Myth Hunters | Episode 8: The Hunt for the Book of Spells | Free Documentary History

[Music] oh Legend has it there's a 5,000 year old book of magic it was handed down by an Egyptian god and contains spells that can predict the future it's called The Book of th and what it says is deeply mysterious some say it contains ancient rituals used by secret organizations each person who is admitted to the order Must Die symbolically and be reborn others say it offers readers the power to Divine the future through tarot cards the original book of the Terell was really engraved on gold tablet and it was a book of thought for yet others the book offers his followers a world of free love and drugs Central to the rock and roll culture of the 1960s some of the most famous people in the world like the Beatles And The Rolling Stones are deeply interested in this sort of thing but what is the truth about the book of tho what does it really say does it even exist now scholars in Egypt are finding the answer this is the story of the quest to find the truth about what some claim is the most important book ever [Music] written Central London among the hustle and bustle are bookshops specializing in the occult and esoteric they sell everything from books on Ancient wisdom to Magic charms but one of the most common images is that of an ancient Egyptian god he's called tho a strange figure with the body of a human and the head of an animal and on the shelves are copies of his book the so-called book of tho 5,000 years after the book of tho were originally composed they are still beguiling modern people I get asked to talk at conferences where the imagery above the stage on the name cards is a figure of tho so who was tho and why does a text from an age dating back to the pyramids exercise such a pull even today the answer lies in a tangled taale that started over 2,000 M away in North Africa the Nile Valley for years at sites across Egypt archaeologists have been uncovering what is probably the greatest civilization of the ancient world [Music] Martin Raven has been digging at a 4,000-year-old burial ground we have uncovered this vast necropolis full of tombs with beautiful paintings wall reliefs inscriptions digs like this have revealed that ancient Egypt had a sophisticated culture a complex belief system system and a Pantheon of gods one of the most important was Thoth he appears as a human body with the head of an Ibis or as the figure of a baboon ancient Egyptian gods were invisible but if they wanted to manifest themselves to our poor eyes they they needed a bodily form many gods had a sacred animal that was thought to be connected with them the baboon uh a monkey looks very wise sometimes very humanlike he has must have deep thought so he was connected with the god thought the other sacred animal is the Ibis he's very quiet he walks through the marshes through the mud but uh he looks as if he also has very deep thoughts to the ancient Egyptians tho was a god with exceptional Powers th was the Secretary of the Gods he noted down what they decided so he became the god of wisdom sometimes also the god of healing and the god of magic according to Legend tho handed down this magic to Mortals in a book it was said to Grant its readers amazing Powers ancient Egyptian literature has it that the book of tho contains esoteric or magic wisdom secret wisdom that would allow an individual to communicate with the gods talk to animals to access the afterlife these kinds of things there's a wonderful story about a a very important magician who found out where this book of th is kept and he appropriates [Music] it and he suddenly understands the language of other [Music] animals and also he sees all the stars moving in the sky he finally understands the the mechanism that is behind the whole universe such was the reputation of the book of th its Fame would spread across the ancient [Music] world in the thir Century BC the Warrior King Alexander the Great invaded Egypt the Greek occupiers were Amazed by what they found they were over by this ancient civilization with wonderful buildings the pyramids statu all of the fabulous stuff that we see today but then it was in its full [Applause] [Music] Glory they were so impressed they adopted much of the Egyptian belief system including some of their gods one of them was [Music] tho the Greeks already had had a figure of Hermes who they believed to be the God who was the patron of what we would call science he was the inventor of writing so they came across the figure of tho who the Egyptians believed was also the inventor of all the mathematics the geometry which had enabl them to build the pyramids so the Greeks associated their figure of Hermes with the figure of tho from ancient Egypt the Greeks declared that Thor and Hermes were the same [Music] God it said they also adopted thoth's book and created a new version the Corpus hermeticum but as they did so Greek influences crept in the Original Egyptian text and the new Greek text became confused and so as Greek culture swallowed Egyptian th's original text simply disappeared one Legend relates that a last copy of the original book was buried alongside the inquisitive Egyptian magician who'd read it and discovered the secrets of the stars but whatever the truth the Original Egyptian Book of th was lost replaced by a new Greek [Music] version the original text would not be rediscovered for thousands of years the Greeks were followed by the Romans the wisdom of the Corpus hermeticum was absorbed into early Roman culture but then came a momentous [Music] change Christianity spread across Europe references to pagan gods like tho and Hermes were banned the Greek version of the book of tho was suppressed with the rise of Christianity and especially with Christianity being adopted by the Roman Empire as the official religion uh this older Pagan philosophy gets wiped [Music] out those who advocated Pagan ideas were burnt at the stake or broken on the [Music] wheel the general kind of ravages of intolerance and Conquest uh led to the loss of the Corpus medicum first The Original Egyptian Book of tho had vanished now the Greek version the Corpus hermeticum disappeared from site to whatever had been written in the book of tho seemed to have been lost forever but then there was another revolution in Western [Music] thinking in the 1300s the Renaissance arrived in Italy it was a time of intellectual ferment and questioning new ideas were born and old ones rediscovered they included the wisdom of Classical Greece and Egypt the very word renaissance means rebirth and its first use of it that we find in the 1400s is somebody who says I seem to see in this new learning The Rebirth of the ancient [Music] culture with it came A Renewed interest in pre-christian [Music] ideas if you think of uh belli's paintings for example of venus and mars or the birth of Venus These Are pagan gods and goddesses which are being painted for the first time time in Europe for a thousand years this new interest in the wisdom of the past included the rediscovery of the Greek version of the book of tho the Corpus hermeticum to the Christian culture of the time it was an explosive [Music] find the Catholic church had been ruling Europe for over a thousand years there was a growing sense it was overbearing and overp Powerful the institutions had become terribly corrupt the office of the Pope had been thoroughly discredited Indulgence were being bought and sold the the church had fallen into a very low Respect by even the common people people there was a ground swell of opposition people began to look back to classical Egypt and Greece for alternative religious inspiration somebody brought to Florence the books of Hermes the Corpus hermeticum and the court of the medich still reeling from the discovery of Plato and the presocratic philosophers suddenly found themselves with these books of Hermes the books of tho For the First Time The Greek version of the book of tho was translated into Latin and published in [Music] Italy it becomes one of the most influ IAL books of the time it goes into several printings over the next um century and a half it may not have been the Original Egyptian text but it spread through the Renaissance world on a wave of [Music] optimism what made the message of this Greek version of the book of th so exciting was its vision of man's place in the world for those seeking to challenge the Orthodoxy of the church it came as a revelation it was a completely different view of mankind not as a fallen creature who after they booted out of the Garden of Eden wandered lost the discovery of the books of Thor was saying no man has an exalt exed position within [Music] creation the message of the book of th seemed to be saying that man was more than a servant to the Gods Not only did he have the same Powers as the gods it was his duty to use those powers to create a better world a more beautiful world th seemed to offer a new vision of the importance of man's place on Earth we've been try to talk to you for a while in the books of th it says that man is halfway between the angels and the animals and has a very special role he is a cocreator with God and he must create objects of beauty just as God has created objects of beauty there's this whole idea of optimism about man but the powers of the Mind the imagination the ability to understand the world to many people the book of th seemed to offer an intensely attractive vision of mankind what made this message even more powerful was its age it seemed to come from a purer time before the church had been corrupted if you were a renaissance man the idea was formed in your mind that if we could somehow restore this ancient wisdom to its proper place we could once again live in a pristine world so what was old was really good and dating apparently from ancient Egypt th's knowledge was as old as any in the world if you think of it as this kind of cascade you know this sort of a mountain or lake at the top full of this clear crystal water and then Through the Ages it comes down it's it's still the same water but it gradually gets a bit muddy and what the philosophers of the Renaissance believed when they had the carus medicum in their hands they were going to the source they were going to you know sort of the the pure Waters of of the ancient knowledge yet the irony was that this whole alternative philosophy was based on the Greek version of the book of th nobody could be certain how much it had to do with the Original Egyptian text yet in the name of Egyptian wisdom it would now lead in some very very curious directions in the early 1700s the first Grand Masonic Lodge was established in London it would grow into the most powerful and successful secret society of all time an organization of politicians and presidents business and Civic leaders but in the early 1700s it was composed of a small group of men looking for a better world it was a time of war and intolerance there was fighting between England and Scotland Catholic and Protestant the period when free was developing was a period of great immorality um politics and religion huge amounts of corruption uh they were trying to find a way to bring people together to forget those differences the early Masons cast around for inspiration they founded in the Renaissance rediscovery of the ancient world we may not be able to trace the historical linkages directly but we can say that the rituals and the foundation purpose of Freemasonry stretches right back into ancient Egypt like renaissance man before him the early Masons were beguiled by THS can do vision of mankind the classical World in Egypt was seen as the start of real civilization where things like science like mathematics um mathematics being the foundation of building um the Masons then saw that as the foundation of the art that they grew out of um so there's a huge reverence for anything from classical times and from ancient Egypt to mark this reverence the Masons adopted Egyptian images you suddenly get the importation of sphinxes pyramids anything to do with Egypt we're sitting in Freemason Hall in London and lodro number 10 there um is a superb example of a restrained um Egyptian [Music] architecture they got copies of the Egyptian Book of the Dead and the walls of their temples are decorated with those with Egyptian Pillars with lotus [Music] work most significantly the Masons focused on one particular part of the Corpus ticum it was a ritual every Mason would have to go through it came they believed straight from ancient Egypt it was the ritual of rebirth each person who is admitted to the order Must Die symbolically and be reborn as a new person and this idea of rebirth it's Central to the books of th to the Corpus hermeticum and th appears again in all his majesty just as he had for the ancient Egyptians as the figure who would Grant all knowledge to the initiate and also guarantee them personal immortality a new era claimed to have rediscovered the ways of ancient Egypt even though the text they' based it on was Greek but nobody could say what was in the original book of tho as a result there would soon be several other versions of [Music] it Paris the late 1700s as Freemasonry was spreading through Europe something new was stirring in France antoan cord jaban was a French Swiss writer and thinker cord jabon who was a he was an occultist he was a Mason he in fact he belonged to the same Masonic Lodge in Paris that voler belong to and and and and he he was friends with the King of France so he was really connected cord abalan had two overriding interests one was ancient Egypt the other was card games cards were a popular Pastime many were Illustrated with mythical or popular figures and [Music] events they were used to play a game called tarot the 18th century equivalent of Ramy or [Music] bridge in the mid 1700s cord Shaban put his two interests together thumbing through a deck of tarot cards he came to a startling conclusion so he starts looking through the deck he goes well this is based on hermetic philosophy and then he starts looking through the cards and he starts realizing that they all seem to be about the most important book in the world the Book of Knowledge the book of thought it was just disguised as a common deck of cards cord jaan's theory that the cards were the original book of tho was not as strange as it appears he knew that the Egyptians would have used hieroglyphics to write the book of tho hieroglyphics are pictures so are tarot cards it therefore made sense to him that the Original Egyptian wisdom of the book of tho could have once been represented by pictures of cards it just needed somebody with the Insight of cord jeelan to discover it so here we had this set of cards that were in pictures but this could actually be this hieroglyphic book so this could be the book of [Music] thought in 1733 cabalan announced his conclusions in a new book it made the entirely novel claim that the book of tho lost for 5,000 years was actually a pack of cards he even claimed the word tarot derived from ancient Egypt he said that the word Tero he felt was an Egyptian word which proved that the tarot was Egyptian and he said that it was the Egyptian word tar raw which meant the Royal Road being the Royal Road to knowledge suggesting that it was the book of Thor it didn't seem to matter at the time that nobody could read Egyptian hieroglyphics Gord jaalam believed he'd stumbled on a profound truth and discovered the Original Egyptian Book of th his book would generate widespread [Music] interest one man captivated by it was an itinerant salesman teacher and spiritualist called John Baptist aliet for years he'd been dabbling in the [Music] occult he now took cord jaan's idea and turned it into his own he published a subtly different set of tarot cards he called them the atella tarot he get uh basically called himself AA for Magical reasons and all it was was his last name spelled backwards the cards had what aliet claimed was an authentic Egyptian feel you see in this first card here which represents a male querin that he actually looks like an Egyptian man a querent is a person seeking knowledge in a tarot reading but aliette didn't stop there okay now if we compare the fool in this ATA to the to the French fool you see the French fool and he's being attacked by a dog cuz he's a stranger now to make it sound more Egyptian AA thought that the creature attacking him should be a leopard thinking that leopards came from Egypt so to see are fools being bitten on the leg by a leopard instead of a dog these cards according to aliad represented the true wisdom of thought moreover they could do something truly magical they could Divine the future in 1788 aliet formed a society for the interpretation of the book of th it was a society dedicated to the reading of his tarot cards just going to go and look at the long term up here so what we've got here is definitely nearly 2,000 years after it had vanished it was now claimed the Original Egyptian version of the book of th had reappeared thanks to the work of two Frenchmen the legend of the book of tho had taken another twist but there would soon be yet another version of the [Music] book in 1904 a strange and idiosyncratic Englishman traveled to [Music] Egypt he was called aliser Crowley a leading member of an occult society called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn Crawley he thought he was an artist a painter a poet a great magician he he was going to be something great he just knew he had greatness in him he even saw it in his name some people pronounce the name Crowley and some Cowley in his own writings he said it's pronounced crowly it runs with Holy One Day in Cairo he claimed he was told the ancient Egyptian gods had a message for him over the course of 3 days he said he received a series of Revelations he sat in a study at his desk with his writing materials and then and this and and uh this being came in that was sort of like transparent and came and stood behind him over over his shoulder over his left shoulder and dictated to him what to write and he and he just wrote it down crowy had no doubt who was speaking to him basically this is message coming from thought crowy called the text he'd received the book of law if he was telling the truth this was surely the most authentic version of the book of tho [Music] ever it had come from the God [Music] himself growley described it as a gospel for New Age his version of the book of tho consisted of a series of tenets so line three says every man and every woman is a star and so now he's saying that we're all like stars you see you know we don't need one Central being to give us direction that we each can find our own direction to this end Crowley argued the most important tenant of his new book of th was do as thou will shall be the whole law th in the shape of the book of law became the basis of a new free willing religion Ry called it Thea it was a religion in which almost anything went the LMA means will which of course what everybody talks about when we talk about Crowley but it doesn't just mean will it means like desire it means including like sexual [Music] desire Crowley's new version of the book of th put sexual magic at its Center and the sexual act became a Sacrament they practice free love they took drugs they had Visions they were promiscuous they had lots of children he wasn't trying to con anybody he he really felt that he was somebody important finally towards the end of his life Crowley pulled his thoughts together but it wasn't in a book it took the form of another set of tarot cards Crowley felt that the tarot cards were this whole message of everything he was trying to get across this whole philosophy of [Music] thma he published them as yet another version of the book of tho th's book originally written on papari had gone through another metamorphosis now it seemed a justification for among other things some very strange sexual practices Crowley died in 1947 but his legacy would be carried on by a new [Music] generation [Music] 1960s Britain Crowley's version of tho was adopted by the rock and roll counterculture his face even appeared on the cover of The Beatles Sergeant Pepper [Music] album a decade later one man fascinated by it was Gary Latchman bass player with the 1970s New Wave band Blondie some of the most famous people in the world like the Beatles And The Rolling Stones are uh deeply interested in this sort of [Music] thing they start uh getting into meditation they start uh checking out their tarot they start uh you know being interested in their Aura and a variety of different occult sorts of things Latchman believes much of the counterculture of the rock and roll period can be traced back to the book of thought people were talking about the age of Aquarius uh which is an ancient Egyptian tradition this tradition of doth this was something that was absolutely Central to the' 60s popular culture but in a further twist the new age explorers were happy to take ideas from several different versions of the book of th from Crowley's version of th they took drugs and free [Music] love from the Greek version the Corpus hermeticum they took the idea of a purer more spiritual age I believe the enduring attraction of the figure of the god thought the the philosophy associated with him the ideas is that it is this intuitive sense we have that life is deeper and more complex and stranger than what the official accounts tell us whether that be science or the church there are some very inspiring passages in the Corpus of medicum grow to immeasurable size be free from every body transcend all time suppose nothing to be impossible for yourself consider yourself Immortal and able to understand everything [Music] now what strikes me as wonderful about that passage and many others in the Corpus of medicum is that it's showing us the potential of our own Consciousness it's showing us the potential of our own minds and Spirits the meaning of what had once been the Egyptian Book of tho was now utterly confused there were now four possible versions of thoth's book and its magic the ancient Greek version the Corpus ticum translated into Latin and taken up by the [Music] Renaissance aliet 18th century version a pack of tarot cards claiming to authentically represent the Egyptian hieroglyphic text cr's sexually Lous version a deck of tarot cards coming it was said in a message from [Music] Thor and a 1960s version which makx several of the earlier versions and came up with something different yet [Music] again four versions all wildly different all claiming to represent the authentic Egyptian Book of [Music] th but how could one book cover such widely different in interpretations do any of them in fact represent the original recent discoveries mean that today for the first time it may be possible to uncover the real truth about the book of [Music] th for over a 100 years archaeologic digs have been uncovering the mysteries of Egyptian [Music] civilization among them are thousands of texts written on pieces of [Music] papy if there is a real book of th this would be the place to find it but the papy haven't given up their secrets [Music] easily they're written in two different Egyptian scripts some in hieroglyphics some in a variation known as demotic for centuries no one could read either script they were only finally cracked in the mid 1800s with the help of one of the most extraordinary objects ever found it's called the Rosetta Stone it had the same decree written in three different scripts hieroglyphics demotic and ancient Greek before the discovery of the Rosetta Stone people didn't know how to approach hieroglyphs essentially they were just little pictures and so people would try and describe what they see treat them as symbols in other words the bird is in the house with the man etc etc this didn't really bear much relevance to what the Egyptians were actually trying to say the Rosetta Stone changed all of that the Greek section could be translated the hieroglyphic and the demotic sections said the same thing so Scholars could work back from the Greek and work out what the hieroglyphs were saying that cracked the code entirely thanks to the Rosetta Stone Scholars are now able little by little to work their way through thousands of fragments of papy it's produced some intriguing results as the fragments have been assembled and translated egyptologists have found explicit references to a book of tho there are also references to Magic but it's not magic as we usually understand it people thought that it is a miracle that the moon doesn't fall down to the Earth or even the sun uh that there's a change of day and night so the magic of the book of th doesn't help you read the future it's simply a way of understanding the World Magic is a way that we can make sense of the Unseen World so things like the seasons rolling day turning toight and back today again uh illnesses as well all of these things that you can't really pinpoint a cause for you could be alive one day and dead the other and that explains that people were really looking for help in every area they could get it and that that's why magic was so incredibly important to them there are also references in the papy to spells but again these are not spells as we normally understand them they are not [Music] magic a spell cataloged by egyptologist as spell 15 reads may he grant that I see the sunis and behold the moon unceasing every day spell 31 deals with a common Menace get back Retreat get back you crocodile do not come against me for I live by my magic so these are not spells designed to perform extraordinary Deeds they're more like prayers the word spell doesn't really help the issue because this is very much our terminology being imposed over the ancient Egyptian literature itself so does this mean all the later interpretations of the book of tho that see magic Supernatural powers in it are simply misguided gradually it's becoming clearer what the book of thought is and what it isn't there are references to man being halfway to a God as the Renaissance believed and there are references to the Masonic ritual of death and rebirth these Clues suggest the Greek Corpus ticum did contain some of the Original Egyptian thinking but there are no references in any of the papy to tarot or images of the tarot cards there are no references to Crowley's notion of free will or his promotion of sexual promiscuity and there is nothing about the rituals of new AG mysticism all these are complete Fabrications but there is something else in the papy that's much more significant today Scholars question whether the book of th ever existed as a physical [Music] object despite the mentions that we have we're not convinced there's actually a book of th that we can one day find essentially the references to a book of tho or the book of tho seem to be metaphors for the collection in its entirety of ancient Egyptian religious literature there are various compilations of magical knowledge written down in different periods and to those Believers of that period that was the real book of thought but when we put them all together they are all so different that there was not one Central [Music] tradition the book of thth never existed so does that mean the legend of tho and his magic book will disappear it seems unlikely in 2002 a BBC poll named Crowley the 73rd most influential Britain ever and a new generation is adding to the legends of ancient [Music] Egypt new films and video games draw on Ancient Egypt and even if there is no book of thought that won't stop a new generation believing in it the 5,000-year-old legend of tho and his magic is still a force to be conjured with there are secret societies even today who still hold th to be the archetypal myog the person The God Who will lead you into the Arcane mysteries of Consciousness it's very very strange but th seems to have something to say to every Century he became a central figure for people who believe believe there is more in this world than can be explained by [Music] science [Music]

Channel: Free Documentary - History

Views: 197,736

Keywords: Free Documentary, Documentaries, Full Documentary, documentary - topic, documentary (tv genre), History, History Documentaries, free documentary history, myth hunters, history documentary, myths, mythical history, historical myth, religious artefacts, bbc history, strange history, alternate history

Id: z3m7E8hQp9M

Length: 49min 4sec (2944 seconds)

Published: Tue May 14 2024