Akhenaton is Oedipus
M Winther
Akhenaton (Ikhnaton or Amenhotep IV, king of Egypt, 1350-1334 BC).
There are telling evidence. Akhenaton lived in a town called Thebes,
just like Oedipus. Akhenaton married his mother Tiy, with whom he had
one daughter (the pharaohs were notorius for incestuous alliances).
Later he married his maternal cousin, Nefertiti. Although Akhenaton
didn't physically kill his father, he obliterated all traces of his
rule. This is a patricide of sorts. Akhenaton, like Oedipus, suffered
from a physical debility. He had some form of genetic disease which
deformed his body.
Akhenaton fought bitterly against the powerful priests who attempted
to maintain the worship of the state god Amon, and obliterated all
traces of the polytheistic religion of his ancestors. This was his
fight against the Sphinx, the Egyptian monster symbolic of the
polythestic order and the worship of the unconscious. In its place he
established the cult of Aton, the solar disk, and the principle of
consciousness. With his rule came a blossoming of culture in Thebes
and Egypt, but he was deposited by his son, and polytheism was
restituted. Some scholars believe that the Hebrew prophets' concept of
a universal God, preached seven or eight centuries later in a land
that Akhenaton once ruled, was derived in part from his cult.
But isn't the Oedipus myth rather a spontaneous product of the
unconscious? Yes, it is, but I think that the initial fairytale, now
forgotten, was recomposed with the story of Akhenaton as prototype.
That's why naive fairytales are more valuable as empirical products
than myths. The latter have been literated by an author and become
more valuable as litery works, but less valuable as empirical products
of the unconscious.
Mats Winther
M Winther
I just found out that Immanuel Velikovsky wrote a book about this:
Oedipus and Akhnaton
Mats