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The queen was obsessed by a wish to dominate. ... I still maintain that had the power of the queen been removed, and had the young Akhen­aten been surrounded by sympathisers, the further history of Egypt would have been very different ... he was wise, clever, mild and gentle, and he lackcd courage.

Later Akhenaten's 'teaching of light' is made relevant to the coming conflict:

The thought-forces in your world to-day form vast clouds which shut out all the light-rays from the finer vibrations of sanity, understanding, sym­pathy, and love for fellow-creatures. . . . You are all heading for war - a terrible war which will settle none of your troubles.²⁹

Akhenaten's relevance continues. A San Diego suburb was home to the Arch­angel Uriel, Cosmic Visionary, Doctor of Psychic Therapeutic Science at the Unarius Academy, also known as Ruth Norman (d. 1993). Her mission was to explain the mysteries of the cosmos to humanity. In a previous incarnation Nor­man had been Akhenaten's mother Tiye, and her husband Ernest Akhenaten himself. Norman describes how these identities became known to them. During a seance, a medium identified Ernest as Akhenaten, then Ruth as Tiye. For some days they lived life on a heightened and blissful level of experience, remembering their past lives, and then verifying the facts in reference books. Her account gives an interesting insight into the relationship of conventional Egyptological know­ledge to the heterodox believer. Scholarship functions as mere corroboration to a truth already known by vivid experience. Ruth Norman's breathless prose gives a sense of how real this recognition was for her:

These times and experiences were simply like reading pages from our own personal biographies, so familiar were they: and yet we had never read of them in this present lifetime previously. It was such a revelation to hear Him [i.e. Ernest/Akhenaten] voice these times, then to find it all there in the cncyclopcdia or history books. Those weeks were the most outstanding of all in our present life together. The excitement and exuberance was at a very high pitch during these times of relating, attunement and realizing - then the proving from the printed pages.'"

While researching this book I heard other individual accounts of past lives at Amarna that were as highly personal and meaningful. Their narrators regarded them as research which one day will be as useful to history and archaeology as any other. One woman told me that many souls incarnated today once inhabited bodies alive in the Amarna period. Memories of these ancient lives, she said, may be recovered through study and meditation, or the doorkeeper who guides the novice through the stages of esoteric initiation may give a clue. Once revealed, these memories will be of considerable interest to Egyptologists for the unsuspected facts they reveal, but more importantly they will unite the souls who had previous lives in the reign of Akhenaten. Another woman told me how, in a past life regression, she had seen the body of Akhenaten disinterred, violated and burned, while a substitute was buried in the royal tomb at Amarna. She described the sickening smell of the smoke from his mummy, and the fine ashes of his wrappings carried away on the wind into the desert. The mystic emphasis on the reality of the spiritual experience over anything else ensures that many interesting spiritual Akhenatens are inaccessible to anyone other than their creators and auditors.³¹