The Curse Of The Boy King
- Sep 28, 2025
- 5 min read
When I was ten years old I saw the face of Tutankhamun encased in gold and I was obsessed. But it would take more than 50 years for me to understand exactly who I was looking at.
His father Akhenaten was a radical king. Standing firmly alongside him was Nefertiti, a woman of unparalleled beauty and intellect. Her ancestry is unknown; however, her name, “the beautiful one has come,” suggests she was a princess of Mitanni (Syria).
Nefertiti was the first Egyptian queen to share equal billing with her king. Art of the time shows her performing rituals, wearing the crown of a king, and even participating in battles.
This couple was not afraid of a challenge; they disrupted Egypt’s entire social order and upended thousands of years of history by casting aside the pantheon of Egyptian gods, declaring Aten, the sun disk, son of Isis and Osiris, as the sole deity. Aten was a god of light and life, worshipped not through intermediaries but directly under the sun’s rays. In the couple’s vision, the divine was no longer fragmented into multiple deities but unified, transcendent, and accessible to all.
Together, they became more than royalty. Nefertiti and Akhenaten ruled as a divine couple, intermediaries between heaven and earth, the balance of creation itself, a harmony of opposites reflecting the natural world.
Their art depicted the royal family in tender moments: Nefertiti and Akhenaten sharing kisses, playing with their children under Aten’s rays, the sun’s hands outstretched in blessing. This was a unique humanisation of divinity. In their world, male and female were equal parts of a sacred whole, a revolutionary concept that could have reshaped spiritual thought for the whole world.
But their vision was fragile. The sudden deaths of Nefertiti and Akhenaten left the throne to Tutankhamun, a child thrust into power too soon.
The old religious order took control over the nine-year-old boy and transported Egypt back to a time of the pharaohs of old who worshipped multiple gods under the control of the temple priests, whose wealth and power depended on the old temples. Tutankhaten became Tutankhamun. The sun’s name was erased. The temples were rebuilt.
His reign is remembered as a return to tradition. But the boy’s hand signed decrees he did not author. Under his seal, the vision of a singular divine light accessible to all, unmediated by priests, was annihilated. Egypt was restored, but its intellectual and spiritual revolution was lost.
In Judah, more than six centuries later, another boy ascended the throne. Josiah was eight years old when he inherited a kingdom where Yahweh (who we now just call God) was worshipped alongside Asherah, the tree of life and queen of heaven.
But then the priests “found” a lost book of law in the temple, claiming to be the words of Moses — a text suddenly filled with rigid decrees, genealogies, and laws designed to suppress women’s rights, outlaw the goddess, and centralise all worship and authority in male hands at the temple in Jerusalem. Josiah accepted it without question. Even when he sent for guidance, the words came through Huldah the prophetess, one of many women in that era who held sacred authority, interpreting the divine with wisdom. Once, such prophetesses were common and revered, the living voice of the divine feminine, but Huldah sold out; the book she authenticated would become the very tool that silenced her kind and banned the moon rites that honoured women’s cycles and the seasons.
Inflamed by this newfound law, Josiah tore down the shrines, burned the sacred groves, slaughtered pagan priests and priestesses, and purged the land of idols. In his zeal, he destroyed Asherah, the mother goddess, erasing the feminine face of divinity from Judah’s faith.
His reform was hailed as holy; in reality it was a purge — the birth of exclusive monotheism, a creed that demanded allegiance to one god and obedience to one text. It silenced the older songs of the land and narrowed the spiritual imagination of a people. Josiah’s righteousness sowed the seeds of exile. The land did not give up its roots so easily; within a single generation the temple was destroyed and the elites with their patriarchal schemes were left crying on the banks of the rivers of Babylon.
So it has always been: those who claim divine authority to rule soon find their empires crumble beneath the weight of their own certainty.
The divine rights of kings collapsed in the UK in 1649 with the execution of Charles I; it was intellectually proven by the Enlightenment in the 1700s and was politically obsolete by 1800 in most of Europe.
So how do we have a 'king' who is ignoring humanity and international law and causing such havoc in this modern age?
Like Tutankhamun and Josiah, Benjamin Netanyahu inherited more than a nation — he inherited a narrative. Though he calls himself secular, his rule is no less godly in its purpose.
From childhood, he was steeped in the myth of eternal siege, taught by his father, Benzion Netanyahu, a historian obsessed with the Spanish Inquisition who believed that Jews stand alone in a hostile world, that strength is survival, and mercy is weakness. His father, a disciple of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, believed only the sword could secure the Jewish future.
As a young man, Benjamin learned the language of Western democracy in America, and the theatre of heroism through the death of his brother Yoni at Entebbe. Out of grief and ideology, a saviour complex was born: the conviction that history chose him to protect his people from annihilation.
In adulthood, he forged alliances with messianic Zionists who see themselves fulfilling biblical prophecy. Together they built a new priesthood, not of incense and sacrifice, but of settlements, walls, and scripture weaponised. Netanyahu may not pray, yet he governs with divine rights, presiding over a civil religion of chosenness and conquest. Under his reign, ancient texts justify modern bombs; prophecy sanctifies dispossession. His is the liturgy of fear, his altar the land itself.
Like the boy kings before him, his hand enacts the will of others — ancient trauma, inherited myth, and the fervour of those who see no future beyond the sword.
It's time for us to come together and bring back a world where male and female, moon and sun, earth and sky, and science and faith come together to write a new story. Because the current narrative comes from the Iron Age and doesn't fit the Tech Revolution that's already here.
Join us on October 1 to imagine what that world looks like....
And if you miss getting together with your sisters to set intentions under the new moon, join us for a fire talk and sound bath...
Comments