The kentritis plant grows from the month Payni in the parts of the black earth, and is like the upright vervain. The recognition of it comes about thus: an ibis-feather — its black tip — is smeared, dipped in the juice, and at the very touch

Here the papyrus turns into a herbal, and the shift in voice is total: no gods, no vowels, just careful field-botany. The plant sprouts in a named month — Paüni, Egyptian June — in 'the parts of the black earth,' which is Egypt's own name for itself: Kemet, the Black Land, the dark fertile silt the Nile lays down, against the Red Land of the desert. And it looks 'like the upright vervain,' a plant the reader is expected to know on sight. This is knowledge meant to be used in a real field by a real gatherer. The recognition-test is a small marvel of empirical magic. Take an ibis-feather — the ibis being Thoth's own bird, the god of writing and magic, so even the test-instrument is sacred — dip its black tip in the juice, and at the very touch the barbs drop from the quill. A plant potent enough to make another human see a god should, the logic runs, visibly unmake a feather; the test is a demonstration of power you can watch. And the word for this whole procedure is gnôsis — 'the gnôsis of it,' its recognition — the same word that named saving, revealed knowledge of the divine, here meaning: how to tell a weed apart in a marsh. In this world the two were not different kinds of knowing.