Re incarnate: Lincoln to Beatles

 

Egyptology is traditionally defined as the study of ancient Egyptian art, history, language, literature and religion from 5,000 BC until the 4th century AD, when Christian authorities closed the pagan temples, burned the libraries and disbanded the priesthood. Arab invasions in the 7th century and the introduction of Islam further eclipsed the old Egyptian ways.

 

When religions die, historians rename them “myths.” However, I would contend that the Egyptian religion and its central deity, the sun-god Re, never really disappeared, but continued in disguised form through other religions and even secular beliefs.

 

I would redefine Egyptology to include the influence of Re and the pantheon of Egyptian gods on any portion of human history. The spirit of ancient Egypt permeates Western Civilization in art, music, war, economics and politics. You can try to separate church and state but you can’t take Re out of our Republic.

 

In fact, we can predict business, political and cultural cycles by looking backward to ancient Egypt and the cycle of Re, the sun god. (Re, pronounced “ray,” is also known as Ra, "rah.")

 

Trinity  Thus spoke Re: "I am Khepera at the dawn, and Re at noon, and Tem in the evening." Khepera (or Khepri) rolls the sun across the sky like the scarab rolls a ball of dung. He has the power of resurrection and self-renewal, bringing the sun back to life after it "dies" at night. Re at noon, depicted as a falcon, conveys power and wisdom, but also brings an unforgiving heat as the sun descends to earth. Tem (or Atum), represented by the water lily, carried the god force through the night, assuring its return in the dawn.

 

Re is represented in earthly form, as a pharaoh or other an equivalent leader, and in spiritual form, in which he traverses the sky in a sun boat with various other deities who help defend the vessel against monsters of the underworld. The most notable of these monsters or demons is Apep, an enormous serpent who tries to swallow the boat.

 

In later stories of Re, the aging god confronts rebellious and wicked subjects. Through the “Eye of Re,” he summons a daughter, the lioness Sekhmet, who devours his enemies. This “myth” may have been inspired by real-life insurrections against pharaohs. 

 

The Re cycle is being repeated in modern history, with each god of the trinity representing a different era. Khepera brings rebellion, freedom and creativity, but in his later stages falls into decadence and economic speculation, such as witnessed in the "Roaring Twenties." When the bubble bursts, as in the stock market crash in 1929, Re at noon appears as a reactionary force, seeking to restore order and morality, often through war against internal or external enemies. After war, nations turn to Tem for rest and recovery, as Europe and Japan did during the 1950s.

 

How far can we trace back the modern Re cycle and what great persons embody the gods?

 

Abraham Lincoln  An incarnate of “Re at noon” can be found in Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), whose “falling sun” scorched the earth in the Civil War. The president had several dreams that placed him aboard a ship, his “Boat of Re,” just before several Civil War battles, including those at Sumter, Bull Run, Antietam, Gettysburg and Vicksburg. In Egyptian lore, Re fought demons from his ship; Lincoln was in combat with Confederate “demons.”

 

On Friday April 14, 1865, Lincoln told his cabinet about another ship dream, in which the vessel, with the sun shining brightly in the background, was approaching a peaceful shore. One cabinet member reported Lincoln as recalling the ship was “badly damaged.” We can interpret the dream to mean that by reaching land, Lincoln had reached the end of his voyage and the end of his life. The next day he was assassinated.

 

Lincoln knew nothing of the “Boat of Re.” Although the Rosetta Stone, the key to interpreting Egyptian heiroglyphic writing, had been discovered in 1799 and extensively deciphered beginning in 1822, public knowledge and interest in Egyptology would not flourish until the 1922 discovery of King Tut’s tomb.

The Lincoln Memorial honors the president who freed the slaves. At Abu Simbel in Egypt, a similar seated figure depicts Ramesses II. Some scholars believe he is the pharaoh who, according to the Book of Exodus, was forced to release the "children of Israel" from bondage.

 

The destructive “Re at noon” era commenced with the Panic of 1837, when a land speculation bubble burst. Out of 850 banks in the US, 343 closed entirely and 62 partially failed. The panic was followed by a five-year depression and record high unemployment levels.

 

In 1837 Lincoln became an attorney, having already served as a state legislator. At this point, by both enacting and practicing law, Lincoln had earned his “first stripe” as the Re figure who embodied authority. In 1847, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he spoke out against slavery and the Mexican War during his single term.

 

One might say Re’s blood-thirsty daughter, Sekhmet, came to life as Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose 1852 anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin aroused the passions of both pro-slavery and anti-slavery readers and divided the country. When Lincoln met the author in 1862, the president reportedly commented, "So this is the little lady who started this great war.”

 

Bleeding Kansas, also known as the Border War, further pushed the nation apart. This conflict, to determine if Kansas would enter the Union as a free or slave state, took place in both the Kansas Territory and Missouri between 1854 and 1858. Bleeding Kansas served as a dress rehearsal for the Civil War, a pattern that would be repeated in the next Re-at-noon period, 1930-1945, when the Spanish Civil War was a staging ground for World War II.

 

Kansas was admitted to the Union as a free state on January 29, 1861. The Civil War began on April 12, 1861 when the Confederates attacked Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina. The war ended on April 9, 1865 when General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox.

 

The Re-at-noon era ended with the president’s death.

 

Claude Monet  We can find Tem if we step back into Europe of the late 19th century. The continent was in a relatively peaceful and sleepy stage, and monarchs still ruled in many countries. An incarnation of the evening god can be found in the French impressionist Claude Monet (1840 - 1926), whose specialty was the water lily, a symbol of Tem.

 

Impressionism was generally characterized by the play of natural light in the painting, a light originating with the sun. Impressionists worked on unprimed white canvas or a pale background to create a lighter, brighter effect. Their paintings celebrated the outdoors and the everyday life of people. The reign of Tem was a time of prosperity and political conservatism.

 

Monet first earned recognition with his 1866 portrait “The Woman in the Green Dress.” This depiction of his future wife, Camille Doncieux, bore a passing resemblance to some paintings of Mary Todd Lincoln, a fitting segue between the gods.

 

Impressionism came to the foreground in 1874 when 55 artists, including Cezanne, Pissarro, Renoi, Degas, Monet, Manet, and his sister-in-law Berthe Morisot, held their first independent group show. Their popularity increased in the 1880s and 1890s, boosted by sales to Americans.

 

Monet spoke of returning again and again to his water garden and water lilies: "Suddenly I had the revelation of how magical my pond is. I took up my palette. Since that time I scarcely had any other model . . . These landscapes of water and reflections have become my obsession . . . I must work a lot to find what I'm seeking: the instantaneousness, above all the envelope, the same light spread everywhere."

 

The small strokes used by Monet and the other impressionists to simulate actual reflected light look much like the granulation on the surface of the sun when viewed through an H-alpha filtered telescope, a technology that would not be available to amateur astronomers until the mid-1970s. Perhaps, through a collective unconscious that transcends time, the impressionists were “worshiping” the sun by trying to reproduce the surface of the sun in their paintings.

 

Monet's obsession concluded with a ten-year project: "The Water Lilies," a set of twelve life-size canvases he donated to France. Alas, when finally installed in 1926 at the museum of the Orangerie in Paris, they drew little interest. The era of Tem was long over; the age of Khepera was in full swing. The calm of the late 19th century Europe had been shattered by rebellion and war.

 

Carl Jung & Albert Einstein  Europe awoke in the 20th century to a new dawn of mind and matter: the creative forces of psychoanalyst Carl Jung (1875 - 1961) and physicist Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955), dual representatives of the god Khepera.

 

Jung coined the terms "introvert," "extrovert" and "archetype" and emphasized the importance of dreams and the collective unconscious in understanding the human mind. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the most widely used personality test in the world, is based on his work. However, Jung was eclipsed by his compatriot, Sigmund Freud, whose emphasis on sexuality trumped Jung's spirituality in the public's imagination.

 

Nevertheless, an incident in Jung's professional life suggests that he, not Freud, wore the mantle of Khepera. Jung was treating a woman whose overly rational approach to life made treatment difficult. The woman told Jung about a dream in which a golden scarab appeared. As she was talking, Jung heard a tapping at his window. He drew the curtain, opened the window, and in flew a gold-green scarab. Jung showed the scarab to the women and from that point on their sessions together became more productive. (F. David Peat, Synchronicity: The Bridge Between Matter and Mind, 1987). I would submit that the scarab was there not to visit the woman but to christen Jung with the identity of Khepera, the scarab god, and validate his spiritual approach to the mind.

 

When a blind beetle crawls over the surface of the globe, he doesn't realize that the track he has covered is curved. I was lucky enough to have spotted it. — Albert Einstein

 

Hardly “blind” , Einstein, the scarab god incarnate, was certainly the master of light. In just one year, 1905, Einstein contributed three papers to the German Annals of Physics that would revolutionize science. In the first paper, Einstein suggested that light could be conceived as a stream of particles — an idea that contributed to quantum theory and the creation of photoelectric cells.

 

In his second paper, he presented his special theory of relativity, which demonstrated the relativity of time. Also, in 1905, Einstein created his famous equation, E (energy) equals m (mass) times c (the speed of light) squared, which led to the creation of the atomic bomb. The third major paper in 1905 confirmed the atomic theory of matter. Einstein addressed Browning motion, an irregular motion of microscopic particles suspended in a liquid of gas.

 

Looking at the sun validated the brilliance of the sun god. In 1919, a solar eclipse proved Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. Observations confirmed that light rays were deflected by the gravity of the sun in just the amount Einstein had predicted. The "blind beetle's" track, the path of light, was curved by gravity.

 

The Great Depression signaled the end of the scarab era.

 

Franklin Roosevelt & Adolph Hitler  Re at noon appeared as opposites: Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882 - 1945) and Adolph Hitler (1889 - 1945), representing maternal and paternal directions in government. In the Roosevelt household, the father was rarely present; the future president was a mama's boy. A tyrannical father presided over the Hitler family.

 

Economic collapse propelled Roosevelt and Hitler to power in the same year, 1933. Both used the power of government to destroy the old economic and political order. Roosevelt created a nurturing welfare state; Hitler established a regimented society. The eagle, like a falcon or hawk, is a raptor that could symbolize Re and the power of authority. The American eagle is an icon of the US government. An eagle was frequently depicted with the swastika on Third Reich coins, stamps, uniform patches and other symbols of authority.

 

Although Adolph Hitler had taken Eva Braun as his mistress, his heart belonged to Nefertiti. A colorful bust of the 18th Dynasty Queen was discovered by German archaeologists in the ruins of an ancient artist's studio on the banks of the Nile in 1912.

 

The bust was first displayed in 1923 in Berlin at the height of the “Egypto-mania” following the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen.

 

When the Egyptian government in 1933 demanded the return of Nefertiti, Hitler replied in a letter, "I know this famous bust. I have viewed it and marvelled at it many times. Nefertiti continually delights me. The bust is a unique masterpiece, an ornament, a true treasure!"

 

Hitler continued, "Do you know what I'm going to do one day? I'm going to build a new Egyptian museum in Berlin. I dream of it. Inside I will build a chamber, crowned by a large dome. In the middle, this wonder, Nefertiti, will be enthroned. I will never relinquish the head of the Queen."

 

Nefertiti was the consort of the pharaoh Akhenaten, who reigned from 1352 to 1336 BC. He offended his subjects by replacing the multitude of Egyptian deities with one sun god, Aten. Nefertiti bore him six daughters and was granted royal status. She may have briefly ruled Egypt after his death.

 

Perhaps Hitler was the reincarnation of Akhenaten, pining in Berlin for his long-lost love. Akhenaten was a reluctant participant in foreign affairs and, in particular, neglected his eastern borders. Hitler may have overcompensated for his previous failings as a pharaoh.

 

The swastika represented a twirling sun. Roosevelt had more than a symbolic sun; the maternal president was "pregnant" with a real one: the atomic bomb. Both Roosevelt and Hitler received fatal damage to the brain: Roosevelt from a stroke; Hitler from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The sun gods descended and died. The suns touched the earth as atomic bombs exploded in New Mexico, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Sunset and time for Tem.

 

Hirohito & Walt Disney  The Japanese revered Emperor Hirohito (1901 -1989) as the semi-divine descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu. While tacitly supporting Japan's imperial aggression during the 1930s and 1940s, Hirohito only became Tem when he became most human. On August 15, 1945, he spoke to the Japanese people for the first time, conceding defeat. On January 1, 1946 he renounced his divinity. Perhaps it will please the Japanese people to discover he was a god all along.

 

From the end of the war until his death, Hirohito presided over a long period of recovery and growth, much like the prosperity experienced by Monet's France in the late 19th century. And, like Monet, he had a water garden of sorts. As a schoolboy, Hirohito developed an interest in marine biology that he carried on for the rest of his life. The emperor often collected specimens of marine animals and plants in and around Sagami Bay, site of the imperial vacation villa, and he built his own marine laboratory on the grounds of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo.

 

Walt Disney (1901 - 1966) first gained popularity in 1928 with short cartoons featuring Mickey Mouse. A productive career in animation and motion pictures reached its pinnacle in the 1950s, a period of economic growth and conservative social values that is typical of a Tem period.
 
In 1955 Disney opened Disneyland, a theme park that expressed different aspects of the Re mythology. At the center of the park is a castle, signifying that a monarch or pharaoh, Disney himself, presides over this magic kingdom. Nearby is a replica of the Matterhorn, the peak in Europe that most resembles a pyramid. The park features boat adventures, such as the Jungle Cruise and Pirates of the Caribbean, which duplicate the experiences of Re, who travels through the sky in a boat and battles the serpent Apep. 

Tem provided prosperity but a restless world was awakening to a new dawn. Here comes the sun. Here comes the 60s.

 

The Beatles  After World War II destroyed Germany and Britain lost its empire, the scarab god revealed itself in the form of the Volkswagen Beetle and the Beatles, bringing a new dawn and resurrection for the German economy and British culture. The beetle god also represented the general creativity and challenge to authority that characterized the 1960s, a period also popularized as the "Age of Aquarius."

 

Each Beatle represented a different facet of Khepera. Paul was the face. I was the smart one. George with all his mysticism, was the spirit, and Ringo was the heart. — John Lennon

 

The scarab feasts on dung. The Beatles honed their talent in nightclubs in the sleazier part of Hamburg, thus nourishing their career on the "excrement" of Germany. Holy crap! A less earthy example of the Beatles' celestial connection can be found in how the band chose its name. John spoke of a vision in which "a man descended unto us astride a flaming pie and spake these words unto us saying, 'From this day on you art The Beatles with an A.'" The flaming pie would be an apt description of a flying saucer or the fiery chariot related by Ezekiel in the Bible.

 

Lennon's most controversial statement, that the Beatles were "more popular than Jesus," was hardly an outrageous comparison as the scarab form, like Jesus, represents resurrection. "In Germany, where scarab worship, in the form of the stag beetle, has persisted longest, the equation scarab = Christ was widely accepted. The quintessential German artist, Albrecht Dürer, associated the stag beetle with Christ in various paintings, and produced a famous watercolor of the insect." (Cambefort, Yves, February 1994, Beetles As Religious Symbols, insects.org)

 

Another Jesus-Beatles connection can be found in dialogue from the “College” episode in the first season of The Sopranos:
 
Father Phil Intintola: You know what's remarkable? If you take everything Jesus ever said, add it up, it only amounts to only two hours of talk.
Carmela Soprano: Nooo. But wait, I heard the same thing about the Beatles. Except it was if you add up all their songs it only comes to ten hours.

 

While initially apologetic about making the Jesus-Beatles comparison, Lennon returned to the subject in the song "The Ballad of John and Yoko":

 

Christ you know it ain't easy, you know how hard it can be
The way things are going, they're going to crucify me

 

Both Jesus and the Beatles were incarnations of Khepera. Since the rebellious, creative Khepera is followed by his opposite, the authoritarian, destructive Re at noon, Hitler certainly fit the bill as an Antichrist; a large portion of the American business community held Franklin Roosevelt in the same regard. The Antichrist could also be thought of as the Afterchrist.

 

The animated Beatles film Yellow Submarine depicted a sun-colored Boat of Re and Khepera's battle with the water demons, the Blue Meanies. Still another link to ancient Egypt was the inspiration the Beatles drew from African-American musicians. Performers in ancient Egypt would have been influenced by the culture of their African neighbors.

 

The ball of dung pushed by the scarab god also had its counterpart in modern culture. That rolling ball is "like a rolling stone," which begat the Rolling Stones and Rolling Stone magazine.

 

The album photo for Abbey Road was shot by Iain MacMillan on August 8, 1969 at a location outside the EMI studio at 3 Abbey Road. The placement of the Volkswagen Beetle on the cover was an unintended "coincidence." Efforts to find the owners to remove the car from the shooting sight were unsuccessful. Police attempting to move the vehicle could only get it partially off the street. In the Era of Khepera, you can't push the scarab out of the picture.

 

For every god, there must be a goddess. The complimentary dark goddess or Kali force in the Age of Khepera was the theme of assassination, with such leaders as JFK and Martin Luther King meeting their deaths. The assassinations of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy were necessary to ensure the success of the Khepera revolution. The youth of America needed to rebel against a rigid, authoritarian father figure. Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon fit the bill. John and Robert Kennedy did not.

 

John Lennon's murder and the attack on George Harrison were foreshadowed in the 1964 Beatles movie Help!, in which an incompetent band of Kali worshippers attempt to kill Ringo. Apparently, to avoid offending Hindus, the goddess was identified as “Kaili” but who were they fooling? Help!, which poked fun at the followers of the dark goddess, might be considered a blasphemy against Kali, for which Khepera had to pay a price. (Leo McKern, who portrayed the leader of the Thuggees, couldn’t escape the dark deity. In his role as a barrister in the TV series Rumpole of the Bailey, McKern would refer to his wife as “She Who Must Be Obeyed,” a reference to the goddess-like character in She, the novel by H. Rider Haggard.)

 

By the mid-1990s, the musical creativity that had been ushered in by the Beatles was a spent force. Music had largely reverted to its most basic, tribal forms: the mating dance and the war dance. George Harrison observed as much when he noted, "I think the popular music has gone truly weird. It's either cutesy-wutesy or its hard, nasty stuff." By the turn of the century, the feel-good Age of Khepera was over, as predicted by musician Prince in 1982: "2000 zero zero party over, oops, out of time. So 2night I'm gonna party like it's 1999." Prince's decision to adopt a hieroglyphic name may have reflected, in part, a past life as an Egyptian.

 

Patterns  Each god of the Re trinity is dominant for a period of several years to two or three decades. We could assign these approximate dates to each phase: Lincoln as Re at noon, 1837 – 1865, Monet as Tem, 1866 - 1899, Jung/Einstein as Khepera, 1900 -1929, Roosevelt/Hitler as Re at noon, 1930 -1945, Hirohito/Disney as Tem, 1946 -1963, and the Beatles as Khepera, 1964 -1999. The gods influence each other. Einstein's E=mc2 was nurtured by Roosevelt into the weapon that would transform Hirohito into Tem. Hitler pushed development of the Peoples' Car (Volkswagen Beetle), which became a Khepera symbol embraced by the hippies in the 1960s and took on supernatural powers in the movie The Love Bug, the biggest box-office hit of 1969.

 

We should also note a doubling of the god force. Lincoln as Re at noon and Tem as Monet represented singular gods in their Re cycle. The 20th century saw a doubling of each god: Jung and Einstein, Roosevelt and Hitler, Hirohito and Disney. With the next Khepera, two became the Fab Four. In the book Man and His Symbols, Jung noted, "Among the mythological representations of the Self, one finds much emphasis on the four corners of the world, and in many pictures the Great Man is represented in the center of a circle divided by four." Indeed, this concept of the Great Man could be applied to Jesus, as the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John reveal the four aspects of Christ. Thus, the Ra cycle beginning with the Beatles (The Fab Four) may represent the most perfect and complete manifestation of the sun god since Jesus walked the earth.

 

Sex and the Cycle  In the last Tem era, expressions of sexuality were repressed and sexual activity was focused on creating children. In the Khepera age, sexual freedom was allowed to flourish, starting from the puppy love of The Beatles' "I want to hold your hand" and concluding with hard core pornography.

 

In the current era of "Ra at noon," sexuality will focus on conflict and destruction instead of creation. Homosexuality, prostitution and sadomasochistic activity will dominate the culture. As various perversities reach their peak, the falling sun of Re will burn them away in a fire of purification.

 

Secondary influences  The forces of Khepera, Re and Tem can exert influence outside their eras, but their impact can be muted or cut short. For example, the 1954 movie The Wild One starred Marlon Brando as a motorcycle gang leader whose rival, portrayed by Lee Marvin, led a gang called the Beetles. This manifestation of the scarab god during the Tem period was premature because these were "rebels without a cause," as demonstrated by two lines of dialogue from the movie:

 

"What's Johnny rebelling against?"

"What have you got?" he sneers.

 

When Khepera was ready to take the stage, in the mid-1960s, the rebels would finally have a cause, in fact, at least three: civil rights, sexual liberation and opposition to the Vietnam War.

 

Another premature appearance of Khepera can be found in the 1959 novel Naked Lunch, in which "Beat" generation author William Burroughs depicted a typewriter, a tool of creation, turning into a giant beetle. Perhaps it would be a slight stretch to point out that the Beatniks were just a few letters away from the Beatles and a few years away from the revolution.

 

Tem would make an attempt to assert itself during the Khepera period when the floral theme of the water lily made a brief appearance as Flower Power and the Summer of Love in 1967. Alas, peace and serenity could not hold its own against the stronger Khepera forces of rebellion and change.

 

A temporary Re-at-noon subversion of the Khepera era occurred in Argentina when the military staged a coup on March 24, 1976. This mini-Nazification left a trail of nearly 13,000 dead or missing, many carried away from their homes in green Ford Falcons driven by the authorities. A disgraced and humiliated military lost their power in 1983 after a mini-version of World War II, in which the British, supplied by their American allies, dislodged Argentine troops from the Falkland Islands. I ran across the Falcon reference when I took my mother's Toyota Tercel in for a smog check on May 25, 2005. In the Smog Connection lobby, I discovered the article "Relics of Argentina's Dirty War Resurface" by James Morrison, along with a photo of one of the Ford Falcons, in the October 2003 issue of Razor magazine. Like a spiritual guide, the white falcon (Tercel) had led me to a green falcon.

 

The default God  Skeptics may accuse of me of cherry picking events and famous people to support my Cycle of Re theory and, in particular, may note that regardless of the cycle period, the "Re at noon" figure of violence and oppression seems to dominate world history. I would suggest that "Re at noon" is the "default God" who serves as the baseline or lowest denominator deity. Cultures are ready to accept the rebirth potential of the trinity only when they become more advanced and enlightened.

 

What now?  Our current period, Re at noon, portends upheavals and wars that could be more intense than those between 1930 and 1945, the last Re at noon era. And even that is not the worst case scenario. At sunset in 1945, the sun touched the earth in the form of atomic bombs. How will the sun touch the earth at the end of this Re at noon?