The Book of Tooth

In my September 26 post "You'll find them in a lion's mouth," I mentioned that I had been reading The Tooth Book again and again to a child who kept requesting it. The post title is a line from the book, in which them refers to teeth, but I reinterpreted it as referring to books, and specifically to sacred texts.

My next post after that, "The eyeing d'Epstein -- plus Bonifacio Bembo and Optimus Prime," included this short video from the Morgan Library and Museum about the Visconti-Sforza Tarot cards:

My reason for watching the video was to see the 14th-century French casket in which the cards are stored. However, the talking head in the video mentions that Antoine Court de Gébelin "traced the imagery on the Tarot deck back to, of all places, ancient Egypt, specifically to the Book of Thoth."

I don't know how you pronounce Thoth, but the most common pronunciation I've heard rhymes with both, with the initial th pronounced the same as the final one. (One exception would be former Internet atheist Martin Willett, who in his SmiteCam project -- calling down the wrath of various gods in the hope of being smitten live on video -- shook his fist at the sky and shouted, "Thoth! Thquath me like a moth!") Those with more Continental influence may pronounce it as tote or taught, with hard t sounds. What I've never heard, except in this video from the Morgan, is the pronunciation "tawth," with a hard t and the beginning and a fricative th at the end. This anomalous pronunciation obviously brings it very close to the English word tooth.

So I began thinking of The Tooth Book and the Book of Thoth together.

This connection was reinforced when, on September 30, I was at the same school where I'd been reading The Tooth Book and saw that they'd put the phases of the moon up on the wall. This one caught my eye:

The Chinese, which is the same for both the waxing and the waning crescent, is 牙月 -- literally "tooth moon." Thoth is of course a moon god, and is specifically associated with the crescent moon. Most Egyptologists believe that the reason Thoth is depicted with the head of an ibis is that the ibis's beak resembles a crescent moon.

I've also been finding some syncs connecting The Tooth Book with The Nephilim Looked Like Clowns. The very first page of The Tooth Book asks, "Who has teeth?" and answers that "red-headed uncles do." In the rest of the book, the majority of the people in the illustrations are redheads. Throughout The Nephilim Looked Like Clowns, Paul Stobbs emphasizes how bright red hair is associated with the Nephilim. At one point, he discusses the discovery in the Great Serpent Mound of

a six-foot skeleton with two rows of teeth (a genetic marker standard in Nephilim), but it was missing its wisdom teeth. The archaeologists and biologists who examined the strange skull concluded this was an adolescent who had not yet lost their first set of baby teeth.

The Tooth Book talks about how you will grow "two sets [of teeth]: set one, set two." (This gives each person a lifetime total of 52 teeth, the same as the number of ivories on a piano. The skeleton lacked wisdom teeth, though, so it would have had only 48.)

The other day one of the bookcases at my school caught my eye. Lettering on the side of the case, put there by one of my employees of her own initiative some seven years ago, reads, "Grab a bite to read!" This can't really be considered a sync, since it's been there all along, but still, referring to a book as "a bite" fits right in with the Book of Tooth theme.

Another idea that came to mind is that a "tooth book" might be a book that requires "teeth" to eat, that is, a "hard" book. This could be related to the well-known "milk vs. meat" metaphor from the Epistle to the Hebrews.