According to Egyptologist Isha Schwaller de Lubicz, here's how the ancients used the Star of Seven (remember Thoth's consort and guide, Seshat, is depicted with the 7 rayed Star above her head).
The Seven "Inexorable" Powers and Numbers
The Egyptian words ascribed by the sage to the seven powers relate to the reactive forces aroused in the world of manifestation when the first seven numbers become active. We must note that these powers are not the first seven numbers nor their active forces, but the reactive forces aroused by the latter. Like the primordial numbers to which they correspond, each power engenders the following one as an inevitable consequence.
The first of these powers, IKU or IK, is the most difficult to understand - lacking numerous examples - because like the origin of becoming, it was regarded as secret. It was nevertheless manifested by its opposite, ki, the usual sense of which, "the other," reveals the meaning of ik. So ki is the other of ik (as the "other" relates to the "same" of Plato), just as in popular language ki expresses "thought," the expression of a potentiality. Actually ik or iku is the impulse that precipitates being into becoming through arousing in the "one" a wish to see itself in an "other," of which the principle is expressed by ki.
The awareness of this duality engenders the second power, MER, the impulse of attraction that brings on the union of these two unities and in Nature becomes the affinity or attraction between two complements for fertilization.
The neutralizing effect of their conjunction awakens by reaction the fire sekhem, which destroys the form of the joined elements at the same time it generates a new life. This third power, SEKHEM, which flows inevitably from the first two, is also related by its name with the number three, khemt.
As the number four is the first result of multiplication, and hense the basis of becoming, so the fourth power KHEPER is the principle of becoming and of the transformations corresponding to the phases of all genesis (kheper, kheprw = existence, becoming, transformation). The fourth power Kheper opens the world of actualization, which begins to manifest the combined action of the three casul powers, ik, mer and sekhem. Its result will be a "thing," considered as either relative reality at the moment of genesis or as a result produced by a genesis.
The name of a "thing" in Egypt is khet. Now a thing, khet, is not a power, but the product of the fourth power Kheper, which required the activity of two factors for its subsistence, namely, the fifth power, AB-IB, and the sixth power, TEKH.
The ordinary meaning of these words is "desire" ab; "thirst" ib; "drink," "drunkenness," tekh. To recognise their philosophical meaning, the cabalistic reversal of letters provides a means to help us understand the cause through the effect.
The fifth power has two aspects: the abstract one, ab and the concrete one, ib, which expresses thirst or desire for the absorption of the vital element necessary for the continuation of a "thing," abstract or concrete. The reversal of letters gives for the abstract meaning BA, the soul that absorbs the universal spirit, and for the concrete meaning bi.t, the bee that sucks the juice from flowers.
The sixth power TEKH, is the capacity for absorption, even up to saturation, caused and measured by the reaction of the fire sw-tekh, without which a thing, khet, would have no existence.
Note that desire-thirst AB-IB puts this fifth power into correspondence (at a more advanced phase) with the attracting impulseof the second power MER. In the same way, the sixth power, TEKH, like the third, SEKHEM, is the reaction of a fire. Ab and ba, ib and bi, tekh and khet surely are a cabalistic language with a meaning much more profound than a simple game of letters!
Finally, the synthesis of the first six "inexorable" powers is the seventh power, SEFEKHT, which means "seven." Sefekht is the term of manifestation, which makes it possible, through a reaction to casual impulse, to enumerate the qualities immanent in the seven-fold unity: the seven colors of light, the seven essential sounds of the scale, the seven-year renewal of body cells, and so forth.
The other name of the seventh power is SESHAT. The names expresses its function, which is the inscription of "signatures" upon everything generated on our earth. In fact, Seshat, means "writing."
And this, from another source:
This leads me on to a new theory about the name Picatrix. The word could be connected with a Latin root meaning painted and if so the feminine ending -ix would give the meaning of painted lady. Who could she have been? Firstly, we know that Egyptian women loved to decorate themselves with make-up and/or tattoos. (Seshat has a dual meaning of make-up artist as well as goddess.) We have found tattoos on Egyptian women in the form of Bes (the lion-faced dwarf god, patron of childbirth) on the upper thigh and rows of dots across the stomach. Some of their wise women were amulet-makers; others were involved in midwifery and determined the fate of the new born, warning which deities must be appeased or would favour the child. The wise woman was called a Rekeet. This is the likely origin of the good fairies, wicked fairies or stepmothers etc. in our fairy tales (Cinderella is derived from an Egyptian tale). The "good fairies" are sometimes known as the Seven Hathors, also the name of the Pleiades in Taurus. They warn of a seven-fold vision or "Bow" of a deity or its totem animal, which would be a powerful omen in the child's life; this is what Joseph dreamt when he saw the seven fat cattle and seven lean.
Let us suppose that the painted lady was a Seshat or Rekeet, then she would have passed on her learning which was concerned with fate and timing by oral means, perhaps for millenia, and in Roman times this would have become a dim memory of a painted lady, probably transmitted through the Thoth cult into the Hermetist movement.
Interestingly, this lends support to the theory that early, oral forms of astrology were in the domain of women...
Take Two Tablets....
