Mythopoetics

 The mythical-ritual actions that center the order of the city on this mythical plane are those of the agrarian festivals, which cover the extension of the astronomical year and follow a triple cyclical pattern based on the birth of the divine child-king, his subsequent nuptials as an adult, and his death and resurrection. It is a staging, which can be complex and sophisticated, of something whose emotional content is extremely simple, a simplicity from which its effectiveness derives. Its extreme simplicity has saturated the possible additional interpretations, in fact, the pre-valuation of these actions, their understanding at a perfectly delimited prehuman level and conditioned by their evolutionary success, makes their symbolic expressions redundant, although it is precisely through this redundancy (that myths and art produce over and over again) how these representations reach their status as the center of social meaning, a position that is guaranteed by their basic emotional ...

 On the mythical plane of the King-God, we witness the deliberate creation of the social persons of the gods, whereas the divinities and supernatural beings in general of the Anima Mundi (First Generation Gods), were the result of spontaneous evolutions of the metaphysics of the totems (an evolution that in some cases led these beings to the posterior category of city founding gods) and of the very foundations of the narrative of Anima Mundi. In the Rigveda, we observe the line that begins with Dyaus-Pitar (“The Sky Father”, First Generation God) and continues through Varuna and Indra (Second Generation God), a line that the Mahabharata continues to Krishna (Vishnu, Second Generation God) in creating a full mythology. Other gods, however, are the conscious and deliberate creation of new social persons, linked to new activities or new moral and epistemological concepts (Third Generation Gods) produced by the new social relationships. It would be tedious to list all the variety of pr...

 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, a...

 The image of the State as a body made up of castes has both a dimension of euphemism of a narrative slavery technique of domination, and of genuine metaphysical belief. In Jainism, the cosmic system is organized according to a reincarnation plan that places each monad (Atman) in its rightful place in the Great Man within a supposed order, a primitive determination that served to structure the empire of Chandragupta Maurya. The genuine belief in a metaphysical system based on the corporation of the castes is perfectly understandable for the case of dominant social persons: the faith in the divine right to the dominion of others unites the caste and its actions. But the exercise of the domination of caste is also perfectly compatible from pragmatic and more or less disbelieving positions, as we read in the Artha Sastra. Its author, Kautilya, minister of the first Mauryan emperor, reconciles, without any problem, the primitive determinations of Jainism with a pragmatic approach to po...

 The importance of primitive determinations in explaining the formation of stratified societies has only been recognized in anthropology relatively recently in the works of Carneiro, Kolata, Demarest, and some others, although it is implicit in the work of Durkheim, and previously, in Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals. Ideology is not a superstructure added to the economic infrastructure (forces and relations of production), but the fixing of economic relations in identity narratives, their evaluative interpretation, from which the different social persons and the actions of the group arise. Narratives of primitive determination, or ideology, can be protocolized into effective techniques for identity control, but they are not for this reason something secondary, an epiphenomenon of an imaginary nature added to the reality of economic relations: there cannot be stable economic determinations without a primitive determination that interprets them, however basic it may be, however, clos...

 To the figures of the Sangu and the Lugal must be added those of the Ensi, or king consort of the goddess, and the Ugula, a later Assyrian denomination to designate the commercial representative of a city. The Ensi figure seems to have been linked to that of the agricultural administrator and designated the ruler of a single city, which implies that it is not a position related to war, but something like a governor under the orders of a Lugal. These distinctions are relevant to understanding the two fundamental lines of formation of the person of kings. The later fusion of the Lugal and the Sangu, the general and the priest, is not done equally in all societies, but we can say, from a good number of examples provided by history, that the stability of a ruling group depends on its ability to generate prestige as Sangu, and such prestige is not a mere question of ability to coordinate the group in war, because in order to unite the power of the community around a mythical-ritual axi...

 The theory of great men that 20th Century anthropology has used to explain the origin of kings, has in its favor the fact that it is a simple hypothesis and that it seems to agree with experience as we see it operating in our lives. The thesis, in the form that is presented in anthropology more or less explicitly, says that the history of humanity is basically the history of a few great men who have been able to promote the development of the whole group. From this point of view, the kings would be the first great men who, spontaneously, were emerging with the specialization of the work of the Neolithic revolution. The thesis, supported by philosophers such as Hegel, Carlyle, Nietzsche, and Spencer, and endorsed by the masses in different traditional theological forms, as well as by the practice of the artistic theory of genius, and it is validated within the social Darwinism of corporate and state capitalism (contemporary China) of the XX and XXI centuries, as well as among the M...