The words of Bcsant's Akhenaten may owe something to the Theosophical myth of Ahriman, the Lord of the Dark Face. Originally a Zoroastrian god, the Theosophical Ahriman encourages people to live for today and neglect spiritual introspection. His anti-spirituality and philistinism appeal to the basest instincts in humans, especially the erotic, hedonistic and consumerist.44 In one way, Ahriman is a natural development of Blavatsky's robustly anti-Darwinian and anti-evolutionary stance, 'that man, in this Round, preceded every mammalian - the anthropoids included - in the animal kingdom'.4' Theosophists believed in the simultaneous evolution of seven human groups on different parts of the globe, but these groups were not created equal and did not develop at the same rates. In an ominous precursor of Nazi racial logic, Jews and gypsies were the degenerate remnants of obsolete races. The symbolism behind giving a dark face to Ahriman, the personification of the bestial in humanity, suddenly begins to take on a rather different meaning. And Akhenaten can easily be invoked in favour of these arguments, too. Theosophical interpretations of him reveal something of the less palatable side of contemporary occultism: a Eurocentrism that the unsympathetic might call racism.
From Amarna to Atlantis
The passage from Madame Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine which I quoted on page 124 comes from the diatribe against 'present-day Orientalists and Historical writers', which ends the first volume of her book with a suitable rhetorical flourish. Here Blavatsky ridicules their arguments in order to claim that the Pyramids of Giza are 73,000 years older than most Egyptologists say and were created by suprahuman beings from the lost continent of Atlantis. The ancient Egyptians, she says, are the descendants of the Atlanteans and the crucial link in preserving and disseminating the wisdom of Atlantis. The idea of an Egyptological conspiracy which denies the true age of the Giza monuments continues to run and run.41'
Following Blavatsky's lead, modern mystics who believe in Atlantis offer a way of finding deep spiritual truth in otherwise empty and materialistic lives. This truth is universal and transcends arbitrary human boundaries, having been disseminated through all the great spiritual centres of the world: Egypt, India, Tibet, ancient Mexico and so on. By stressing that all culture ultimately comes from a single source, belief in Atlantis could be said to be something unifying as well as uplifting, and certainly it is on those terms that many people believe in it today. Yet to me there seems to be a worrying subtext in the Atlantis literature. Indeed, it could be argued that the whole Theosophical notion of Atlantis is inherently racist.4' It proposes the historical existence of a race of superior beings who created civilisation, so denying the creative role of indigenous peoples - and the places most frequently invoked as repositories of Atlantean wisdom are all conspicuously non-white former colonial cultures (Egypt, India, Mexico). Many mystic books link Akhenaten to Atlantis, and their authors sometimes present him in ways that seem uncomfortably close to the Aryan Akhenaten of the Nazis.
A representative example of these books is the Theosophically influenced Initiation by the Nile by Mona Rolfe, a respected esoteric teacher and prolific writer. Initiation by the Nile traces the history of the teaching of Atlantis, via Egypt to other spiritual centres and ultimately down to the present day. It is available in paperback and subsequent reprints, and is certainly taken very seriously in some quarters. My own copy, bought second-hand from an occult bookshop, is covered with annotations, including accents showing how to pronounce the Egyptian names of power correctly - Amen Hotep, and so on. In this book Rolfe puts forward an entire alternative version of Akhenaten's life and beliefs in which conventional histories play little part, in spite of a certain debt to Breasted. In fact it is an antidote to conventional Egyptological interpretations. 'You believe that the tomb of Akhnaton has been discovered and all that was in it has been revealed. This is not so.' Akhenaten's mother, Queen Thitos, is a foreigner. He is unhappily married to Nefertiti, a princess of the royal line imposed on him as queen by the will of the Egyptian people, but also has a new wife, the beautiful Hareth. His mission is to establish temples of light instead of temples of darkness, but he underestimates popular attachment to the worship of Amun. Nefertiti dies of a heart complaint before Akhenaten, who also dies young and is buried with Hareth under the 'Temple of Thebes'. Included with their burials are manuscripts which will elucidate the books of Genesis and Revelation, as well as treasures brought from Atlantis.4"
