Akhetaton, Moses AND Monotheism

MOSES AND MONOTHEISM by SIGMUND FREUD

TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN by KATHERINE JONES

1939

Without Akhetaton (Ikhnaton), would there have been a religion with one God? Would there have been an exodus or Moses? What was the relation of Moses to Akhetaton? Freud offered his theories in 1938 which if anything provides ample research references.

In the sixth year of Amenhotep's reign this enmity had grown to such an extent that the king changed his name, of which the now proscribed name of the god Amon was a part. Instead ofAmenhotep he called himself Ikhnaton. [I follow Breasted's (American) spelling in this name (the accepted English spelling is Akhenaten). The king's new name means approximately the same as his former one : God is satisfied. Compare our Godfrey and the German Gotthold.] But not only from his name did he eliminate that of the hated God, but also from all inscriptions and even where he found it in his father's name Amenhotep III. Soon after his change of name Ikhnaton left Thebes, which was under Amon's rule, and built a new capital lower down the river which he called

Akhetaton (Horizon of Aton). Its ruins are now called Tell-el-Amarna.[ This is where in 1887 the correspondence of the Egyptian kings with their friends and vassals in Asia was found, a correspondence which proved so important for our knowledge of history.]

 . . .

The Aton religion had not appealed to the people; it had probably been limited to a small circle round Ikhnaton's person. His end is wrapped in mystery. We learn of a few short-lived, shadowy successors of his own family. Already his son-inlaw Tutankhaton was forced to return to Thebes and to substitute Amon in his name for the god Aton. Then there followed a period of anarchy, until the general Haremhab succeeded in 1350 in restoring order.

. . .

In this sad interregnum Egypt's old religions had been reinstated. The Aton religion was at an end, Ikhnaton's capital lay destroyed and plundered, and his memory was scorned as that of a felon.

. . .

Weigall (The Life and Times ofAkhnaton, 1923, p. 121) says that Ikhnaton would not recognize a hell against the terrors of which one had to guard by innumerable magic spells. " Akhnaton flung all these formulas into the fire. Djins, bogies, spirits, monsters, demigods and Osiris himself with all his court, were swept into the blaze and reduced to ashes."

A. Weigall, I.e., p. 103, " Akhnaton did not permit any graven image to be made of the Aton. The true God, said the king, had no form; and he held to this opinion throughout his life."

. . .

We venture now to draw the following conclusion: if Moses was an Egyptian and if he transmitted to the Jews his own religion then it was that of Ikhnaton, the Aton religion.

. . .

When comparing the Jewish with the Egyptian folk religion we received the impression that, besides the contrast in principle, there was in the difference between the two religions an element of purposive contradiction. This impression appears justified when in our comparison we replace the Jewish religion by that ofAton, which Ikhnaton as we know developed in deliberate antagonism to the popular religion. We were astonished and rightly so that the Jewish religion did not speak of anything beyond the grave, for such a doctrine is reconcilable with the strictest monotheism. This astonishment disappears if we go back from the Jewish religion to the Aton religion and surmise that this feature was taken over from the latter, since for Ikhnaton it was a necessity in fighting the popular religion where the death god Osiris played perhaps a greater part than any god of the upper regions. The agreement of the Jewish religion with that of Aton in this important point is the first strong argument in favour of our thesis.

. . .

As I remarked earlier, my hypothesis that Moses was not a Jew but an Egyptian creates a new enigma. What he did easily understandable if he were a Jew becomes unintelligible in an Egyptian. But ifwe place Moses in Ikhnaton's period and associate him with that Pharaoh, then the enigma is resolved and a possible motive presents itself, answering all our questions. Let us assume that Moses was a noble and distinguished man: perhaps indeed a member of the royal house, as the myth has it. He must have been conscious of his great abilities, ambitious and energetic; perhaps he saw himself in a dim future as the leader of his people, the governor of the Empire. In close contact with Pharaoh he was a convinced adherent of the new religion, whose basic principles he fully understood and had made his own.

. . .

The dreamer Ikhnaton had estranged himself from his people, had let his world empire crumble. Moses active nature conceived the plan of founding a new empire, of finding a new people, to whom he could give the religion that Egypt disdained.

. . .

According to our construction the Exodus from Egypt would have taken place between 1358 and 1350, that is to say, after the death of Ikhnaton and before the restitution of the authority of the state by Haremhab.[ This would be about a century earlier than most historians assume, who place it in the Nineteenth Dynasty under Merneptah :or perhaps a little less, for official records seem to include the interregnum in Haremhab's reign.]

. . .

The triumph of Christianity was a renewed victory of the Amon priests over the God of Ikhnaton after an interval of a millenium and a half and over a larger region. And yet Christianity marked a progress in the history of religion : that is to say, in regard to the return of the repressed.

Moses And Monotheism (1939) @ http://archive.org/details/mosesandmonothei032233mbp

The Holy Grail Stone?

My interest? I read “The Seventh Sword” by Andrew Collins. Andrew was in Egypt researching Akhetaton the day Sadat was assissinated.

It has long since become common knowledge that the experience of the first five years of childhood exert a decisive influence on our life, one which later events oppose in vain. Much could be said about how these early  experiences resist all efforts of more mature years to modify them, but this would not be relevant. It may not be so well known, however, that the strongest obsessive influence derives from those experiences which the child undergoes at a time when we have reason to believe his psychical apparatus to be incompletely fitted for accepting them. The fact itself cannot be doubted, but it seems so strange that we might try to make it easier to understand by a simile; the process may be compared to a photograph, which can be developed and made into a picture after a short or long interval. Here I may point out, however, that an imaginative writer, with the boldness permitted to such writers, made this disconcerting discovery before me. E. T. A. Hoffmann [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._T._A._Hoffmann] used to explain the wealth of imaginative figures that offered themselves to him for his stories by the quickly changing pictures and impressions he had received during a journey in a post-chaise[http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/472040/post-chaise], lasting for several weeks, while he was still a babe at his mother's breast. What a child has experienced and not understood by the time he has reached the age of two he may never again remember, except in his dreams.

MOSES AND MONOTHEISM by SIGMUND FREUD

TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN by KATHERINE JONES

1939

 
Ironic that my path has progressed from Akhetaton through ACIM and Quimby