Pharaoh

This reminds us of the Egyptian sequence: Pharaoh, ka, God. The triune stone consists of ‘three different and distinct substances: Sal-Mercurius-Sulphur.’ As the Egyptian mystique of kingship shows, the king, like every archetype, is not just a static image; he signifies a dynamic process whereby the human carrier of the mystery is included in the mysterious drama of God’s incarnation.

Jung reads the Egyptian triadic sequence Pharaoh–ka–God as a structural parallel to alchemical triunity, arguing that kingship is not static symbolism but a dynamic, incarnational psychological process.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy, 1955thesis

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The Great King or the Great House, Pharaoh, is the embodiment and representative of the people. Speaking of this stage, the Pyramid Texts say the king was already in existence before the creation of the world, an ideology which reappears later in connection with the Messiah.

Neumann establishes Pharaoh as the paradigmatic ‘Great Individual’ in whom the archetype of the god-king achieves its fullest historical expression, tracing the ideological continuity from divine pre-existence to messianic expectation.

Neumann, Erich, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019thesis

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Perhaps the earliest historical example of this is to be found, once again, in the Egyptian Pharaoh. The kings of Egypt were on their fathers’ side sons of Horus, the heirs of Osiris, and, as the kingship developed, they were identified not only with Osiris, the moon, but with Ra, the sun. The king styled himself ‘the god Horus.’

Neumann presents Pharaoh as the earliest documented instantiation of the hero-as-solar-deity archetype, wherein the mortal king’s self-identification with Horus and Ra enacts the myth of divine sonship.

Neumann, Erich, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019thesis

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Pharaoh, the mythological terrible father, is as anxious as ever to have the hero-child assassinated — slaying of the first-born — not only does he not succeed in this, but Jehovah, the transpersonal father, with the help of Pharaoh’s daughter and in contradiction to the mythological pattern, brings the redeemer child back into the alien system of rulership.

Neumann analyzes Pharaoh in the Moses narrative as the archetypal terrible father whose oppressive household paradoxically serves as the instrument of the transpersonal father’s providential design.

Neumann, Erich, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019thesis

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The pharaohs in their cult were no longer simply imitating the holy past, ‘so that the scripture might be fulfilled.’ They and their priests were creating something of and for themselves. We are in the presence here of a line of grandiose, highly self-interested, prodigiously inflated egos.

Campbell diagnoses dynastic Pharaonic culture as a paradigm of mythic inflation, in which the sacred imitatio dei degenerates into ego aggrandizement, marking the transition from participation mystique to willful self-deification.

Campbell, Joseph, Oriental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume II, 1962thesis

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Pharaoh (the Hero), when it became known to him that the time had come for him to be slain, set forth to procure a token of his qualification for continued possession of his throne (Call to Adventure). Led by the ‘Opener of the Way’ (Guide to Adventure: Magical Aid), he entered the palace of the underworld.

Campbell decodes the Sed festival as the Pharaoh’s enactment of the monomythic hero journey, structurally identical to the universal Adventure of the Hero pattern.

Campbell, Joseph, Oriental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume II, 1962thesis

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She also mentioned the dual nature of the Pharaoh (one of his appellations was ‘The Two Lords’).

Jung’s correspondence cites the Pharaoh’s dual title ‘The Two Lords’ as a concrete historical instance of the opposites principle operative in Egyptian sacred kingship.

Jung, C. G., Letters Volume 2, 1951-1961, 1975supporting

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She also mentioned the dual nature of the Pharaoh (one of his appellations was ‘The Two Lords’).

A parallel citation in the earlier letters volume confirming Jung’s sustained interest in the Pharaoh’s dual nature as psychologically significant.

Jung, C.G., Letters Volume 1: 1906-1950, 1973supporting

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Did God impart to Moses the Divine nature? Did He not rather make Moses a god in the sight of Pharaoh, who was to be smitten with terror when Moses’ serpent swallowed the magic serpents and returned into a rod… That was the sense in which Moses was appointed to be god to Pharaoh; he was feared and entreated, he chastised and healed.

John of Damascus uses the Moses-Pharaoh confrontation to articulate a theological distinction between being appointed a god (functionally, in relation to Pharaoh) and being God by nature.

John of Damascus, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016supporting

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The idea already in being in the Narmer palette was destined to survive as an effective culture-building and -sustaining force through millenniums of new and old, familiar and alien, unfavorable and favorable political and economic crises, until supplanted and liquidated, not by a new army or economy, but by a new myth.

Campbell argues that the pharaonic mythopoetic vision — the fully integrated micro-macrocosmic worldview — was civilization’s organizing principle, displaced ultimately only by a rival mythological system rather than material forces.

Campbell, Joseph, Oriental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume II, 1962supporting

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In the Book of Exodus, the pharaoh, who is impugned there, seems to be Ramses II, whose dates are about 1305 to 1234 or 1236 B.C. He reigned for a long, long season. He was enormously powerful. I don’t think any scholar would suggest that he could possibly have been the pharaoh of the Exodus.

Campbell applies historico-critical analysis to the Exodus narrative, arguing that the figure of Pharaoh in the biblical text is a mythologized construction rather than a reliable historical identification.

Campbell, Joseph, Transformations of Myth Through Time, 1990supporting

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He presents as the symbol Pharaoh’s Rule of deity, the solar disk. Instead of Amon, who is the lord creator of the Theban system, he calls the deity Aton.

Campbell traces Akhnaton’s religious revolution as an internal reformation of the pharaonic mythological system, linking the solar-disk symbol to the Pharaoh’s traditional identification with solar divinity.

Campbell, Joseph, Transformations of Myth Through Time, 1990supporting

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‘O child,’ said Isis, ‘in thy name of Sahuriya, He who is Re journeying in heaven, do not journey longer in the womb!’ Whereupon the child came out upon her hands… of a cubit’s length, powerful of bone, with members the color of gold, and lapis lazuli hair.

Campbell presents the divine birth narrative of the pharaonic child as mythological documentation of the belief that each Pharaoh is a solar incarnation, born of divine procreation under the supervision of Isis and Nephthys.

Campbell, Joseph, Oriental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume II, 1962supporting

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Those warrior kings, strategists and politicos, fashioners of the first compound political state in the history of the world, were not offering themselves like actual bulls, pigs, rams, or goats, to the local priestly guardians who in former days had derived their solemn knowledges of the right order (ma’at) from a watch of the cycling stars.

Campbell traces the historical shift by which Pharaoh internalized the cosmic order (ma’at), transforming the earlier enacted ritual sacrifice of the king into the symbolic mime of the Sed festival.

Campbell, Joseph, Oriental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume II, 1962supporting

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We view again the necropolis of King Narmer, the uniter of the two lands, the mighty bull of his mother, who on a day overthrew six thousand enemies. And we ask who were in those other graves: or in the two large subsidiary chambers near the tomb of that other possible first pharaoh, Aha-Mena.

Campbell examines the mortuary archaeology of the earliest pharaohs, reading the subsidiary burials as evidence for the lived mythological identity of the divine king whose death entailed the deaths of his retinue.

Campbell, Joseph, Oriental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume II, 1962supporting

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Common to both tales are the lethal danger at home (associated with a relative: the brother Esau, the grandfather Pharaoh), flight into the desert, the bride at the well (associated with the number seven), and then servitude as shepherd to her father.

Campbell identifies Pharaoh structurally as the life-threatening elder figure whose role in the Moses birth narrative is parallel to Esau’s role in the Jacob cycle, both functioning as the oppressive authority that triggers the hero’s flight into the desert.

Campbell, Joseph, Occidental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume III, 1964supporting

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He is in the role here essentially of the god Min ‘of the uplifted arm’ in the scene of Figure 10, representing the continuing force of the pharaonic principle as it proceeds from father to son.

Campbell identifies the ‘pharaonic principle’ as the generative force of divine kingship transmitted through the Osirian father-to-son lineage, here symbolized in the Serapis figure.

Campbell, Joseph, The Mythic Image, 1974supporting

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Among the fragments there was found the monolithic base of a throne, ornamented by fourteen lion (not bull) heads, carved in the round. An age had passed: that of the bull. Another had dawned: that of the lion.

Campbell reads the transition from bull to lion symbolism in pharaonic monuments as an astronomical-mythological shift from lunar to solar cosmology, marking a transformation in the metaphysical basis of the pharaonic office.

Campbell, Joseph, Oriental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume II, 1962aside

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In the ancient valley of the Nile, in the third millennium b.c., a lived myth — or rather, a myth living itself out in the bodies of men — was turning a Neolithic folk culture into one of the most elegant civilizations of the ancient world.

Campbell characterizes dynastic Egypt under the pharaonic mythos as the clearest historical example of a civilization literally constructed by a ‘lived myth,’ warning that mythic identity without ironic distance produces the nightmare logic of compulsion.

Campbell, Joseph, Oriental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume II, 1962aside

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