How Almighty God was born
Pharoah Akhnaton invented the idea.
Learn why his people destroyed him.
2nd January 2011
for Martin Hoffman, ex-MD
www.mdsarequacks.com/links.html
A lovely lady named Savitri Devi wrote a series of sweet books about
who she thought was the greatest man the world had ever seen �
Akhnaton, the so-called heretic pharoah of ancient Egypt, who brought
the concept of monotheism into the world. But Akhnaton let his empire
molder and die, and disappeared into the dust with only this one
ineradicable conceptual achievement to keep his name alive for three
thousand years � the invention of the one god above all.
The man who invented psychology, Sigmund Freud, thought so highly of
Akhnaton that he tried his best several times to attribute the Hebrew
religion to this odd pharaoh�s precepts, speculating in chapter after
chapter how Moses might have interfaced with Akhnaton�s idea that the
Sun was the source of everything and all those other gods were simply
not of the same all-encompasssing magnitude. But in his last book,
Moses and Monotheism (1939), Freud couldn�t make the connection
convincingly, and was left guessing because Egyptology was not
sufficiently advanced in his time; plus, he didn�t live long enough to
learn that the Old Testament was a clumsy fiction of writers
fabricating a tradition out of ideas stolen from other cultures.
Today we have Princeton University Egyptologist Donald B. Redford
(2002) vaporizing the idea that anything in the Old Testament was ever
accurate historical fact, that the Exodus was in reality a garbled
version of the expulsion of the Hyksos invaders, and that the events
represented in the OT really happened centuries later than everyone
believes. So Freud�s attempt to link Akhnaton and Moses failed not
only timewise but by intent, as Akhnaton�s god Aton was a pacifistic
bestower of the gift of life on humanity, whereas Moses�s dictatorial
Yahweh � or Jahve, as Freud called him � was a violent volcano god
more interested in scaring his flock into submission than in loving
them � or let�s say, more interested in the profits than the promise.
But just when we thought we had everything figured out, out of the
woodwork pops an old book, a disturbing master work � Immanuel
Velikovsky�s �Oedipus and Akhnaton� (1960) � and all of sudden we have
a sudden and disturbing concordance . . . that the inventor of a
religious system that has captured most of the known world . . . turns
out to have been a deformed freak who earned the hatred of his own
people for violating the world�s oldest taboo. And it was a hatred
that sought, after Akhnaton had been deposed in disgust, to rub his
name out of history for all time, which is why most of his monuments
no longer exist.
Yet somehow, as the wind of time blows clouds of dust over the
momentous accounts of history, the part of Akhnaton that traveled
three millennia into the future � surely the longest lasting unchanged
idea in history � was his oft repeated insistence that the Sun was the
One True God enfolding us in His life giving rays. It was the very
origin of monotheism; on this point, all the experts agree. The
romantic writer Savitri Devi took his peace-loving message to
rhapsodic extremes in a missive titled �Akhnaton�s Eternal Message: A
scientific religion 3300 years old� when she wrote:
�The main feature of Akhnaton�s character is uncompromising
truthfulness, perfect sincerity, allied to the rare courage to stick
to what he considered right, even at the cost of the highest of
interests. It has been said that, to his eyes, �what is, was right,�
and nothing could be better said, provided we realise the full meaning
of the sentence. �What is,� here, means what is real, in the religious
sense what does not depend upon men�s whims or men�s interests what is
in consistence with the eternal order of the Universe, with the laws
of life which are the laws of God. And the law of God, according to
Akhnaton�s teaching, is love.
�From what we know of it through the beautiful relics . . . and
through the inscriptions, Akhnaton�s private life, even judged from
the standpoint of the purest morality, was spotless. It was not the
life of an ascetic, conscious of the power of sin in the midst of his
renunciation of it, but that of a man who, by nature, seems to have
had no tendency to either excess or perversion, and, at the same time,
no prejudice against the innocent pleasures of life.�www.savitridevi.org/works.html
So spoke the perceptions of a true believer, an eloquent promoter of
godliness, who seized upon a fragment from history and turned it into
a beautiful bouquet. In our happiness, we often forget that the view
of the true believer, magnificent though it may be, is only ever
frosting on a cake that inevitably has an entirely different flavor.
Freud�s interest in Akhnaton had a similar focus � link the concept of
monotheism to this eloquent pharoah to provide some shred of
historical legitimacy to a Jewish religion that otherwise had none.
But the Jewish tradition of the Exodus has been proved impossible. No
archeological evidence has ever been found of either it or ancient
Israel in the 10th century BC and earlier, because it didn�t exist,
although the Old Testament very clearly insists that it did. And
Manetho�s story (3rd century BC) about the tyrannical Shepherd Kings
who seized control of Egypt for four generations tells a very
different story about the plague and warfare that the Hyksos (later
the Phoenicians and still later the Jews) brought to his country
before they were driven out. �The lepers,� Manetho called them,
although that could have been just because their ideas were radically
different from the Egyptian natives. It�s the familiar figures of the
Old Testament Manetho is really talking about.
In Moses and Monotheism Freud all but admits there was no direct
connection between the Moses of the Exodus and what the Jews later
came to call their Mosaic religion, noting that gaps several centuries
long passed when Hebrews worshipped regional gods until the legend of
Moses was resurrected at a later time in an attempt to give a
monotheistic Jewish religion its apparent credibility.
A qualified scientist rather than a proselytizer of his own scientific
discipline like Freud, Professor Redford raised an interesting
question in his voluminous mastery of ancient literature, implying
that Akhnaton was a provable figure in history, whereas the case for
Moses is not so solid. He writes:
�It is hard in the present state of our knowledge to come to any
decision in this matter. One cannot rid oneself of the dismay
attendant upon the realization that our lengthy and detailed account
of Moses, in all his roles, is late (in history) . . . and that,
although the figure of this charismatic leader may well have been the
focus of legend much earlier, for us this prior stage in the
formulation of the tradition is a dead letter. Moreover, one cannot
help but sense in the entire Mosaic tradition, as we now have it, a
pervasive, informing element, which produces nought but effect. . . .
All this may be highly entertaining; but it is literary artifice, not
history. The author is playing secondarily upon a primary Mosaic
tradition that he does not allow us to see. The vast majority of the
"facts" he now gives us about Moses are demonstratively late, and
worthless in the task of uncovering the historical basis for the early
"hero."�
In other words, Redford concludes that the very historical character
of Moses was a fictional artifice created hundreds of years after he
supposedly existed and parted the Red Sea, enbaling his oppressed
Jewish kinsmen to flee the wrath of the evil pharoah.
Redford continues to tell Egypt�s side of the story about the biblical
book known as the Exodus � Manetho�s Aegypticus, written in the 3rd
century BC.
�The use of the Greek terms "lepers" and "unclean" suggests a
pejorative in the original Egyptian (or demotic) that in Pharaonic
propaganda was customarily attached to undesirable antisocial
elements, whether native or foreign. In the present case it seems
clear that the devotees of Akhenaten's sun cult are the historical
reality underlying the "lepers," and this is confirmed by the
iconoclastic nature of the lepers' legislation and the figure of
thirteen years for the occupation, which corresponds to the period of
occupation of Amarna.� (the citadel Akhnaton built for himself and his
god).
Aton, represented by a sun disc, was the only true god, Akhnaton
repeated throughout his apparently brief life. His choice to
decommission the existing religious system in Egypt at a time when
�hundred-gated Thebes� was the biggest and brightest city in the
world, needless to say, made him some enemies. These enemies restored
the old system of many gods after they dislodged and disgraced
Akhnaton.
As a child, probably because of his bizarre physical appearance,
Akhnaton was sent away to live with the Mitanni, a tribe well up the
Euphrates in what is now northwestern Iraq. His father, Amenhotep II,
had continued the expansion of the Egyptian empire to its furthest
reaches before he died. A warning from pharoah�s soothsayers had
caused the young Akhnaton to be sent away, and upon his return, he
wreaked the vengeance that had consumed him all his life. His choice
was to smother the land with love and become a pacifist, apparently.
Which is why Egypt lost all its foreign territories.
The fateful question lingers for all eternity: Why � if Akhnaton
invented such a great religious system and was called by the great
Egyptologist James Henry Breasted �the first individual in human
history� � was he destroyed by his own people, and his memory defaced
for all time?
The answer was found in the classic literature of ancient Greece by
one of the great scholars of any century, Immanuel Velikovsky, an
intellectual superstar of the mid-20th century who is much better
known for changing the way science views the history of our own solar
system through his groundbreaking and earthshaking books �Worlds in
Collision�, �Ages in Chaos�, and �Mankind in Amnesia.� http://varchive.org/
Former colleague of both Freud and Einstein, Velikovsky consistently
startled the scientific world with his radical pronouncements about
practically everything and due to his stupendous scholarship,
consistently turned out to be right. From his early days of reading
the famous Greek playwrights, Velikovsky was struck by the fact that
almost all of them wrote plays about Oedipus, the ill-fated king who
inadvertently killed his father, unknowingly married his mother, and
when these facts were made public, began an odyssey of agony unmatched
in Western literature.
This frequency of plays led Velikovsky to believe they all were
describing a genuine historical event, and his subsequent
investigation unearthed an avalanche of matching facts.
A blind seer warns the king that his son is a danger to him and must
be killed or sent away. Loving parents send him away. In Sophocles�
most famous Greek tragedy, many years later a now grown Oedipus meets
his father on the road, and, not knowing who he is, argues with and
kills him. Thereupon, he seizes his father�s kingdom, marries his wife
and produces many children by her before he learns the awful secret
and its accidental consequences.
On the banks of the Nile, centuries earlier, things went slightly
differently. Akhnaton was born a son of the king, but deformed, with
enormous thighs and a football shaped head. A blind seer tells his
father he is a danger, and he is shipped off to a foreign country,
never to be mentioned again. When his father dies, Akhnaton is
summoned to be the new pharoah.
Akhnaton builds a new city, now known at Tell-el-Amarna (its
archeological name), has beautiful daughters by his beautiful wife
Nefertiti, and seems to walk around in the nude a lot, judging by the
paintings of him in various wall paintings. All the time, the real
power running Egypt was his mother, Queen Tiy, widow of Amenhotep II,
who recalled her son from exile and remained with him the remainder of
his days.
Akhnaton decommissions Egypt�s existing religion, angering many
powerful priests and nobles. Worse, Akhnaton ignores all his overseas
commitments, and abandons his allies. The empire begins to fall apart.
Somewhere along the way, Akhnaton gets rid of his beautiful wife
Nefertiti. She is never heard from again. Then comes the coup de
grace, followed by the everlasting verdict of history.
Akhnaton fathers a child by his mother, and subsequently tries to
delegitimize his other children in favor of the newborn favorite.
I�m guessing � and Velikovsky was, too � that this was about the time
the Egyptian elite rose up and got him the hell out of there for
making such a perverted spectacle of himself. The Egyptian empire
survived for a time but never recovered the former vitality that had
guided it for two thousand years, and that was at a point three
thousand years ago.
So here we have the twist of history: an idea by one of the most
demented minds ever to walk the planet has lasted three thousand years
and today dominates most aspects of our lives, if you subscribe to the
notion that what we believe is what we actually do, and that most
people at least say they believe in the one god, and try to adhere to
the tenets of what people who claim to be his representatives pass on
to us, right?
So now is the time, with the perspective of all those centuries, to
ask where this belief in the one god has taken us.
In these times we have referred to above, gods were like nationalities
� each country had a different one. But as Velikovsky reports, Zeus,
Jupiter, Marduk, Baal and Shiva were all essentially the same god,
only in different languages. Only one people didn�t have an obvious
god connection, and that was the Phoenicians, the consummate traders
who stay mostly invisible in the history books, but they gave us our
alphabet and in 300 BC were running a tin route from Egypt to England,
among other things.
The one god concept really never outcompeted the local god concept
until Christianity came along and sent its franchises all over the
world. By then everyone had forgotten that the original idea had
emanated from a reviled renegade pharoah who changed the course of
history.
And the much respected Professor Redford drew a pointed conclusion to
his efforts to research the Exodus, Moses and these related matters.
�One final irony lies in the curious use to which the Exodus narrative
is put in modern religion, as a symbolic tale of freedom from tyranny.
An honest reading of the account of Exodus and Numbers cannot help but
reveal that the tyranny Israel was freed from, namely that of Pharaoh,
was mild indeed in comparison to the tyranny of Yahweh to which they
were about to submit themselves. As a story of freedom the Exodus is
distasteful in the extreme � I much prefer the account of Leonidas and
his three hundred at Thermopylae � and in an age when thinking men are
prepared to shape their prejudice on the basis of 3,000-year old
precedent, it (the Exodus story) is highly dangerous.�
Bibliography:
Savitri Devi: www.savitridevi.org/works.html
Donald Redford: www.mailstar.net/archaeology-bible.html
(excerpts courtesy of the great Australian scholar Peter Myers)
Sigmund Freud: Moses and Monotheism, 1939
Immanuel Velikovsky: Oedipus and Akhnaton, 1960
John Kaminski is a writer who lives on the Gulf Coast of Florida,
urging people to understand that no problem in the world can be
authentically addressed without first analyzing tangents caused by
Jewish perfidy, which has subverted and diminished every aspect of
human endeavor throughout history. Support for his work is wholly
derived from people who can understand what he�s saying and know what
it means.
250 N. McCall Rd. #2,
Englewood
FL 34223
USA
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