Spiritual Forum

The Pharaohs of Egypt were considered to be an immaculately conceived, resurrected form of the god Osiris, Osiris' son, Horus. Although the Pharaoh was considered to be a god his queen was considered to be a mortal consort.

The first sons of Pharaoh were immaculately conceived; born of a virgin queen impregnated - not by a mortal man but by the god Horus(Pharaoh).

Pharaoh Amenhotep III and Queen Tiye had two known sons.

When the elder brother died as a teenager Pharaoh Amenhotep III branded his wife as Neith.

The goddess Neith was considered to have given birth while remaining a virgin.

This made the second son, now Amenhotep IV, able to fulfill the mandate of being born of a virgin which assured the Pharaoh's lineage of succession.

Strict religious traditionalists most likely considered this branding heretical at the time.

Amenhotep IV was educated in the court of Amenhotep III in the royal capital of Memphis, and later, after being branded the god Horus, at the religious capital of Thebes. Amenhotep IV ascended to the throne in 1375 B.C. at the age of 18.

Amenhotep IV quickly wrought nothing less than a complete revolution in religion, art, construction and governance.

Amenhotep IV did away with the old gods, which were generally portrayed with human bodies and the heads of animals. In the place of the old gods, Amenhotep IV decreed that there was only one God, the god of his father and grandfather Aten, symbolized by the Sun Disc. Amenhotep IV changed his name to Akhenaten, which means roughly, "The useful Son of the Sun Disc," and began replacing the names of the old gods from temples and public buildings with gods being combined and blended into Aten. The difference between night and day became, simply, that Aten was not present at night. No longer do other gods rule the dark.

"The real revolution implied transformation of thought patterns, in which all the traditional forms were bathed in the glare of a new light which the traditional Egyptians came to find intolerable. Beginning with the change in the king's birth name, from which the name of the (state god) Amun was removed, there was a step-by-step process of elimination. Amun was replaced by Aten, mythical statement by rational statement, many-valued logic by two-valued logic, the gods by God. All this was accomplished according to a well-conceived plan." - Erik Hornung

"Akhenaten was not a visionary but rather a methodical rationalist. Akhenaten was a rational philosopher who took the throne of perhaps the most powerful empire on earth at that time, and implemented reforms one by one as soon as the necessary political conditions had been created. Akhenaten manipulated the power of the priestly institutions at his command very brilliantly. The new religion could be summed up as there is no god but Aten, and Akhenaten is his prophet. " - Jimmy Dunn

Akhenaten was the first head of state on the Earth to decree the concept of one God. Akhenaten called himself the Son of Aten, prefiguring the legend of Jesus.

Akhenaten also provoked a change in art. In the long history of Egyptian art, Pharaohs were generally presented as ideal figures, with athletic bodies and handsome faces. Portraits and statues made during Akhenaten's rule were much more realistic in style, often showing Akhenaten and Queen Nefertiti, Akhenaten's Chief Royal Wife, in intimate, affectionate poses or with their children, six daughters, on their laps. At times, Akhenaten is shown riding with Nefertiti in a chariot, kissing Nefertiti in public and with Nefertiti sitting on his knee. Akhenaten himself was portrayed with a long, narrow face, wide hips on a somewhat deformed body, a small potbelly, and unusually long fingers and toes.

A variety of evidence suggests that Akhenaten suffered from Marfan syndrome, a genetic disorder that alienated him from his family. Marfan sufferers recall feelings of rejection and isolation in childhood. As a result of the disease and Akhenaten's unusual appearance his family most likely shunned him and that isolation may have led him to reject the gods of the old religion. The connective tissue defect was shared by Abraham Lincoln.

Akhenaten later sired Tutankhamen (meaning "Living Image of Aten), likely by the royal wife Kiya.

Each of the royal women had her own sanctuary, frequently called a sunshade temple, usually situated in a parkland environment of vegetation and water pools. Crucially important to Akhenaten was renewel of creation through reproduction, basic to Akhenaten's personal life, but also in the daily renewal of creation affected by Aten. Another change Akhenaten wrought was the elevation of women. Akhenaten compares with Muhammad and Siddhartha Gautama in founding a religion respectful of women as human beings.

In the fourth year of his reign, Akhenaten decided to build his own capital city, and he chose the site now known as Tell el-Amarna, midway between Memphis and Thebes. To speed construction, Akhenaten changed the way buildings were put together.

In the past, public buildings had been put together with large blocks of stone, often weighing as much as12-1/2 tons. Akhenaten decreed that the masons use blocks that averaged only about 10 inches square and 20 inches long, making them much easier to transport and assemble. They were quarried from a soft sandstone that could be easily shaped.

As a result, Akhenaten moved to the new city, called Akhetaten, or "Horizon of the Sun Disc", within two years after construction began. Elaborate drawing and narratives were carved onto the outside of the buildings and painted. Akhenaten built eight structures at East Karnak, some the size of four football fields. This method of building was abadoned at the end of the reign of Akhenaten.

Unfortunately their was a backlash to this revolution in thought. Cracks can be seen in the Egyptian empire , and they became ever more evident during the reign of Akhenaten.

As early as the latter years of Amenhotep III foreign holdings were neglected. During Akhenaten's reign the civil and military authority was left to Ay, 'Father of God', possibly Akhenaten's father-in-law, and general Horemheb. Ay and Horemheb both eventually became kings before the end of the 18th Dynasty, and Horemheb particularly was instrumental in reversing the Egyptian state religion back to its previous traditional form.

It is possible that some of the followers of Akhenaten and Aten, the inhabitants of Akhetaten, fled from Eygpt when the Egyptian state religion was converted back to its previous traditional form.

This wandering tribe came to be known as the Hebrews. There does seem to be much difference between Akhenaten's one God and the one God of Moses who lived a century after Akhenaten. Akhenaten focused on the creative aspects his one God - the reproduction of life, the daily resurrection of the life giving warmth of the sun, the seasonal life giving aspects of the waters of the Nile, etcetera. Whereas the God of Moses, although still the God of Creation, now has a nomadic warrior characteristic as manifested in Yahweh.

Contrary to the rumor that the Hebrews were enslaved by Pharaoh they worked for and with Pharaoh. Joseph (Yosef), who was sold into slavery by his brothers, became Pharaoh's trusted adviser. The myth that the Egyptians used slaves to build the pyramid is false. The Egyptians planted and harvested in the proper seasons and after harvest they went down to the city to work as craftsman in the construction of the pyramids.

Near a pyramid was discovered the first bottled beer factory. Those bottles have been found scattered at places of habitation throughout the Mediterranean Sea basin.

"The mouth of a perfectly contented man is filled with beer," according to the ancient Egyptians, and on that basis it was a happy society. Bare-breasted women engaged in sudsy brewing work adorn tomb paintings and clay models from the dynastic period.

To slake his thirst, each laborer on the pyramids got a daily beer allotment of 1 1/3 gallons. Everyone partied at the annual celebration of the Drunkenness of Hathor, goddess of fertility, motherhood and the Milky Way.


"In front of the towering golden sandstone entrance to the temple of Edfu stands an imposing granite statue of a falcon, about 12-feet tall, representing Horus, a premier Egyptian god. Sculpted into Horus' chest is a small figure of a later Greek ruler of Egypt.

To buttress his political legitimacy, the alien neo-pharaoh carved himself into the stone of a powerful god.

The rulers of Egypt had been playing this game for 5,000 years.

More than three millenniums before the birth of Jesus, when ancient Europeans were still wandering the primal forests the first dynasty of the Pharaohs had already built a unified kingdom down the valley of the Nile, and they were treated as demigods.

Later the Pharaohs presented themselves as children and intimates of the sun god Ra, of Isis and Osiris and of their divine offspring - Horus.

(Ra, the sun god, went through a daily cycle of death and rebirth, dying at the end of each day and being reborn in the morning as Ra-Horakhty, and it was through this cycle that the blessed dead traveled so as to enjoy rebirth along with the sun.)

Gods were great for keeping you in power, but they were also interchangeable in whole or in part, for another god of like nature or kind.

Over the centuries, as the politics changed, there were god mergers and corporate god takeovers.

Luxor luminary Amun and Ra merged to become Amun-Ra, a strong new brand.

The Ptolemaic successors of Alexander the Great promoted Serapis, a deliberate blending of Greek and Egyptian gods.

At the Greco-Roman temple of Philae, you see a mother-and-child image sculpted on the walls of the sanctuary, but the face of the mother has been chiseled away. In a Christian time, Isis was thus crudely rebranded Mary, turning Horus into Jesus.

Later, there was Allah, of course, and his messenger Muhammad.

For president Gamal Abdel Nasser, the architect of post-colonial Egypt, there was pan-Arabism, Islam added to pretend socialism.

Politics, seen from this perspective of 5,000 years of Egyptian history, is something very different from what you find in American civics textbooks.

It's not about the installation of this or that logically and legally constructed political system, based on this or that ideology.

It's about rulers borrowing, bending and merging gods, ideologies and legal systems, adapting to internal and external forces, mixing coercion and patronage, sharing some of the spoils where necessary, but always with the goal of maximizing their own power and wealth and hanging on to it for as long possible - for yourself, and your children, and your children's children.

Those who take the legitimating religion or ideology too seriously - be it Osirisism or socialism - are missing the point.

The gods are continually morphing; what endures over the millenniums is men's lust for power and wealth and their vain quest for immortality."

- adapted from Timothy Garton Ash

parallels between Christian and Egyptian mythology

After Osiris' death Osiris' spirit enters Isis immaculately conceives Horus.

Horus and Jesus are both born of immaculate conception.

There is a strong resemblance to the depiction of the seated Isis holding or suckling the child Horus and the seated Mary and the baby Jesus. In the catacombs at Rome are images of the baby Horus being held by the virgin mother Isis, the original "Madonna and Child."

Horus is the rising Sun = Jesus is the rising Son.

The pharoah was considered to be an incarnation of Horus (also known as "Amun-Ra," the sun god).

In the same way, Jesus is considered to be the incarnation of God, the Father.

Like the Egyptian pharoah, Jesus was called a "shepherd".

Horus had an evil adversary named "Set".

[Set was homosexual and is depicted as trying to prove his dominance by seducing Horus and then having intercourse with him. However, Horus places his hand between his thighs and catches Set's semen, then subsequently throws it in the river, so that he may not be said to have been inseminated by Set. Horus then deliberately spreads his own semen on some lettuce, which was Set's favorite food. After Set has eaten the lettuce, they go to the deities to try to settle the argument over the rule of Egypt. The deities first listen to Set's claim of dominance over Horus, and call his semen forth, but it answers from the river, invalidating his claim. Then, the deities listen to Horus' claim of having dominated Set, and call his semen forth, and it answers from inside Set. In consequence, Horus is declared the ruler of Egypt. Horus cast Set into the darkness where he lives to this day.]

"In the last days, Horus and Set will fight one last time. Horus will defeat Set forever, and Osiris will be able to return to this world. On that day, the Day of Awakening, all the tombs shall open and the just dead shall live again as we do, and all sorrow shall pass away forever."

Horus was considered a savior after defeating Set.

Horus was the keeper of wisdom as was Jesus.

Horus had four sons; Imsety - human headed son of Horus, Hapi - the baboon headed son of Horus, Duamutef - the jackal headed son of Horus, Qebehsenuef - the hawk headed son of Horus. The four evangelists are Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Matthew is symbolized as a human; Mark is symbolized as a lion; Luke is symbolized as an ox; John is symbolized as an eagle.

The hiding of the infant Horus in a marsh by his mother parallels the story of the hiding of the infant Moses in a marsh by his mother.

When Horus died, Isis implored Ra, the Sun, to restore Horus to life. Ra stopped his ship mid heaven and sent down Thoth, the moon, to bring Horus back to life. The stopping of the sun and moon by Isis recalls the myth of the stopping of the sun and moon by Joshua.

The difference between Osiris and Horus, father and son, blurred and after a few centuries, it came to be said that Horus was the resurrected form of Osiris.

From The Book of the Dead or The Papyrus of Ani, 1240 BC

the merging of Eygptian, Greek and Roman mythology

With the rise of Greece came an increase in contact with Eygpt.

The Egyptian god Osiris and the Greek god Dionysus had been equated in the 5th century BC by the historian Herodotus.

The composite term Osiris-Dionysus is found around the start of the first century BC, for example in Aegyptiaca by Hecataeus of Abdera, and in works by Leon of Pella.

At the time of Jesus' birth there was a mystery religion with a God referred to as Osiris-Dionysus.

This religion included:

Osiris-Dionysus is God made flesh, the savior and "Son of God."

Osiris-Dionysus' Father is God and his mother is a mortal virgin.

Osiris-Dionysus' birth was prophesized by a star in the heavens.

Osiris-Dionysus is born in a cave or a humble cowshed before three shepherds.

Osiris-Dionysus offers his followers the chance to be born again through the rites of baptism.

Osiris-Dionysus miraculously turns water into wine at the marriage ceremony.

Osiris-Dionysus was powerless to perform miracles in his home town.

Osiris-Dionysus rides triumphantly into town on a donkey while people wave palm leaves to honor him.

Osiris-Dionysus had 12 disciples.

Osiris-Dionysus was accused of licentious behavior.

Osiris-Dionysus was hung on a tree, stake, or cross.

Osiris-Dionysus dies at the Vernal Equinox as a sacrifice for the sins of the world.

Osiris-Dionysus descends to hell after bodily death, and then on the third day he rises from the dead and ascends to heaven in glory.

The cave where Osiris-Dionysus was laid was visited by three of his female followers.

Osiris-Dionysus' followers await his return as the judge during the Last Days.

Osiris-Dionysus' death and resurrection are celebrated by a ritual meal of bread and wine, which symbolize his body and blood.

Osiris-Dionysus sacrificial death reunites the believer with God and atones for Original Sin.

Numerous religious mystery groups existed in the eastern Mediterranean during the late classical antiquity period, including the Eleusinian mysteries, the Dionysian mysteries, the Orphic mysteries and the Mithraic mysteries. Some of the many divinities that the Romans nominally adopted from other cultures also came to be worshiped in mysteries, so for instance Egyptian Isis, Thracian/Phrygian Sabazius and Phrygian Cybele.

At the heart of the mysteries was the myth of a dying and resurrecting godman, who was known by different names in different cultures: in Egypt he was Osiris, in Greece Dionysus, in Asia Minor Attis, in Syria Adonis, in Italy Bacchus, in Sumeria Tammuz , in Persia Mithras.

The name 'Osiris-Dionysus' was sometimes used to denote a universal and composite nature.

Constantine was searching for a new State religion to unite the far flung reaches of the Roman Empire. To this end Constantine took existing fragmented and splintered religious mysteries groups and codified the basic structure of those mysteries into a new religion with a new sacred text - the New Testament which was underlain by the religious mytholgy of the Hebrews found in the Old Testament.

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