#21 IMHOTEP, NEFERTITI AND THE WHITE ORDER
“Why, Gatekeeper, did Imhotep have to incarnate?
“If he hadn’t incarnated at that stage the Egyptian civilisation, which was stalled in decay, would have imploded leaving a vacuum in the known world and chaos would have resulted.
Chaos plays the same role in history as rot does in physical matter. It prepares a social system for destruction giving a triumph to the Dark and of ignorance over knowledge. When I say the time demanded the life of a genius – this is what I meant.”
“Is that why St Germain chose this life?”
“Imhotep was to be allowed the gift of genius and St Germain knows he will deliver. He will be the seed, which will produce a tree which will allow the intellectual desert of Egypt to flower again. He took that job because nobody else could do it as well as St Germain… the more difficult his challenges, the greater his triumphs. Imhotep’s life is emblematic of all that is noble in the human spirit, he reached for the stars. Without that nobility, humanity would become enslaved.”
“What qualities of St Germain did he bring into this life?”
“His vast organisation capacity, his innovation and his deep thinking: a genius. He had the ability to conceptualise vast projects, he had St Germain’s skills as a physician, his engineering capacity, his mathematical qualities as well as his ability as a surgeon, and as an administrator. He was not, however, a linguist, but he learned Greek – a primitive form of the language of the people of the Green Water and he was a poet, but not as great a poet as Homer.”
“What was his life’s purpose?”
“His life purpose was his work and he achieved it.”
“What was his spiritual challenge?”
“I will answer that question with the following proviso. This is how Imhotep sees his spiritual challenge and we have to accept his word for it. He was in continual warfare against his vanity. He defeated it temporarily in that life but he would struggle with it again as Plato and Robespierre and Jean-Paul Sartre. Perhaps it is easier to defeat as a supreme ruler where self-belief is an important component of success. In my view his hint of arrogance is merely a realistic assessment of his ability.”
“Robespierre! I can’t believe that he was the gentle Plato. Robespierre was the main instigator of the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. He was a murderer and an ideologue dressed as a dandy!”
“Let’s put Robespierre aside until we can consider him coolly. When we compare him dispassionately, we will discover what his journey was about. Your next question is?”
“Imhotep’s name has never been forgotten in four and half thousand years. What kind of a man was he?”
“An immensely modest man, despite what he says, with no instinct for self-aggrandisement; he was pleasant, polite and courteous always. In meetings he almost always waited until everyone else had spoken, then he either cut through all their blather or tied the argument neatly together. He was a kind man with a great natural authority.”
“Where is his tomb? We haven’t found it so far.”
“And you won’t because he doesn’t have a tomb. The King or Pharaoh made him one but Imhotep said he wanted to be cremated because it was a hygienic way of disposing of corpses. He requested that his body be burned and his ashes scattered on the Nile. His interest in hygiene came partly from his membership of the White Brotherhood because they focussed on cleanliness, clean hands, clean nails, pure water, fresh food and white clothing.”
“Gatekeeper, could you ask Imhotep if he had any regrets?”
“Only what you’ll come to appreciate as the usual regrets. He sacrificed his personal relationships because he was the original workaholic who worked night and day. He lacked balance, but delivered brilliance and light. And now let’s look at the queens who will show us, for the first time, Mary’s role in governance and give us the opportunity to explore the Brotherhood of Light.”
Nefertiti, Nefertari
Nefertiti and Nefertari were two remarkable queens of Ancient Egypt whose husbands Akhenaton and Ramses left undeniable marks on Egyptian life.
Living well over three thousand years ago, they enjoyed their full status as queens, which were reflected in the relatively higher status of women in Egyptian society. Egypt had two pharaohs who were women and both of them, Hatshepsut and Cleopatra, ruled like kings.
Egypt passed family inheritances down the matrilineal line and perhaps these emboldened women to take the initiative in courtship and often propose marriage. But societal rules changed to ensure the family still controlled the property, leading to the unusual consequence of brothers marrying their sisters to stop the family wealth giving comfort to male strangers.
Kingship too, seemed to pass down the female line; with a royal child’s status was determined by their mother as well as by their father, so that a royal heiress, the eldest born of a pharaoh, could “give” her right to rule to her husband who may be her close relative, even her brother. Scholars suspect that both Nefertiti and Nefertari had higher status than their husbands when they first married because there is evidence of co-rulership in both reigns.
NEFERTITI (C1370-1336BC)
Mary began her historical association with Egypt as the wife of a pharaoh. Swan-necked and stunningly beautiful, the sculptured head of Queen Nefertiti is one of the famous icons of Ancient Egypt. The three thousand three hundred-year-old bust of the queen from the fourteenth century BC is the most celebrated exhibit in Berlin’s Egyptian Museum, attracting thousands of admirers each year. Her sculptured head was one of two discovered in El Amarna in a royal portrait studio of the chief sculptor, Thutmosis. It had never left his studio which could explain why her left eye had not been inserted in her head.
As the elegant wife of the Pharaoh, Amenhotep IV of the eighteenth dynasty, Nefertiti (meaning the beautiful one has arrived) was by his side when he renamed himself Akhenaton (1379-1362BC), and declared there was to be only one god in Egypt, the sun disk Aten. Aten was a different god: unique, indestructible and all-powerful. Akhenaton’s abandonment of the traditional gods including Amun, Isis and Osiris ushered in a period of intense religious controversy and political instability as he wrested power from his polytheistic priesthood, closed the temples and took over their revenue. Akhenaton built a new capital in the middle of no-where; a barren place surrounded by cliffs, called El Amarna, and deserted the religious capital, Thebes. As king of the superpower of his time, he devoted his energies not to foreign policy and territorial acquisition but to religious pursuits and appears to have neglected the administration of both of his kingdom and his empire.
Nefertiti, the mother of his six daughters, shared her husband with two other royal wives: Mekytaten and Ankhesenpaaten, and a ‘greatly beloved wife’, a concubine, Kia. Nefertiti came from a long line of high priestesses of the god, Amun, and was a descendant of the first queen of the eighteenth dynasty, Ahmose-Nefetari. They appeared to have a happy marriage because the surviving stone reliefs show them as a loving couple and family. Nefertiti, who was officially the “great royal wife”, appears to have played an active role as a priest in the new religion and she was a devoted worshipper of the new god. She is shown, unlike other queens, taking part in the daily worship and enacting the same rituals as her husband and seems to be more prominent than other past or future queens.
We do not know whether she had real power or ceremonial power or how committed she was to monotheism. Something strange happened in the fourteenth year of Akhenaton’s reign. Three of his daughters died then his mother before Kia disappeared. What was the cause? A plague? Or a purge? And what were the political implications of such a loss of nearly half of the royal household in a little over a year?
Later in the fourteenth year, Nefertiti also disappeared from all official records; virtually vanishing. He tomb has never been found. How important was she? Did she die at thirty or was she banished?
Conversation with the Gatekeeper
“Gatekeeper, Nefertiti is to us larger than life because of the beautiful sculptures we have of her. Did she have time in her life to accomplish something other than mothering her six daughters?”
“Nefertiti was a fighter for women’s rights. She won the admission of women to the school for scribes that allowed them to become lawyers and economists. The head scribe had been adamant: no women. Nefertiti devised a method to go around him. If women would apply to the High Priestess of Bast to become one of her priestesses then as priestesses the Head Priest or scribe would not be able to refuse to admit them to the school. This was an enormous step forward for women. She devised the strategy and her husband gave his passive support. Her victory was one of the reasons Nefertiti was perceived as dangerous.”
“Why was it that in the first five years of his reign, Nefertiti is shown almost twice as often in the reliefs as her husband?”
“Nefertiti had a better claim to the throne from both sides of her family. Her mother and father were both from the royal line directly while Akhenaton was only from the royal line on his father’s side. Therefore, she is in more pictures than him. Your scholars believe erroneously she was not of royal blood; she was truly a queen and known at the time as ‘the Heiress’.”
“One relief depicts her racing her husband in a chariot. This is very kingly behaviour, unusual for a woman. Did she, in fact, do that?”
“Nefertiti was a tomboy who was very much indulged by her father. She was very imperious and the real ruler – the dominant one in the relationship. She bet Akhenaton she would beat him and she did, but she merely pulled back at the last minute. He loved her. She didn’t love him as completely as he loved her because unfortunately, she was used to adoration.”
“Where did the idea of one god come from and was the idea of religious reform supported by Nefertiti as well as by her husband?”
“Nefertiti was the originator of the idea. She believed in one god. As we discussed with Imhotep, there had always been a small sect in Egypt who held monotheistic beliefs. This sect was known as the White Brotherhood because they only wore white garments and both the pharaoh and his queen were members.”
“Then why is it called a ‘brotherhood’ if women were members?”
“I am using a translation of the Latin name for it: Fraternities Alba, but in Egyptian it was called Temku and a better translation is the “White Order”.
“Why was Nefertiti made a member?”
“She was the first female to be made a member in hundreds of years. The Brotherhood had lost a great deal in being male only (as had the Church). She was invited to join because of her goodwill, intelligence, her gift for governance and her purity of intention and because her yin energy and her feminine logic gave a different perspective to the Order.”
“It all sounds like a secret society of one of the Hermetic orders. Is the White Order a religion?”
“No, it is not a religion but its ideas have influenced Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It is the monotheistic teaching of a band of refugee priests from Sumeria. It expanded in Egyptian society of Pharaonic times where monotheism and polytheism existed happily side-by-side and where monotheism came and went in popularity. This is the source from which the Israelites took their religion. In Egypt, Abraham came under the influence of the Order and Aaron and Moses reinforced this influence later because they had been educated by them. The remnants of it still exist in the Rosicrucians and the original Rosy Cross High Order of Freemasons which is purely the White Order. Today you will find elders of the White Order in Masonry, the Catholic Church, Islam, and Buddhism and in the Hindu Sardis. Its name in Sanskrit is Alba-Thi which appears in Arabic as Al-Bathi.”
