Akhenaten: Son of the Sun

CHAPTER 1-2

Ma-nan, who is in charge and has been always, treats me with cold severity, and it is he who inflicts pain if I refuse to do what he demands of me. His underling, the thin one, seems as frightened of me as he is of Ma-nan, and avoids me as much as possible. When I am taken to the Temple of Amun I see other priests, but they are always encased in rigid ceremonial robes and their faces are as expressionless as masks. Beneath the robes and the paint I wonder who the real men are.

Everything that is said and done in the temple is ritualised. The very way the lector priest reads from the holy texts in his high whining voice hides, rather than reveals, any meaning the texts were once supposed to have. How can they expect me to believe the god is really there when they themselves do not address him as though he were?

After the chanting it is my turn to perform. I am placed before the god in the high place of the sanctuary and am expected to stare into his eyes with the one eye painted on my forehead. I have to stare and stare, unblinking, until my own eyes sting and water in the smoky atmosphere. I am never told the “why” of anything, only that I have to stare until Ma-nan gives me a signal by moving the taper he holds up to the god. Then I have to speak out the words Ma-nan has taught me to say. If I try not to say them, knowing that they are his words, and not the words of the god I am supposed to be speaking for, he will rouse his familiars; and I will be surrounded by ghastly figures, man-bodied, animal-headed, like the gods, yet not like the gods, demon figures who surround me and torment me.

No one else sees them. Only I.

Then, if I have rebelled, I will be punished when I am taken back to the dark house.

I shudder as I remember the punishments. I hear my heart beat faster. I know I cannot go on like this. I will not go on like this! This river that bears me now alive, will bear me tomorrow, dead.

We arrive at the jetty. The bier is lifted again. Again the plumes flutter against the sky, as the Nubians lift me and carry me along the causeway to the pyramid, the place where all the worlds meet, the only place I know of where man can leave his body, travel in the other worlds and return to his body, without experiencing body-death.

I shiver as we pass through the low door and into the long gallery of stone. Warmth and sunlight are gone and I will never see them again. For a moment I weaken and think: A little longer... perhaps I could endure this life a little longer, just so that I can occasionally feel the sun’s warmth and see its light...

The darkness oppresses me.

I smell the sticky black blood of the torches, and see the soot-grimed rock ceiling getting lower and lower as we go deeper and deeper in, further and further from the sunlight.

I’m afraid. I don’t want to be sealed in. I don’t want to be left alone in that impenetrable dark. I begin to scream; but my lips do not move. No sound comes from my throat. The footsteps of the Nubians are enormously loud on the stone floor. I can hear them panting with the effort of climbing up the narrow ramp. I feel I will suffocate long before I reach the chamber at the centre. Huge and grotesque shadows flicker over the walls and the ceiling.

I am going to die with no one knowing my story. No one knowing what I have suffered, am suffering. No one has ever loved me, known me, cared. My loneliness is huge. Having no name, my story cannot even be scratched on the walls, cannot even be written in blood. In my death I will cease to exist. I will never have existed...

We have reached the chamber, and I am lowered carefully on to the slab of cold black granite.

I hear them leave. I hear the hollow clang of the rock door as it is shut. Every muscle in my body is straining to lift me off the bier, to call out, to plead for them not to leave me. The Nubians will listen. I suspect they don’t like Ma-nan any more than I do. But Ma-nan’s resin has worked well and my body is still paralysed, though my consciousness is agonisingly active. I smell the different kind of resin smell, the kind that is used for sealing. They are sealing the cracks around the chamber door. No one may break these for three days and three nights.

Ma-nan thinks that when he opens the door again, he will find me as he did last time, on the floor, my fingernails broken and my fingers bleeding from trying to dig away the resin and open the door. But this time he will find me lying on my bier as he left me, my face composed and calm: and he will no longer have me in his power. This time when I leave my body I will not return, but travel on until I am transformed and become one with the mighty splendours of the Secret God who is beyond all gods.

But to achieve this I must keep calm. I cannot die of starvation in three days, and there are no weapons with me to kill myself. No, I will do what I have been sent to do. I will leave my body and travel to that realm where I have been before in soul-form, the abode of the free spirits who have chosen to help our world. There I will plead for the water for the fields, for life for the people of Egypt. When this is granted, and only then, will I plead for myself. If they will not take me I will defy even them. I will not return to my body, no matter what.

But first the preparation and the journey.

I try to conquer my fear. I can feel the paralysing effect of Ma-nan’s drug wearing off, and I can move my limbs again. The temptation is to jump up as I did last time, and tear at the door. The darkness is absolute. The cold is the cold of the tomb. My heart is pounding. My thoughts race about in my head like rats in a trap. What if I can’t control myself, and at the end of the three days I am gibbering and whimpering at the door of life, whining to be let back in?

I waste precious time, weeping.

Now I have the full use of my limbs back. To give that up, voluntarily... I have had few pleasures in this life, but one of them is to sit by the pool in the tiny walled garden of the dark house and watch the water-lilies open. Can I give this up? Can I?

I take a deep, deep breath and bring myself under control. I must not think of the water-lilies, the one star of dawning, the moon, nor of the faces of the people I sometimes glimpse when I am taken to the temple. I must think of the pain, the loneliness, the darkness, the constant harassment from Ma-nan; the demons waiting to get me if I say or do something against his will...

What if Ma-nan has planted his familiars in this chamber? I look around fearfully. But it is as though I am blind, the darkness is so complete. My skin does not prickle as it does when Ma-nan’s demons are near. I feel increasingly calm and relaxed, as though there are good spirits present... or at least...

I begin to do my breathing as it should be done in preparation for the separation. I flex all my muscles, rejoicing that they now obey my commands, and gradually relinquish the use of them, one by one. Every time my old fear threatens to rise to my throat and choke me I say the words I was given in one of my visions, words not even Ma-nan knows. I think, with brief satisfaction that Ma-nan does not know how to leave his body as I do, that in this he cannot interfere — though he will no doubt insist on giving me the words to say to the people when I come out. But in here now — I am alone, and what I experience is my secret, and the secret of those I reach towards. If only I can keep my fear under control.

It gradually becomes easier.

I know my ka is slipping from my body when I begin to see again. The darkness no longer exists for me, and I can see my body as though it is a stranger’s, lying on the dark stone. I see inscriptions and paintings on the walls in minute detail, yet I know that the walls of the chamber are not painted or inscribed. To anyone existing only in the body the dark stone is smooth and unmarked. To the ka it is filled with signs and symbols needed for the journey. This is the threshold between the known and the unknown, and there is a map here of the universe beyond the stars, of the realms where the gods sail throughout eternity — and I do not mean the eternity of endless time, but the eternity that only the gods know, the eternity that has never known time. The words inscribed are not of worldly matters, but are written in the old language, almost forgotten, hinting at mysteries too deep for the human mind to grasp. I feel strange — as though as I look at them they are keys that are turning lock after lock in my invisible self, and as each one turns, a little more of me is released from the world I know.

I hover, enjoying the freedom from the restrictions of the body.

I look dispassionately at the youth lying so still. He is thin. I can see his ribs and his prominent shoulder bones. The kohl has run down his temples where his tears have soaked it off his eyelids. His lips are set in a sad line as though he rarely smiles.

I speak the words of praise I have been taught to Hapi, god of the Nile, spirit of the inundation who lives in a great cave under the river and in whose power it is to draw on the primeval waters beneath the world.

“Thou who canst not be sculpted in stone, nor seen in the images that are set in the crowns of the South and the North. Thou who accepteth no works nor offerings and cannot be brought forth from Thy secret abode, for the place wherein Thou dwellest cannot be known. Thou who canst not be found in inscribed Shrines, for there is no habitation which is large enough to contain Thee... nor imagining that can fashion an image of Thee... Whose blood flows with the green waters of the great primeval ocean from which we all come... hear my prayer...”

I visualize the river swelling as it does at times of flood, flowing with its rich green and brown over the fields; the festivals of greeting in all the towns and villages; the fleets of little boats decorated with coloured streamers by day, and torches by night, passing from village to village over areas that a few short hours previously had been dry, cracked earth and withered shoots.

And then I invoke Osiris, the great spirit of fertility, who will bring from Hapi’s waters and from the rich black silt they have deposited, the bright green growth that will feed the people of the Two Lands.