The queen was obsessed by a wish to dominate. ... I still maintain that had the power of the queen been removed, and had the young Akhenaten been surrounded by sympathisers, the further history of Egypt would have been very different ... he was wise, clever, mild and gentle, and he lackcd courage.
Later Akhenaten's 'teaching of light' is made relevant to the coming conflict:
The thought-forces in your world to-day form vast clouds which shut out all the light-rays from the finer vibrations of sanity, understanding, sympathy, and love for fellow-creatures. . . . You are all heading for war - a terrible war which will settle none of your troubles.29
Akhenaten's relevance continues. A San Diego suburb was home to the Archangel Uriel, Cosmic Visionary, Doctor of Psychic Therapeutic Science at the Unarius Academy, also known as Ruth Norman (d. 1993). Her mission was to explain the mysteries of the cosmos to humanity. In a previous incarnation Norman had been Akhenaten's mother Tiye, and her husband Ernest Akhenaten himself. Norman describes how these identities became known to them. During a seance, a medium identified Ernest as Akhenaten, then Ruth as Tiye. For some days they lived life on a heightened and blissful level of experience, remembering their past lives, and then verifying the facts in reference books. Her account gives an interesting insight into the relationship of conventional Egyptological knowledge to the heterodox believer. Scholarship functions as mere corroboration to a truth already known by vivid experience. Ruth Norman's breathless prose gives a sense of how real this recognition was for her:
These times and experiences were simply like reading pages from our own personal biographies, so familiar were they: and yet we had never read of them in this present lifetime previously. It was such a revelation to hear Him [i.e. Ernest/Akhenaten] voice these times, then to find it all there in the cncyclopcdia or history books. Those weeks were the most outstanding of all in our present life together. The excitement and exuberance was at a very high pitch during these times of relating, attunement and realizing - then the proving from the printed pages.'"
While researching this book I heard other individual accounts of past lives at Amarna that were as highly personal and meaningful. Their narrators regarded them as research which one day will be as useful to history and archaeology as any other. One woman told me that many souls incarnated today once inhabited bodies alive in the Amarna period. Memories of these ancient lives, she said, may be recovered through study and meditation, or the doorkeeper who guides the novice through the stages of esoteric initiation may give a clue. Once revealed, these memories will be of considerable interest to Egyptologists for the unsuspected facts they reveal, but more importantly they will unite the souls who had previous lives in the reign of Akhenaten. Another woman told me how, in a past life regression, she had seen the body of Akhenaten disinterred, violated and burned, while a substitute was buried in the royal tomb at Amarna. She described the sickening smell of the smoke from his mummy, and the fine ashes of his wrappings carried away on the wind into the desert. The mystic emphasis on the reality of the spiritual experience over anything else ensures that many interesting spiritual Akhenatens are inaccessible to anyone other than their creators and auditors.31
The World Wide Web's opportunities for self-publication now offer heterodox religionists more chances to publicise their ideas and beliefs about Akhenaten, however. These run the gamut from quasi-scholarly discussions of the relationship between Akhenaten, Moses and the historicity of the Bible or diatribes against Scientologists to personal accounts of previous incarnations as Akhenaten and other members of the royal family. One Web site invites the browser to see how Akhenaten and Nefertiti 'anchored the light in Ancient Egypt', how the site owner recognised his own previous incarnation as Akhenaten and then came to meet his soul-mate in this lifetime. 'In truth anyone can travel the memory tracks of Akhenaten if they accept the multi-dimensional light matrix that leads to Atlantis. One light flows in all - the Aten.' Akhenaten and Atlantis is a popular collocation, discussed in more detail shortly. Inevitably, Akhenaten as alien also appears on a Web site which suggests that the distinctive cylindrical head-dresses worn by Akhenaten and Nefertiti conceal their bulbous alien skulls. And under the name 'Amarna' and a graphic of the Step Pyramid, another site is a general catch-all for anything vaguely fringey with Egyptian overtones, providing links to esoteric, role-playing and fantasy Web sites.32 There are virtual Amarnas to explore, too. As well as this postmodern pastiche of cyber-Egypts, the Web's commercial side offered opportunities to visit the site of Amarna before unrest in Middle Egypt made this quite difficult. The advertising for these mystic tours made the inaccessibility of Amarna and its lack of any impressive remains into a virtue by stressing the numen and spirituality of the place itself, a place where 'the sun and soul were recovered from their long dark voyage through the underworld and set in brilliant transit across the horizons of this life'. Oncc again, Amarna becomes a place of pilgrimage where the lived and embodied mystic experience is paramount.
A more conventional source for modern encounters with Akhenaten is the novels which fictionalise past life experiences at Amarna. Erica Myers wrote a romantic novel set at Amarna, Akhenaten and Nefertiti: The Royal Rebels, which is described in its introduction as 'a form of psychometric clairvoyance, reaching into the past, or perhaps a kind of spirit communication'. Moyra Caldecott, author of Son of the Sun (about Smenkhkare") and several other mythologically inspired novels, had her interest in the paranormal 'confirmed in recent years by her own strange experiences under hypnosis, as a result of which Son of the Sun was conceived. She also experienced a dramatic psychic healing.'33 Both these novels contain many things that are anachronistic or incorrect (Myers has the Eighteenth Dynasty Egyptians cultivating cotton and rice, for instance), but the genuineness of the experience to the writers themselves still comcs over strongly.
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.