Monarchies

(Link to text in Spanish)

  
 In Ancient Mesopotamia, monarchy was one of the Mes contained in the bronze Tablets of Destiny which the god Marduk wore as a symbol of his power. The Mes included abstract concepts as well as physical objects. Me is lordship, kingship, truth, the shepherd like care of the elite for their masses, the legal language, sexuality, prostitution, art, musical instruments, and several other actions and symbols which somehow function as civilizing tools, the knowledge needed to organize a city. The Mes represent the universal law, or better, the universal law is an induction from the Mes, the way things are on a cosmological scale which includes the order of the city. The unstable homeostasis of social order unveiled the divine pretenses of the King-Gods: both Isis and her divine royal family were exposed. Naked to the eye of the intellect, kings could only maintain their prestige bowing themselves to the law which they were supposed to represent. Their role as divine officials and mediators was never questioned, for the Me was the institution, and not the particular king. In liminal times, the myths of the plane of the King-God revert to their more basic configurations. The king falls back to his role as spiritual leader, as the shaman which brings order, as the civilizing ancestor hero which acts as ambassador of the higher powers, always mysterious, unknown, strange, ineffable, out of logos and discussion, accepted by the masses in fear and awe.

   The prestige of monarchies is grounded on this control over civilization, on the safety provided by the myth which gives form to the city, an emanation from the divine source. Their mystic reputation is in fact their technique of domination, a self-narrative of identity embedded in the mist of superstition and ignorance, a set of patronizing narratives for the implementation of paternal social actions which exploit the more rudimentary versions of our basic emotions. The benefits of civilization are thus capitalized not only by its founders but also by the elites which inherited the control over the myth, the collectors of an ancient endless revenue that can never be completely paid by the masses. Part of the myth is the continuous threat of a chaotic monster which will raise and devour the godly perfection of the social order, the universal law reflected upon the human structures of stratification. Any menace to the monarchy is presented as a threat to society at large, for the land itself will collapse if the Mes are disturbed.

   A relatively recent example of the myth was enacted in Spain with the failed coup d’état of 1981. The Spanish King calmed down the monster of chaos, and the waters of conflict receded under his control. We know that kings are linked to storm-gods. The myth is conveniently reenacted today in 2014 with the proclamation of a new king. The process is not innocuous: it revitalizes myths which are contradictory with a social contract based on the human law, and it also leaves the citizen in a perennial state of political infancy.

   Narratives of domination are based on the basic emotion of fear, the fear we feel for the uncertainty of the future of our sons, engraved by the fire of evolution in the mammal’s neural systems long before we appeared in the drama. In liminal situations, like the proclamation of a king, or in the Babylonian Akitu ceremony, when the king was annually publically humiliated in order to be reinstated afterwards with honors, reason gives way to more basic protocols of survival.

I hear in my head the forgotten verses of the White Bard of Manhattan, like an Athenian echo over the uneasiness of my internal exile:

Spain

Out of the murk of heaviest clouds,

Out of the feudal wrecks, and heap’d-up skeletons of kings,

Out of that old entire European debris—the shatter’d mummeries,

Ruin’d cathedrals, crumble of palaces, tombs of priests,

Lo! Freedom’s features, fresh, undimm’d, look forth—the same immortal face looks forth;

(A glimpse as of thy mother’s face, Columbia,

A flash significant as of a sword,

Beaming towards thee.)

Nor think we forget thee, Maternal;

Lag’d’st thou so long? Shall the clouds close again upon thee?

Ah, but thou hast Thyself now appear’d to us—we know thee;

Thou hast given us a sure proof, the glimpse of Thyself;

Thou waitest there, as everywhere, thy time.

(W. Whitman)