political and religious controversies, and he still is. This chapter examines the ways in which Akhenaten is used by two contemporary movements, both of which have particular vested interests in ancient Egypt while mostly remaining outside the academic establishment - alternative religionists and Afrocentrists. Such generic terms smooth over the differences between very disparate groups, and it is important that I make clear how those terms arc being used here. Afrocentrists I take to mean those who aim, among many other things, to reinstate the blackness of the ancient Egyptians in an African context after centuries of white historians presenting them as proto-Europeans. Underlying this aim is the belief that political liberation and the end of exploitation can never be achieved without people of African descent re-establishing ancestral ties to their continent of origin. By alternative religionists I mean those who look outside established faiths for spiritual fulfilment. This definition encompasses major religious communities such as Spiritualism, Theosophy, Anthroposophy, New Age religions, neo-paganism, and goddess worship, but also highly personal belief systems that individuals have formulated by themselves. Sometimes it is difficult to distinguish between the religious and political imperatives for invoking Akhenaten. For instance, he comes up frequently in the rhetoric of the Nation of Islam, which is both a religious and political movement. Forcing the Akhenatens of Afrocentrism and alternative religion to share the umbrella of heterodoxy does not imply anything about the claims to veracity of either, because I am primarily interested in both as phenomena in the history of ideas. Another reason for considering Afrocentrists and mystics together is that both have similar positions in relation to received Egyptological wisdom. They use the same (often outdated) books as sources. Both favour as authorities the works of Breasted, and especially the numerous books on hieroglyphs and Egyptian religion by E. A. Wallis Budge (1857-1934), Keeper of Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum from 1894 to 1924. Many of Budge's books are easily available in cheap reprints. They are still widely used, especially to tcach yourself ancient Egyptian. His translation of The Book of the Dead (1898) is one of the most consistent sellers in London's main Egyptological bookshop. Budge has gone from being academically respectable in his day to a resource largely of interest to the fringe. The position he held at the British Museum lends an imprimatur to his work, much of which is now obsolete, although there is no reason for those outside the field to know this. Budge has been criticiscd as a servant of Eurocentrist scholarship; he certainly said some things about Akhenaten that would now be regarded as racist and, as we have seen, the same may be true of Breasted.1 His diffusionist beliefs about the development of culture that ideas are first created and then given to (or stolen by) somebody else rather than developing independently in different times and places - have a value to Afrocentrists who believe that the black Egyptian contribution to civilisation has been stolen by whites. Breasted is attractive to alternative religionists too. In his Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt (1912) Akhenaten heads a religion of light in a Manichaean struggle against the forces of darkness symbolised by the priests of Amun, a notion which appeals to Theosophieal ideas.
