Skip to main content

The King-God as shepherd of men

 Since the earliest written testimonies, kings have presented themselves as shepherds of men, and the difference in the hierarchy is literal. We have examples in the Gilgamesh, the hero is the shepherd of Uruk, in the Enuma Elish, in the myths of the shepherd King-God Dumuzi, in the introduction to the Code of Hammurabi, in the texts of Ashurnasirpal II, in the myths of Krishna, in the Bible in relation to David and in other myths from the Middle East to India in which the King-God legitimizes himself as a caring force for the group. But herding is nothing more than a more stable and evolved form of hunting, and the predatory descent of the shepherd over the herd weighs on this rhetoric of power. The narratives often combine the benefit that cattle derive from being cared for, their livelihood, with total dependence and submission to the will of the shepherd. In these myths, there are not even slave images as they would be understood in the modern world, but rather proclamations of difference of species that are put into practice in the organization of the city: on the one side the gods (or their representatives) and on the other, the “blackheads”, an Akkadian metaphor to designate common men. The first temple-cities of Mesopotamia are literally dairy farms, with stables next to the temples and the residences of the priests, responsible for milking the sacred cows with the same attitude with which the population of servants and slaves are exploited.

The rhetoric of pastoral power, as Michel Foucault called it, supposes the creation of myths that function as a technology of power, as protocolized primitive determinations that stabilize economic relations, legitimizing them in the figure of a King-God creator of the world and the city, who governs it as a benign figure for those who submit, and terrible for those who oppose his will, identified with the universal order. The city wall protects from the enemy and prevents the flight of the slave and the cattle. It is interesting to note that the first temple cities of the Middle East and Mesoamerica arose in closed habitats, in river and mountain valleys, from which it was difficult to escape.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Limen et Continuum

  Existence is Encounter. Meeting at the limen. In the limen, the masks disappear, that is, the basic intuitions of identities, such as the identity that I feel and think in relation to the tree that I see in front of me. The identity of the tree is a projection of mine: the unity of my process of perceiving the tree generates a mask in me, the ghost of a limited unity separated from everything else. The simplest form of intuitive understanding of masks and limen is given to us by numbers. Numbers intuitively express the liminal tension that is Existence. A little etymological note. Rythmos in Greek means flow. Arythmos (number) is what does not flow, what remains solidified. Numbers express the liminoid, and flow, rhythm, expresses the liminal. A rhythm becomes liminoid when we can trace patterns in it, that is, when we can construct masks of identities. Mathematics has spoken of flow using the Latin word “continuum”, the continuous. All modern science, since Leibni...

What is Mythopoetics?

  The narrative grew in the process of being told, as myths always do. The Blog has become more labyrinthine over the years. It contains my Mythopoetics book and a few other things. For those who access these texts without knowing anything about Mythopoetics, I am going to post the introduction of the first part, so you can decide if you want to spend your precious time thinking about the identity narratives that we humans have developed over the years. throughout our eventful existence as a species. "Mythological narratives are the only intellectual activity that has been continuously practiced by human beings, a fact that makes them a unique tool for thinking synthetically our evolution as homo-sapiens. In this sense, they are the first valuation settings that humans have made about themselves and their environment, and as such, they have conditioned the ones that have come afterwards, both in form and content. Their communicative function places them at the basis o...

Ritual, Scientific Experiment and Truth

 Human rituals have their roots in animal behavior, and the animal pattern has its roots in the need for repetition of living organisms, in the cyclical structure of physiological actions. At the human level, ritual behavior involves a delimitation of space and time, as well as a different meaning of both with respect to the spaces and times of everyday experience. From the ritual ceremonies of cold societies, we observe the care and thoroughness of the shaman to determine with precision the spaces, times and elements that intervene in the rite. Sacred space delimits the world, not only as a place of action, but also the scope of meaning of the things contained in that space. It is a space loaded with meaning: there is an order in things. Time itself acquires its meaning in relation to this order of things, and cyclically closes the space in the “tempo” of the rite, a tempo that is a symbol of the tempo of the World. What is not in the rite or is not referable to the rite has no re...