Technology of civilization: the Mes (Divine Ordinances)

We could define the Mes as an inventory of physical and conceptual objects, as well as actions, with which a civilization technology can be built. In mythopoetic terms, they are nothing but the economic and primitive determinations of the Mesopotamian peoples of five thousand years ago. The Mes offer a human self-representation already different from that of the Anima Mundi, a general and vague idea of ​​civilization that is inextricably linked to the figure of a King-God within an agricultural mythic-ritual axis. The Mes do not, however, offer a self-representation of themselves, since for this it is necessary to contrast with other categorizations of the primitive determinations that they suppose, a contrast from which the verification of invariance and the first forms of universalizing generalization derives. Even so, within the local mythic-ritual axes, the Mes have totalizing rank, and their effectiveness is unquestionable. When the Goddess Inana (Love and War) asks God Enlil (Wind) about the Mes that constitute the city and make it great, it is not a question of choosing a matrix of economic and primitive determinations against other possible ones, such as those of Egypt, for example, but of importing the Eridu's infallible civilizing formula, sealed by the gods, whose success is already in the memory and is the result of a very long process that has culminated in priestly reflection that explicitly narrates the categories contained in myths and rites. What is sealed by the Tablets of Destiny is the very authority of priestly reflection that has made the Mes explicit, a new form of consciousness that legitimizes the order of the King-God and in this process shows the force of law as the culminating human thought, although it will not be until the weakening of the person of the King-God that this new form of continuous rationality will take the path of its own development, fostering a new mythical plane.

The Mes began as the valuation core of everyday life. As a nucleus, it acts metonymically as a representation of the mythical-ritual axis, up to the point of replacing it in the priestly reflexive meta-narratives. Therefore, whoever has the law of the Tables dominates the social group, since it contains his actions in a scheme. The law, as a set of the Mes, not merely as legal norm regulating socio-economic transactions, closes the mythical-ritual game in a perfectly manipulable and organized linguistic simulacrum, it is a simplification invested with the authority of the totality to which represents: the process of social hierarchization had, in fact, followed a similar epistemological action to order the increasing complexity of social persons and actions. What is not collected by the Mes does not constitute an essential assessment, it is secondary and dispensable, or that, in any case, must be submitted to the value hierarchy of the law.

The economic and primitive determinations that establish the Mes linked social processes to universal processes: the laws that make the sun move across the sky with apparently different speeds according to the time of year, are in the Mesopotamian mind linked to the social events. The physical law does not have an isolated representation of the moral law, since the physical, from the movements of clouds and meteors to navigation or metallurgy techniques, through flooding and irrigation of the fields, are defined from the determinations primitive identity, are the actions of divine powers. The Mes give formal unity to the world, and for the first time a general representation of control is generated by the knowledge of the mechanisms of interaction of things.

The Mes are expanded to principles of order more general than those of the city in which they arose. They are no longer just representations of the physical and abstract civilizing objects, of the actions that guaranteed the success of the stratified and triumphant society over the biophysical environment, but they represent a deeper order of existence, of which the Mes themselves are only an image.