The Four Personae of the Kings

The genesis of monarchies in Ancient Mesopotamia offers a clarifying picture of the different economical and ideological narrative forces which form the social persona of the King-God. The King-God is the synthesis of the Sangu, or spiritual leader, the Lugal, or military leader, the Ensi, or landlord, and the Ugula or great merchant.

The Sangu is the evolution of the personae of the Shaman and the priest. It is the mediator with the ancestors and the unknown forces of life. It is the royal persona with higher prestige and the unquestionable figure which controls the basic narratives of life and death, the giver of the referential valuation for social action, a valuation which has its roots in successful economic actions of the past.

The persona of the Lugal emerges out of the needs of war. It is an active extension of the Sangu, and only the Sangu can justify and support ideologically his performance. Lugal and Sangu represent also two different ways of ascension to power. The occurrence of one or the other is conditioned by the limitation of resources. Limited resources lead to land expansion and quickens the appearance of the military leader, the Lugal, while a lower population pressure (in simpler societies) allows scenarios of political control by mere ideological prestige. Once cities reached a critical dimension, both Sangu and Lugal where needed, either synthesized in one single persona (the most stable solution), as Marduk himself does, or in two personae working closely together, a posterior solution demanded by the complexification of society which led to the development of the closely related institution of priesthood.

The Ensi is the owner (consort) of the land, a key persona in agrarian economies. It has a religious dimension through the myths which identify the King as the consort of the Goddess, i.e., the Land. For instance, the god Dumuzi, the shepherd, is an Ensi, but Ensis are also the storm gods, Enlil, Marduk, the Hittite Teshub, the Canaanite Baal, Zeus, the Mayan Hurakan and so many others. In the Babylonian Akitu, as in all harvest festivals around the world, the King-God enacted the bond of fertility as the Ensi of the land.

Finally, the Ugula, the great merchant, is the complementary figure of the Ensi, the economical action of the city beyond its frontiers. The Ugula is closely linked also to the Lugal for war and city’s commerce are but a small step apart. It is a persona whose development is posterior to others, closely related to the Ensi, for the control of trade and commerce is grounded in the property of the fruits of the land.

The King-God is the synthesis of these four figures. In some cases, all synthesized in one, but also available in different combinations of the four. Depressingly enough, the model works even today. Saudi Arabia, Qatar or Swaziland are examples of states where there is a total unity of the four personae. The British monarchy synthesizes the Sangu and the Ensi figures, for it symbolically owns 6.600 million acres around the world, the biggest land owner of the planet. Of course, the very same idea of owning the land is metaphysical, half-way between childish selfishness and deep psychological delusion, but it works, sadly, as a narrative of domination which, enforced by arms, is today exploited by the kings of Kuwait, Lesotho, Bhutan, Jordan, Nepal, Oman, Thailand or Morocco, the landlords of their countries. Land fetishism is deeply grounded in our myths, which, in turn, have their roots in subsistence actions. In modern times, in republican countries, is not strange to see Ugula figures avidly buying land to incorporate the prestige of the Ensi, like Ted Turner (CNN) or the Canadian Irving Brothers, climbing the kingly scale through a marriage with the Goddess which promises extra-immortality.

There are monarchies even in cases where there are not traditional kings, for there is a monarchy as long as there is a separate Sangu, Lugal, Ensi or Ugula persona or a combination of them. There are plenty of examples of republics all around (some democratic) where the president acts as both Sangu and Lugal with the approval of the majority of the population. It is definitely not a question of mere inheritance (it never was), but of dominance and social order through metaphysics. In this sense, traditional European monarchies play still today a religious role of prestige which is inconsistent with the political human proposals of the Enlightenment, exercising a limiting force for the development of free and mature political thinking. Furthermore, they produce a curious and unfortunate phenomenon. Let us think for a moment in the King of Spain or the Queen of Britain. Nowadays, their major social action is the one of the traditional Sangu, performing at festivals, funerals, memorials, inaugurations, conventions, diplomatic delegations, etc., actions which in the opinion of some render the institution innocuous, even beneficial. But since their role as spiritual leaders is a narrative untenable today -not only because their moral actions could hardly inspire anyone but mainly because the Christian ideology is developed independently of the will of the monarchy by the priestly caste- they just contribute to the mystic narrative of the concept of nation, a very badly ventilated political construction which by believing in the transcendentality of the land and the institutions, only helps to perpetuate old and unjust distributions of property and social stratifications.