Akhenaten had been born with a chromosomal defect that gave him a strange, hermaphroditic, even unearthly appearance: womanly thighs and an elongated face that might be read as ethereal, even spiritual. This defect can also lead to symptoms of mental instability — mania, delusions, paranoia.
Some combination of these factors may have contributed to his actions, which threatened to disrupt the whole progress of human evolution.
Unlike in Babylon, where kings acted independently of the priesthood, leading to extremes of despotic cruelty, the pharaohs of Egypt ruled under the aegis of the initiate priests. This is why the popular view of Akhenaten’s revolution that sees it as an act of radical individualism is quite wrong.
The start of Akhenaten’s reign coincided with the beginning of a Sothic cycle. This was one of the greatest of the astronomical cycles that shaped history, according to the priestly theology.
The Sothic cycle is 1460 years long. In Egyptian mythology each new beginning of this cycle saw the return of the Bennu bird, the Phoenix heralding the birth of the new age and a new dispensation. When Akhenaten announced the closing of the most magnificent temple in the world at Karnak, and the founding of a new cult centre and capital city approximately halfway between Karnak and Giza, this was not the wilful act of an eccentric individual, but an initiate king acting out cosmic destiny. He was preparing to welcome the return of the Bennu bird in 1321 BC.
His first act was to build a new temple to Aten, the god of the sun disc. In the great courtyard of Akhenaten’s new temple was its centrepiece, an obelisk topped by the Benben stone on which the legendary Phoenix was to alight.
His next act, supported by his mother Queen Tiy, was to build his great new capital city and sail the whole machinery of government down to it on barges. He wanted to shift the earth on its axis.
He then declared that all other gods did not really exist and that Aten was the one, true and only God. This was monotheism in something very like the modern sense. The worship of Isis, Osiris, and Amon-Re was forbidden. Their temples were effaced and shut down, and their popular festivals declared superstitions.
There is something appealing to modern sensibility about Akhenaten’s reforms. Like today’s monotheism, Akhenaten’s was materialistic. By definition monotheism does away with other gods — and it tends to do away with other spirits and other forms of disembodied intelligence too. So monotheism tends to be materialistic in the sense that it tends to deny the experience of spirits — and that experience, as we have already said, is what spirituality really is.
So it was the physical sun that Akhenaten declared divine and the source of all goodness. As a result, the art of Akhenaten’s reign did away with the hieratic formalism of traditional Egyptian art with its ranks of deities. Akhenaten’s art seems naturalistic in a way we find easy to appreciate. Some of his beautiful hymns to Aten have survived and they seem, remarkably, to anticipate the Psalms of David. ‘How manifold is that which you have made. You created the world according to your desire — all men, cattle and wild animals,’ declaimed Akhenaten. ‘How countless are your works,’ sang David, ‘you made all of them so wisely. The world is full of your creatures.’
But behind the poetry, behind all the clean intelligence and modernism there lurked a monomaniacal madness. By banning all the other gods and declaring himself the only channel for the wisdom and influence of Aten on earth, he was in effect making the whole priesthood redundant and replacing them with just himself.
But despite making himself the focus of all religious practice, he withdrew deeper and deeper into the maze of courtyards of his palace with his beautiful wife Nefertiti and their beloved children. He played with his young family, composed hymns and refused to hear any bad news regarding unrest among the people or of the rebellions in Egypt’s colonies that threatened its supremacy in the region.
Collapse eventually came from within. Fifteen years into his reign the daughter on whom he doted died, despite all his prayers to Aten. Then his mother Tiy, who had always supported him, died too. Nefertiti disappears from court records.
Two years later the priests had Akhenaten killed, and they put on the throne the young boy who was to become known to the world as Tutenkhamun.
Immediately the priests set about restoring Thebes. Akhenaten’s capital quickly became a ghost town and every monument to him, every depiction of him, every mention of the name of Akhenaten was ruthlessly and systematically effaced.
Some modern commentators have seen Akhenaten as a prophetic, even saintly figure. It is significant, though, that as we know from Manetho, the Egyptians remembered his reign as a Sethian event. Seth is, of course, Satan, the great spirit of materialism, who always works to destroy true spirituality. If his envoy, Akhenaten, had successfully converted humankind to materialism, then the three thousand years of the gentle, beautiful growth of the human spirit, and many qualities that had evolved since would have been lost forever.
ALTHOUGH IT MAY NOT HAVE SURVIVED in anything like the same state of preservation as some of the Egyptian temples, no temple looms larger in the collective imagination than the Temple of Solomon.
Saul has recently been identified as a historical character who features in the letters of kings subject to Akhenaten. They loyally wrote to him with reports of local events. Saul’s name in these letters is ‘Labya’, the king of the ‘Habiru’. Following these identifications in the records of neighbouring cultures, we may now say with confidence that David — ‘Tadua’ — became the first to unite the tribes of Israel in one kingdom when he became king of Jerusalem in 1004 BC, which is to say in the reign of Tutenkamun. David lay the foundations of a temple at Jersualem, but died before he could build it, and so this task was left to his son, whom we now know was anointed king of Jerusalem in 971 BC.
Before the advances made by David Rohl’s New Chronology, it had been believed that Solomon, if he was a real historical character at all, lived in the Iron Age. This was a big problem because archaeology could find in the remains of that period no evidence of the wealth and building projects for which Solomon has always been famous. Relocating Solomon in the late Bronze Age has proved to be a perfect fit. The remains of Phoenician-style architecture that a Hiram might have built have been dug up in the appropriate strata.
The figure of Solomon glows in the popular imagination as the embodiment of all kingly magnificence and wisdom — and in the secret tradition, as the magical controller of demons. In the secret traditions of Freemasonry — as we know from an oration by Chevalier Michael Ramsay in 1736 — Solomon recorded his magical knowledge in a secret book which was later laid in the foundations of the second Temple in Jerusalem.
In Jewish folklore Solomon’s reign was so splendid that gold and silver became as common as stones in the street. But because the Jews had no tradition of building temples up to this time, having been a nomadic people, Solomon chose to employ as architect for this project a Phoenician, Hiram Abiff. If the building seems, on the evidence of the measurements given in the Old Testament, no larger than a parish church, it was nevertheless crammed with ornamentation of unparalleled magnificence.
In its middle stood the Holy of Holies, lined with gold plate and encrusted with jewels. It was designed to contain the Ark of the Covenant, containing the tablets of Moses. The Cherubim whose wings stretched protectively over it were, as we have seen, representatives of constellations of the zodiac belt. On the corners of the altar stood four horns, representing the moon, and a golden candlestick with seven lamps — of course, a representation of the sun, the moon and the five major planets on either side. The Pillars of Jakim and Boaz measured the pulse of the cosmos. They were so placed as to mark the furthest points of the sun’s risings of the equinoxes, and according to the first-century Jewish historian Josephus, and Clement, the first bishop of Alexandria, they were topped with ‘orreries’, mechanical representations of the motions of the planets. Decorative, carved pomegranates are mentioned several times in the biblical account. The robes of the priests were decorated with precious stones representing the sun, the moon, the planets and the constellations — emeralds being the only stone named.