Slavery as dependence in relation to a mythico-ritual axis

 It is very likely that the legal idea of ​​belonging to a person, slavery, developed in small steps of administration of the most basic social persons within other more complex collectives: those of gender, totem, or caste. In fact, it does not seem that until today there has been a single human society in which the subject, in any of its social persons, has not been considered as conditioned to the will of the group, as an object owned by the community, with an independent life only as long as there is no group urgency, or only in moments when the social function is not active. And this dependence reaches the kings themselves and the gods. Dependency within cold societies occurred reciprocally, and as a need based on basic social emotion: the individual cannot be without the group. However, in complex urban societies, although the same emotional system operates, the group is divided into subgroups with dominance conflicts between them, so the dependence of one caste on another, and in general, on a person with respect to another, comes from subordination with respect to a mythical-ritual structure. The king of Babylon could not exercise his power outside the mythical structure of the city: he depends on Marduk, and his subjects as subjects of Marduk, and obedience to his person is given to the extent that he assumes and interprets within a few rules, the person of the king. Thus, for example, the fact that during the Akitu there was a moment in which the king was publicly humiliated, did not imply the humiliation of Marduk, but the reversion to a mythical order prior to the city, emotionally more basic, in which neither the person of the king nor that of the priests made sense neither those of the rest of the urban people, a reversal towards the genre and age persons, expression of the more basic individuations of the members of the group. When the king returns to his royal person, he becomes immediately the representative (most of the time as a son or alter ego) of the mythical God of the city (traditionally a God of the Storm). In the same way, the power of the priests and nobles over others was a function of their performance in the social drama and not the cause of direct dependencies (asymmetrically reciprocal) with respect to slaves and serfs. The dependency is not in relation to a city-state, it is not the dependency with respect to a geographical location, nor with respect to the figure of the god or the king, but in relation to a mythico-ritual structure, and more specifically, with respect to the economic success of this structure, that is, its ability to solve nutritional, environmental and war threats. 

Within the social persona of the gods, we observe a minimum of two divine generations within this mythical plane. The gods of the Anima Mundi were the great civilizing ancestors, fused with a totem, either animal or vegetable, or a meteorological or natural force. With the passage of time, the human character of the ancestor is lost in stereotyped narratives linked to specific rites and economic actions, it is transformed into a collective person that functions in a transgenerational way, to which the representations elaborated by the priestly caste based on the complexity of the new urban communities, which include the economic actions of mythical-ritual agricultural schemes. This first generation of gods is challenged by the appearance of external demographic pressures, which produce readjustments of their personalities or directly their destruction. The stories of this mythical plane have a clear cosmogonic character, narratives of heroic struggles and events, of changes of order. The battles for economic determinations are related to primitive determinations. Historical enemies are also mythical, in a type of narrative that, to this day, has not abandoned us at all. The war to expel the Hyksos, worshipers of Seth, the enemy brother of Osiris, from the delta of the Nile, is the earthly performance of the cosmic battle of the Osiris myth, as had been the founding fight of Babylon on the part of Marduk, as will be the dynastic succession of the Mahabharata between Kurus and Pandavas in the struggle for the city of discernment, Hastinapura (City of Elephants), in a cosmic cycle of battles between good and evil, as will be the war narratives against Nazi power on the part of the allied forces, or that of Islam against the demonized West that the fundamentalisms of our day proclaim.