GROUP PROJECT Akhnaton

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GROUP PROJECTAkhnatons Religion

• For AMS 1F 2007
• Submitted By
• Wayne Purdin
• Imeegene Alcantara
• Elise Hoist
• Bey Allex

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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.

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

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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 Akhenatons grandfather, Thutmose
  IV, who established a separate priesthood of Aton
  at the temple of the sun in On (Heliopolis).
  Akhenatons 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 Akhenatons
  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 wasnt till Akhenaton
  took over the throne that things came to a head.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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• 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,
  Akhenatons vizier. It is likely that after
  Akhenatons death, Joseph and his family fled to
  Elephantine island with other initiates of
  Ahkenatons 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 Pharaohs 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 .

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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
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• 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 wasnt
  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
  1616 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 172
  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.

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In the Lost Light, Theosophist Alvin Boyd Kuhn
wrote that sun worship was the hearts 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.