New Book Claims to Be Rediscovered Ancient Text Written by Egyptian God Thoth. It Is Actually "Channeled" New Age Mysticism

​So, this one was a big “No” from me. I started to take a look at an upcoming release from Bear & Company called The Tablets of Light: The Teachings of Thoth on Unity Consciousness (2017), which appears under the byline of Danielle Rama Hoffman and the copyright of Danielle Lynn Hoffman, who are presumably the same person. I did not make it very far. Mostly I wanted to give up when the acknowledgements thanked the Egyptian god Thoth, to whom the book is pompously dedicated, and to “the Council of Light, Isis, Sanat Kumara, Venus Beings of Light, and all the Light Beings I have the blessing of multidimensionally communicating with.” But I did give it a go into the first chapter. It was a mistake. I had expected at least a passing familiarity with Egyptian, Greek, and Hermetic sources; I received rambling New Age mumbo-jumbo.

​I mentioned that the book is copyrighted to Danielle Rama Hoffman. This makes for an interestingly self-refuting volume, since the book professes to be a faithful transcription of extemporaneous remarks delivered by the god Thoth to Hoffman while communicating psychically across dimensions. As extemporaneous remarks, they would be beyond the protection of copyright. (The law is complex; I am simplifying here for effect.) So, in order to assert copyright, it would seem like one of the following things must be true: (a) Thoth prepared these remarks ahead of time as a written text whose copyright he assigned to Danielle Hoffman or (b) the text’s claims are untrue and the true author is Danielle Hoffman, who therefore can assert copyright. There are other, even less logical possibilities, but I’m pulling for (a), mostly because I’d love to see the legal documents assigning Hoffman the copyright to an Egyptian god’s trans-dimensional texts.
 
If I were a jackass, I’d publish “Thoth’s” words and dare her to prove she legally owns them, thus demonstrating the threadbare revelation of a fictitious deity. But I am not that much of raconteur. Suffice it to acknowledge that she would be unlikely to produce legal evidence of Thoth.
 
At some level, Hoffman must recognize this since she has a special preface explaining that Thoth is both an incorporeal entity beyond all human understanding and also her “business partner.” Try claiming that deduction on your taxes. This is in contradistinction to her other special spirit friends, Metatron, Mary Magdalene, Isis, etc., who are simply bosom buddies but not creative partners. Technically, Hoffman alleges that as a “scribe” she “co-creates” text with Thoth, and thus owns it, though this would still give him a share of the copyright, barring a legal agreement otherwise. When a book includes text written by a person other than the author, the publisher typically requires a legal document granting permission to use that text. I’m guessing that Bear & Company doesn’t have one on file for Thoth, supposed and named author of the preface and “co-creator” of the book itself, which professes to be in his words. It’s a pretty clear admission that the supposed entity isn’t real, or at least not in any sense recognized by the law.
 
Thoth, for his part, claims in the preface to be the “keeper of the Akashic Record.” Between that reference and Hoffman’s discussion of Venus Beings of Light, it’s pretty clear that her New Age claptrap is recycled from Theosophy. And for being “the god of infinite knowledge,” Thoth is pretty vague and rather light on specifics. One might thing an omniscient being might be able to give us a little more detail rather than setting up what he admits to be ambiguous puzzles that simply reflect the reader’s feelings. But what would you expect from a text that Hoffman says is “simultaneously old, ancient, forgotten, and new, innovative, and remembered”? What would you say if I told you that the Tablets of Light were supposedly “reborn” into the world on February 16, 1970, “the same day that our beloved Divine scribe and transmitter of these words, Danielle Rama Hoffman, was born”? Frankly, I don’t trust any “ancient” text that refers to DNA as DNA. Thoth must keep up on the latest science, but nothing more. He is the god of infinite wisdom, but does not care to share anything more than what can be found by Google.
 
I guess it’s for the best, since Hoffman lives in southern France where she runs “Thoth’s Magic Academy,” an ersatz school for wannabe wizards ... sorry, seekers of wisdom​ ... that charges $3,300 in tuition for a year of YouTube-style videos (some are actually on YouTube) and 12 conference calls by phone, and “Scribe It!”, a program for forming your own mystic bonding experience with a supernatural entity who will dictate books to you. 

​I am clearly in the wrong business. I didn’t know people will pay so much for so little. The videos simply feature Hoffman standing against a blank wall, with flat lighting, vamping for time with what seem very much like extemporaneous stream-of-consciousness remarks. You’d think the god of infinite knowledge could have transmitted to Hoffman a few lessons on how to improve her videos’ production values.