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Open Cultural Studies 2017; 1: 483–492
Simon Magus*
A Victorian Gentleman in the Pharaoh’s
Court: Christian Egyptosophy and Victorian
Egyptology in the Romances of H. Rider
Haggard
https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2017-0045
Received August 8, 2017; accepted December 5, 2017
Abstract: The following article analyses the ways in which the developing field of Egyptology found its way
into Victorian culture, more especially via the romances of H. Rider Haggard. It considers the process of
acculturation in terms of the Christianizing tendency of a biblical archaeology which was looking for evidence
of biblical narratives in opposition to Higher Criticism of the Bible. It focusses on the specific influence of
the Egyptologist and Assyriologist E. A. Wallis Budge’s ideas on Haggard’s fiction and also examines how the
prominence of excavations at Amarna produced a Victorianization of the household of the pharaoh Akhenaten
in the phenomenon of “Amarnamania.”
Keywords: Atenism; Original Monotheism; Osiride Christology; Egyptosophy; Amarnamania; Egyptian
Romance
Figure 1. Front cover motif from the first edition of She (1887)
Out of the bag we took first a very beautiful miniature done upon ivory, and, secondly, a small chocolate-coloured
composition scarabæus, marked [with] symbols which, we have since ascertained, mean ‘Suten se Rā,’ which is being
translated the ‘Royal Son of Rā or the Sun.’
H. Rider Haggard, She (1887).
Introduction
Sir Henry Rider Haggard (1856-1925) was one of the most prolific and popular author-novelists of his age.
Although now remembered principally as the author of She and King Solomon’s Mines, he penned 56 other
novels, two collections of short stories, and numerous works of non-fiction. Rather than the common
perception of Haggard as a dyed-in-the-wool imperialist, his romances reveal a more complex individual
whose literature was influenced by the nineteenth-century occult milieu within which he wrote, and who
articulates a palimpsest of esoteric, romantic and occult idioms to create parables of sin and redemption
and the pursuit of Truth. This search for hidden wisdom would lead Haggard to ancient Egypt and its study
Research Article
Open Access. © 2017 Simon Magus, published by De Gruyter Open. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 License.
*Corresponding author: Simon Magus, University of Exeter, Exeter, United Kingdom, E-mail: simon.magus@btinternet.com
484 S. Magus
was his life-long passion: at least 11 of his romances feature Egyptian themes or motifs. This article explores
how the Egyptosophical speculations in his literature reflect the agendas of the emergent discipline of
Egyptology during the Victorian era and beyond.
The term “Egyptosophical” was coined by Erik Hornung to denote the “study of an imaginary Egypt
viewed as the profound source of all esoteric law.” As Hornung writes:
[a]lready in antiquity, there was an opinion that the land of the Nile was the fount of all wisdom and the stronghold of
hermetic lore. Thus began a tradition that is still alive today, and which I venture to designate “Egyptosophy.” It was only
after the decipherment of the hieroglyphs by Jean-François Champollion in 1822 that its younger sister, the discipline of
Egyptology, made its appearance. (Hornung, The Secret Lore 1).
As I demonstrate in the following account, the boundaries between these aspects of the study of Egypt,
especially the history of that study, are in any case blurred. Where, for example, does Biblical Egyptology
fit, especially when looking for archaeological witness to the miraculous? It is in an attempt to answer
that question that I have further qualified Hornung’s term in this context as “Christian Egyptosophy.” I
concur with Christina Riggs when she says that “the Manichean duality between “esoteric” and “academic”
Egyptology’ that Hornung has proposed ‘is misleading” (“Discussing Knowledge in the Making” 136). There
are significant difficulties to be negotiated in delineating Egyptology and Egyptosophical speculation,
including the Egypt which found its way into Haggard’s fiction.
Interest in Egyptology was pervasive in British cultural consciousness especially following the
establishment of the British Protectorate in Egypt in 1882, and the ever-present “Egyptian Question.”
The rise of Darwinism earlier in the century, attempted Anglican Broad Church reform and the so-called
Higher Biblical Criticism emanating from Germany frequently meant that the emergent Egyptology—far
from being the purported developing empirical science—sided with the Church in searching for evidence
of Biblical narratives in Egypt: many Egyptologists were clergy searching for the route of the Exodus. Thus
there arose a discourse of Christian Egyptosophy, whereby Egyptosophical speculations were directed
toward a revitalisation of the scriptural aspect of Anglicanism. In addition, the attempt at restoring the
supernaturalism stripped away by the Broad Churchmen, particularly after the liberal reform manifesto
Essays and Reviews of 1860, led progressively to the epiphenomenal blossoming of British occultism in the
last quarter of the century, and given the preeminence of Egypt in British culture at that time it is perhaps
hardly surprising that it should take an Egyptianizing turn. Notable in this context is the foundation of
the paramasonic Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1887/8, whose ceremonial magicians and initiates
were part of the fin-de-siècle occult milieu in which Rider Haggard was deeply immersed. W. B. Yeats, with
whom Haggard corresponded, wrote some of the Egyptianized ritual for the Golden Dawn; Wallis Budge,
Haggard’s great friend and whose influence we discuss below, also taught Florence Farr, famed actress
and one-time Praemonstratrix of the Golden Dawn, who would write her own Egyptian Magic which had a
distinct Christian Egyptosophical leaning. The notorious magician Aleister Crowley and his epigones would
elaborate their own particular brand of British-Egyptian occultism.¹
In what follows, I am more concerned with the interaction of Biblical narratives, Victorian cultural
mores, and Egyptology in Haggard’s fiction than Egyptian occultism per se. The Christian Egyptosophical
speculations are considered under the three rubrics of “Osiride Christology,” “Original Monotheism” and
“Atenism,” and I shall elucidate these concepts as we proceed. Later in the essay, I consider how Victorian
domesticity was seen reflected in ancient Egypt—particularly in the Eighteenth Dynasty, the so-called
“Amarna Period” of the art historian. Attention is focused on Haggard’s Cleopatra of 1889, Smith and the
Pharaohs (1921), and She (1887), making reference to other works where necessary.
1 For the Egyptianized rituals of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn see Israel Regardie, The Golden Dawn: A Complete
Course in Practical Ceremonial Magic, Four Volumes in One. St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 1993. For Farr’s Egyptosophy,
see Florence Farr Egyptian Magic. Milton Keynes: Kessinger Publishing, 2010. A particularly interesting example of Crowley’s
Egyptian occultism is the Tarot deck he designed with Lady Frieda Harris. See Aleister Crowley, The Book of T hoth: A Short Essay
on the Tarot of the Egyptians being Equinox Volume III No. V by The Master Therion. Artist Executant: Frieda Harris. York, ME:
Samuel Weiser, Inc., 1993.
A Victorian Gentleman in the Pharaoh’s Court 485
Osiride Christology: The Passion of Osiris
The propensity for Egyptologists to equate elements of ancient Egyptian religion with Christian doctrine
from a presentist perspective in support of biblical narratives was evident from early on in the nineteenth
century. In fact, “the pedigree of Christology in pre-Christian Egypt had been a well-worn theme of the
1830s.” (Gange, Dialogues 220). In this regard, it is important to understand that Haggard’s reception of
Egyptology was particularly coloured by the ideas of his friend and colleague Sir Ernest Arthur Thompson
Wallis Budge (1857-1934), the Keeper of the Department of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities at the British
Museum between 1894 and 1924. Budge’s Egyptological discourse was characterised by a marked Christian
inflexion. Notably, his work presents what I have termed an “Osiride Christology,” where Osiris is presented
as a type of Christ the Redeemer—Christ in an Atef crown. Budge’s comparison of Christ with Osiris becomes
a recurring theme: in turn, it necessitates an over-emphasis of the Osirian cultus in his oeuvre, relative
to those of the other deities of the Egyptian pantheon. In the tellingly entitled Osiris and the Egyptian
Resurrection (1911), Budge notes that:
[b]oth Plutarch and Diodorus agree in assigning a divine origin to Osiris, and both state that he reigned in the form of a
man upon the earth. This being so it is clear that Egyptians generally believed that a god made himself incarnate and that
an immediate ancestor of the first Pharaoh of Egypt was a being who possessed two natures, the one human and the other
divine. As a man he performed the good works which his divine nature indicated to him (16).
In the preface to his Egyptian Magic, this is even more apparent:
[they believed in] the resurrection of the body in a changed and glorified form, which would live to all eternity in the
company of the spirits and souls of the righteous in a kingdom ruled by a being who was of divine origin, but who had lived
upon the earth, and had suffered a cruel death at the hands of his enemies, and had risen from the dead, and had become
the God and king of the world which is beyond the grave.
(xiii)
As David Gange has observed: “[f]ew writers managed to avoid self-consciously Christological language
when they wrote of the Egyptian pantheon: a staple biblical referent was found in “the altruistic—we had
almost written vicarious—sufferings of Osiris.” (Gange, Dialogues 211). Thus, we find Budge referring to
the hieratic papyrus of Nesi-Amu as “the service book of the Passion of Osiris” (Athenaeum 246). Again,
in his Book of the Dead, Budge refers to the “wonderful doctrine of the resurrection of the spiritual body
and its everlasting existence” (v). Budge’s pervasive Osiride Christology is directly adopted by Haggard.
In the Egyptian romance Smith and the Pharaohs, Smith muses that “When one came to think of it,
beneath a mass of unintelligible symbolism there was much in the Egyptian faith which it was hard for
a Christian to disbelieve. Salvation through a Redeemer, for instance, and the resurrection of the body”
(15). Indeed, Haggard elaborated on Budge’s ideas—notably in his romantic reworking of the story of the
historical Cleopatra VII Thea Philopator. Early in the narrative the novice priest Harmachis is initiated into
the mysteries of Isis via a series of mystical and eventually anacalyptic visions. Describing one such vision,
Harmachis observes:
I saw that man was created vile, but Those who are above took pity on him, and came down to make him good . . . . But man
returned to his wicked way, and then the bright Spirit of Good, who is of us called Osiris, but who has many names, offered
himself up for the evil doing of the race that had dethroned him (60).
Haggard goes on to tell the reader, through the voice of Harmachis that “the mummy cloths of symbol and
of ceremony that wrap Osiris round fell from him, and I understood the secret of religion, which is Sacrifice”
(60). Here there is a clear statement and assertion of the Christian doctrine of vicarious atonement, cast in
the Egyptian idioms of the Isis-Osiris cycle: Osiris died for the sins of humankind.
The question remains as to why there is the particular emphasis on Osiris in Haggard, aside from the
obvious influence of Budge. It would appear that the elements of concordance with Egyptian religion
486 S. Magus
that Haggard emphasises are explicitly those most closely resembling the “miraculous Christ” of Pauline
epistolary scripture, that is St Paul’s focus on Christ as the Son of God and his Divine Nature, his death
and Resurrection, and substitutionary or vicarious atonement—all of which are seen in the excerpts
presented above. Vital to the survival of the Christian faith for Haggard is the necessity of the miraculous
aspect of Christ’s Divine nature or, in his words, that “a God-endowed Being of supernatural strength did
show signs and wonders before the eyes of His generation” the most important of such miracles being the
Resurrection itself. Without this ‘as St Paul says, we are of all men the most miserable, then let us eat and
drink for to-morrow we die . . . . If He never rose from the grave, then, so far as I can see, there is no hope for
Christian man” (320). For Haggard, we are “miserable sinners” bound to “seek for the help we cannot give
to ourselves, to crave that we too may be sprinkled with the atoning blood. Why this should be necessary I
cannot say – for who can comprehend those wonders?” (322-3). Haggard sees the miraculous as continuing
beyond Biblical times, and he reveals his occultist perspective in this regard: “To state that miracles, which
after all may be but the partial manifestation of some secret law veiled from us as yet, have ceased is, in my
opinion, a profound mistake” (320).
Original Monotheism
As we have seen, Budge’s ideas were extremely influential in Haggard’s absorption of Egyptology.
Particularly important in this regard is Budge’s espousal of an “original monotheism” in Ancient Egypt:
that behind the panoply of theriomorphic deities there was a hidden “monotheism for initiates.”² Thus
Budge posited an esoteric monotheism and an exoteric polytheism, which he framed within a Victorian
class distinction: “[t]he educated classes in Egypt at all times never placed the “gods” on the same high level
as God, and they never imagined that their views on this point could be mistaken.” (Egyptian Religion 84).
Echoing the former, Haggard asserts that the Egyptian “God” was a “Divinity, which they worshipped under
so many names and symbols” (Morning Star x), thus directly identifying Judaeo-Christian monotheism with
the speculative “original monotheism” in Egypt derived from Budge: an appeal to the “primordial wisdom”
of Egypt as a legitimization of Christian doctrine.
The pursuit of such legitimisation had consequences for the development of Egyptology. Although it
is often assumed that during the Victorian era Egyptology was establishing itself as an empirical science,
in reality, archaeology was often driven by a priori Egyptosophical and fictional narratives. As Elliott Colla
succinctly remarks: “Textual representations of Egyptian antiquities and fictional narratives on Pharaonic
themes were not simply posterior reflections of material practice. On the contrary, archaeology and
museum culture anticipated, as much as they proceeded from, the cultural imaginary of Egyptomania and
Pharaonism” (Conflicted Antiquities 18).
There was thus an exchange of ideas between Egyptology and the pharaonic fiction of Haggard and his
predecessors: this alongside the single most important narrative driving archaeological exploration—that
of the Old Testament. It is to the Old Testament and Egyptological preoccupations with the Exodus that we
now turn, along with an exploration of the monotheisms of Moses and the pharaoh Akhenaten.
Atenism: Moses and Akhenaten
In his Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism, Jan Assmann considers the seismic
shift from polytheism to monotheism in the ancient world and its profound significance for Western
culture. In his argument, he contrasts two historical figures of most importance in this regard—Moses and
2Although clearly not the exact Judaeo-Christian homologue that Budge was averring, the contemporary discussions of mo-
notheism in ancient Egypt are philologically complex and conceptually nuanced. Assmann considers the possibility of this in
the guise of an inscrutable “hidden unity” of the cosmos within the god Amun-Ra who can only be apprehended in terms of
polytheistic manifestations (Moses the Egyptian 168-207), whereas Hornung sees the Ancient Egyptian term for“ “god” as only
ever referring to specific individual gods and never used in the abstract sense of a single“ “Divinity.” (Hornung, Conceptions of
God in Ancient Egypt 33-65, 237-43).
A Victorian Gentleman in the Pharaoh’s Court 487
a pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty, Akhenaten. Moses is a figure entirely of memory and tradition—and
thus “mnemohistory.”³ There is no physical trace or archaeological evidence that Moses ever lived. This
contrasts with Akhenaten who is a figure with a significant archaeological presence, who was completely
lost to cultural memory after this was deliberately erased and only rediscovered following excavations in
the nineteenth century. Moses effectively instituted the shift from transcultural “cosmotheism”—in which
different cultures recognised their respective gods because they carried out similar cosmic functions and
were hence easily equated—to one where the gods of cultures other than that of Yahweh were considered
as false gods. Akhenaten instituted a monotheistic “Atenism”—the worship of the solar disc—by means
of a religious revolution in the Eighteenth Dynasty, which resulted in the wholesale suppression of
polytheism. After Akhenaten’s death, his religion collapsed, his memory was erased. Sometime following
his coronation, his son Tutankhaten would seek to distance himself from his father’s apostasy by assuming
the name “Tutankhamun,” abandoning Amarna for Thebes, and inculcating a restitution of the worship of
Amun-Ra and the rest of the pantheon.
Figure 2. The “Berlin Stele.” A family portrait of Akhenaten, Nefertiti, and their daughters, 18th Dynasty (Neues Museum,
Berlin).
Assmann has described two historical descriptions of Moses: “Moses the Hebrew” and “Moses the
Egyptian.” As he notes: “[a]s a figure of memory, Moses the Egyptian is radically different from Moses
the Hebrew or the Biblical Moses. Whereas Moses the Hebrew is the personification of confrontation and
3 Mnemohistory is concerned not with the past as such, but with the past as it is remembered: “It surveys the story-lines of
tradition, the webs of intertextuality, the diachronic continuities and discontinuities of reading the past” (Assmann, Moses the
Egyptian 9).
4Though as Assmann points out, relatively recent discoveries at Thebes have indicated that there was never a complete re-
constitution of the old polytheism but instead a novel pantheistic summodeism, where multiple deities exist as a manifestation
of one ‘high’ deity. (Moses the Egyptian 171).
488 S. Magus
antagonism—between Israel = truth and Egypt = falsehood—Moses the Egyptian bridges this opposition”
(Moses the Egyptian 11). In Haggard’s portrayal of the Exodus narrative, Moon of Israel, the Patriarch leads
the Israelites from bondage. However, Haggard’s Moses is more emphatically of the Egyptian variety: in both
of the romances where Moses makes an appearance, the story is narrated from an Egyptian perspective. He
is mentioned in The World’s Desire, where he is described as “one of ourselves, a shaven priest, and knows
our wisdom” (65). In Moon of Israel, Moses’ name appears only once—and that when he is pulled as a baby
from the bull rushes (90).
Haggard’s Exodus story is an example of how closely his fiction echoed shifting Egyptological opinion—
when it suited him—in this case on the timing of a biblical event. There had long been speculation amongst
Egyptologists as to the chronology of the Exodus, and which pharaoh was the “Pharaoh” of the Oppression
and the Israelite Sojourn, and Haggard’s writing closely follows contemporaneous Egyptological vogue in
this regard. In an interview in The Strand Magazine from 1892, Haggard describes a ring in his possession:
“Its red stone is believed to chronicle the portrait of Rameses the great, the Pharaoh of the Oppression,
with whose coffin it was discovered” (How 6). However, in 1896, the Egyptologist William Flinders Petrie
(1853-1942) discovered the Merneptah Stele, the so-called “Israel Stele.” This was the first mention of Isrir—
Israel—to have been discovered. It was hence inferred that Merneptah was the Pharaoh of the Exodus, with
his father as the oppressor. As Petrie commented at the time, “Won’t the reverends be pleased!” By the time
of writing Smith and the Pharaohs, Haggard had referenced Petrie’s discovery and speculation. Locked in at
the Museum of Antiquities in Cairo, Smith turns around and gazes on the mummy of Merneptah, “whose
hollow eyes stared at him from between the wrappings carelessly thrown across the parchment-like and
ashen face. There, probably, lay the countenance that had frowned on Moses. There was the heart that God
had hardened” (38). But again, by the time of the publication of Moon of Israel, he had radically altered the
story—apparently following a discussion about the possibilities for a new plot with Gaston Maspero. As a
result, Haggard’s new “Pharaoh” is the historically opaque pharaonic usurper of the Nineteenth Dynasty,
Amenmeses.
However, to clarify, my focus in this article is more concerned with Egypt seen as a progenitor to Judaeo-
Christian religious ideas rather than with the dating of the Exodus per se—as much as verification of the
Israelite sojourn was an important drive to archaeological exploration. To Biblical archaeology, it was more
important that the Exodus took place at all rather than to name the Pharaoh of the bible.
In Haggard’s Exodus tale Merapi—the titular “Moon of Israel”—is vital to the expounding of his
religious ideas. During the course of the narrative, she destroys the statue of Amon-Ra by the agency of
her own Israelite deity, “Javeh” (157). By the specific destruction of the head of the pantheon, Haggard
juxtaposes the iconoclastic revolution of Akhenaten and thus reinforces the Yahweh-Aten equivalence, and
a concordant Egypto-Hebraic monotheism: it is to Akhenaten’s actual “revolution” that we now turn.
Given Haggard’s focus on and interest in contemporaneous archaeological knowledge, it is hardly
surprising that there is considerably more to discuss on Haggard’s relationship with the archaeological
Akhenaten rather than the mnemohistorical Moses: the pharaoh who instituted the monotheistic revolution
of the Eighteenth Dynasty—the so-called “Amarna heresy.” It is evident that in doing so, Haggard conflates
this historically veridical monotheism with Budge’s speculative “Original monotheism” that was discussed
above. In his autobiography, Haggard writes that Akhenaten was known for “the heresy of the worship of
the Sun’s disc, by which, I take it he symbolised the one Almighty God who made the world” (qtd. in Cohen,
Rider Haggard 22). Haggard features Akhenaten in both Smith and the Pharaohs and The Way of the Spirit.
In the former it is his ghost that appears, Haggard employing an older heteronymic form “Khu-en-aten”:
5 The significance of the inscription on the stele is discussed and illustrated by Gaston Maspero in Chapter X, “On an Egyptian
Monument Containing the Name of Israel,” (New Light on Ancient Egypt 91-6).
6 Petrie would also remark that “this stele will be better known in the world than anything I have found” (Dower, Flinders
Petrie 221).
7 As mentioned in the dedication of the novel to Gaston Maspero after the latter’s death.
8On the ascension of the pharaoh Amenmeses (Amenmessu), see Shaw, The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt 295.
9Eighteenth Dynasty, 1390-1352 BC. See Bard. An Introduction to the Archaeology of Ancient Egypt 22 1-9.
A Victorian Gentleman in the Pharaoh’s Court 489
There, for instance, was the long-necked Khu-en-aten, talking somewhat angrily to the imperial Rameses II. . . . He was
complaining in a high, weak voice that on this, the one night of the year when they might meet . . . the magic images of the
gods who were put up for them to worship, should not include his god, symbolized by the “Aten,” or the sun’s disc (45).¹
According to Rameses, so many of the pharaohs were heretics including his grandson Seti: “I am told that
he really worshipped the god of those Hebrew slaves whom I used to press to build my cities.” Khu-en-aten
says in reply: “I will talk with him . . . It is more than possible that we may agree on certain points” (45-6).
Again, the parallels between Egyptian and Hebrew monotheism are emphasised.
As above mentioned, Haggard was thoroughly engaged with contemporary developments in Egyptology,
and Petrie’s archaeological excavations at Amarna were no exception. In The Way of the Spirit, Rupert
Ullershaw, the protagonist, brings back two stelae from Egypt. He informs his mother of the provenance of
one of the stelae:
[i]t comes from Tel-el-Amarna, which, as of course you know, was the city built by the heretic king Khu-en-Aten, and was
put up in the tomb of one of the royal princesses. Look at her picture on the top, with the globe of the sun above, and from
it the rays ending in hands all stretched out in blessing over her (63).
Later in the novel, the Egyptian girl Mea who befriends Rupert and later has a platonic love affair with him,
is said to have ancient Egyptian royal lineage. She is one of “the last descendants of an ancient and high-
bred race” (203). In terms of religious belief, the reader is informed that: “Although they talked of Allah they
were not Mohammedans, and if they worshipped anything, it was God as symbolised by the sun. Indeed,
this was all that remained of their ancient faith, with the exception of certain feasts and days of mourning,
whereof they had long forgotten the origin” (203-4). In other words, these last survivors of the ancient
Egyptian “race” are Atenists—other than the survival of a few polytheistic ritual elements. Thus, Haggard is
also suggesting the survival of ancient Egyptian religion into contemporaneous Islamic Egypt.
Victorian Egyptology had as we have seen promulgated Akhenaten’s monotheism as evidence of an
exchange of ideas between the Israelites and the “heretic” pharaoh—suggesting at the very least their
presence in Egypt in support of the historicity of the Pentateuch—though in which direction monotheism
flowed depends on the commentator. In his Ancient Egypt (1886), in a chapter entitled “Khuenaten and the
Disk-Worshippers,” Canon George Rawlinson notes that: “[i]t is not unlikely that the “Disk-worshippers”
were drawn on towards their monotheistic creed by the presence in Egypt at the time of a large monotheistic
population, the descendants of Joseph and his brethren” (226).
There are a number of reasons for Haggard’s focus on Akhenaten, and once again it is predicated upon
the quest for evidence of biblical narratives of “Israel in Egypt.” In the season of 1891-2, Petrie was excavating
the site of what was then called Tell-el-Amarna in Middle Egypt, the site of Akhenaten’s city of Akhetaten
(“Horizon of the Aten”). This resulted in something of an “Amarna vogue.” To some Egyptologists who were
contemporaries of Haggard, Akhenaten was not merely a prototype of an Old Testament patriarch, but the
progenitor of the Hebrew Psalmists. Typical of this is the best-selling biography written by Arthur Weigall,
The Life and Times of Akhnaton, Pharaoh of Egypt (1910) which states that: “[Akhenaten] himself wrote
religious hymns, amongst which is the undoubted original of our 104th psalm” (9).¹¹ Weigall also made the
etymological assertion that “Aton” was equivalent to the Hebrew “Adonai” (Assmann, Moses the Egyptian
24). Taking up the reins from Petrie, Weigall’s work was instrumental in the development of the public
perception of Akhenaten. Thus, perhaps somewhat bizarrely, there developed a cult of personality of a
long-dead pharaoh in Victorian England.¹² In this regard it is significant that Akhenaten’s spectacular yet
10The form of the name “Akhenaten” is that adopted by Flinders Petrie in his Tell el Amarna. See also the review of this volume
by Cecil Torr: “Akhenaten (Akh-en-Aten) is Mr Petrie’s name for Khu-en-Aten or Chu-en-Aten. I follow his spelling throughout
to avoid confusion.” (The Classical Review 320). Budge continued to use the older form, and it is unsurprising therefore that
Haggard continues to follow suit.
11 Akhenaten’s “Great Hymn to the Aten” and Psalm 104 have very similar themes and solar phraseology; Assmann supports
the connection (Moses the Egyptian 191).
12The Way of the Spirit was published in 1906. On the cult of personality for Akhenaten, see Gange, Dialogues with the Dead
233-5 and Montserrat, Akhenaten, passim.
490 S. Magus
short-lived religious revolution provided the only example of non-Jewish monotheism in the ancient world
and as a result:
[i]n the eyes of Petrie and other Akhenaten aficionados [this confirmed] the belief that Egyptian civilisation maintained
some memory of an antediluvian civilisation that was initially harmonious, godly, and glorious. Akhenaten’s reign—in
reality pretty brutal—was therefore glorified as a brief period of Christian virtue in its most Victorian, bourgeois, form
(Gange, Religion and Science 1094).
This nod to the bourgeoisie extended to family portraits of Akhenaten and Nefertiti with their children,
which at the time were not only hailed for their “naturalism”—anachronistically employing the aesthetic
terminology of the period—(Montserrat, Akhenaten 44) but were also transposed into the setting of a middle-
class Victorian homestead. Haggard asserts that Akhenaten—perhaps unusually for a pharaoh—enjoyed a
blissful monogamy with Nefertiti, “my only wife” (Haggard, Smith 46). Here he is again echoing Petrie who
wrote in The Times in 1892 that Akhenaten “openly proclaims the domestic pleasures of a monogamist” (qtd.
in Montserrat, Akhenaten 3). This is now known to be historically inaccurate. As Jason Thompson points
out, in 1959 it was discovered that Akhenaten had a second wife (Wonderful T hings vol. 2 45); Akhenaten had
Nefertiti as the Great Royal Wife and Kiya as his Nebenfrau.13 As Thompson has remarked, “Many of the high
ideals thought to infuse the Amarna experience turned out to be anachronistic and mistaken projections
of modern values onto an utterly alien past” (Wonderful Things vol. 2 46). Akhenaten is thus seen as a
type of Victorian paterfamilias on the Nile, and in part these projected Victorian sensibilities confirmed
for Haggard that Akhenaten’s court and family life were demonstrative of the proto-Christian monotheism
that we have been discussing. Dominic Montserrat has termed the accompanying cultural phenomenon
“Amarnamania,” and it was partly fuelled by this and earlier pharaonic fiction. These descriptors were vital
to the Victorians’ appropriation of the “heretic” Pharaoh, and his provision of a historical precedent for,
and affirmation of, their own cultural mores. Moreover, Akhenaten was not simply seen as a legitimising
force for Old Testament Christianity but was also co-opted as an ancient prefiguration of Protestant dissent.
The leading American Egyptologist James Henry Breasted (1865-1935)¹ cast the pharaoh as a type of
Egyptian Luther, reforming the idolatrous religion of the god Amun. His anti-Catholic sentiment is evident
when he announces: “[t]his Amonite papacy constituted a powerful obstruction in the way of realizing the
supremacy of the ancient Sun god.” (qtd. in Montserrat, Akhenaten 101-2).
Haggard’s projection of Akhenaten into the Victorian household would include his own home. In an
interview with the author appearing in The Strand Magazine, Haggard describes the contents of his home,
Ditchingham House, which Marilena Parlati has described as resembling a Renaissance Wunderkammer—
the later “cabinet of curiosities” of an antiquarian culture which preceded that of the didactic museum.
Haggard demonstrates a number of objects including “ancient Egyptian bows and throwing-sticks and . .
. an ancient cedar rod believed to be similar to the one which Moses cast before Pharaoh” (How quoted in
Parlati, ‘Memories of Exoticism’ 179). He shows the interviewer a number of ancient rings, one of which is
a ring which had been inscribed with Haggard’s own name in hieroglyphs. In addition, a ring belonging to
Queen Tiye (“Taia” in the original article), Akhenaten’s mother, is shown, and here the interviewer projects
the queen onto the Tudor royal family, calling her “the feminine Henry VIII” (181).
13On Queen Kiya, the ‘lesser wife’ of Akhenaten, see Nicholas Reeves,“ “New Light on Kiya from Texts in the British Museum”,
The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 74 (1988): 91-101.
14Haggard read Breasted’s work. As Morton Cohen relates, “In 1907 the Bookman asked a group of authors which book each
had enjoyed most during the past year. By and large, they chose either a work of fiction, a book on current events, a memoir or
biography. Haggard significantly chose Breasted’s Ancient Egyptian Records” (Cohen, Rider Haggard: His Life and Works 103).
See also H. Rider Haggard “The Book of 1906 Which Has Interested Me Most.” Bookman January 1907:162. The work referred to
is James Henry Breasted. Ancient Records of Egypt: Historical Documents from the Earliest Times to the Persian Conquest. 5 vols.
Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1906.
A Victorian Gentleman in the Pharaoh’s Court 491
Figure 3. The Hieroglyphic Letterhead and Bookplate of H. Rider Haggard (Author’s photograph after Addy, 1998).
Conclusion
We can summarise, then, the fundamental Egyptosophical components of Haggard’s oeuvre: an “Original
monotheism” conflated with an explicit Atenism, and—again, reprising Budge—an Osiride Christology. For
Haggard, there is a hidden, proto-Christian God behind all the menagerie of the Egyptian pantheon. He
is appealing to the “primordial wisdom” of Egypt, and there is less of the imperialist here—it has more
to do with Church than State. Haggard’s Christian Egyptosophical speculations, in turn, reflect Victorian
Egyptological agendas and these ideas would stay with him throughout his working life. Likewise, the
fascination with Akhenaten and the projected fealty of the Victorian bourgeoisie would persist in the
consciousness of the British public well into the first decades of the twentieth century. Not only was the
Victorian household projected onto ancient Amarna, but in his own home, Haggard situated himself in
Ancient Egypt in a number of ways. Firstly, he inscribed an ancient ring with his own name in hieroglyphs.
He said on a number of occasions that he thought he had been in ancient Egypt in a previous incarnation,
and this act of inscription confirms simultaneously a wish and a belief. Secondly, Haggard had a bookplate
and letterhead created for him by the Egyptologist the Revd. W. J. Loftie in March 1888 (Higgins, Rider
Haggard 128) in which his home is referenced in an Egyptian context (see Figure 2). The hieroglyphs
translate as follows (Addy, Rider Haggard and Egypt vi):
H. Rider Haggard, the son of Ella, lady of the house, makes an oblation to Thoth, the Lord of writing, who dwells in the moon.
492 S. Magus
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