Akhenaten полностью

Alternative religions are, by their nature, multidimensional, Protean and eclec­tic, and possess a logic of their own that may not conform to what the outside observer demands. To judge them according to the standards of the non-believer is pointless: they have to be seen, as far as possible, from the inside, from the standpoint of the believers. What is the position of Akhenaten and his theology in these modern appropriations of ancient religious traditions? The short answer is, very varied. As the most 'spiritual' pharaoh of the most highly esteemed occult tradition, Akhenaten appears in many different guises that have particular mean­ings to the theologies of particular heterodox groups. For some alternative reli­gionists, Akhenaten is the inventor of the Tarot; to others he is an astronomer who relocates his capital at Amarna on astrological principles and influences Nostradamus, or a central figure in the cosmic battle between the light and the dark before the Age of Aquarius and the coming of the second Christ, or a link in the transmission of the wisdom of lost Atlantis, or a medium's spirit guide, or an unsuspected figure behind the development of Greek mythology. To others still, Akhenaten's spiritual halo is distinctly tarnished, and he is 'that dismal entity' who abandoned the aspects of Egyptian religion most attractive to mod­ern mystics.²'' In terms of presentation, they range from wholly personal experiential narratives to complex works of counter-scholarship. One work, privately published in Australia, argues that belief in 'Atenism' survived Akhen­aten's death and went on to have a major influence on Greek mythology. Its authors adopt a classic fringe scholarship technique of suggesting alternative philologies to prove their points, with Nefertiti as the original Aphrodite, and so on.

These variant readings are the most recent descendants in a line of enquiry about ancicnt Egyptian solar religion going back at least to the Enlightenment, with its growing western interest in Egypt. In the context of the search for Akhenaten it is instructive to look at the conclusions of some of these Enlighten­ment scholars. One of the most widely read of them was Charles Francois Dupuis (1742—1809), who was writing in France amid the religious and political upheavals of the 1780s and 1790s. His main work, L'Origine de tons les cultes, ou Religion universelle (1795), was enormously successful. It had gone into four editions by 1822, was translated into English in 1877 (for a Spiritualist press) and reissued in 1897. Dupuis looked closely at Egypt in his search for a primordially revealed religion unencumbered by state intervention. He believed that Egyptian temple- based cults were the most extreme example of a corrupt, state-organised religion which deliberately set out to deceive a whole people through a tyrannical bargain between the priesthood and the monarchy. Instead Dupuis advocated a 'religion universelle', an original, true religion of the passage of the sun. Dupuis, rather like Jean Terrasson earlier in the eighteenth century, discovered one aspect of Akhenaten before his name was ever read or his religious reforms ever heard of. His account of a sun-based religion which transcended the corruption of state worship prefigures some readings of Akhenaten in all but name. It would be interesting to know whether Dupuis ever read Sicard's description of the Atcn- worshipping scenes on boundary stela A at Amarna, or saw his drawing of it (see Figure 3.2).²⁷

The variety of alternative mystical Akhenatens available now seems bewilder­ing — how can one man appear in so many, mutually exclusive, versions? Yet there is no doubting the sincerity of the people who believe, for instance, that they once lived in the reign of Akhenaten, or that his spiritual wisdom is still as powerful and inspirational as it ever was. In the 1930s, with anxiety about war with Ger­many increasing, a Blackpool schoolteacher and amateur medium named Ivy Beaumont (1883-1961) spoke in a trance through 'Nona', a courtier of Amunhotep III who had known the young Akhenaten well. Sometimes Nona spoke a strange guttural language, supposedly ancient Egyptian. The messages Nona transmitted through Ivy Beaumont were published in books that went into several editions (Miss Beaumont discreetly pseudonymiscd as 'Rosemary' for remembrance). They received enthusiastic reviews in all sections of the press and were even taken seriously by the Egyptological establishment.²⁸ In Beaumont's utterances Akhenaten appears conventionally, following Breasted and Weigall, as the youthful visionary of a religion of light, and Tiye as a controlling reactionary harridan: