Who is the Atenist?

In simple terms, it is the ghost of the fourteenth century B.C. Pharaoh Akhenaten, who is widely believed to be the first individualist, the first monotheist, the first pharaoh who truely sought truth and beauty in everything -- and found it. He loved life and new ideas and boldly pursued both with fervor and conviction. He wasn't ashamed of being who he was, flaunting what others called grotesque as unique and worthy of note. He wasn't so much a sun worshipper as he was a worshipper of the power behind the sun. He rightly called himself "the son of God," as all of us are sons and daughters of nature -- that is, if we believe that nothing on earth exists without the power of the sun, the power of nature. Akhenaten eloquently elaborated on that idea in his "Hymn to the Aten." Although other pharaohs alluded to the phenomenon of the power of nature, Akhenaten was the first to articulate what later was described as the indestructibility of nature, of the life force, the transmigration of energy. In that sense, he was the first physicist, the philosopher king that Plato glorified.

But the world was not ready for him. And neither was the world ready for another Atenist, Jesus Christ, who proclaimed, as Akhenaten did thirteen hundred years earlier, "The Kingdom of God is within."

Even though historians and Egyptologists vilified him and gave more respect and appreciation to his consort, his wife, Nefertti, it was Akhenaten, the one they called "The Heretic," who has endured.

I do not dare put myself in the same league as Akhenaten or Jesus, but I do believe fervently in what they stood for: peace, love, justice, honesty, decency, and a clarity of vision that left no doubt as to who they were and where they came from.