6. THE CONNECTIONS OF THE ATON WORSHIP WITH OLDER RELIGIONS.
In developing his religion Akhnaton must have come into almost daily conflict with the priesthoods of the old gods of Egypt; and even the Heliopolitan Ra-Horakhti, from which his own faith had been evolved, now fell far short of his ideals. He does not seem, however, to have yet imposed the worship of the Aton upon the provinces, nor to have persecuted the various priesthoods. He hoped, no doubt, that he would be able to persuade the whole country to his views as soon as those views were thoroughly matured; and, secure in his new city, he was free to purge his religion of its faults before declaring all other creeds illegal.
It is probable that the sacred bull, Mnevis, was banished from his ceremonies at an early date, for no tombs seem to have been made for these holy creatures, and they are not referred to after the sixth year of the king’s reign. The priests of Heliopolis would now have hardly recognised their doctrines in the exalted faith of the Aton, though here and there some point of close contact might have been observed. One may also detect slight resemblances to the Adonis religions of Syria, from whence the Aton had originally come. Mention has already been made of the worship of Adonis. So widespread was that deity’s power that it very naturally affected many other religions. In the Biblical Psalms one finds several echoes of this old pagan worship, as for example in the lines from Psalm xix., which read:—
The heavens declare the glory of God....
In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun,
Which is a bridegroom coming out of his chamber,
And he rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race.
There is nothing hid from the heat thereof.
Here one surely must recognise the youthful Adonis, the bridegroom of Venus. And similarly in the Heliopolitan worship, at the commencement of Akhnaton’s reign, the sun, Ra, is referred to in the following terms: “Thou art beautiful and youthful as Aton before thy mother Hathor [Venus].”
In Akhnaton’s religion one may still catch a fleeting glimpse of Adonis. One of the king’s courtiers, named May, held the office of “Overseer of the House for sending Aton to rest.”[50] Akhnaton’s queen is mentioned in the tomb of Ay under the peculiar title of “She who sends the Aton to rest with a sweet voice, and with her two beautiful hands bearing two systrums.” This “house” was, no doubt, the temple at which the vesper prayers to the Aton were said at sunset, and from the above title of the queen it would seem that she had particular charge of these evening ceremonies. One cannot contemplate the fact that it was a woman who officiated at a ceremony which consisted of a lament[51] for the death of the sun without seeing in it some connection, however faint, with the story of Venus and Adonis. The lament of Venus for the death of Adonis—i.e., the setting of the sun—was one of the fundamental ceremonies of the Mediterranean religions. Here again was a connection with an older religion for Akhnaton to consider and perhaps to purge away; and one may suppose that all such derivatives from earlier faiths were gradually eliminated as the young king developed his creed. Soon not a scrap of superstition remained in the religion; and one may credit this Pharaoh of three thousand years ago with as great a freedom from the trammels of traditional superstition as that of the advanced thinker of to-day.