Knowledge is Power but Wisdom is Sanity

'The weighing of the heart'

There is a passage in Plato’s Phaedrus which illustrates the danger with communication. The story is that in Egypt there dwelt one of the old sacred gods of the country, the god to whom the bird Ibis is sacred, his name being Thoth it was he who invented writing. …. The piece goes on to say that, when Thoth revealed his arts to the king (Horus) he feared that if writing was revealed to Egyptians in general it would foster forgetfulness and sloth and would alienate them from the inner world that links them to God and to nature. “Men filled not with wisdom, but the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows…”

Thoth is actually not a person, a God or a strange bird headed alien, it is a representation of a characteristic which exists within all human beings. The story of Thoth revealing his art to the king is an example of an inner debate between two aspects of the same person. The king being the heart, the true self and the wisdom, and Thoth the analitical mind and the store of knowledge. It is an example of considering the consequences of our actions. In this case how the introduction of this (at the time) new method which would ultimately lead to a new type of education, and how it would influence the human consciousness.

Thoth (as shown above); Is associated with the tongue, the word thoth can not be said without pushing the tongue forward. Thoth is either represented as an Ibis bird because of its long tongue, or at other times as a Baboon because Thoth was also said to have been taught the language of no words from the human faced baboons.
The ancient Greeks later assimilated many of the stories of Thoth into their God of Wisdom Hermes, the repercussions of which were transferred into Europe during the Renaissance.

“Through clever and consistent application of propaganda,
people can be made to see paradise as hell,

and also the other way around,
to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise.”
-Adolph Hitler