Akhenaten полностью

Weigall's interpretation of Akhenaten was simple and sentimental. He was the prophet of monotheism — though, as we have seen, Weigall's private opinions about this may have been rather different from those in the book. He was also a pacifist, a reformer, and one of the great teachers of humanity, like Buddha, Christ and St Francis of Assisi. As such, Weigall's Akhenaten is less narrowly Protestant than Breasted's. First and foremost, though, his Akhenaten was a monogamous family man who was devoted to his wife and daughters. Weigall talks of the charm and sanctity of his family life: 'Akhnaton seems to have never been happy unless all his children were with him and his wife by his side.'*'' He ventures into psychobiography with his detailed reconstruction of Akhenaten's formative years, something to which the less speculative Breasted pays little attention. Weigall gives Akhenaten a domineering mother in Tiye, and a distant, passive father in Amunhotep III - the central actors in an Oedipal drama. A glance through Karl Abraham's 'analysis' of Akhenaten shows how much he used Weigall to reconstruct the family narrative, which was one of the reasons why the early psychoanalysts were interested in him. If they wanted Akhenaten to bear the burden of proof for the transhistorical reality of the Oedipus complex, Weigall was a much richer source than Breasted. Taken together, Weigall and Breasted were a powerful combination for the 'inner circle' of psychoanalytic pioneers in their search for historical authentication. In his evaluation of Karl Abraham's work in 1927, Freud's biographer Ernest Jones commented that Akhenaten was of supreme historical importance because he could be used to prove 'how a knowledge of psychoanalysis could contribute to the elucidation of purely historical problems'. Moreover, Akhenaten was the 'forerunner of the Christian teachers of the doctrine of love and an ethical revolutionary who reserved his fate for his father only ... all Echnaton's innovations, iconoclasms and reforms could be directly traced to the cffects of the Oedipus complex'.²¹' In a telling Freudian slip, Jones got Akhenaten's dates wrong, saying that he had died twenty-three centuries ago, so making him a whole millennium more up to date! Akhenaten, Jones implies, was more than a test-case for the validity of psychoanalysis as an objective science: he was also central to the writing and rewriting of a completely new kind of history. Both of these aspects of Akhen­aten, as extracted from Breasted and Weigall, went into shaping Moses and Monotheism.

Moses and monotheism in context

'Remember, Moses was a prince of Egypt, not a schmegege with sidelocks. According to Freud, he was as Egyptian as they come.'

'Quiet, Schloymele, quiet! Freud was a filthy German. All we know about our Teacher Moses is what's written in the Torah.'

(Isaac Bashevis Singer 1999: 5)

In Moses and Monotheism, Freud examines the idea that Judaism's origins are obscured by trauma. He tells the story of Moses, the man who did the most to shape Jewish identity, but who was by origin an Egyptian aristocrat who had lived at Akhenaten's court and learned about his teachings there. Freud's Moses is extremely anodyne - a reflection, I think, of the antiseptic portrayal of Akhenaten in Breasted and Weigall. Moses joined the Jews after Akhenaten's death and imposed upon them a version of Akhenaten's solar religion so that it would survive. Moses' version of Atcn-worship was cerebral, intellectual and austere. Freud called it 'the imposing religion of his master' and 'the exacting faith of the religion of the Aten', again reflecting the views of his Egyptological sources.²⁷ After Moses led the Jews out of bondage in Egypt, they merged with other tribes, including the Midianites, who worshipped the primitive volcano-god