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
The great days in the 1860s and 1870s of Spiritualism - a belief in the continuity of the personality unchanged after death - had come and gone before anything much about Akhenaten was known in Europe or America. So unlike the numerous Caesars, Cleopatras and Alexander the Greats, Akhenaten does not figure as a manifestation or spirit guide (the spirit of a deceased person who speaks through the medium when in a trance state) in any late nineteenth-century Spiritualist accounts. To the cynic, Akhenaten's non-appearance in nineteenth- century seances might be an argument against the claims of Spiritualists that they really have contact with the spirits of the dead. Yet Akhenaten still had a part to play. In 1911 an upper-class English woman, Constance Sitwell (related by marriage to the famous literary trio), sailed down the Nile on holiday. One of her fellow travellers was an Egyptian Jew interested in Spiritualism who first told her about Akhenaten and his mysticism. She then became fascinated by the spirituality of Akhenaten and the Egyptians, studied Egyptian religious writings, and eventually became president of the Spiritualist College of Psychic Science. "1 After its heyday among social elites, however, Spiritualism continued to be an important alternative religion all over America and Europe, particularly among working- and lower-middle-elass communities. (We have already read the portentous words of the Blackpool schoolteacher-cum-medium who applied her version of Akhenaten's teaching to the impending Second World War.) It was in Europe, at the height of his media presence in the 1920s and 1930s, that Akhenaten was to be of special importance to two French
Spiritualists, Augustin Lesage (1876-1954) and Joseph-Albert-Alfred Moindre (1888-1965)."
Lesage and Moindre both came to Spiritualism in mid-life after humdrum jobs - Lesage had been a miner, Moindre a shopkeeper - and went on to devote the rest of their lives to their new beliefs. As well as receiving spirit messages from a number of guides, both produced extraordinary paintings built around Egyptian motifs and symbols which expand on their religious messages. Their paintings were exhibited in Paris, where the writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a keen Egyp- tophile and Spiritualist, much admired Lcsagc's works. Lesage visited Egypt in 1938, remembering subsequently a past life as an Eighteenth Dynasty Theban tomb painter. While their paintings are completely different in feel and technique, they both see Akhenaten and Amarna as a sort of mnemonic for lost mystic knowledge the knowledge that Lesage and Moindre belived they possessed, but was ignored by the rationalist world.
Lesage and Moindre are usually seen as masters of art brut ('raw art') - art produced by people without formal training out of their own irresistible desire to create. Lesage painted very large, symmetrical canvases in oils with rigidly repeated Egyptian motifs punctuated by vignettes of carefully copied objects: among his favourites arc the Berlin bust of Nefertiti, various sculptures of Akhenaten and pieces of Tutankhamun's funeral furniture, especially the throne back with the Aten-disc.i8 His paintings have titles like Remembering a noble past: Thebes, Memphis (En souvenir d'un grand passe. Thebes, Memphis) and Lost Religions of Old (Anciennes religions disparues). Like many art brut painters, Lesage interspersed written text with image. In Anciennes Religions disparues (1921), for instance, Lesage juxtaposes Akhenaten (as Amcnophis IIII) and Tutankhamun alongside great leaders of other world religions. The text scattered between the Egyptian motifs reads KRISHNA - MOISE, PYTHAGORE, PLATON - ANCIENNES RELIGIONS DISPARUES - TUT-ANK-AMEN PHARAON - ROIS - AMENOPHIS IIII - VALLEE DES ROIS.39
Unlike Lesage's large oils, Moindre used gouache for his much smaller paintings, in which Moses is a recurrent figure. Moses was Moindre's spirit guide, and he is typically shown as a man with a heavy forked beard surrounded by Egyptian symbols such as sphinxes, Osiris-figures, and sometimes Aten-discs, whose rays significantly touch Moses' hair. In spite of his paintings' small size and monodi- mensional feel, Moindre's figures have a certain monumental quality, appropriate to the important spiritual messages he hoped to convey through them. Some of his paintings explore his interest in Akhenaten and his relationship to Moses. In Moise, pharaons et divinites (Plate 5.2), painted some time in the 1940s, Moses holding the tablets of the law is flanked by two figures obviously based on the statues of Akhenaten from the Gem-pa-Aten complex, excavated in the 1930s (see Plate 2.1). Details such as the cartouches on Akhenaten's torso have been carefully reproduced, though Moindre used his imagination to restore the missing lower halves of the statues. On a temple tympanum, an Aten-disc with uraeus spreads its rays over the whole assemblage. Moindre probably knew of the theory that