Ahmed OSMAN
or
Casaubon
in the Second Renaissance

I met Ahmed Osman, an Egyptologist, in London in 1994, and his research provided me with a confirmation of my 1985-1990 psychoanalytical identification of Akhnaton-Moses-Oedipus. Yet, regarding Christianity, Osman added to his research an extended theory, which I consider problematic, with symptoms that must be deciphered. I will attempt here to define Osman's primary discovery and secondary repression:

Ahmed Osman's work is based on a remarkable comparison between the Hebrew record (Bible - Hebrew Texts) and Archeology (Egyptology). He first found a point of contact where the Bible would apparently match the Egyptological data. In Osman's first book - "Stranger in the Valley of the Kings" - the Hebrew Patriarch, Joseph, (biblically known for his political position in Egypt), was identified as a prominent figure discovered by Egyptologists - and whose mummy, (Yuya), was discovered in a tomb, and his actual existence reported with accuracy. It is thus well established that Yuya and his wife are the parents of Queen Tiy, who was Akhnaton's mother - and this is where Osman's observation leads to such an important conclusion : If Yuya, who was not an Egyptian, is actually the Hebrew Joseph, consequently Akhnaton was member of the Hebrew tribe.

YUYAfather of TIY mother of AKHNATON

Egyptology thus confirms that the Bible made a correct historical record (Joseph in Egypt), and reciprocally confirms what was feared, for it obviously affirms that Akhnaton was remarkably close to the Hebrew... Moses.
Freud was the first renowned author who linked Akhnaton to Moses.  And during his century, mostly all academia has kept silent on this subject. Even the body of Freud's disciples joined the mute flock of scholars. Many years before Osman's observation, a tormented Freud had concluded that Moses was an Egyptian. Yet refusing to identify him with Akhnaton, he thought that he was merely a priest of Aton, who was eventually assassinated.
This complex recognition/annihilation, and the speaking silence of the inhibition, were broken by Osman in 1990, when he drew the deduction of the Hebraic identification of Akhnaton in a second book - "Moses Pharaoh of Egypt". There he shows that there is not any Biblical (nor Egyptological) opposition in the recognition of Moses as Akhnaton himself.

I fully agree with this identification, since I had already established my theories by other means (and unaware of Osman's parallel study). The fact that similar conclusions may be drawn from two different sources is a major factor of reciprocate reinforcement. However, Osman and I did not state the same hypothesis regarding the final fate of this 'Akhnaton-Moses' - and I believe that a typical symptom of Resistance has eventually caught Osman's endeavor in the backlash of his courageous breach, as in an Academic stupor or repression.

In order to understand the base of this symptomatology, it is useful to make a comparison between Osman's Akhnaton=Moses and Velikovsky's Akhnaton=Oedipus methods and conditions. It shows problematics,  rooted as deep as the conception of Time in the human psyche, with its correlative conceptualization of Death (thus ego and identity).
While Velikovsky dealt there with archeological texts (Sophocles), which recollected much earlier events than these texts - Osman relied on archeological artifacts, (such as the Amarna Tablets, to mention only one), which give testimony of events that were actually happening while they were written.

picture 01

This is nothing less than the linguistic issue which dazzles the philosopher who reckons with its existence, its perception, and its recollection. It is also avoidable in a large range of scientific observations.
Osman did not have to deal with the complex time frames, which link events and recollections, because the artifacts that he interpreted describe events which happened concurrently.
Yet, after his two compelling demonstrations (Yuya/Joseph & Akhnaton/Moses), the Egyptologist Osman felt that he should write a third book where he challenged the memory complexity that Velikovsky failed to solve . In this attempt, Osman seems to have failed likewise; not only did his mistake and the low quality of this essay (The House of the Messiah) degrade his credibility, but in adding an emotional rejection, it opened to question whether he did not, in fact, neurotically attempt to shut again a tremendous opening that he had first, perhaps too naively, disclosed. (This mechanism  - 'Resistance' - was shown when Freud scuttled his disclosure of the Oedipus Complex in claiming that Moses had been murdered - and thus could not be Oedipus escaping at Colonus ).

Such systematic resistance affects the reactions of a discoverer (after his discovery), and is not entirely negative - it is even quite productive!  For it leaves a stump where remaining, or new, enigmas within the repressed matter are unconsciously brought to daylight. It makes, for instance, the quality of Osman's symptom more perceptable- and therfore valuable, in looking at the way he discredited himself :
Egyptologist Oman's third book, which is so disappointing, concerns Jesus' identity. It is well known that the historical Jesus is not an easy matter to objectify. Yet, it is admitted that the New Testament describes events that would have taken place at the same time (approximately) that they were written (See above config B). It would mean that, from the Ancient, up to the New Testament, the whole Bible would be a report, written fairly concurrently, with the events it describes - for it is in conjunction with Osman's work regarding Akhnaton-Moses. But then, in a rush from Moses to Jesus, Osman breaks this schema. He pretends that such synchronicity does not apply to the New Testament report.
Osman sees a time dislocation there, similar to the one that Velikovsky clearly saw, regarding Sophocles and Oedipus (See above config.A - compare fig below). To be precise : in the same way as through the Oedipus tale, Sophocles (400BC) tells a story which took place with Akhnaton (1300BC), Osman claims that through Jesus, the New Testament tells a story which took place in Akhnaton's time. According to his third book Osman says - the same way Oedipus depicts Akhnaton - that Jesus depicts Tutankhamon !

picture 02

It is certainly important to detect a similar issue confounding Velikovky and Osman, for this repeated symptom indicates a permanent and crucial cause. When I interviewed Osman in London, he told me two things: one which is clear throughout his works, and that he confirmed, and one that he hid from me, that was even more eloquent:

The first statement was confessing a reference to S.Freud :
When Freud published his 'Moses' in 1938, he was not only claiming that Moses was an Egyptian and his religion inspired by Akhnaton. He was also stating that this Minister of Aton had been murdered by the Hebrews after he had freed and initiated them. When Osman published his Moses-Akhnaton in 1990, he also stated that Moses (Akhnaton himself) had been assassinated by the pharaoh Seti.1st, who was chasing him.
However, beside sound arguments to identify Moses with Akhnaton, there are practically none which argue the case for a murder, or a violent death. To be more precise, when I questioned Osman about the quality of the proof, he explained that his first concern was the identity of Akhnaton-Moses - but the outcome and the death of the historical character was not his main focus. Actually, he told that he had simply followed Freud, who had already stated a murder ended the story of Moses. So, said he, smiling, "the Freudians will approve of my theory."

Now, if we read Sophocles' - Oedipus at Colonus - (alias, Akhnaton in Exile_) we learn that Akhnaton's opponents were plotting to spread the rumor of his violent death (which would have contradicted the possibility of his success) - and, moreover, Freud's major obsession was the promotion of the idea of a constituent murder - supposedly repeated all along human history, as the Murder of the Father. According to Freud, this compulsive crime would have victimized Moses.
This blending of an historical mass propaganda and a psychological law indicates that the belief of a murder, in the wake of Akhnaton's escape, would stand for the necessary representation of death in the principle of an existential Initiation . This is the first lesson which is reminded by Osman's resistance.

Even if we neglect this metapsychological insight, the Oedipus-Akhnaton revealed by Velikovsky tells us that the hypothetical murder was probably a camouflage that would hide the extension of Akhnaton's influence up to Greece (when Oedipus leaves Colonus and initiates Theseus, the founder of Athens). There is the second information that Osman interestingly hid:

When he was asked if he had thought of the possible Oedipian development (escape and completion), instead of the murder (premature termination and death on the Sinai), Osman pretended that he had vaguely heard about Velikovsky's work; but complained that he was too short on time for extending his interest and research up to Greece. He confirmed that (except for Freud's thesis) he had no clue as to a murder, and admitted, without difficulty, that nothing in his own research could reject the possibility of an Akhnaton-Moses' escape, beyond the Sinai.
Fortunately, when I was invited a few years later to give a lecture to a UN association, I met, by chance, the leader of this group who knew Osman many years ago, when he was still living in Egypt. Today, Osman has been working on Egyptology in London for more than thirty years; but when he was young,  in Cairo, he was writing texts that my UN correspondent was translating ; at that time, A.Osman was passionately inspired by the classical Greek literature and theater- that is, Sophocles and Oedipus.
This former specialty must be accounted in the comprehension of the symptom. Not only a conception of death is manifested (for compensation of its irrepresentability in the Unconscious) but a personal repression carries and indicates the outcome, which is challenging the first negative expression of the ego. In the case of Akhnaton-Moses-Oedipus, it is clearly a knowledge which surmounts the throes of mortality. (centuries later, the City founded by Theseus, initiated by Oedipus and witness of a miracle in place of his passing  , Athens, reveals its meaning at Hermopolis Magna  - a drive later resumed by the Christian Alchemy of Trismegistus - Hermes-Thot  - that achieves, in our present time, a control over the Darwinian curse).

The intellectual recoil of A.Osman is an important contribution in the formation and/or explanation of a symptom.

Freud's work on Akhnaton is an other illustrious example, of forgetting such original views as Karl Abraham's, about Oedipus , in whom he was primarily interested. In Osman's case, a similar oblivion prevented him from reading Velikovsky.
Indeed, would he have read Velikovsky's "Oedipus and Akhnaton", perhaps Osman would have quenched the thirst of his forever young passion, and thus would have not been inclined to apply to Jesus what already applied very well to Oedipus, regarding an earlier referent identity

It is evidently interesting to also look at a similar behavior in Velikovsky. It is clear that all his career swivels around an identification (Oedipus-Akhnaton) which he could not complete, but eluded with an extravagant dispute in the astronomical field . It is no less remarkable that he used a 'temporal dislocation' to work out his diversion .

It is also informative to look at other periods - as the Renaissance, (since there are some good reasons  to consider an enlightening similarity between the 16th century phenomenon and our present time, as the Analyst A.Verdiglione suggests ). It completes this comment about Osman's work, and other aspects of the symptoms of resistance:
After Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499 A.D.) had shown (on the base of Macedonian documents), that there were no reasons to distinguish the legendary King of Egypt, Hermes Trismegistus (Akhnaton) with his own disciple Moses, The Renaissance entered a tumultuous perplexity which ended with an essay written by the Swiss Isaac Casaubon who was living in London at that time. Using a Temporal Dislocation argument, Casaubon announced a new dating for Trismegistus , that made him an impossible contemporarity of Moses.
It is possible nowadays, to show that Casaubon was wrong, and I explained this in my first report on Osman's work - "Livre 20" - of how Osman's dis-location of Jesus (who he describes as a late representation of Thut, 1300B.C. ) is strictly similar to Casaubon's dislocation of Trismegistus.
This similarity would logically drive us to think that Osman opened a cycle which would end with a fall of Christianity, as Casaubon marked the beginning of the final repression of Hermeticism by the Inquisition. Evidently it is a far too extravagant prophecy, and we should better review our idea of repetition - after all, isn't it the way resurrection opposes reincarnation ? (Renaissance means 'rebirthing' in French - a component of neurosis, called displacement or metonyme) !

To avoid a theological bent to this discussion, we would have to content ourselves with another contribution by Freud - e.g., the way he bears the symptom, since Osman suggests following this first psychoanalyst.
Where Freud interrupted Moses' journey in the Sinai, Osman came the other way round; according to the Akhnaton-Moses-Oedipus journey; for he visited Greece (without going further South-East, towards Israel, nor further, Egypt). Visiting the land of Oedipus was a long and exceptional journey for a middle-class Austrian doctor. He left a report for posterity, wherein he described the altered state of memory that he experienced when he visited the Acropolis. His trance was a weird feeling, said he, to realize that what he had read in his school books, when he was a child, was indeed real - Greece actually existed! . There again the linguistic problematic in the Conception of Time is shown through Freud's behaviorist attachment to the hypnosis of the Letter .

Built on the attachment to semi-consciousness (bliss of ignorance), and the refusal of non-mortality of the human psychology, the symptoms of these many seekers for truth are a lesson for all of us who would like to know about our history. Although one must not expect more from their light than their initial impulses could disclose, their daemon does not end with its backlash; despite their withdrawal, they continue to inform us of how we shall face the future.

It first warns us that the recognition of Akhnaton within the civilization shall probably cause an altered state of mind, and a subsequent denial. This is worrisome, for it can manifest in violent conflicts - one shall therefore understand that the dramatic laxity of the average scholastic community in the 20th, regarding the foundation of Monotheism, is not so much cowardness, than it is a caring attitude for protecting the populations from precocious truth.
There are some reasons to believe that they may be waiting for Artificial Intelligence to be more mature, since the identification of Moses raises a matter which concerns Writing.

Thirdly it may concern something further - and I don't mean the possible biological effect of a Jesus on his environment, and therefore his planet. This is something that even the Church does not say. I mean an additional contribution that may be granted to Ahmed Osman. For, he told me that he intended to refer the Atonian-Hebrew saga to a former ecological disorder. I have reported this in "Livre 20 " - for it has not been yet in Osman's published data. I hope that he will realize that it is much more relevant to our present documentation, than to speculate that prince Thut was Jesus!
There are priorities...
The identification of Moses as Akhnaton in exile is one of them - since the ecological spirit of the religion of Akhnaton may add to the great figure of Moses, a beneficial look on our Other, Earth .

In this series you can also find:

Akhnaton, Moses, Oedipus, Triple Hermes, Freud, Lacan, Velikovsky I & II, Osman I & II, Theaux.

END OF THE PAGE

FOOT PAGE

© William Theaux 1949-1999