Thoth: The Egyptian God of Wisdom and Writing

Thoth (Egyptian Djehuty) was the scribe of the gods, the inventor of writing, the lord of wisdom, magic, science, and the moon. He is usually depicted as a man with the long, curved beak of an ibis, holding a scribe’s palette and reed pen, or as a baboon, sitting with the moon’s disk on his head. He kept the records of the gods, calculated the seasons and the years, healed the Eye of Horus, and stood beside the scales in the Hall of Judgement to record the fate of every soul.

In a civilization that prized writing and learning as highly as ancient Egypt did, Thoth was an immensely important god. Scribes poured a drop of water from their ink-pots in his honour before starting work. Later, the Greeks identified him with their own god Hermes, and the combination — Hermes Trismegistus, “thrice-great Hermes” — became the legendary founder of alchemy, astrology, and the mystical tradition known as Hermeticism.

Ibis and Baboon

Thoth had two sacred animals.

The sacred ibis (Threskiornis aethiopicus) is a wading bird with a white body, black head, and long, downward-curving beak. It probes the mud for food, and its curved beak may have suggested the crescent moon or a scribe’s pen dipping into ink. The bird arrived in Egypt with the annual Nile flood, linking it with renewal.

The hamadryas baboon was sacred to Thoth because of its intelligence and its habit of chattering noisily at dawn, as if greeting the rising sun. Statues of baboons with raised arms were placed in temples, facing east.

Millions of mummified ibises and baboons were buried as offerings to Thoth in vast catacombs at Tuna el-Gebel and Saqqara. At Tuna el-Gebel alone, an estimated four million ibis mummies were deposited over the centuries.

Origins

Thoth’s origins are mysterious and the myths about his birth vary. In one tradition, he was self-created at the beginning of time, born from the lips of the creator god, a pure word. In another, he emerged from the head of Set after Set accidentally swallowed the semen of Horus (see The Contendings of Horus and Set). In Hermopolis, he was the creator god himself, who laid the cosmic egg.

His main cult centre was Hermopolis (Egyptian Khemenu, “city of the eight”), in Middle Egypt, where he presided over the Ogdoad, the eight primordial gods of creation.

The Scribe of the Gods

Thoth was believed to have invented hieroglyphs — which the Egyptians called medu netjer, “the words of the god.” He was the patron of all scribes, and his knowledge encompassed every field that writing made possible: mathematics, astronomy, medicine, law, and magic.

He served as the vizier and secretary of the sun god Ra, recording his decrees and keeping the accounts of the cosmos. He measured time, and was credited with dividing the year into months and seasons.

The Five Extra Days

One famous myth, recorded by the Greek writer Plutarch, tells how Thoth created the five extra days of the Egyptian calendar. The sky goddess Nut was pregnant, but Ra had decreed that she could not give birth on any day of the year. Thoth played a game of draughts with the moon god Khonsu (or with the moon itself) and won a seventy-second part of the moon’s light. From it he made five new days, outside the 360-day year. On these five days Nut gave birth to her five children: Osiris, Horus the Elder, Set, Isis, and Nephthys.

The Egyptian civil calendar did have 360 days plus five epagomenal days, which were celebrated as the birthdays of these gods.

The Moon

Thoth was a god of the moon, and the moon was his measuring instrument: its phases marked the passage of time. As moon god, he was also associated with the healing of the Eye of Horus, which was identified with the moon, damaged and restored each month (see The Eye of Horus).

The Healer and Magician

Thoth was a great magician, second only to Isis in some traditions. In the Osiris myth, he helped Isis restore her husband. When the infant Horus was stung by a scorpion, Thoth came down from the sun boat and spoke the spell that healed him. Many Egyptian magical and medical texts are attributed to him.

The Weighing of the Heart

Thoth’s most solemn role was in the Judgement of the Dead. In the Hall of the Two Truths, the heart of the deceased was weighed on a great balance against the feather of Ma’at, the goddess of truth. Anubis adjusted the scales. Thoth stood beside them with his palette and pen, recording the verdict. If the heart was light, the deceased was declared “true of voice” and passed to the paradise of the Field of Reeds. If heavy with sin, it was devoured by the monster Ammit (see The Weighing of the Heart).

Thoth was thus the god of justice as well as knowledge. He was often described as the one who “reckons” and “judges truly.”

Thoth and Ma’at

Thoth was closely associated with Ma’at, the goddess and principle of cosmic order, truth, and justice. In some traditions she was his wife. Together they stood beside Ra in his sun boat, and together they ensured that the world ran according to its proper order.

The Book of Thoth

Egyptian literature speaks of a legendary Book of Thoth, containing all the secrets of the gods, the language of the animals, and the power to see the gods themselves. The most famous story about it is a Ptolemaic-era tale of the prince Setne Khaemwaset, who steals the book from a tomb and suffers terrible consequences. See The Book of Thoth: The Legendary Book of Magic.

Hermes Trismegistus

When the Greeks ruled Egypt after Alexander the Great, they identified Thoth with Hermes, their messenger god and guide of souls. Hermopolis (“city of Hermes”) took its Greek name from this identification.

Over time, Thoth-Hermes became Hermes Trismegistus, a legendary sage believed to have written thousands of books of wisdom. The Corpus Hermeticum, a collection of Greek philosophical and religious texts from the second and third centuries CE, was attributed to him. Rediscovered in Renaissance Florence and translated by Marsilio Ficino in 1463, these texts were believed to be older than Moses and inspired centuries of Western esotericism, alchemy, and occult philosophy. (The scholar Isaac Casaubon showed in 1614 that they dated from the Roman period.)

The word hermetic, as in a “hermetically sealed” container, derives from the alchemical traditions associated with Hermes Trismegistus.

Thoth Today

Thoth remains one of the most admired Egyptian gods today, a symbol of learning, writing, and wisdom. The Thoth tarot deck designed by Aleister Crowley and Lady Frieda Harris, and the popular notion that the tarot preserves the “Book of Thoth,” are nineteenth- and twentieth-century inventions, but they show the continuing appeal of the idea of an ancient god of secret knowledge. His ibis-headed figure appears in many modern depictions of Egypt, from museum shops to fantasy novels.

Last reviewed: September 2026.

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The Book of Thoth: The Legendary Book of Magic