I was once at the vanguard of Empire, one of its sacrificial sons. I could strip a sub-machine gun when I was fourteen. I went to a white only para-military boarding school with grenade screens on the windows and rifle drill after classes. By the time I was eighteen I had trained with special forces, enlisted in an elite commando unit and went to war with my dark brother, little realizing that our task was not to emerge one triumphant over the other but for both our life’s blood to be spread out on the battle-field.
Such insights can take a little prompting.
We had been dropped behind enemy lines, into a terrorist base camp. There was a brief but intense battle. Afterwards we swept across the camp looking for weapons, documents and survivors. The sweep line crossed a clearing and on the far side I saw the broken body of a man.
I approached him cautiously. Multiple wounds. Large pool of blood. Twisted limbs. Then he opened his eyes and looked at me. He was alive. He stared at me impassively and without fear. His eyes bored into me. I made a quick check for weapons to distract myself from his gaze but he was unarmed. He was however desperately wounded. I stood and stared at him. He stared back. His eyes ripped into me. Not a word was spoken.
Strange thoughts forced their way into my head. This is a man in his own backyard. Someone’s son. Someone’s sweetheart. What am I doing? And in the name of what? Something in my chest started to splinter and then suddenly snapped. I wasn’t fighting for freedom and ‘our way of life’ at all, though it had been easy to sell that to me because I’d wanted nothing more than to fulfill family expectations and live up to that heroic ideal. In fact I was a hired goon of Multinational Annonymous enforcing corporate takeovers that were actually just robbery of vast tracks of land and the enslavement of everyone upon them.
And far from returning heroic, soaking the earth with as much blood as could be afforded seemed to be the order of the day, the gorier the better. The task was not to kill the enemy but to die for your country, sacrificial appeasement to unnamed Gods for the hubris of Greed, taking land just because you can. I looked down at the broken man before me. It was just a roll of the dice which one of us lay ridden with bullets and the other still standing. We were like Isaac and Ishmael, sons of Abraham, locked in enmity engendered by a Father who would be a King chosen by God, quietly sat in his club nursing a brandy with some chums.
I called a medic, radioed for a chopper and began to patch my dark brother’s wounds. His eyes never left my face. As I bound one wound after another I noticed a ring on his finger. I took it. He said nothing, offered no resistance, just continued staring at me. I patched another wound then gave him the ring back. Suddenly ashamed. When I had finished I picked him up and carried him to a clearing in the bush where a chopper was waiting. As I slid him onto the helicopter floor he pressed the ring back into my hand and said, ‘Datenda Nkosi’. ‘Thanks boss’. I never went into battle again.
That night I dreamed I was fighting my dark brother. Back and forward we went. Eventually I pushed him away. ‘’Don’t you understand why we are fighting?’’ I gasped. ‘’Look at all this stuff you’ve got!’’ The room was spacious and immaculate. Expensive carpets, period furniture and portraits by the masters. ‘’Mine?’’ he puzzled, ‘’I thought it was yours.’’
When there’s is not enough to go around we defend ourselves from the despair of it all by imagining that if we are not getting the marrow of life then somebody else must be. This allows us to remain dynamic whilst feeling robbed. It’s a bad enough bind between ordinary brothers, but when those brothers are Abraham’s Children, Isaac and Ishmael, patriarchs of Judeo-Christianity and Islam respectively, a sibling scuffle can assume global proportions.
The problem created for Isaac and Ishmael, is that Abraham’s having such a special and exclusive relationship with God, combines worldly power and Divine will, bringing mixed consequences to the people and, as we’ll see, definite problems for his sons.
”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
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, the rules about who you can kill without calling it murder…and how the gods are to be appeased by such rank inflation.
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.
Not only is the CEO style king a political leader, he is also the high priest, an incarnation of State-Your-Prefered-Deity-Here. 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, that 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 in the inevitability of any violent outcome. Latent violence is there, but it’s subject to the natural law that distinguishes friend from foe. 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. And the sons least of all.
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…
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.
King Aun of Sweden (C6th B.C.) decided he didn’t fancy ritual dismemberment and prayed to Odin for a way out. Odin replied that he could live for as long as he sacrificed a son every twelve years. This he did, sending nine sons to their deaths. The Swedes prevented him from killing the last and tenth, so Aum died and was buried at Upsala.
On the other side of the World from Upsala the kings of Cambodia and Jambi would ritually sacrifice sons in their place, neatly buying time and eliminating the competition in the same breath, for who better qualified to serve as a substitute than one endowed with the very same qualities of potential kinglyness that make him a deadly threat? And what better appeasement to the gods for all the heinous greed than the blood of your own offspring?
Rather than repair his relationship with Artemis whose deer he killed, Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia in order to secure a different agenda than the goddess intended…
and went to war.
Violence is going to erupt in any society where the instinctive rules governing whether killing is murder have been eroded by the king’s inflation to the point where everyone is alien and excluded from the circle of compassion, a breach of belonging that can only be jammed closed with appropriate sacrifices. When citizens are unprotected by natural law, when they can be disposed of with impunity, they soon begin to harbour the wish to become a god/king themselves., domestic tyrants, small time bullies, lunch money bandidos of sacrificial subgroups made less than citizen, whilst war drums beat for the cleansing blood of the Nation’s sons.
