Pharaoh Akhenaton,
sun soaked king,
powered by what he considered
the right use of a monarch’s might,
wrangled the multitude of gods
into a single disc of light.
Priests, guardians of the way,
were disturbed in their souls,
and in their coin-filled purses,
by the pharaoh’s order of the day.
And oh the vitriol, the rancor,
the sunset squabbles far into the night
priests stomping in fits of rage,
now that the plenitude of gods were gone,
and the pharaoh’s singular sun
was the only god on stage.
Not easy, even for a king,
to amalgamate all deities
into Ra’s monotheistic ray.
The pharaoh Akhenaten moved the royal court
from the old city of Thebes to the city of Amarna
he had built to gain a fresh start for his new
one-god religion and his realistic form of art.
The old gods waited patiently in the wings.
One day Nefertiti, Akhenaten’s widowed queen,
looked at her stunning image in a three-way mirror
and saw herself in more ways than one,
saw that we are all much more multiple,
and need polytheistic pantheon of gods
to relate to our multi-dimensional selves.
When she moved the center of Egypt from
new Amarna back to old Thebes
divine diversity came roaring back.
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This part of Egyptian history has fascinated me for some time.
The pharaoh Amenhotep IV, 18th dynasty(1353–1336)
wanting to continue his father’s Amenhotep III’s reform of the
old polytheistc religion by weakening the priesthood, dismantled
the traditional Amun religion in Thebes, and created a new religion,
Atenism based on the disc of the sun god Aten which brings light
and life to the world. This was a large scale top down reformation.
Some scholars think this was an early promotion of monotheism.
Amenhotep IV changed his name to Akhenaton (Effective for Aten)
and moved the capitol to the new city he had build, Amarna,
Akhenaton also encouraged more realistic and unflattering
depiction of persons including himself. After his death his widow
Nefertiti ruled Egypt as pharaoh, dissolved the new Aten religion
and moved the seat of religion and government back to Thebes.
A short-lived religious experiment.