A Dire Prophecy about Egypt

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Thomas Taylor · Down to Earth Series · 12 pages

The first half establishes who is supposed to be speaking. Wisdom is inseparable from divinity, and the Babylonian Nebo, the Thoth of Memphis and the Greek Hermes were all gods of esoteric wisdom; Ammonius Saccas declared that all moral and practical wisdom was contained in the books of Thoth-Hermes Trismegistus. But Thoth, on this reading, means a college, school or assembly, and the works of that name are identical in doctrine with those of the sages of the far East — so that Thoth-Hermes was never the name of a man but a generic title, and what speaks through those books is the voice of Egypt's great hierophants, the personification of the sacred teaching of her sacerdotal caste.

The second half is the prophecy itself, a passage from the Asclepian Dialogue ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus, foretelling that Egypt shall be forsaken when divinity returns from earth to heaven. Blavatsky reads it as fulfilled rather than pending, and dates the beginning of the fulfilment precisely: the first hour for the disappearance of the Mysteries struck on the clock of the Races with the Macedonian conqueror, after which the adepts of Egypt were compelled to recede further and further from the laurels of conquest into the most hidden spots of the globe, and her sacred scribes and hierophants became wanderers on the face of the earth.

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