Thrice-Greatest Hermes, Vol. I — G. R. S. Mead (1906)
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Tehuti, the Egyptian name of Thoth, it has been suggested, is to be derived from tehu, the supposed oldest name of the ibis in Egypt; the termination ti thus signifying that he who was thus called possessed the powers and qualities of the ibis.
But if this is the true derivation, seeing that Tehuti in his highest aspect is a synonym for the Logos of our system at the very least, I would suggest that we should rather exalt the " ibis " to the heavens than drag down the sublime concept of that Logos to considerations connected with a degenerate fowl of earth, and believe that the Egyptians chose it in wisdom rather than folly, as being some far-off reflection of a certain Great Bird of the Cosmic Depths, a member of that circle of Sacred Animals of which the now conventional Signs of the Zodiac are but faint sky-glyphs.
But the derivation of the name Tehuti which seems to have been favoured by the Egyptians themselves was from tekh, which usually means a " weight," but is also found as the name of Thoth himself. Now the determinative for the word tekh is the sign for the "heart"; moreover, Horapollo (i. 36) tells us that when the Egyptians wish to write "heart" they draw an ibis, adding, " for this bird was dedicated to Hermes (Thoth) as Lord of all Knowledge and Understanding." Is it possible, however, that in this Horapollo was either mistaken or has said less than he knew ; and that the Egyptians once wrote simply " heart " for Thoth, who presided over the " weighing of the heart," but subsequently, in their love of mystery, and owing to the name-play, substituted the bird tekh or teknu, which we know closely resembled the ibis, for the more sacred symbol ?
The now commonest name for Thoth, however, is Egy. hob, Copt, hiboi, Gk. ibis ; and it is the white ibis (AbUL Hannes) which is the Jbis religiosa, so say Liddell and Scott. Another of the commonest symbolic forms of Thoth is the dog-headed ape. Thus among birds he is glyphed as the ibis, among animals as the cynocephalus. The main apparent reason for this, as we shall see later on, is because the ibis was regarded as the wisest of birds, and the ape of animals.1
In the Judgment Scene of the Book of the Dead the dog-headed ape (Aan) is seated on the top of the beam of the Balance in which the heart of the deceased is weighed ; his duty apparently is to watch the pointer and tell his master Thoth when the beam is level. Brugsch has suggested that this ape is a form of Thoth
1 And this is the case with the latter even to-day, where in the Sudan the natives " believe that its intelligence is of the highest order, and that its cunning is far superior to that of man." (Op. at., i. 21.)
as God of " equilibrium," and that it elsewhere symbolises the equinoxes; but this does not explain the ape. Thoth is indeed, as we have seen, the Balancer — " Judge of the two Combatant Gods," l Horus and Set ; he it is who stands at the meeting of the Two Ways, at the junction of Order and Chaos; but this by no means explains the puzzling cynocephalus. It was in one sense presumably connected with a certain state of consciousness, a reflection of the true Mind, just as were the lion and the eagle (or hawk) ; it " mimicked " that Mind better than the rest of the " animals."