He Erased the Gods for the Sun — Akhenaten, the Sun Tarot, and a Young Pharaoh’s Curse
The child in the Sun tarot card rides forward, arms open, beneath a sky that holds nothing back. No weapons. No shadows. Just light. The card suggests joy. Clarity. A truth too radiant to hide from.
But truth — when worshipped too literally — can burn.
This is not a story about tarot. Not really. It’s about a man who tried to live that card. Who tried to become it.
Akhenaten — the heretic pharaoh. The king who cast down Egypt’s gods and replaced them with a faceless sun. He didn’t reform Egypt’s religion. He detonated it. Declaring the Aten god supreme, he tore Amun from the stones, reimagined divine art, and crowned himself the only voice the heavens would hear.
We’ll explore how he did it — how one man changed the gods, reshaped the human form, and nearly rewrote the cosmology of a civilization. You’ll meet the radiant Aten, the temples of Abydos Egypt, the cult of light that rose and fell in under two decades, and a young pharaoh who followed in his shadow.
You’ll also see why the Sun tarot keeps appearing here — it isn't a gimmick, but a mirror. A card about radiant certainty. About standing bare in full exposure. And what happens when you mistake light for safety.
And here’s the theory I’ll explore more fully in a future article:
I believe Tutankhamun was killed.
Not by illness. Not by accident.
But because of what — and whom — he inherited.
Let’s begin.
The Radiant Faith of Amenhotep IV
Born Amenhotep IV, the pharaoh of Egypt’s 18th Dynasty had long been heir to a pantheon. But one morning of his reign he cast it all aside. He renamed himself Akhenaten (“Beneficial to the Aten”) and boldly proclaimed Aten, the sun-disc, as the sole divine source of life. In lofty tomb inscriptions, he calls Aten “his one-and-only god,” and the Great Hymn to Aten – his hand-composed psalm – fills temple courtyards like an ancient “praise and worship” anthem to the dawn.
In practice, Akhenaten closed the great temple of Amun at Karnak and literally chiseled Amun’s name from history.
Temples across Egypt saw the names of gods like Amun and Mut blotted out, as the Aten god was raised so high it eclipsed all others. In Thebes, Amenhotep III’s gilded shrines gave way to rough limestone “talatat” blocks erecting four new Aten temples, each catching the morning light for the Sun King.
Yet scholars caution that Akhenaten was not a strict monotheist in the modern sense. Berlin Egyptologist Rolf Krauss notes that despite the fanfare, other gods quietly survived.
Outside Thebes the faithful still uttered traditional names, and even in Thebes only Amun and his family were targeted. In Rolf Krauss’s famous phrasing, Akhenaten was “not a monotheist” but rather a sort of polytheist who simply favored one god above all. In other words, he took a fancy to the Aten god and swept aside its rivals, but he did not deny the existence of all other spirits. The Aten, after all, had once been a mere aspect of Amun-Ra; under Akhenaten it became like Ra himself – visible and palpable, streaming life-giving rays into the world each morning.
Divine Art and the Pharaoh’s New Look
Akhenaten’s revolution was as much visual as religious. Sculptors broke with centuries of tradition. Portraiture melted from rigid idealism into something uncanny.
Steles and statues show Akhenaten with a slender, elongated face, protruding belly, narrow limbs and voluptuous hips – features too strange to ignore. Art historians call it “Amarna style,” a kind of living abstraction where male and female attributes intertwine.
A tallate quarry yielded some of the best examples: reliefs of the pharaoh under Aten’s rays, his daughters giggling in his arms, or he and Queen Nefertiti kneeling side by side before the disk. One famous tableau even shows two princesses resting under the sun’s beams, as if they were children on the Sun tarot card itself, innocent and illuminated.
Medical researchers have speculated that this strange physique might have reflected reality.
Some believe the royal family may have inherited a rare hormone condition that caused the body to produce too much estrogen. In men, this can lead to breast development, soft features, and fat distributed more like a woman’s — exactly what we see in Akhenaten and even in statues of young Tutankhamun.
In their view, “the bizarre physical features portrayed in these images… are not only realistic but were shared by many members of Egypt’s 18th Dynasty,” consistent with familial syndromes.
Whether or not these diagnoses are correct, the effect on the psyche would have been profound: a king who looked different, who might have felt the sun’s warmth and power in his own bones, now crowned the Aten god above all.
Hymns of the Sun and Hidden Conflicts
Every morning at Akhet-Aten (his new capital city) priests would lift the king’s hands to the sky, and the sun’s rays – the Aten’s fingers – descended to bestow life-symbols (the ankh) onto the king and queen.
New hymns burst forth, and even common folk in Amarna would sing blessings as the first golden beams spilled over the horizon. It was as if Egypt itself had awakened to a single omnipresent presence. But this zeal also bred tension.
The old priesthood of Amun seethed in secret. At Abydos, a great cult center of Osiris, archaeologists later found Amenhotep I’s statue scrawled upon by iconoclasts erasing his name – clearly an Atenist gesture – yet Osiris’s figure was left untouched.
In other words, Akhenaten’s workers struck out Amun’s father’s name, but spared Osiris. This suggests a curious compromise: Aten dominated, but entrenched local gods like Osiris were quietly tolerated.
In Thebes itself, the flip side of his creed was evident. Temples to Aten sprouted among the ruins of Amun’s basilicas, built hastily from the same limestone tablets (and even sometimes dismantled later under Ramesses). But outside the main centers, most Egyptian deities survived undisturbed.
In hundreds of provincial tombs, people continued to draw the usual gods on walls – Horus, Thoth, Isis – even as Akhenaten’s Aten shone over Amarna. This half-and-half reality explains Krauss’s verdict that Akhenaten ended up a “polytheist who took a fancy to a particular god, the sun god”, rather than a monotheist who forbade all others. The Aten was exalted, but the old symbols – the throne of Osiris, the vulture and cobra crowns – remained part of Egypt’s soul.
A Sunlit Egypt From Thebes to Abydos
Akhenaten’s new religion was born in Thebes, but its light quickly stretched north and south. Temples to the Aten rose in Karnak, then in Memphis and Heliopolis — the latter a city that would regain cosmic importance in the 25th Dynasty. Limestone sunshades appeared across Upper Egypt. Even the far steppes of Nubia bore shrines to the sun god.
But two cities stand out: Abydos and Akhmim — ancient strongholds of Osiris and Min. In Abydos, a place Alexander’s age would call the realm of the dead, fragments of Akhenaten’s revolution still surfaced centuries later. Four limestone blocks, repurposed in the Osiris temple, show his royal barge with Nefertiti and their daughter Meritaten, sailing forward to strike enemies of the sun.
Another depicts the king as a sphinx — stripped of all names but one: Aten.
He was honored here, far from Amarna. But the fact that these blocks were buried inside a temple of Osiris, god of the afterlife, speaks volumes.
Even in death, the old gods were watching.Excavations by Flinders Petrie at Abydos in 1902 uncovered reliefs where Amenhotep I’s cartouches had been carefully obliterated while leaving Osiris’s name intact.
In other words, Akhenaten’s scribes inscribed their approval on the old king – but as subjects of the one true sun god. The Osirian cult was not banned outright, instead, its greatest enemy (Amun, Amenhotep I’s father) was erased while Osiris himself remained.
This selective iconoclasm hints at a calculated policy: Aten’s influence at Abydos was enough to scrub out key names, yet bowers of Osiris continued to be respected. (No doubt priests of old grudged this strange balance.) The temple itself may have housed a small Aten chapel alongside Osiris shrines – branches of the sun’s cult that Kriuss and Jackson now believe existed at places like Abydos and Akhmim.
The Sun Sets – and a Young Pharaoh Rises
Like any star system, Akhenaten’s sun eventually set. After seventeen years, the king died (at about age 50), and Egypt lurched back.
Temples were quickly rededicated to Amun and Ra, and the Aten inscriptions were chiselled away. The solar theology collapsed as suddenly as it had arrived. Into this frantic revival strode a boy-king.
Tutankhamun, the “young pharaoh” born Tutankhaten (“Living image of Aten”) but now reborn Tutankhamun under the old gods’ protection. He was barely ten years old when he took the throne amid swirling uncertainty.
No one knows exactly how Tutankhamun’s own story ends – only that it was short and shrouded. Some strange twist of fate (a fall from his war chariot? A palace assassination?) struck down the boy-king before he reached his prime. But as he vanished, his tomb was walled with hints of what came before: images of a sun-masked king (his father?) and gods cast out.
Now Tutankhamun’s lonely mask sits in glass, a gilt icon of secrets yet unearthed.
In that hush before dawn, one might feel the presence of both past and future. Akhenaten’s dream of light had blazed gloriously, like a tarot’s Sun card full of promise, and then dimmed. But the wheel kept turning, as if guided by a greater mythic hand. Egypt’s next Sun tarot card – the bright promise of a boy-child on a white horse – was about to be revealed in Tutankhamun.
Rolo’s Note: If one thing endures about this story, it is its power to astonish. Akhenaten’s golden revolution was earnest and extreme – and, in the end, fragile. Yet even in ruin his solar faith casts a long shadow. One can almost feel the winds of Amarna whispering that ancient praise and worship, carried by shafts of sunlight to the tombs of all who follow.
Sources: Recent scholarship underpins this account. Egyptologist Rolf Krauss finds Akhenaten best understood as a “polytheist” drawn to the sun god. Briana Jackson (Naming and Mapping the Gods, 2022) details the pharaoh’s art reforms and temple closings and notes archaeological finds at Abydos, Egypt. Medical writer Irwin Braverman et al. analyze Akhenaten’s unusual visage via genetic syndromes. Their combined work illuminates Akhenaten’s sun-smitten reign – the first great blinding dawn before Egypt’s long night.