Counter-Currents
Remembering Jan Assmann
(July 7, 1938–February 19, 2024)
Greg Johnson
Jan Assmann (Photo credit: Martin Kraft, MJK62894 Jan Assmann, CC BY-SA 3.0)
676 words
Johann Christoph “Jan” Assmann, the world’s foremost Egyptologist and a profound religious thinker and cultural historian, died on Monday at the age of 85.
Assmann was born in Langelsheim in Lower Saxony and grew up in Lübeck and Heidelberg. After studying Egyptology, classical archeology, and Greek studies in Munich, Heidelberg, Paris, and Göttingen, as well as doing fieldwork in Egypt, Assmann was appointed professor of Egyptology at the University of Heidelberg in 1976, where he stayed until his retirement in 2003. Assmann then became Honorary Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Constance, where his wife Aleida Assmann taught English. Jan and Aleida raised five children and developed a theory of memory and cultural transmission.
Assmann was the author of 25 books, about half of which have been translated into English, including his classic Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); his magisterial synthesis The Mind of Egypt: History and Meaning in the Time of the Pharaohs, trans. Andrew Jenkins (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003); his definitive study of Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt, trans. David Lorton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006); Religio Duplex: How the Enlightenment Reinvented Egyptian Religion, trans. Robert Savage (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2014); and The Invention of Religion: Faith and Covenant in the Book of Exodus, trans. Robert Savage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018).
Assmann’s work is particularly important for neopagans, Traditionalists, and those who entertain questions about Jews and Biblical monotheism.
Assmann’s concept of “cosmotheism” refers to the idea that behind the different polytheistic pantheons — as well as all other particular phenomena — is a single transcendent divine principle that manifests itself through these phenomena. This “cosmotheist” idea is found in the Corpus Hermeticum, a collection of Greek and Latin texts from Roman Egypt that was rediscovered in the Renaissance and influenced modern Western esoteric traditions, including Freemasonry. One of Assmann’s most important discoveries is that the cosmotheism of the Hermetic tradition is an authentic Egyptian religious teaching which he traces back as early as the nineteenth dynasty (the thirteenth century BCE).
You can buy Julius Evola’s East & West here.
The cosmotheist idea of a single transcendent divine principle behind all manifestation sounds very much like the Traditionalist idea of the “transcendent unity of religions,” but for an important difference. The Traditionalists claim that this unity embraces the Biblical monotheist religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. But Assmann begs to differ. These religions all adhere to what Assmann calls the Mosaic Distinction. They claim that their one God is the only true deity, and all other gods are false. The cosmotheists, however, held that in a deep sense, all religions are true, contradictions and all, because they are manifestations of the same divine principle, although they are accommodated to different religions and cultures. Cosmotheism gives rise to religious pluralism and tolerance, whereas monotheism introduces religious violence and intolerance into a world that already has enough problems.
Assmann connects Biblical monotheism with the intolerant monotheism of the Egyptian heretic Pharaoh Akhenaten. He also argues that Judaism arose from the “normative inversion” of Egyptian polytheism. Judaism, in short, was the first instance of what Nietzsche called the “slave revolt” in morals, long before Christianity inverted the values of the Greeks and Romans.
These ideas are explored in Moses the Egyptian and Religio Duplex, as well as The Price of Monotheism, trans. Robert Savage (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010); Of God and Gods: Egypt, Israel, and the Rise of Monotheism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008); and From Akhenaten to Moses: Ancient Egypt and Religious Change (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2014).
For further reading on Assmann, see the following pieces by me that were published at Counter-Currents:
- “The Hatred Born on Sinai: Jan Assmann’s Moses the Egyptian” (French version here, Slovak version here, Spanish version here).
- “Jan Assmann’s Critique of the Axial Age” (French version here, Spanish version here).
- “Notes on Moses the Egyptian,” Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 (French version: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3; Spanish version: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3).
See also items tagged Jan Assmann for places where he is mentioned in passing.
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32 comments
Well, at least in the case of Christianity, the essential doctrine is one of peace. Of course practical statecraft often mandates war with neighbouring states and so clerics were called upon to bless both the internal and external struggles of Christendom. I think it most unlikely that a persistently pagan, and consequently disunited, Europe would have withstood the Islamic expansion but if it had I doubt it would have been any more peaceacble than Christian Europe was.
Isn’t Bolshevism’s essential doctrine one of withering away of the state?
Christianity lost the Middle East, North Africa, and Anatolia to Islam permanently. It lost Spain, the Balkans, and most of Hungary for centuries. Pagan Greece turned back two massive Persian invasions.
Pagans fought wars about many things. But they did not engage in religious crusades and exterminations.
Aren’t exterminations just a thing part of doing business in war? Caesar massacred hundreds of thousands of Gauls at Alesia, the Mongols loved a good massacre when required, the Russians massacred the French in the retreat from Moscow, the Americans and Brits were content to massacre German civilians during WWII and after both WWI and WWII by blockade and exposure of the ‘disarmed enemy forces’. None of these had much religious motivation. All that was needed was othering and dehumanisation. In each case a Realpolitik aim was achieved.
You just switched the context again from religious war to other kinds of wars.
I would add that Pagan ancient Greeks were much more “civilized” in all sences: culture, art, literature, politics incl. liberties and rights, military, philosophy, mythology, etc., and also much more honest and decent people than their descendants, the Christian Byzantine Greeks.
“More honest and decent people”? Really? Ruling classes are always full of strife and scheming, and the ancient Greeks were no exception.
The Rhomaioi certainly became gradually less effective militarily and were gradually crushed by the Turks. Now we are getting some traditional racial defamation.
“More honest and decent people”?
Of course. Remember that Homer writes that the Greeks who besieged Troy were not delighted with the military trick invented by Odysseus with a wooden horse. They argued that the enemy must be fought face to face with the sword, and Odysseus had difficulty persuading them to use a ruse to penetrate Troy. (Of course, it is possible that there was no horse at all, or that it was a siege tower with a battering ram, but this does not matter). As for the “Eastern Roman Empire,” it is not without reason that the very word “Byzantine” has long meant cunning, deceitful, insidious. And this is exactly how the inhabitants of Byzantium were perceived by both the Western European crusaders, by the Slavs, and by the Türks.
So what Homer says about a few heroes and demi-gods of a mythical or at the very least legendary Greek past is to be compared with what their enemies said of the most powerful and enduring Christian state of the first millennium?
I don’t find this convincing. You’re comparing Greek legends of a golden age to what the enemies of an ancient, civilized and powerful state said about it.
Wow! I just skimmed your articles on Assman’s works. They look excellent. Have you read every book you reference? That would be impressive.
In a comment a decade ago, you write:
Greg Johnson
July 4, 2014 at 9:47 pm
…
I am a Traditionalist, meaning a pagan, meaning a believer in the transcendent unity of religions, which is incompatible with the monotheism of the Biblical counter-religions.
Do you still agree with this self-characterization? If so, what do you mean by “pagan”? Does it entail belief in anything “supernatural” as that term is conventionally understood, or is it merely an attitude towards creation? If the former, does that mean you believe in the literal existence of 1) God (as a single entity, like a person); 2) multiple gods; or 3) the specific Germanic gods?
The latter. It is also a political view, consistent with maintaining tolerance and the right to differ, which is important for nations and cultures as well as religions.
If Assmann is right, the only unbroken polytheist tradition is the Egyptian, and then only the mystical esoteric strand. We know very little about the exoteric myths and rituals. We also know very little of the exoteric or esoteric strands of Greek, Roman, Celtic, and Germanic paganism.
Yes, I have read the books I cite.
Dr. Johnson,
You’ve published many books, but I think you need to write the great Treatise on Race, a work which will tie together everything known about the race problem from both the humanistic and empiricist disciplines into a new philosophy of race for our time. I can’t think of anyone in the Anglophone world (or perhaps the entire world, though my non-conversance with foreign languages does not permit me to assert this with confidence) more qualified to do so. The White Nationalist Manifesto was wonderful for its purposes, but something much grander is needed to explain how the white race has ‘misreasoned’ itself onto a path of auto-extinction. Yes, I realize we have enemies whose nefarious actions have greatly jeopardized our survival chances, but as Jared Taylor noted decades ago, if whites had 10% – I might raise that today to 20% – of the racial solidarity of other races, we could turn everything around and decisively win the war for our racial future.
We’ve met our enemies, and the main one is still, I think, us. How did this baleful condition arise? Anyone can supply the simple, proximate answer: we embraced diversity and threw open our borders. But it will take a towering intellect, one having mastered the relevant material from many fields, especially philosophy, to explain why we did something so obviously self-destructive. You should take up the task.
Thank you for this very kind vote of confidence. I could write such a book, and I think it would be worthwhile. But I just don’t have the time. I would need serious patronage so that I can hand over all my administrative functions at CC and just devote myself to writing. Sadly, there seems little to no chance that will happen.
I can appreciate your situation. I’d like to do some much simpler writing, but for the moment, reading and commenting is all I can really manage (unless I gave up every activity but my job and the reading related to my prospective writing; I’m not prepared, or maybe don’t have the fortitude, to do this, however).
Sometimes (many times) I regret the professional choices I made. A few years before the pandemic I learned that a onetime college “suitemate” of mine, one who’d gone directly to Wall Street and I-banking (as we called it then) from undergrad, interrupted later only by a couple of years at Wharton for his MBA, had recently made a $20 million donation to our alma mater (which of course was merely added to the $10+ billion endowment these intersectional wokesters already have). He was a smart guy, but I don’t recall him being especially noticeably better a student than I was. Instead of wasting my time in mostly failed intellectual and activist pursuits, I should have just relentlessly focused on making money. I actually got offered a finance analyst job by a ’boutique-y’ Wall Street firm, but turned it down to pursue grad school (I had applied for some jobs just to see what I might get, and in case I didn’t get into grad school). This was right at the start of the ensuing Reagan/Wall Street boom. Who knows what I might have been able to contribute now, four decades later?
I hope you can one day secure that patronage (it could even be from me, but, alas, only upon my death, and assuming I have enough left over, which is dicey). How nice it would be to have just one white nationalist billionaire!
I’m a cosmotheist. I worship the gods of Christianity, Greek mythos, Norse mythos, and tolkienian mythos. I feel the later Greeks admitted of both Christianity and pagan mythos simultaneously.
Ill tell you guys this too: in Europe I got a little idol to Bast, the cat goddess. I’ve noticed since I put it in my bookcase a number of cats have sidled up to me in a friendly way, whereas before small animals avoided me! They’ve been way too aggressively friendly for it to be coincidence.
There is something truthy about the Abrahamic religions being anti religions. Like assman said that while the Egyptians held the ram sacred, the abrahamians sacrificed the ram. It’s conceived to inflame the people around you. Similar to going to live among people and saying that not only is their god false, yourselves have historically slain him! It’s calculated to inflame people around you. A recipe for discord.
Hail Manwe!
I thought you were a scientific materialist/atheist? Or perhaps you’re being facetious.
I could never be a pagan. My Christian heritage and outlook is too ingrained. It’s either Christ or a hard, barren cosmos. Alas, I remain unsure which one is reality!
The heart and mind are confused sometimes. In Simone Weil’s essay on the Iliad, she claims the creation of higher alternate reality, which she credits to the Greeks through Plato and the New Testament, is a sign of the height of Greek genius. A covering of the ugly realities of the world. It’s the same theme expressed in Life of Pi, I suppose. I always thought self delusion was a sign of mental weakness.
I should say I don’t expect the laws of nature to be violated at any point. Perhaps common folk need a noble lie to sustain them.
The idea of the ‘noble lie’ is just a way to get White people to act like con-men towards their own. In the end, the ‘noble like’ just ends in rule by spies.
I don’t know why you could not just declare ‘Christianity’ a ‘pagan’ faith? How is ‘Christ in you’ not acceptable to both Christians and Pagans? How does ‘Christ in you’ demand the conversion of pagans?
Christianity is radically anthropologically inclusive – anyone can be Christian, and radically metaphysically exclusive – Christ is the Truth and the Way. I believe this better accords with the Western mind than classical paganism, which was relatively more primitive (a lower stage in man’s development). Of course, there is much street-hustler buffoonery that calls itself “Christian”, but my Christ (were I to overcome the philosophy of religion difficulties which keep me agnostic) is a philosophical deity cleansed of errant nonsense.
Western Man properly rejects idiotic notions about “my truth” and “your truth”, insisting that truth about real entities is a unitary concept. Clearly, the pagan gods of old are mere human myths and psychological projections (to be fair, I don’t think Plato or Aristotle literally believed in “the gods” of the stories, though they did believe in some kind of Prime Being). The Trinity, OTOH, has a serious amount of thinking undergirding it (which doesn’t mean that it is reality, only that it can’t be dismissed as easily as the ancient myths).
Anyway, I don’t know if any of us is going to uncover the final truth about the meaningfulness of the concept of “God”, let alone the existence or divinity of Christ. My view of issues at the intersection of Christianity and white preservation is simply that there are more Christians than WPs; that white Christians tend to be less racial leftist than white atheists (which is not intuitive, but seems to be born out by political affiliation and voting); that white Christians are more fecund than both WPs and white atheists; and that combining these observations leads me to conclude that WP needs to make itself as attractive as it can to white Christians, as that’s our largest pool of potential converts, at least in the USA. I believe that a prowhite Christianity has much greater future growth prospects than any Eurofolkish paganism, which, imo, will always be a rarefied hobby of no more than a tiny number of enthusiasts.
Christ is the Truth and the Way. I believe this better accords with the Western mind.
The ‘Western mind’ is what White people make of it.
As for ‘Christ is the Truth and the Way’ or the highway, a lot of White people are taking the highway. ‘No religion’ is the fastest growing religious demographic with the ‘Western mind’.
[C]lassical paganism…was relatively more primitive (a lower stage in man’s development).
This is a very good reason why a ‘Christian Right’ cannot defeat ‘progressives’.
The Christian Right shared the ‘progressive’ view of history with the progressive Left.
It’s why I have to ruefully chuckle whenever I see Christians saying ‘Return to Tradition’ because I know that what they really mean is ‘Return to Tradition…but not too far’.
Christianity is radically anthropologically inclusive – anyone can be Christian
Which is why Christianity cannot be of any real assistance to the preservation and thriving of the White race. The faith simply doesn’t care about Whites enough to want to save them.
Already, Whites are a minority within Christianity. There isn’t a single major Christian denomination that supports Whites who wish to protect their homelands.
Not one.
Christians are not going to be the salvation of the White race, no matter how much they breed because Christians don’t care about race and it’s baked into the ‘radically inclusive’ nature of their faith.
So, when Christian converts take over White Nationalism, it will simply become a de-racinated ‘Christian Nationalism’.
Christianity was at the forefront of the ‘civil rights’ movement in the US: One of the most important betrayals of Whites (right up there with supporting wars of Whites on Whites in Europe).
I contend that even if everything you say about Christians and White Nationalism were to come to pass, Christianity wouldn’t save the White race.
Because it doesn’t want to and it’s not designed to do so.
Unlike White Nationalism.
If Peace is the ultimate goal we should go ahead and submit and have done with it.
Life is struggle, contest, discontent; Peace is death.
Peace is my goal, but we have to kill all warmongers first, and then weed them out of every future generation. Not exactly pacifism, I’ll grant you that.
With all due respect Greg, doesn’t Peace ultimately lead to degeneration and Nihilism. And isn’t Death and non-being the ultimate peace ala Buddhism via Schopenhauer? With all his faults I think Nietzsche settled this question.
Ah; Peace the old-fashioned way.
Rez: unless I miss my guess, Greg is speaking facetiously.
Haha … totally missed that!
If there were a secret society or succession of them which ultimately directed the flow of information and resources in this world to a beneficent and eugenic end, I would like to think that it would maintain man’s ability to struggle in his own genetic interest whilst increasing his capacity for wisdom and compassion. Tough job!
He sounds like a very learned man.
Did he interact at all with Savitri Devi? IMO Savitri Devi’s “The Lighting and the Sun” was The best presentation of history, racial realities with positive religion and just – practical things to do in a really really bad time “Kali Yuga”.
Did this Egyptologist Johann Christoph “Jan” Assmann also write about the Mittani royals that Savitri Devi said the Egyptian royals intermarried with because the Mittani’s supposedly had better “blue blood”.
I had never heard any references to “The Mittanis” except through Savitri Devi’s “The Lightning and the Sun”
Nietzsche, on the one hand, and even the Nazis, on the other, did not see Islam as a religion of slaves. These are just facts. While the femininity and androgyny of Christianity and cosmotheism can easily be justified or not contradict the development of this in the case of cosmotheism.
German author Sigrid Hunke who has worked in Ahnenerbe, was a big fan of the Islam, but she despiced the Christianity as weak and non-European religion.
I’d not heard of this person or their work. Very interesting.
The Egyptians introduced another concept (besides monotheism) into the supernatural thinking of the West: Judgement after death.
It’s almost ubiquitous now due to the embrace of ‘judgement after death’ across the West, even among folkish and pagan practitioners. But when one looks at the folks beliefs enough, one sees another view entirely. In this view, we keep on living in the afterlife one that which we built while alive. Thus, whatever ‘judgement’ befalls a person is constructed during their lives, but they are not ‘judged’ by a supreme law other than ‘if you build it, you must live in it’.
Egypt introduced the idea of the ‘weighing of the soul’ and it caught on as a means of social control in all of the nations that it significantly influenced. First you create the idea of ‘lack’ than you provide the means of filling that lack (for the price obedience and a regular tithe).
Like Assman, I believe that every spiritual belief ultimately resolves in the same way, leads to the same destination. However, some beliefs lead to less suffering in life than others.
What Whites cannot afford are supernatural beliefs that require everyone believe the same thing (like monotheism). The tiniest point of friction will be exploited to create divisions and internal violence within the White race.
If all Whites could all have the same supernatural belief at the same time it wouldn’t matter if that belief were ‘true’ or not. It would matter that, for once, we were all on the same page.
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