GROUP PROJECT Akhnaton’s Religion

1. GROUP PROJECTAkhnaton’s Religion For AMS 1F 2007 Submitted By: Wayne Purdin Imeegene Alcantara Elise Hoist Bey Allex

2. Akhenaton • In 1369 B.C., Amenhotep IV, took over the reigns of Egypt from his ailing father Amenhotep III. During his upbringing he was educated at the Temple of the Sun at On or Heliopolis where the priests instilled in him a devotion to Aton. When he became pharaoh, he was given the secret mysteries of the sun handed down from his great grandfather. He learned that Aton was the one true, self-created, unmanifest God and that all the other gods, including Amen-Re, were man-made. Early in his reign, he changed his name to Akhenaton, meaning “he who is beneficial to Aton.” He considered himself a son of Aton. • Akhenaton initiated a change in the religious climate from a fear-based polytheism with its death cult, magic amulets, numerous idols, animal sacrifice, and secretive rituals of a powerful priesthood to a more devotional religion, which was free of graven images, obsession with the afterlife, and magic; which emphasized reverence for sunlight and cleanliness, and simple burial; and which allowed ordinary citizens to freely worship in open-air temples with offerings of fruits, flowers and incense, as were offered in the original solar religion of Egypt. Aton's temples had no idols or graven images other than the one Akhenaton devised -- a sun disk from which proceed rays, the ends of which terminate in hands. Some of these hands held the ankh, the symbol of life, to the nostrils of his sungazing worshippers.

3. AKHENATON'S VISION It was said that one day Akhenaton had a vision wherein he saw a sun disc between two mountains. He felt that God was guiding him to make change. He was shown the God, Aton, as the Sun Disk - the Light. He felt guided by Aton to build a city between the two mountains. In the sixth year of his reign Akhenaton rejected the Gods of Thebes. They were never part of his childhood anyway since he had been shunned as a child. Akhenaton had declared for the first time in recorded history that there was only one God - the concept of monotheism. Overnight he turned 2,000 years of Egyptian religious upside down...

4. “Gazing into the Sun ... Direction from Aton" Akhenaton, Nefertiti and daughters worshipping Aton

5. This was not worship of the physical sun but worship of one God, a supreme deity, whose spirit was in Heaven and whose physical manifestation was the Sun - the Symbol of life.

6. 1369-1332 BC: Amenhotep IV - Akhenaton • The Pharaoh Akhenaton was known as the Heretic King. He was the tenth King of the 18th Dynasty. Egyptologists are still tying to figure out what actually happened during his lifetime as much of the truth was buried, for all time, after he died. • Akhenaton lived at the peak of Egypt's imperial glory. Egypt had never been richer, more powerful, or more secure. Up and down the Nile, workers built hundreds of temples to pay homage to the Gods. They believed that if the Gods were pleased, Egypt would prosper. And so it did. • Akhenaton and his family lived in the great religious center of Thebes, city of the God Amun. There were thousands of priests who served the Gods. Religion was the 'business' of the time, many earning their living connected to the worship of the gods. • All indications are that as a child Akhenaton was a family outcast. Scientists are studying the fact that Akhenaton suffered from a disease called Marfan Syndrome, a genetic defect that damages the body's connective tissue. Symptoms include, short torso, long head, neck, arms, hand and feet, pronounced collarbones, pot belly, heavy thighs, and poor muscle tone. Those who inherit it are often unusually tall and are likely to have weakened aortas that can rupture. They can die at an early age. If Akhnaton had the disease each of his daughters had a 50-50 change of inheriting it. That is why his daughters are shown with similar symptoms.

7. ATONISM: THE ROOTS OF THE JUDEO-CHRISTIAN TRADITION • The worship of Aton as the one, self-created, unmanifest God as opposed to one sun god among many began with Akhenaton’s grandfather, Thutmose IV, who established a separate priesthood of Aton at the temple of the sun in On (Heliopolis). Akhenaton’s father Amenhotep III and his mother Queen Tiya, continued supporting the priesthood of Aton and engaged in their own devotion to Aton. Amenhotep III was somewhat insistent that he be identified with this sun god during his lifetime. Around the time of his first jubilee in the 30th year of his reign, he named palaces, temples, lakes and pleasure boats after Aton. (The name "aton" had simply been a word meaning "sun" until Amenhotep III's father elevated Aton to the status of a deity.) He also used stamp seals for commodities that may be read, "Nebmaatra (one of his names) is the gleaming Aton". The shrine in the house of Akhenaton’s advisor, Panehsy contained a plaque that showed Amenhotep III beneath the sun disc, in the style usually confined to Akhenaten and his officials. • While Amenhotep III accepted the traditional view that all gods are aspects of the same divine essence, there are hints that a theological split was already in the offing. For example, some inscriptions from the pharaoh's mortuary temple mention only Aton. And there were hints of a feud or power struggle between Amenhotep III and the High Priest of Amen-Re, Aanen, the brother of Queen Tiye. • The priesthood of Amen-Re tolerated the priesthood of Aton and the religious aberrations of the royal family. But it wasn’t till Akhenaton took over the throne that things came to a head.

8. Akhenaton was the son of Amenhotep III and Queen Tiy, a descendent of a Hebrew tribe. The largest statue in the Cairo Museum shows Amenhotep III and his family. He and Queen Tiy (pronounced 'Tee') had four daughters and two sons. Akhenaton's brother, Tutmoses was later named high priest of Memphis. The other son, Amenhotep IV (Later to take the name Akhenaton) seemed to be ignored by the rest of the family. He never appeared in any portraits and was never taken to public events. He received no honors. It was as if the God Amun had excluded him. He was rejected by the world for some unknown reason. He was never shown with his family nor mentioned on monuments. Yet his mother favored him.

9. In 1369 B.C., Amenhotep IV, took over the reigns of Egypt from his ailing father Amenhotep III. During his upbringing he was educated at the Temple of the Sun at On or Heliopolis where the priests instilled in him a devotion to Aton. When he became pharaoh, he was given the secret mysteries of the sun handed down from his great grandfather. He learned that Aton was the one true, self-created, unmanifest God and that all the other gods, including Amen-Re, were man-made. Early in his reign, he changed his name to Akhenaton, meaning “he who is beneficial to Aton.” He considered himself a son of Aton. • Akhenaton initiated a change in the religious climate from a fear-based polytheism with its death cult, magic amulets, numerous idols, animal sacrifice, and secretive rituals of a powerful priesthood to a more devotional religion, which was free of graven images, obsession with the afterlife, and magic; which emphasized reverence for sunlight and cleanliness, and simple burial; and which allowed ordinary citizens to freely worship in open-air temples with offerings of fruits, flowers and incense, as were offered in the original solar religion of Egypt. Aton's temples had no idols or graven images other than the one Akhenaton devised -- a sun disk from which proceed rays, the ends of which terminate in hands. Some of these hands held the ankh, the symbol of life, to the nostrils of his sungazing worshippers.

10. Akhenaton established his new religion by building an entire city dedicated to Aton complete with a necropolis and royal tomb. • The priests worried about the God Amun and the fact that the 'Rebel Pharaoh' had declared their • god extinct and deserted the religious capitol of Egypt. Gone were the royal offerings. The resources • of Egypt were flowing out of the established cities of Egypt and into the desert. People who earned their • livings based on the old religions – wood carvers, scarab makers, and others were out of business. • The people worried about their afterlife and what would happen now that they were not worshipping • the traditional Gods. All of the old belief systems into the next world were discarded. • The vision of the afterlife changed.

11. THE END TIMES • Akhenaton lived in his dream in Amarna for ten years as conditions grew worse in Egypt. He remained isolated from the true problems of the people. Akhenaton apparently neglected foreign policy, allowing Egypt's captured territories to be taken back, though it seems likely that this image can be partially explained by the iconography of the time, which downplayed his role as warrior. In 1332 BC Akhenaton died, the circumstances never explained. His memory and all that he had created soon to erased from history not to be found for centuries later.

12. AFTER AKHENATON'S DEATH • Soon after his death the followers at Amana, unable to understand what their Pharaoh had been preaching, abandoned the city, and returned to Thebes and the familiar Gods. The priests branded the name Akhenaton, as a heretic. It was erased from the monuments of Egypt. • It was his son, a young Pharaoh named Tutankhamen who the world would get to know. King Tut moved the capital back to Thebes and returned to the old religion. • Akhenaton's successors, the generals Ay and Horemheb reestablished the temples of Amun they selected their priests from the military, enabling the Pharaoh to keep tighter controls over the religious orders. • Later Pharaohs attempted to erase all memories of Akhenaton and his religion. Much of the distinctive art of the period was destroyed and the buildings dismantled to be reused. Many of the Talitat blocks from the Aten temples in Thebes were reused as rubble infill for later pylons where they were rediscovered during restoration work and reassembled. • Three thousand years ago, the rebel Pharaoh Akhenaton preached monotheism and enraged the Nile Valley. Less than 100 years after Akhenaton's death, Moses would be preaching monotheism on the bank of the Nile River, to the Israelis. The idea of a single God once the radical belief of an isolated heretic is now embraced by Moslems, Christians, and Jews throughout the world. The vision of Akhenaton lives on! • Amarna was lost in antiquity until the end of the 19th Century. It was uncovered by the founder of modern Egyptology, Sir Flinders Petrie. They discovered a vast lost city in the dessert with temples, palaces and wide streets. • The cult of the Aton is considered by some to be a predecessor of modern monotheism.

13. The Origins of Atonism • This religious reformation appears to have begun with his decision to celebrate a Sed festival in his third regnal year — a highly unusual step, since a Sed-festival, a sort of royal jubilee intended to reinforce the Pharaoh's divine powers of kingship, was traditionally held in the thirtieth year of a Pharaoh's reign. • His Year 5 marked the beginning of his construction of a new capital, Akhetaton ('Horizon of Aton'), at the site known today as Amarna. In the same year, Amenhotep IV officially changed his name to Akhenaton ('Effective Spirit of Aten') as evidence of his new worship. Very soon afterward he centralized Egyptian religious practices in Akhetaten, though construction of the city seems to have continued for several more years. In honor of Aton, Akhenaton also oversaw the construction of some of the most massive temple complexes in ancient Egypt, including one at Karnak, close to the old temple of Amun. In these new temples, Aton was worshipped in the open sunlight, rather than in dark temple enclosures, as had been the previous custom. Akhenaton is also believed to have composed the Great Hymn to the Aton. • Initially, Akhenaton presented Aton as a variant of the familiar supreme deity Amun-Ra (itself the result of an earlier rise to prominence of the cult of Amun, resulting in Amun becoming merged with the sun god Ra), in an attempt to put his ideas in a familiar Egyptian religious context. However, by Year 9 of his reign Akhenaton declared that Aton was not merely the supreme god, but the only god, and that he, Akhenaten, was the only intermediary between Aton and his people. He ordered the defacing of Amun's temples throughout Egypt, and in a number of instances inscriptions of the plural 'gods' were also removed. • Aton's name is also written differently after Year 9, to emphasise the radicalism of the new regime, which included a ban on idols, with the exception of a rayed solar disc, in which the rays (commonly depicted ending in hands) appear to represent the unseen spirit of Aten, who by then was evidently considered not merely a sun god, but rather a universal deity. It is important to note, however, that representations of the Aton were always accompanied with a sort of "hieroglyphic footnote", stating that the representation of the sun as All-encompassing Creator was to be taken as just that: a representation of something that, by its very nature as something transcending creation, cannot be fully or adequately represented by any one part of that creation.

14. There existed an inner circle of about 300 initiates who learned from Akhenaton the mysteries of the sun. According to Egyptologist, Robert Feather, one of these initiates was Joseph, son of Jacob, also known as Nakhte, Akhenaton’s vizier. It is likely that after Akhenaton’s death, Joseph and his family fled to Elephantine island with other initiates of Ahkenaton’s mystery school. This would explain the origins of the Jewish-like sect that exists in Ethiopia, but not why the Shilonite priests and the Essene sect of Judaism proper contained elements of Atonism. For this, we need to look at another patriarch, Moses. In the History of Egypt Manetho wrote “Moses, a son of the tribe of Levi, educated in Egypt and initiated at Heliopolis, became a High Priest of the Brotherhood... He was elected by the Hebrews as their chief and he adapted to the ideas of his people the science and philosophy which he had obtained in the Egyptian mysteries… when he established a branch of the Egyptian Brotherhood in his country, from which descended the Essenes. The dogma of an ‘only God,’ which he taught, was the Egyptian Brotherhood interpretation and teaching of the Pharaoh who established the first monotheistic religion known to man. [Akhenaton]. The traditions he established in this manner were known completely to only a few of them, and were preserved in the arcanae of the secret societies, the Therapeutea of Egypt and the Essenes.” After returning from Heliopolis, Moses became an annoyance to the priests of Amen-Re and the court of Ramses II because of his Atonistic ideas. The historian Josephus records that Moses was sent on a military expedition to Cush (Ethiopia) in an effort by Pharaoh’s courtiers to get rid of the “dissident.” There he not only found a wife but another outpost of Atonism on Elephantine Island. Robert Feather thinks that it was in the wilderness of Cush that Moses saw the burning bush and received his mission. Flavia Anderson, in The Ancient Secret: Fire From the Sun, claimed that the burning bush was actually a small golden tree with a crystal that reflected the sun so brightly that it appeared to be on fire .

15. Moses and the Burning Bush Robert Feather thinks that it was in the wilderness of Cush that Moses saw the burning bush and received his mission. Flavia Anderson, in The Ancient Secret: Fire From the Sun, claimed that the burning bush was actually a small golden tree with a crystal that reflected the sun so brightly that it appeared to be on fire

16. Jesus passed on the Essene secret teachings on the mysteries of the sun to his disciples, including Mary Magdalene. Jesus so identified with the Word (i.e., the spirit of the Universal Christ in the sun) that he became the Christ, the Word made flesh. Anyone can do this. Jesus wasn’t the only Christ. There were others before him and there were others after him. Cicero, when he traveled in Greece, found inscriptions on monuments to the Christ Hercules and other Christs. Christ said, “The things that I do shall ye do also, and greater things, for I go unto my Father.” Because Jesus was the Christ, the spirit of the sun, some of the things he said referred to the sun and sunlight. The fundamental error of Christianity is taking the words of the master Jesus as referring to his self that dwelled in his body (what he referred to in third person as “the son of man”) and not the Christ that dwells in the sun (“the son of God”). Because Jesus was one with the Christ, when he said in first person “I am” as in “I am the light of the world,” and “I am the living bread which came down from heaven,” it was not Jesus speaking of himself, but it was the Christ in the sun speaking through him. Peter realized this when he said in Matthew 16:16 “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God.” The Christ said to Peter “Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-jo’-na: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven.” Peter understood that the spirit of Jesus was not of a prophet but of Christ and he knew it not from any human source but from the inspiration he received from God while sungazing or looking up to heaven. Six days later, Peter along with James and John witnessed Jesus’ transfiguration into the Christ. In Matthew 17:2 they saw that “his face did shine like the sun, and his raiment was as white as the light.” The Christ chose Peter to become the head of Christianity because he had the correct understanding that the Christ dwells in the sun and in each heart and not just in Jesus. The Taittiriya Upanishad states that “He who dwells in man and who dwells in the sun is one and the same.” Unfortunately, Peter did not maintain the correct understanding. Peter and the early Christians, at first worshipped the spirit of Christ in the Sun, but after a while, they lapsed into a personality cult of Jesus worship, which has continued to this day.

17. In the Lost Light, Theosophist Alvin Boyd Kuhn wrote that sun worship “was the heart’s core of all religion and philosophy everywhere before the Dark Ages obscured the vision of truth. And world religion will not fulfill its original function of dispelling from the soul of mankind the dark earth-born vapors that envelop it until the mind once again is irradiated with the light of that transcendent knowledge. Christianity forsook its high station on the mount illuminated by solar radiance when it submerged the Christly sun-glory under the limitations of a fleshly personage and dismissed solar religion as ‘pagan.’ In converting the typical man into a man of history, it forswore its early privilege of basking in the rays of the great solar doctrine. Light, fire, the sun, spiritual glory - all went out in eclipse under the clouds of mental fog that arose when the direct radiance of the solar myth had been blanketed. Christianity passed forthwith out of the light into the dreadful shadows of the Dark Ages. And that dismal period will not end until the bright glow of the solar wisdom is released once more to enlighten benighted modernity.”