Don’t Know Much About® Mythology (15 page)

What is an Egyptian pyramid doing on the U.S. dollar bill?

There is another peculiarly American mystery that pertains to the pyramids, and there is one in your wallet or pocket. The dollar bill, with its strange combination of pyramids, eyes, and Latin text, has inspired considerable speculation and myth—in the sense of something commonly believed but untrue. Many people think that the symbol represents the powerful influence of the semisecret society called the Freemasons. According to this theory, the symbols in question—the pyramid topped by an all-seeing eye—were put there by the “Masonic president,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to show that the country had been taken over by Masons.

In fact, these symbols are actually the two sides of the Great Seal of the United States, which dates from the late 1700s. Benjamin Franklin, also a Freemason, is often credited with their use, but even that may be a myth. The “All-Seeing Eye of the Deity” is mentioned in Freemasonry, but the concept behind this image dates back to the Egyptians. The unfinished pyramid symbolized the unfinished work of nation-building. Contrary to much popular myth, the pyramid is not a particularly Masonic symbol. The eye in the pyramid was a common symbol of an omniscient deity that can be seen in Italian Renaissance painting, long before the birth of Masonry, which was not formed until the early 1700s.

The Great Seal of the United States, symbol of the nation’s sovereignty, was adopted on June 20, 1782, and the reverse side of the seal is what appears on the back of the dollar bill. A pyramid of thirteen courses of stone represents the Union, and is watched over by the “Eye of Providence” enclosed in a triangle. The upper motto,
Annuit coeptis
, means “He [God] has favored our undertakings.” The lower motto,
Novus ordo seclorum
, means “the new order of the ages” that began in 1776, the date on the base of the pyramid. Anti-Mason groups and conspiracy theorists have mistranslated this as “New World Order,” attempting to fit the seal into the belief that Masons constitute a vast international conspiracy to create such an “order.” When the first President Bush used that phrase during his presidency to describe the changing political map of Europe following the fall of Communism in Europe, it was quickly seized as further evidence of the “Masonic plot.”
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One of the oldest and largest fraternal organizations in the world, Freemasonry was formed in London in 1717 by a group of intellectuals who took over a medieval craft guild and fostered what they called “enlightened uplift.” They were dedicated to the ideals of charity, equality, morality, and service to God, whom Masons describe as the “Great Architect of the Universe.” The order spread quickly through Enlightenment Europe and included men as diverse as Voltaire, King Frederick II of Prussia, and the Austrian composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. As it developed, Freemasonry was viewed as anticlerical and was later thought to be antireligious by conservative Congregationalists in the United States. An anti-Mason movement took hold in the nineteenth century, and the Antimasonic Party became the first significant third party in American politics. But the fact is that Masonry was a voluntary fraternal order—a kind of eighteenth-century spiritual Rotary Club—and not a sinister cult intent on world domination, as it has often been portrayed.

Was the ruler of Egypt always a pharaoh?

The earliest carvings and written references to kings show that the Egyptians long considered the king as the earthly manifestation of the sky god Horus and the son of Re, the sun god. Yet, while all the kings of Egypt are typically thought of as “pharaohs,” the Egyptians did not call the ruler that until around 1550 BCE. The administrative complex around the court at Memphis was known as Per Ao (“the great house”). The word “pharaoh” was attached at first to the royal palace, and only later to the king himself.

In theory, the pharaoh owned all the land and ruled the people and also served as the high priest of Egypt. But in reality, his power was sometimes limited by strong groups, including the priests and nobility, or local provisional ruler of the
nomes
, called
nomarchs
. Although remarkable for the relatively few coups or assassinations in its long history—perhaps a tribute to the power of the Egyptian religion as a stabilizing force—Egyptian politics could sometimes be Machiavellian. There are cases of royal wives getting rid of their divine husbands, and there is even unproved suspicion that the young King Tut was murdered. The intrigues of the Egyptian court are best seen in the story of Pharaoh Amenemhet I (1985–1956 BCE), who was one of the few pharaohs definitely known to have been assassinated. He is famed for a set of instructions supposedly written posthumously, but most likely the work of a scribe, in which he advises his son to be on guard for intrigues:

From
Egyptian Myth and Legend
, Gresham Publishing, 1907; cited in Jon E. Lewis, ed.,
The Mammoth Book of Eyewitness Ancient Egypt
, New York: Carroll & Graf, 2004.

Did a pharaoh inspire Moses to worship one god?

Even as Egypt became the world’s greatest power, it fell into disarray over religious politics, an intriguing moment in history that might provide a valuable lesson about the volatile combination of belief and government. During his reign, the pharaoh Amenhotep IV (1352–1336 BCE) made a remarkable and radical—if somewhat mysterious and unexplained—decision. Amenhotep severed all links with the traditional religious capital of Egypt in Memphis and its god Amun-Re, chose
Aten
as the only god of Egypt, and set out to build an entirely new city devoted to this god. Located about two hundred miles north of Thebes, the city is known today by the name “Amarna,” and this period is called the “Amarna Revolution.” It affected Egypt in its time as profoundly as the Protestant Reformation affected Europe.

Aten had previously been a little-known god worshipped in Thebes. Unlike Re and other gods, Aten, whose name meant “disc of the Sun,” had no human characteristics. Aten was depicted only as a sun from which rays emanated, ending in hands that held the
ankh
, Egyptian symbol of life. Amenhotep was so devoted to the worship of Aten that he changed his name to Akhenaten. Akhenaten’s wife Nefertiti was his supporter in this transformation, taking on the role of priestess and assisting Akhenaten in the new religious ceremonies. Supposedly one of the most beautiful women in Egyptian history, Nefertiti is the subject of several sculptured portraits that have survived from ancient times. She and Akhenaten began a full-scale attempt to wipe out references to all other gods. Throughout Egypt, statues to Amun-Re were smashed, and the god’s name was literally chiseled out of monuments. State temples were torn down, and the traditional religious festivals and public holidays were no longer celebrated. The reasons for this radical reformation—the equivalent of a modern American president trying to wipe out any reference to Christianity in America and banning Christmas, Easter, and other religious holidays—are uncertain. There may have been political reasons behind Akhenaten’s purge of the other gods.

Within a short time, the vast state mechanism of religion had been reduced to worship of a single god led by one man, the pharaoh. Only he and Nefertiti could communicate with this god. As popes and other religious leaders have well understood over the centuries, the professed ability to communicate exclusively with the gods is a great way to consolidate power.

After Akhenaten’s death, the Egyptians stopped worshipping Aten. The new pharoah, Tutankhamun, began the restoration of the old gods, and traditional worship was completely restored under Horemheb, a general in Tut’s service, who managed to secure the throne for himself after the death of Tut’s successor, and then leveled Amarna.

But for years, many scholars have argued that the worship of this one divinity lingered among the people of Israel, who, according to biblical accounts, had lived in Egypt for hundreds of years. And that creates another interesting collision of myth and faith. The concept of one god became an important part of the religion that was developed by the Israelite leader Moses. The history of the cult of Aten has led to the suggestion that the Jewish and Christian belief in one God may have been derived from Egyptian worship. Among the proponents of this idea was Sigmund Freud, who laid out his theory in his final book,
Moses and Monotheism
. Or perhaps it was the other way around. As Bruce Feiler writes in his bestseller
Walking the Bible
, “Might the Israelites have learned to worship one god following the lead of some maverick pharaoh? Or might the Egyptians have learned the same thing by taking an idea from the patriarchs?”

In the traditional Jewish and Christian view, such questions are heresy. But they point to the reason why mythology matters. Cultures collide. Myths are absorbed in the aftermath of that collision. The ideas of one civilization are borrowed and remolded by another. There is no question that the Egyptians profoundly influenced the Greeks in their beliefs and practices. Is it reasonable to ask if they had done the same to the ancient Hebrews? Aten’s monotheistic revolution raises a beguiling set of questions. Where do the Hebrews, the twelve tribes of Israel, fit into Egyptian history? And did these Egyptian ideas influence the man who brought the Israelites out of Egypt and delivered God’s biblical law on a set of tablets received on Mount Sinai?

This is where myth and history collide—and it is one of the fundamental reasons to understand mythology. Where is one faith or religion—or mythology—born? Whose divinely revealed truth is
the one and only truth
?

Other intriguing questions surface, the foremost of which involve Moses. In spite of his exalted status in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—Moses is referred to fifty times in the Koran, which credits him with negotiating God down to Islam’s five prayers a day—Moses is a mystery man. There is no evidence of his existence in any historical documents outside the Bible or Koran. Extensive Egyptian records contain no reference to a Moses—an Egyptian name; it is Moshe in Hebrew—raised in the house of a pharaoh, as the biblical account and the Hollywood version of
The Ten Commandments
have it. There is also no reference in Egypt’s ancient monuments of bureaucratic records to “the children of Israel” working as slaves and then escaping en masse. There is a single reference to a battle with the Hebrews in a victory column—or stela—erected by Pharaoh Merneptah.

This lack of historical records has led many scholars over centuries to doubt the existence of Moses. That is, of course, a radical idea to many believers, since the story of Moses leading the captive Hebrews out of Egypt, miraculously crossing the “Red Sea”—a mistranslation of the Hebrew words for “Sea of Reeds”—and entering the wilderness, where they spent forty years before entering the Promised Land, is the essence of Judaism. It also provides important symbolic connections to the life of Jesus.

The biblical account of the sojourn of the Hebrews in Egypt goes back to the story of Joseph, one of twelve sons of the patriarch Jacob (son of Isaac, grandson of Abraham). The favorite son, Joseph was famed for his “coat of many colors,” but was envied by his brothers, who sold him into slavery and told their father that Joseph was killed while tending sheep. Taken to Egypt, Joseph eventually rose to become a counselor to the Egyptian throne because of his uncanny ability to interpret dreams. One biblical account tells the story of how the wife of Potiphar, Joseph’s Egyptian master, accused Joseph of attempting to rape her after he had actually rejected the woman’s advances. This story, told in Genesis, echoes an old Egyptian folktale called “The Tale of Two Brothers,” which contains all of the details that were presumably “sampled,” in modern terms, by the authors of Genesis.