The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [50]
When, having exerted oneself to understand the people of ancient Egypt and the bafflement they expressed in the face of nature and the universe before Christian revelation, Atoom-Hadoo’s writings provide a marvellous discovery. For one finds in the king’s poems an all-consuming desire for knowledge, and it is this, above all, that made him a worthy ruler in his era and makes him now a worthy subject of study. From this distance, “through a glass, darkly,” as Paul wrote to the Corinthians, we can see in this ancient, dusky prince a man struggling in his desire for what in our era we would call Christian enlightenment and divine wisdom. If his topics may sometimes shock us (and I cannot recommend that ladies be exposed to them), let us nevertheless face them boldly, as they are the essential questions of life itself.
Jean-Michel Vassal, the French discoverer of Fragment B, thought little of Harriman, and though he could not recognise his own faults as readily as he could Harriman’s, I will allow him to express his opinion of his predecessor in Atum-haduan studies. From the preface of Le Roi Amant (1899, Englished as The Lover-King in 1903 by Marie-Claude Wilson):
As for proving to dubious minds of dubious calibre the existence of Atoumadou, one must also confess that our own side have done us inestimable harm in the form of those bloodless dilettantes I will not name who—choking at the sight of a nude woman, blanching like a virgin schoolgirl at the very mention of man’s darker urges, the iniquities of a callous deity, the temptations of power, or the baser motivations of this beast-ape Man—have presented to the world a feeble Atoumadou softened like an old woman’s lapdog, castrated, soaped, and fluffed, red and blue ribbons in his fur, fed fat with almond marchpane and numbed by laudanum and lack of open-air exercise, and so as a result, it falls to me (and the scholarship of France, the nation most closely tied by Destiny to the protection and proliferation of the great Pharaoh’s thought and writing) to restore to . . .
(This sentence, incidentally, continues on for more than three pages in my edition of Vassal. Credit is due to Mrs. Wilson for her stamina.)
His protestations of fearless honesty aside, Vassal, too, stopped well short of an accurate translation, preferring instead his mild titillations suitable for murmuring to ladies in the privacy of Parisian boudoirs, but not so forthright as to have the translator prosecuted by the touchy French authorities.
As Harriman hoped to find Queen Victoria in golden tunic and cobra-vulture crown, Vassal was eager to see in Atum-hadu an ancient Casanova, a practical Machiavelli, a prototype Napoleon. Both men mistranslated as necessary to achieve their portraits, leaping far beyond the available evidence to arrive at the conclusions they longed for.
It is vital not to allow one’s desires to carry one from observing to creating. Both translators confused what they found with what they wished to find (a disorder perhaps attributable to the influence of the Creator-god Atum himself). They created. The two men fertilised their discoveries themselves. Fertilise being the key word here, for let us remind those who, perversely, have not yet read Desire and Deceit in Ancient Egypt, in which these issues were most fully explored, the name Atum-hadu translates as Atum-Is-Aroused. And, as any schoolboy who has studied the Egyptian pantheon is quick to note, memorise, and then quote in his own defence when interrupted in solitary creativity by a nosy parent, Atum the Creator, the first being (and thus quite, quite alone), made all the other gods and the world, too, by using his own celestial hand to spill his own celestial seed onto fertile ground.
Atum-Is-Aroused: