Phoenix Aflame.

Love him or hate him the world is glued to Trump’s Phoenix mega church play date with his worshippers. But will this slow train wreck of a Presidency finally burst into flames in Phoenix? It seems rather likely. Somehow the intersection of plague, collective denial, magical immunity fantasies and an age old need for the dying king to sacrifice his finest to the Gods in order to prolong waning power is all too tempting for Fate to leave alone.

The part of Trump who would be king is bound by convention to propitiate the Gods with the lives of his nearest and dearest. It’s a tradition. The victims are either individually chosen, mostly by being foolish enough to get within reach, or they are culled collectively, as in the Aztec Flower Wars, whose sole purpose was the capture and sacrifice of fine specimens to please the divine powers behind the throne. Deprived of the convenience of war, this need for sacrificial victims most find some other expression.

Trump is a deeply religious man but not in the way you might normally think. His is more an identification with God, conferred by much laying on of hands, massive collective Messiah projections, and a narcissistic personality disorder the size of a large house.

It may seem entirely counter-intuitive to host an indoor chanting contest during the peak of air-borne plague, especially given his trajectory after Tulsa. It’s easy to forget that we are not dealing with rational forces here and would do well to remind ourselves that Covid does more than give an opportunity to flaunt your omnipotence. Whether this is on account of being bathed in the blood of Christ or having cleverly invented some high-tech ionization gizmo, guaranteed to kill 99.9% of corona virus or your money back, er, unless you signed a waiver, or unless you were just the unlucky statistic. It also means that you might die a martyr for your cause, which does great things for your adrenal and cortisol responses, bringing you closer to God in ways unspecified by the Good Book.

In his conquest of Central America, Cortez came across captives of the Flower wars, being kept plump for some festive occasion, and set them free. They were most put out and demanded to be sacrificed… Extreme Stockholm Syndrome? Maybe. Yet examples of martyrs offering themselves up for sacrifice abound through different times and cultures.

Perhaps part of the problem is that if life’s rewards are all deferred to some future idyll it might make folk all the keener to embrace it, not to mention the Brownie points in store for those laying down their lives for the Cause, ‘Greater love hath no man, than he who would drown in his own phlegm for his white picket fence and our way of life.’

So sometimes the excoriating ego death of genuine religious experience is acted out in an all too literal fashion, permitting you a pimped eulogy at your funeral without ever having had to change and grow.

The Aztecs also had a way you could be of service without having to be captured in battle. In the spirit of being willing to die for the economy a volunteer would be dressed up like the god Tezcatlipoca. His skin would be painted and he would wear a flower crown, a seashell breastplate, and lots of jewelry.

The man would be given four beautiful wives to do with as he pleased. He was only asked to walk through the town playing a flute and smelling flowers so that the people could honor him.

When 12 months had passed, he would walk up the stairs of a great pyramid, breaking his flutes as he climbed to the top. As an adoring crowd watched, a priest would help him lie down on a long altar made of stone. Then they’d rip his heart out of his body.

Afterward, a new Tezcatlipoca would step forward and start all over again.

We think we are so different from the Aztecs and so lose sight of the way in which the deep running currents of the collective psyche operate. What should frighten us is not that Trump is stupid or uneducated but that he operates from this archetypal layer of the psyche without the trivial garnish of ego functioning, one which might mediate the Old Testament quality of either sacred immunity or risking oneself for the sake of the glorious leader so that the path way to the Gods may be kept open.

It’s not even that he doesn’t care, he needs the martyrs and the martyrs need him. They are all having a religious experience. Unfortunately, it is at the level of ‘participation-mystique’, which is all about undifferentiated mergement, a state of being utterly un-phased by the body count. The gods must be propitiated.

The pundits criticize Trump for his selfishness. Bolton claims he makes all his decisions on the basis of personal interest. More frightening still is the thought that the wish to be above the law leaves a man at the mercy of unconscious processes wherein everyone’s rights and safety are threatened. His greed is the least of our worries. For the man who would be king, everyone else is sacrificial stock. Of course testing must be stopped. People cling to their leader in times of crisis… even if twas he that caused it.. No war time President has ever been deposed….

The Soulful Sacrifice. 1.

When milk bottles were first introduced, Blue-tits learned how to take the tops off pretty quickly. But the truly impressive aspect of their door step robberies was that they managed to communicate the secret to one another faster than Blue-tits can fly.

How did they do it?

Whatever the answer, Blue-tits are not the only species to have this knack of manifesting collective change without crib notes or peeking over one another’s shoulder.

Give or take a few centuries, humans all over the world changed the structures of their societies without confering nicely or resorting to the pointy end of something more persuasive.

We invented kings and queens.

The characteristics of this new type of leader differed markedly from those that preceeded them. They may look like chiefs with their rides pimped but there are important differences that have an impact on culture and consciousness difficult to get your head around.

”This was not simply a quantative extension of a ranking system, it was a truly qualitative change by which society had entered a new realm.” P V Kirch

These new leaders emerged simultaneously in cultures that had no bearing or influence upon one another which suggests that something greater was at work than big hairy blokes with extra pointy beards wanting a crown.

But what?

Whether you take the Egyptian Pharaohs, or the ancient kingdoms of West Africa, early European lineages or the far-flung Aztec and Chinese emperors from whom they were entirely isolated, there are aspects of this new fangled system of resplendent dudes in metal hats so common to all that you’d think they’d copied each other’s homework.

All agreed, there was to be a fundamental change in how humans got on together with ramifications for Collective Consciousness we can scarcely suspect.

or is that scaredly?

or sacredly?

Superficially, kings meant centralised power, more rigid hierarchies, increased divisions of labour and more highly organised economies. But the most important difference, the most impactful on their subjects, was a shift in the value of human life and the rules about who you can kill without calling it murder…

so you’ll be pleased to know that Kings are only recent inventions.

”The way of life we now take for granted and on the foundations of which we have built civilizations, occupies but one percent of the time of the big-brain’s preoccupation.” R. Ardrey.

We tend to think of kings as something that belongs to history and by which we are no longer affected. In fact it’s the other way around. The institution is very recent and pervades the very viscera of modern life.

Far from being ousted by revolutions or the democratic aspirations of suitably frightened subjects, kings adapted as only the very youthful can. They went underground, as our serf like devotions to the rich and famous, as the farce of rule by deep state oligarchs, as the proliferation of corruption and being above the law whose daily tabloid shenanigins, violent exploits and eternal wars are just the kind of court intrigue you’d expect from period drama.

There are a number of important differences between chiefs and kings, with consequences for those grovelling nearest, but there is one that stands alone in its impact upon us because it affects our perception of what it means to be human.

Not only is the king a political ruler, he is also the high priest and most significant for those within reach, an incarnation of State-Your-Prefered-Deity-Here. Again, you might imagine this to be some amusing footnote of history, a witty anecdote from The Golden Bough and yet its widely accepted by considerable swathes of people in our time that might has right. The powerful are ordained by and represent God. In everyday life this trickles down and manifests in the wider populace as the feeling that, by virtue of your allegiance, you too are special and/or entitled to be exempt and above the law.

‘I like to be offensive”, said a Charlottesville supremacist. After all, what is the point of being above the law if you don’t demonstrate it once in a while? In fact what other way is there to make the point?

The archives of Ethography are rich in examples of how animals of all kinds obey a natural law which distinguishes between neighbour and stranger. This is so that the aggression necessary for survival within a species does not spill over into communal violence. Snakes won’t use their fangs when they fight. The anxiety of the young male baboon to join a new troop is not just for acceptance but for protection. Herring gulls will erupt into a frenzy of squawking and tear up great lumps of grass when anger boils over, without ever resorting to their rapier sharp beaks.

People are the same..

”All known societies make a distinction between murder, the killing of member’s of one’s own group – and the killing of outsiders.” G. Gorer.

In other words the Principle of Relatedness is more fundamental in its distinction of friend from foe than the inevitability of violent outcome.

”It is the effect of natural arangments, not the inoffensiveness of natural disposition that minimizes violent behaviour in a natural world.” Ardrey

Latent violence is there, but it’s subject to the natural law that distinguishes friend from foe. In a society run by leaders who are not ordained by the gods, nor  believed to be so special that they may not touch the ground, everyone in the community is protected from each other by this natural law. Contact with those who fall outside this protection can be made safer by rituals of politeness, exchange, intermarriage and stylised etiquette..

We shake hands, give gifts, let you have the seat furthest from the lavvy…

For folk who have been chosen by God and doing His Will, this natural law works against the majority because the king is removed from the community by a host of taboos which means that everybody, subjects and strangers alike, are now Other, unprotected by the rule which says that even an angry wolf will instinctively muzzle his bite if a pup merely shows him its belly.

No-one is safe.

In 19th C Buganda, not saying thankyou properly, with just the right amount of dust poured on your head, could get you killed. Oh, and also if you were vaguely related, or caused his Maj’ to touch the ground..or if you were unlucky enough to see him eating…. or caught his eye…

and so life is suddenly very precarious…

security and belonging eroded..

defences kicking in.

The rats start to turn on each other.

The advent of King-ship spills contained aggression into explosive violence. Not just between the king and anybody that looks at him funny but between the subjects themselves who are now also objects just a shade higher in worth than a non-believer and scrabbling to secure their positions.

If just deserts are your thing it doesn’t end well for the king. He is inflated and so must die. Tradition has it that he comes to a very bad end.  In Dahomey, if he’s lucky, he just gets murdered for the crown. If he’s not so lucky he has to be chopped up in bits, sometimes having to do the job himself, while he can, before being ritually consumed by the next incumbent.

Sometimes the king’s violent demise is ritualised at the end of fixed terms. Scandanavian kings ruled for twelve years after which they were put to death or a substitute found to die in their place, for just the right kind of sacrifice might appease the gods… sacrifices in their ones and twos all decked out in costumed finery, but then… maybe it would cover all the angles if they were also made in their uniformed millions.

Parts 2, 3, and 4 to follow.