Akhenaten полностью

Up to now I have stressed the range of mystic Akhenatens. Yet he appears less than one might imagine in alternative religious writings (cxpcricnccs, as I have pointed out, are a different matter). There are probably several reasons for this. Akhenaten has no place in the so-called Hermetica, the writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, the mythical founder of occultism. The proto-Christian Akhenaten of older books, like Weigall's, may not attract those seeking alterna­tives to Christianity. In addition, Akhenaten was little known in the nineteenth century when authors such as Madame Blavatsky, who continue to be importance sources for mystics, were writing. Perhaps more significantly, Akhenaten was of little interest to Rene Adolphe Schwaller de Lubicz (1887-1961), one of the most influential fringe writers on Egyptian mysticism, quoted both by occult and by Afrocentrist authors. Schwaller de Lubicz lived in Egypt for eight years and made a close study of the Theban temples. He argued in several books, still in print, that a symbological reading of these temples can reveal a vanished doctrine which synthesised scicncc, religion, philosophy and art (as Theosophy also claims to do). The great temples were the centres for initiation into the Egyptian myster­ies. Since Akhenaten shut down the temples pivotal to this argument, Schwaller de Lubicz obviously gives him little space. Another reason for Akhenaten's rela­tively low mystic profile may be that his reforms abandoned polytheism and with it the constructed afterlife whose attainment is based on esoteric knowledge. The numerous gods of the traditional Egyptian pantheon are central to the mystic initiations that lie at the heart of many modern versions of anc.icnt Egyptian religion, as are funerary rites. One mystic argument goes that Egyptian funerary rites are concerned with personal metamorphosis and transformation, with the shedding of the physical body and the acquisition of the divine. Initiation is thus a process of transformation taking place within life.⁵⁴ In the context of this kind of belief system, popular ideas about Akhenaten's religious reforms (destroy­ing temples, getting rid of most of the pantheon, abandoning the afterlife) allow little scope for the personal initiation and self-transformation that are now so desired. Finally, some alternative religionists regard monotheism as a religion of negativity, and consider that Akhenaten's assaults on polytheism depleted the powerhouse of concentrated mystic power in Egypt.

While some occultists are suspicious about him, there is still an impressive range of alternative spiritual Akhenatens to conjure with, a range which reflects his appeal as a precursor for almost any kind of personal mysticism. After all, the battle between Akhenaten's own enlightened religion and the corrupt priesthood, 'the black Priests of Amun', can be made emblematic of a cosmic conflict between the dark and the light, or any alternative religion's conflicts with an established state religion. It is an allegory for occult groups' own feelings of marginalisation within a stifling Judaeo-Christian tradition. Akhenaten's numer­ous mystic incarnations are reminders that a myth is never a monolith, but an unstable structure subject to infinite redrawing and reconfiguration. A myth can exist in multiple contradictory forms, and different historical periods privilege one version of the story over another; methods of reading the myth arc con­stantly revised in response to political and ideological imperatives. Like the fic­tional Akhenatens of the next chapter, mystic ones arc caught up in their own times, even though alternative religionists want their experiences of him to be seen as something absolute and therefore transhistorically 'true': a fact excavated from a distant past and supremely relevant to the present. In this respect Akhen­aten's mythic trajectory is comparable with the matriarchal Goddess of modern feminist and pagan mythologies. '³ It is also the case with Spiritualism and The- osophy, perhaps the most widespread and influential alternative religious move­ments to have embraced Akhenaten. They are useful case-studies for examining Akhenaten's mythical and allegorical trajectory.

Spiritualist Akhenatens

SOULFUL LADY: 'There are times, Mr Simpkins, when I feel con­vinced that I was on earth in Ancient Egypt.'

YOUTH: 'I say, you know, it's jolly rare for a girl to joke about her

age like that.'

Caption to cartoon from Punch, 14 February 1923