Joseph and His Brothers, page 143
his father, the god, and rather than fearing them, looked forward to them with eager expectation—because he returned out of them and back into the Ught of day enriched with authentic doctrines and revelations concerning the beautiful and true nature of the Aton.
It should therefore be a cause for neither wonder nor doubt that serious consideration was given to the idea of leaving the young sun in his morning state, of keeping him beneath the shadow of night's wings even after he had come of age. The idea, however, never ripened to maturity, and despite the arguments of Amun, it had at last been dismissed. The reasons against it ultimately outweighed those for it. It was not prudent to admit to the world that Pharaoh was ill or so frail that he could not exercise his sovereignty—that ran counter to the interest of the sun's reigning hereditary dynasty and might have entailed dangerous misunderstanding throughout the empire and those regions required to pay tribute to it. Moreover, Pharaoh's infirmity was of such a nature that it provided no valid reasons for his being permanently kept under tutelage—was, in fact, of a sacred nature that was more likely to contribute to his popularity than to detract from it, and that it would be better to use not as the basis for denying him his majority but for countering Amun instead, whose secret desire to unite the double crown with his own feathered headdress and to establish his own dynasty lurked behind everything he did.
That was why, then, maternal night had ceded to her son the full and sovereign authority of his noonday manliness. Closer examination, however, reveals that Amenhotep himself greeted the event with some ambiguity, that he felt not only pride and joy, but also apprehension, and all in all would perhaps have preferred to remain under those wings. For one particular reason he had even looked ahead to the day of his coming of age with horror: Tradition demanded that at the beginning of his reign Pharaoh, in his capacity as commander in chief, personally undertake a campaign of war and plunder against Asiatic or Negro lands, at the glorious conclusion of which he would be solemnly received at the border and upon his return to the capital would not only have to sacrifice a large portion of the booty to mighty Amun-Re—who had, after all, brought these princes of Zahi and Kush under his feet within their own lands—but also to slay with his own hand a half dozen prisoners of as high a rank as possible, or, if need be, those promoted for the occasion.
The Lord of Sweet Breath, however, felt totally incapable of performing such formalities and at their mere mention—or if he simply thought of them himself—his face would become contorted and immediately turn pale and green. He abhorred war, which might be of interest to Amun, but was not even remotely a concern of "my father Aton," who had instead expressly revealed himself to his son, in one of his states of sacred, ominous oblivion, as a "Lord of Peace." Meni could not take to the field with steed and chariot, or pillage, or shower Amun with booty, or slay princely—or ostensibly princely—prisoners for him. He could not and would not do it, not even indirectly or in pretense, and he refused to be depicted on temple walls and pylons as standing high in his chariot, shooting arrows at the terrified enemy, or holding a pack of them by the hair with one hand and brandishing a murderous club above them with the other. All that was intolerable and impossible for him, which is to say for his god and thus for him. The court and the nation needed to understand that under no circumstance would there be an initial campaign of pillage—and ultimately this could be got round with a few good words. One could proclaim, for instance, that the lands of the earth lay in such submission and in such numbers at Pharaoh's feet, and their tribute flowed in such timely abundance, that any war campaign would be superfluous and that Pharaoh wished to glorify the inauguration of his reign precisely by engaging in no such thing. And that is what happened.
But though he was spared in that regard, Meni's feelings at entering upon his noonday glory remained mixed. He could not disguise from himself that as sole ruler he had to deal directly with the world as a whole and in all its dimensions, in all its languages and idioms, whereas until now he had had the luxury of contemplating it from only one particular viewpoint, the religious perspective he so ardently preferred. Free of all the claims of earthly affairs, he had been allowed to wander among the flowers and exotic trees of his garden and dream of his loving god, to conceive and advance him, and to ponder how his nature was best comprehended in a name and suggested in an image. Those had been taxing responsibilities enough, but he loved them and gladly endured the headaches they caused him. But now he had to act and think in ways that left him with headaches for which he felt no fondness whatever. Every morning, while sleep still lay in his head and limbs, there would appear before
him a man named Ramose, the Vizier of the South, a tall man with a little goatee and two golden necklaces; and after first greeting him in a litany of very flowery and long-winded formulas, Ramose would then unroll his marvelously inscribed scrolls and pester him for several hours with the current affairs of state—with court decisions, tax rolls, plans for new canals, foundations to be laid, questions about the lumber supply for construction, the opening of quarries and mines in the desert, and so forth, all the while informing Pharaoh just what his beautiful will was in all these matters, only then to raise his hands and marvel at the beauty of that will. It was Pharaoh's beautiful will to travel this or that desert road in order to determine appropriate places for wells and way stations that had previously been established by others who knew far more about such things. It was his admirably beautiful will to bid the count of the city of El-Kab to come before his countenance that he might interrogate him as to why the payment of his official taxes in gold, silver, cattle, and linen had arrived at the treasury in Thebes so unpunctually and, what was more, in less than full measure. It was also his lofty will to depart the day after tomorrow for wretched Nubia in order to participate in the solemn founding or opening of a temple that was primarily dedicated to Amun-Re and thus, to his way of feeling, in no way worth the exhaustion and headaches such an arduous journey inflicted on him.
In general, obligatory ceremonies, the ponderous rituals of the imperial god, laid claim to a major part of his time and energies. Outwardly this had to be his beautiful will, but inwardly it most definitely was not, since it prevented him from thinking of the Aton and, what was more, demanded he keep company with Beknechons, Amun's man of strict observance, whom he could not stand. He had tried in vain to bestow the name City of the Radiance of Aton on his capital, but the name never won the hearts of the people, because the priests never allowed it to be mentioned; and so Wase was and remained Nowet-Amun, the city of the Great Ram, who by the arm of his royal sons had overthrown foreign lands and made Egypt rich. Even then Pharaoh was secretly toying with the idea of moving his residence away from Thebes, where the image of Amun-Re gleamed on every wall, pylon, column, and obelisk, offending his eye. He had not yet thought, however, of founding a new city of his own, dedicated solely to the Aton, but was merely contemplating resettling
the court at On at the tip of the Delta, where he himself felt much more comfortable. He had a pleasam palace there very near the Temple of the Sun, nothing so magnificent as Merima't to the west of Thebes, but one equipped with all the comforts that his delicate nature demanded; and court chroniclers had to record the good god's frequent journeys, both by ship and chariot, down to the city of On. True, this was also the residence of the Vizier of the North, who oversaw the administration and the justice system of all the nomes between Asyut and the mouths of the river and who also was quick to give him headaches. But here Meni was at least spared having to waft incense in Amun's direction under the watchful eye of Bekne-chons, and he took great pleasure in conversing with the learned baldheaded priests from the house of Atum-Re-Horakhte about the nature of their splendid god, his father, and about that god's inner life, which despite his vast age remained fresh and active, rendering him capable of the loveliest transformations, refinements, and developments, so that, with the aid of human reasoning, from an old god, if one might put it that way, there was slowly emerging a new, increasingly more perfect, ineffably more beautiful god—which is to say, the marvelous Aton who illuminated the universe.
If only one could have given oneself over entirely to him, have been nothing except his son, midwife, herald, and confessor, instead of having also to be King of Egypt, the successor of those who had set Keme's boundary stones at great distances and made of it a world empire. One was indebted to them and their deeds, one was under obligation to them and their deeds; and it was reasonable to presume that one could not stand Beknechons, the man of Amun, who constantly emphasized all this, because he was right in emphasizing it. Which is to say: the young Pharaoh himself presumed as much, it was a suspicion of his innermost conscience. He suspected that not only was it one thing to found a world empire and quite another to help bring a universal god to life, but that also this second activity very possibly stood in some sort of contradiction to his royal responsibility to preserve and maintain the creation he had inherited. The headaches that made him close his eyes when the Viziers of the South and North pestered him with imperial business were also hnked to suspicions that impHed—or, if not definitively implied, at least tended in that direction—that those headaches resulted not so much from fatigue and boredom, but rather from that vague, but
disquieting awareness of the contradiction between his devotion to the theology of his beloved Aton and the responsibilities of a King of Egypt. Or put another way: they were headaches of conscience and conflict, and were, moreover, understood to be just that, which did not make them better, but only worse and reinforced his nostalgia for his former state as a morning sun shaded by the wings of maternal night.
Without doubt, not only he but the nation itself as well was in better hands back then. For the prosperity of a nation of this earth is always better tended to by the mother, even if its transcendental affairs are better left to the thoughts of the son. This was Amenhotep's secret conviction, and he was surely inspired to it by the spirit of the land of Egypt itself, by the creed of Isis of the Black Earth. In his mind he differentiated between the world's material, earthly, natural prosperity and its spiritual, psychological well-being, though always with the vague fear that these two concerns might not only not coincide, but instead might also stand in basic conflict, so that to be entrusted with both at once, to be both king and priest, was an awful burden that ended in headaches. Well-being and prosperity were the concern of the king; or, rather, it was far better for them to be the concern and business of a queen, the concern and business of the mother, of the Great Cow—so that her son the priest could spin his solar thoughts and freely pursue the issue of spiritual well-being with no responsibility for matters of material prosperity. The royal responsibiHty for material concerns weighed heavily on the young Pharaoh. For him, the very idea of his kingdom was bound up in the notion of that black Egyptian loam that lay between desert and desert—black and fertile with the impregnating flood. But his passion was for pure light, for the golden youth of the sun at its zenith—and it left him with an uneasy conscience. Ramose, the Vizier of the South—to whom everything was reported, including the rising of the Dog Star, which presages the first swelling of the waters—kept him constantly informed about the current state of the river and its prospects for flooding, for fertilization and harvest; but to Meni, no matter how attentively, indeed anxiously, he listened, it seemed as if it would be better for the man to turn, as before, to his mother, the Isis Queen, who was more familiar with these things and into whose care they were better entrusted. Nevertheless, both for him and the land as a whole everything depended on the blessed reg-
ularity of the black workings of fertility, that they never falter or fail; if that sort of thing were to happen, he would be blamed. It was not for nothing that the nation had a king who was god's son, who thus surely represented a safeguard, in god's name, against any wavering in these sacred and necessary processes, over which no one had any influence otherwise. Any failure and general distress in the Realm of the Black Earth necessarily meant that the people would be disappointed in him whose mere existence should have prevented such a thing—and that would bring with it a severe decline in the prestige he sorely needed to assist in the triumph of his beautiful doctrine, the creed of Aton, whose nature was heavenly Ught.
This was the source of his quandary and qualms. He had no connection to the black below, but loved only the light above. But if things did not go smoothly and well with that nourishing blackness, it would be the undoing of his authority as a teacher of light. That was why the young Pharaoh's feelings were so divided when maternal night removed its sheltering wing and ceded the kingdom to him.
Pharaoh 5 Dreams
And so Pharaoh had journeyed once again to edifying On out of an insuperable desire to escape the precincts of Amun and to converse with the shiny-headed priests of the House of the Sun concerning Harmakhis-Kheper-Atum-Re, the Aton. Bending low and pursing their lips, the court chroniclers had delicately recorded how His Majesty had announced his beautiful decision, whereupon he had boarded a great chariot made of electrum, together with Nefertiti, whose name was Nefernefruaton, Queen of the Two Lands, whose womb was now fertile and who flung her arm around him, and how in a blaze of radiance he had flown off down his beautiful path, followed by other chariots—by Tiy, the mother of the god, by Nezem-mut, the queen's sister, by Baketaton, his own sister, and by a host of chamberlains and ladies of the women's court, fans of ostrich feathers at their backs. The barque Star of the Two Lands had also been used for parts of the journey; and the chroniclers likewise described how, sitting beneath the baldachin, Pharaoh had consumed a roast pigeon, holding out to the queen the little drumstick on which she
had dined and inserting confections into her mouth after first dipping them in wine.
At On, Amenhotep had entered his palace in the temple district and, exhausted from the journey, had slept there that first night without dreaming. He had begun the following day with a sacrifice to Re-Horakhte of bread and beer, wine, birds, and incense, had then held an audience for the Vizier of the North, who spoke with him at length, and thereupon, despite the headache this had caused him, had devoted the rest of his day to those conversations with the god's attendants that he had so longed for. The chief topic of their consultations, a subject to which Amenhotep had been giving much deep thought, was the bird Bennu, also called Offspring of Fire, because it was said that it was both motherless and in fact its own father, that for it dying and genesis were one and the same, since it burned itself alive in its nest made of myrrh only to be reborn from the ashes as the young Bennu. This occurred, so several teachers claimed, every five hundred years, and in fact occurred within the sun temple of On, for the golden-purple bird, said to resemble a heronlike eagle, came there expressly for that purpose from somewhere in the east, from Arabia or India. Others asserted that it brought with it an egg made of myrrh, as large as it was able to carry, and, having sealed its own deceased father—meaning actually itself—inside, placed it upon the sun's altar. These two statements could coexist side by side—so many things can coexist and, though different, be equally true and thus merely different ways of expressing the same truth. But what Pharaoh first wanted to know or at least wished to discuss was what part of that period of five hundred years between the birth of the Offspring of Fire and its depositing of the egg had already passed, and where they now stood between its last appearance on the one hand and its next arrival on the other—in short, at what point in the phoenix year were they? The great majority of the priests were of the opinion that they must be somewhere in the middle of the time span; for if they stood close to its beginning then there would still have to be some memory of Bennu's most recent appearance, which was not the case. But if they were close to the end and new beginning of the cycle, then they would have to expect the bird's return very soon or perhaps even momentarily. But they did not expect to have such an experience in their own lifetime, leaving the midway
point as the only possible conclusion. Yes, a few of them went so far as to conjecture one would always be left hovering in the middle, and that the true mystery was that the interval between the phoenix's most recent return and its next one was always the same and always at midpoint. But this mystery was not Pharaoh's chief concern, the object of his burning interest. The point he had come to discuss above all others and that he then spent half the day discussing with these shiny-headed priests was the doctrine stating that the myrrh egg of the fiery bird, in which it sealed the body of its father, did not become heavier in the process. For the bird had made it so large and heavy that it could just barely carry it, but if it could still carry it after sealing its father inside, then it was obvious that the egg's weight was not increased by the body.
To the young Pharaoh's eyes, this was an exciting, a ravishing fact of universal importance that demanded the most urgent discussion. If one added one body to another and it did not become any heavier, that meant that there were immaterial bodies—or to put it another, better way: disembodied realities, as immaterial as sunlight itself. Or to put it yet another, even better way: there was such a thing as spiritual reality, and this spiritual reality was ethereally embodied in Bennu's father. But in accepting that Bennu body, the myrrh egg's own character was changed in the most exciting and significant way. An egg was definitely a thing of female specificity, only female birds laid eggs, and nothing could be more maternally feminine than the great egg from which the world had once emerged. Bennu, however, the bird of the sun, was motherless and its own father; it made an egg of itself, a rival world egg, a male egg, a father egg, and laid it as a proclamation of paternity, spirit, and light on the alabaster table of the sun divinity.
