Lest we forget, the Prophet of the Lovely Star was very much seduced by the Egyptomania that had swept Europe during his lifetime. While on his honeymoon, he toured major archaeological sites like Khufu’s pyramid on the Giza Plateau, visited the Bulak Museum and so on. Having performed an invocation of Horus he would receive the text of Liber AL from a prater-human sentience he called Aiwass. The deities represented therein all bear the names of Egyptian Gods and Goddesses. Among objects held as sacred by Thelemities is the funerary stele of Ankh F N Khonsu, which is currently on exhibit at the Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza having moved from the Bulak, where Crowley encountered it, to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo – always accompanied by its original i.d. tag: 666. SO, I’m thinking y’all would be interested in the exhibition of a primo copy of The Book of Going Forth by Day aka The Egyptian Book of the Dead, currently on display at the Brooklyn Museum. The Guardian ran a lovely article on it. An excerpt reads:
“the Book of Going Forth by Day” – a 2,000-year-old copy of the text is now on display at the Brooklyn Museum in a remarkable full, gilded version.
“This particular book of the dead is gilded and complete, both of those are incredibly rare,” said Egyptologist Yekaterina Barbash, who, before working on this exhibition, had never seen a gilded papyrus in all her decades of researching ancient Egypt. One of only about 10 Egyptian gilded papyri known to exist, this one is particularly special, as the blank sheets bookending the start and finish of the scroll indicate that it’s a complete book.
And leave us not forget, that one of the major achievements of the late, much-missed Brother James Wasserman was helping produce and publish an edition of The Book of Going Forth Today, using the papyrus of Ani, which visuals restored, and text translated.
ead the entire article:
