Message #74

[Bianca]

The character and deeds of Akhenaten, who for seventeen years directed the
fate of Egypt and the civilized world in the fourteenth century BC, continue to
engross and mystify the historians.  From being one whom his people did their
best to forget, he has become, thirty centuries later, the celabrated subject of
novels, operas and other works of the imagination.

In essence his doctrine rejected the universal concept of idolatry.  He taught that the graven images in which Egyptian gods revealed themselves had been invented by man and made by the skill of artisans.  He proclaimed a new god, unique, mysterious, whose forms could not be known and which were not fashioned by human hands.

The single-minded zealotry with which Akhenaten promoted the worship of a spirit, self-created daily, and transcendental, in place of a tangible repository of numinouspower, reveals a self-assurance which has provoked modern critics to class him and his chief queen Nefertiti, as religious fanatics; just as their subjects in their day recognized their exceptional charisma with backs bent low in adoration. 
Neverthe-less, although the royal pair share in the divinity of their god, they recognize its supremacy and prostrate themselves abjectly in its presence. 

This new found deity was yet a very old one - the sky god Horus, that since pre-
historic times had been incarnate in the king and carried the Aten, the disk of the
daytime sun, Re, across the heavens upon giant falcon wings.  In the Re-Herakhte of Akhenaten, however, the falcon was soon transformed from the bearer of the
solar disk upon its vertex into the disk itself, shooting forth its rays, each ending in a human hand, thus manifesting itself as an active force, a heavenly king like Re,
reigning over the Horizon where lay the realms of light. 

Within a few months this solar symbol of deity had devoloped into an abstraction and a sole god. 
During the remainder of the reign it became increasingly regal, pre-
dominatly abstract and at the last,  brooked no rival.

This belief, however was almost as old as the pharaonate itself.  Every pharaoh was an incarnation
of the great sky god Horus, and since early times had borne the
title "Son of Re", the active solar deity to whom he would be assimilated at death.