin Texts and the Book of the Dead, so his cult ran for more than two thousand years before the Greeks arrived. The wider setting is covered in the [Ancient Egypt topic hub](/topics/ancient-egypt).
Where was Thoth worshipped?
Thoth's main cult centre was Khemenu in Middle Egypt, which the Greeks renamed Hermopolis, "city of Hermes", and which is today el-Ashmunein. The Egyptian name means "Eight-Town", after the Ogdoad, the eight primordial deities of the local creation myth, over whom Thoth presided. Amenhotep III set up colossal quartzite baboons there in the fourteenth century BC, and parts of them still stand.
At the desert edge nearby lies Tuna el-Gebel, where underground galleries hold vast numbers of mummified ibises and baboons offered to the god in the Late and Ptolemaic periods.
What are the main myths about Thoth?
The best-known Thoth stories concern the calendar, the Eye of Horus and the judgment of the dead. In the version Plutarch tells in "On Isis and Osiris" (Greek, around AD 100), the sun god forbade the sky goddess to give birth on any day of the year, so Hermes, meaning Thoth, played draughts with the moon, won a fraction of its light and made it into five extra days added to the 360-day year. On those days Osiris, Horus the Elder, Seth, Isis and Nephthys were born. Egyptologists note this is a Greek retelling, but the five epagomenal days were a real feature of the Egyptian calendar.
In the myths of Horus and Seth, preserved most fully in Papyrus Chester Beatty I of the Twentieth Dynasty, Thoth is secretary to the divine court and restores the Eye of Horus after Seth damages it. The restored eye, the wedjat, became one of Egypt's most common amulets, and Thoth's role as its healer is why he is linked to medicine and making things whole.
In the afterlife, Thoth is the scribe at the weighing of the heart. Spell 125 of the Book of the Dead, illustrated in the Papyrus of Ani in the British Museum, shows Anubis checking the scales, Ammit waiting beside the scales, and Thoth with palette and pen recording the verdict.
Greek writers added a layer of their own. In Plato's "Phaedrus", Socrates tells of Theuth, an Egyptian god who invented number, geometry, astronomy and letters and offered writing to King Thamus as a remedy for memory; Thamus replies that it will breed forgetfulness.
What is the Book of Thoth?
The "Book of Thoth" names two different things: a legendary book of spells in Egyptian fiction, and a real demotic wisdom text recovered by modern scholars. The legend appears in the Setne Khamwas tales, demotic stories of the Ptolemaic period about a son of Ramesses II remembered as a magician. In the first tale, the prince Naneferkaptah steals a book written by Thoth from the bottom of the Nile near Coptos. Reading it lets him understand animals and see the gods, but the theft brings ruin on his family, and the book is eventually returned to the tomb.
The historical text is a demotic dialogue between a teacher, apparently Thoth, and a pupil who wants to enter the House of Life, the scribal institution attached to temples. Reconstructed from dozens of fragments and published by Richard Jasnow and Karl-Theodor Zauzich in 2005, it discusses sacred writing, the underworld and a scribe's training. Scholars see it as a bridge between Egyptian temple learning and the Greek Hermetica, though it is not the Corpus Hermeticum or any emerald tablet.
How did Thoth become Hermes Trismegistus?
Thoth became Hermes Trismegistus through the Greek habit of matching foreign gods with their own, combined with an Egyptian title already in use. After Alexander's conquest in 332 BC, Greeks in Egypt identified Thoth with Hermes, since both were messengers, guides of souls and patrons of speech. Egyptian texts of the Ptolemaic period call Thoth "great, great, great", which Greek scribes rendered as "megistos kai megistos" and eventually "Trismegistos", thrice-great. The name is a genuine Egyptian epithet in Greek dress, not a Renaissance invention.
Over the following centuries Hermes Trismegistus stopped being a god in the strict sense and became an ancient sage, a wise Egyptian king or priest who had lived before Moses, or around the same time, and whose books held the wisdom of the temples. This is the Hermes that Christian writers such as Lactantius and Augustine discussed and later Europe inherited.
What are the Hermetica and the Emerald Tablet?
The Hermetica are Greek and Latin philosophical writings, composed mostly in the second and third centuries AD in Roman Egypt, that present themselves as teachings of Hermes Trismegistus. The core collection, the Corpus Hermeticum, holds seventeen Greek treatises, the first of which, the "Poimandres", describes the creation of the cosmos and the descent of the divine human into matter. A separate work, the "Asclepius", survives in Latin translation of a lost Greek original and contains the lament that Egypt is "an image of heaven" whose gods will one day depart.
The Emerald Tablet, or Tabula Smaragdina, is a different and much shorter text: a single page of alchemical sayings whose earliest known form is Arabic, embedded in the "Book of the Secret of Creation" attributed to Balinus, the Arabic name for Apollonius of Tyana, and dated by most scholars to the eighth or ninth century. Latin versions followed in the twelfth century, and it became the most quoted text in Western alchemy. Its opening, usually rendered "that which is above is like that which is below", is the source of "as above, so below". The full story of the text is told in the companion article on the [Emerald Tablets of Thoth explained](/emerald-tablets-of-thoth-explained).
What happened to Thoth's legacy in the Renaissance?
The Renaissance made Hermes Trismegistus the founder of a supposed ancient theology, then took the title away. In 1463 Marsilio Ficino, working for Cosimo de' Medici in Florence, translated the first fourteen treatises of the Corpus Hermeticum into Latin. Printed in 1471, Ficino's "Pimander" led thinkers such as Pico della Mirandola and Giordano Bruno to treat Hermes as a prophet from the age of Moses.
In 1614 the philologist Isaac Casaubon showed from the Greek vocabulary and its borrowings from Plato and the New Testament that the Hermetica belonged to the early Christian centuries, not remote antiquity. Most scholars accepted his dating, and Hermes faded from mainstream philosophy while staying central to alchemy, Rosicrucianism and later occult movements. Modern Egyptology has since shown that the Hermetica, though Greek, preserve genuinely Egyptian ideas about the temple, the gods and the soul.
Where does Thoth the Atlantean come from?
The idea of Thoth as an Atlantean priest-king who founded Egypt comes from a twentieth-century American text, "The Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean", published in 1939 by Maurice Doreal, founder of the Brotherhood of the White Temple in Colorado. Doreal claimed to have translated ancient tablets in which Thoth describes himself as a survivor of Atlantis who sailed to Egypt, ruled it for thousands of years, built the Great Pyramid and departed, promising to return.
No Egyptologist accepts Doreal's tablets as ancient, and no physical tablets have been produced for examination; mainstream scholarship treats the book as a modern esoteric composition drawing on Theosophy and earlier Atlantis literature. The distinction matters: Doreal's Thoth is a figure of twentieth-century revelation, while the Egyptian Thoth and the Greek Hermes Trismegistus are documented in surviving texts and monuments.
Billy Carson's reading
Billy Carson approaches Thoth not as a myth but as a historical teacher whose story was mythologised over time. In his "Compendium of the Emerald Tablets", published in 2019, Carson takes Doreal's tablets as his primary text and reads them line by line, connecting their account of an Atlantean founder of Egypt to the Hermetica, to the Egyptian record and to modern physics and consciousness research. In conversations with Cliff Dunning and with George Noory on Beyond Belief, he has said that he reads Thoth, whom he calls Tehuti, as a real person of Atlantean origin who brought advanced knowledge to Egypt, and that the god of later cult is the memory of that teacher.
Carson also draws a comparison mainstream scholars do not: he links Thoth with Quetzalcoatl, the feathered-serpent deity and culture hero of central Mexico, arguing that both are remembered as bringers of writing, the calendar and civilisation who promised to return. Archaeologists see no evidence of contact between the two cultures; Carson's position is that they are too specific to be coincidence. Readers can weigh the argument in the Compendium of the Emerald Tablets.
Watch, read and go deeper
The [Egyptian Mystery School](/watch/egyptian-mystery-school) series on 4BK TV walks through the temple tradition that produced Thoth's priesthood and the House of Life. On the podcast, Billy Carson and the history of Thoth the Atlantean with Cliff Dunning is the clearest statement of Carson's view of Thoth as a historical figure, while the hidden secrets of Mexico and Thoth, known as Tehuti of Egypt sets out the Quetzalcoatl comparison. His interview with George Noory, Thoth and the Anunnaki on Beyond Belief, places Thoth inside Carson's wider reading of Mesopotamian and Egyptian sources. For the texts themselves, the [Emerald Tablets hub](/topics/emerald-tablets) collects every article on the tablets, the Hermetica and their interpreters.
Frequently asked questions
Is Thoth the same as Hermes Trismegistus?
Not originally, but they merged. Thoth was an Egyptian god worshipped for thousands of years; Hermes Trismegistus is the Greek-period identification of Thoth with Hermes, later reimagined as an ancient sage. The Hermetica and the Emerald Tablet are attributed to Hermes Trismegistus but were written in Greek, Latin and Arabic long after the pharaohs.
Why is Thoth shown with the head of an ibis?
The ibis was sacred to Thoth, and Egyptian artists combined a human body with an animal head to show a god's nature, not to depict a literal creature. The ibis's curved beak was compared to the crescent moon and to the scribe's reed pen. He is also shown as a baboon, another animal sacred to him.
Did Thoth write the Emerald Tablets?
There is no ancient evidence that he did. The Arabic Emerald Tablet of the eighth or ninth century is attributed by its own text to Hermes Trismegistus, and Doreal's 1939 book claims to translate tablets written by Thoth himself. Mainstream scholars regard the first as a medieval alchemical text and the second as a modern composition; Billy Carson reads Doreal's tablets as preserving a genuine tradition and presents that as his interpretation.
What was the Book of Thoth?
In Egyptian fiction it was a book of spells written by Thoth that let its reader understand animals and see the gods, stolen from the Nile in the Setne Khamwas stories. In modern scholarship the name also covers a real demotic dialogue between Thoth and a student about scribal knowledge, published in 2005.
What is Thoth's role in the judgment of the dead?
Thoth records the verdict. In spell 125 of the Book of the Dead, the heart of the deceased is weighed against the feather of Ma'at; Anubis tends the scales and Thoth writes down whether the heart is in balance. If it is, the dead person is declared true of voice and passes to Osiris.
Sources and further reading
- Plutarch, "On Isis and Osiris", translated by Frank Cole Babbitt (Loeb Classical Library).
- Raymond O. Faulkner (trans.), "The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead", edited by Carol Andrews, British Museum Press.
- Miriam Lichtheim, "Ancient Egyptian Literature, Volume III: The Late Period", for the Setne Khamwas tales.
- Richard Jasnow and Karl-Theodor Zauzich, "The Ancient Egyptian Book of Thoth", Harrassowitz, 2005.
- Brian P. Copenhaver (trans.), "Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius", Cambridge University Press.
- Garth Fowden, "The Egyptian Hermes: A Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind", Princeton University Press.
- Frances A. Yates, "Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition", for Ficino and Casaubon.
- Maurice Doreal, "The Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean", 1939; Billy Carson, "Compendium of the Emerald Tablets", 2019.
