Cosmotheism's compromises

In the spirit of reconciliation between Torah and AltRight, for which the Baghestan is so-noted... Greg Johnson offers a tribute to Dr Jan Assmann. Unlike Mix-A-Lot I don't think he was ever knighted.

The name aside (sorry), I ran across several of Assmann's books over the later 1990s. He promoted that form of Aegyptology which supported the priesthood against the pharaoh. Where late-Victorian Brits had lauded Akhenaten (Assmann's spelling), for his "beautiful monotheism" leading to Moses; Assmann damned his "counter-religion" for "normative inversion". Assmann planted his work in the "heretic pharaoh" subgenre alongside, in 1987, Donald Redford (and lately Foerster). Akhenaten was Egypt's Popol Vuh.

Mind you, given that temples and banks were the same thing back then: I place Akhenaten in the same reformist plane as Henry VIII and Basil I. The Alt-Left peopled by such as Michael Hudson should prefer the Victorian position, here.

Assmann studied more the Hellenistic-era Aegyptian theology, which he named "cosmotheism".

For Assmann (and Johnson), cosmotheism allowed for religious tolerance. If you wanted to build some other temple in Egypt - you could! you just shouldn't (say) be slaughtering lambs where Egyptians could hear it.

Assmann also studied the "axial age". Assmann didn't deny it existed; for him it was a "media event", wherein "truths" could be put to peer-review. A Greek could now read an Egyptian holy text, and critique it. In its wake a new world of exclusionary bigotry suppressed cosmotheism. (I gather it was Darius who spun-up Assmann's axis; if we're defining that age by textual- and calendrical-continuity through to the present.)

I won't review Assmann for what follows. I haven't ever read beyond his prefaces, and that was long ago. So I am trusting Johnson. What follows will go toward Johnson:

Down Egypt proper, I must ask how far the native Nile farmer (paganus, in Latin) was ever interested in this "cosmotheism", by Johnson's own lights more global-friendly than local cults would be. Ptolemy V was deep into the Hellenistic Age - and had inherited a brutal rebellion, against it. For Egypt, cosmotheism existed alongside the Axial Age, but ... how? The Rosetta Stone is all about the compromises which the Ptolemies had to make with the priests for their support, against their own commons.

Cosmotheism, then and now, smells to me like an élite phenomenon. It smells less like the old paganism and more like an artificial adaptation thereof, forcing pagans as much as Jews into a wider oecumene - and wider economy. Johnson's readers might ask (or be asked) how globalism compares with, say, New Guinean autarky (still neolithic at best). That subset willing to side with The Globe might ask how effectively cosmotheism can serve this Global community.