Message #162

[Bianca]

E P I L O G U E




                                                                                                                                                             



MORE THAN AN EPISODE



Akhenaten and the religion he founded were not just transitory phenomena, as they are so often made out to be.

The challenge he posed compelled succeeding generations to rethink questions that had seemed resolved, just as
art received new impulses from this debate.

As Jan Assmann has put it  "The effects of Amarna religion was to clarify, not to reform.  The traditional religion be-
came only ever more self-conscious as a result of this confrontation with its antithesis".

This is especially evident in the case of beliefs about the afterlife.  The denial of a hereafter and the realm of
Osiris compelled a rethinking of the meaning of the dark half of the cosmos.

Light remained dependent on darkness and the positive value of the latter was never felt as clearly as it was after
Akhenaten.

There can be no greater contrast to his religion of light than this statement in a solar hymn of Tjanefer, a high
priest of Amun, in early Dynasty 20, regarding the sun god when he descends to the realm of the dead:


"WHEN YOU COME TO THEM ....YOU ARE SMOKY AND DARK, FOR YOUR ABOMINATION IS LIGHT"!