Egypt & The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn

The GD grade signs may have something in common with genuine Egyptian techniques such as what's been called the Heptagramme rite of PGM XIII 824-841 and the Mithras Liturgy , the most widely read of all the PGM. If I remember rightly this also has grade signs used in the initiation of a female adept (That the initiate in this ancient rite was female was omitted from previous translations).

Skrying, astral contact and other freeform ritual work is indeed another important but often neglected aspect of GD. Again, new research is revealing that dream and vision questing was also a feature of the late antique Egyptian magical religion. Some contemporary practitioners tend to write off this feature of Victorian GD type work, thus it is often hidden or edited out in favour of a more masonic interpretations. Same goes for much Crowley ritual work. Doing so restricts your magick to one 'channel' and robs it of the valuble use of music, dance and trance induction. The same goes for ancient Egyptian magic, which for a long time was interpreted through the lens of the (supposed) Victorian GD techniques - which few people find very effective. It's worth thinking about this issue of multi-channel magick (I've borrowed the term from educational psychology.)

A useful corrective to mono-channel type magick come IMO from Chaos Magick and works by Jan Fries, especially Visual Magick. Incidentally it's been quite hard to get this message across - one recent encyclopedia on nature magick refused a piece on Crowley, because their 'crowley expert' said there was no need for him to be in - presumably because they felt he didn't practice nature magic - so the circle of misinformation continues!!

More information on the Heptagramme Rite is available in the modern reconstructed version in Steven Flower's interesting book
'Hermetic Magick: the postmodern Magical Papyrus of Abaris'
Its also recommended in my own book
'Tankhem: Seth and Egyptian Magick'
and elsewhere.

Because of the sevenfold nature of the rite - it is currently in use by several 'sethian' and 'sabbatic' groups as an alternative to the LBR. The whole business about the symbolism of the number seven, the starry plough etc., is something whose significance is spreading to many other practitioners.

Which leads on the the question of how many of the barbarous names of the occult tradition are based on Egyptian godnames, rubriks and stereotypical formulae? Many of the later were 'mistaken' for god names or voce magicae during the Roman revival. The best example off the top of my head is 'Ouphor' - which is not a god name but the name of the ritual for the opening of the mouth. In the PGM, only the name survives. The rite alluded to is extremely ancient and important in the animation of mummies and other fetish objects.

Thaphthartharath occurs in one such medieval grimoire as an invocation of Thoth.
Chris Lehrich goes through the whole QBL analysis of the name - which is interesting although I would have thought the first place to look would be in the Egyptian language itself - then Greek then Hebrew - I was thinking about it yesterday in my own 'house of life' and it could be something like:

Thaph thar tharath

Which is very close to the name Thoth, 3 times by reduplication -
which is a very egyptian thing - hence Thrice Great Thoth!
Incidentally a new edition (text and translation) of the egyptian 'Book of Thoth'
was published last year - the mss thought to be the work of eqyptian hermeticists.