That Imagery of Thoth, Ma'at, and the Unconscious

The imagery of the Ibis is particularly important and delightful for me right now because I am deeply engrossed in reading Henri Ellenberger's classic,“The Discovery of the Unconscious.”

The bird obviously, easily, and naturally digs beneath the surface to get life-sustaining nourishment from the muck at the bottom.

So it fits that the ancient Egyptians would consider it to be sacred and it's heartwarming and delightful to think of them imaging Thoth (Hermes-Mercury) with the head of an Ibis! It gives me a feeling of immediate kinship with people thousands of years ago, as if they were right here now, in this room.

I've thought for many years about the image of Thoth's wife, Ma'at, as being Truth, symbolized by a feather. You often see an image in the Egyptian hieroglyphic writings of a person with a feather for a head and a person with an Ibis for a head.

Ma'at and Thoth

Here are two very simple images – an Ibis and a feather – that are yet profound, ancient and helpful symbols - truth is built up from very small strands like those of a feather, and discovering truth requires plunging beneath the surface into the hidden depths of the unconscious to retrieve nourishment.

People wear feathers on the head even today, even if it be only a very small one stuck into a hat band – a ancient symbol.

And there is that imagery of the Last Judgment with the Feather in one side of the scale and your soul in the other side, with this Ibis-headed Thoth standing right there taking note.

At the Great Hall of Judgement

I think being acquainted directly with the animals that are used as symbols gave old-time people a greater power to understand these symbols than we are able to possess, having little direct experience with those animals. Having some real life experience with sheep and goats, for example, makes their use as symbols in the Bible much more readiily accessible. Still, videos like the one of an Ibis' flight below are now easily available on the Internet at sites like YouTube, and I think that's a good thing.

Finally, the thought keeps coming up to me of how great it would have been if something was said to me during my long, difficult, expensive education about the meaning of just the Ibis and the Feather. I remember now the psychology course I took at university – it was filled with all kinds of “scientific” words about experiments and statistics and neurons and synapses and rats – none of it being of the slightest use in real life.