If there is any common denominator to Freud's and the Fascists' conceptions of Akhenaten, it is the idea of legitimation through an appeal to the past. It's worth remembering that when they began, both psychoanalysis and Nazism were eccentric fringe movements with no legitimating history of their own, and the only way they could get one was by aligning themselves with esteemed figures from history. The same processes are at work in the way Akhenaten is used by the groups I turn to in the next chapter, who are still very much at the boundaries of orthodoxy: Afrocentrists and alternative religionists.
RACE AND RELIGION
I think you have a good collection. But I was very disappointed about what you said about Akhenaten being grotesque. Only a white would say he was ugly.
Your exhibit seems to deny Akhenaten and Nefertiti were Black Africans - which they were. I am sure you did not ask any black historian to contribute.
A knowledge of Reincarnation and Karma is necessary to understand this Exhibit. THEOSOPHY-MYSTICISM-
Comments from the visitors' book of an exhibition of Amarna art
in the Brooklyn Museum, quoted in Wedge 1977: 56-7, 114
In the autumn of 1973, visitors to a major exhibition of Amarna art held at the Brooklyn Museum were invited to record their reactions to the show in a visitors' book. They make interesting reading. Alongside practical observations about the lighting, labelling and provision of seats, many comments revealed how political the exhibition was perceived to be. Since it was held during a period of renewed hostilities between Egypt and Israel, many people responded to the ancicnt objects in sectarian terms relating to the modern Middle East: 'Long Live Egypt! Down with the Barbarians!' or 'Not bad considering its [.rac] Arab.'1 Other visitors, however, interpreted the exhibition in terms of conflicts they felt very personally. Many African Americans who wrote comments thought that too little attention had been paid to the African origins of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, and that the labelling and presentation of exhibits was racist. There was also a crop of comments by believers in a whole range of heterodox religions. Some were inspired by the alternative cosmologies of chaos theorist and Akhenaten buff Immanuel Velikovsky, but others related to prophecy fulfilment, numerology, Theosophy and Spiritualism. Several combined alternative religion with racial politics:
Oh ATEN; The truth ist [«c] Light. The Sun People will rise again; to take back our art (Afrikan) from the Enemy of the Sun. And to ratify [.rac] the Big Lie of the Egyptians being white (Hamite and Semite). The time of truth is upon us. Today the Egyptians, Nubians, etc. arc called Niggers. But never fear Oh Aten The Truth is on the WAYUl2
In New York in 1973, Akhenaten was a meaningful symbol for all kinds of
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.
Furthermore, exponents of alternative Akhenatens use very similar strategies to argue against conventional Egyptology. Many of them believe that there is an academic conspiracy which denies the true extent of Egyptian spiritual or cultural achievement, and deliberately falsifies the evidence by mistranslating hieroglyphs, for instance.4 Alternative religionists and Afrocentrists can, and do, present themselves as being far ahead of the academic community, having new ideas, new perspectives on perceived wisdom, and new evidence. All in all, my search for the alternative Akhenatens of mysticism and Afrocentrism led me into an alternative intellectual universe. It has its scholars, but it is also a world of committed amateurs and passionate autodidacts, people who are concerned with finding answers to fundamental questions about their own lives and place in the world. In some ways they recall the self-taught plebeian radicals of the English Civil War - the Ranters, Levellers, Diggers, Muggletonians, Tryonists, Familists and Fifth Monarchists. Like the alternative 'Akhenatenists', many of these groups believed that vital secret meanings lay behind familiar texts and images - secret meanings which could only be understood after traditional wisdom was unlearned. It is this unlearning of received interpretations that support an unacceptable social and political status quo which both alternative religionists and Afrocentrists take as their point of departure.
Black pharaohs
Egyptian royalty, our affection for each other is chronicled along the walls of the Pyramids. Our belief in one God was considered quite radical for our time. Who are wc?