The relationship of these works to conventional histories of Egyptian religion is ambiguous. Certainly many esoteric books have the apparatus of scholarship, equipped with indiccs, footnotes and citations to authorities that corroborate their arguments. A closer look at them reveals some oddities that are not immediately clear, however. One of the most prolific authors of alternative religious works on Egypt, Murry Hope, refers to one James Bonwick as an Egyptological expert in her Practical Egyptian Magic, citing an edition of his up-to-the-minute- sounding book Egyptian Belief and Modern Thought dated 1956. In fact, Egyptian Belief and Modern Thought is a Thcosophical work first published in 1878, and Bonwick was a Tasmanian schoolmaster born in 1817, whose other books include Curious Facts of Old Colonial Days, Astronomy for Young Australians and Mike Howe, the Bushranger of Van Diemen's Land. Many other writers on esoteric subjects, including Hope, also use sources that were once academically respectable but are now quite out of date, like the works of Budge. By and large, however, mystic writers arc far less interested in documenting their work than Afroccntrists.
To look for scholarly scrupulousness in these books, however, is to miss the point, since their authors often regard conventional academic Egyptology as a conspiracy designed to disguise the true profundity of ancient Egyptian spirituality. My epigraph to this section shows how this idea had already crystallised in the
mind of Helena Pctrovna Blavatsky (1831 91), the founder of Theosophy, as
early as the 1870s, before Egyptology was even an academic discipline taught in universities. Furthermore, modern mystics do not need the writings of academic Egyptologists to describe their spiritual quests, because they have actually experienced what they describe and can make these experiences meaningful in their own terms. The symbols of Egyptian religion can come to mean what you want them to mean. As one esoteric source puts it, this 'is an attitude that may occasionally steer us into some appalling inaccuracies as far as die-hard Egyptologists are concerned, but we will make otherwise dead symbols come to life within us, and enrich ourselves accordingly'.24 The relationship between Egyptologists and mystic writers is like the difference between reading about a dish in a cookery book, and actually preparing and eating it. One adjusts the seasoning to suit one's own taste, and modifies the ingredients according to what is in the larder - experience rather than scholarship becomes the touchstone of authority. Members of esoteric groups are bound together by the common conviction that they are cognoscenti to whom a hidden truth has been disclosed. Their bonds arc strengthened when non-members react with incredulity, scorn and derision, and that shared truth becomes an all-important survival strategy, making them psychologically inclined to interpret the world in congruence with their beliefs. Exactly the same, of course, is true for academic Egyptologists, who are themselves initiates into a body of arcane knowledge and often react with horror when their position as ordained interpreters of that knowledge is questioned.
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: